A day of shame

Anation will long remember with shame and sorrow that when white supremacists descended on the college town of Charlottesville, Va., in fury over threatened removal of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, when they taunted objectors with Nazi slogans and anti-Semitic tirades, when a deranged member of their ranks sped his car into a crowd and left a woman dead and many injured, the President of the United States saw not an assault on fellow Americans, but a clash of hate upon hate, violence upon violence, bigotry upon bigotry.

The President condemned the ugliness — “On many sides,” a phrase for the ages.

Not as the doings of self-professed Nazis. Not as wrought by organizers who included ex-Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who said the event served “to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.” Not fueled by fiends seeking to restore the long-defeated Confederacy.

That “side” — the remnant of the original sin of this great nation — has been responsible for lynchings, cross burnings, church bombings and other examples of domestic terrorism.

Trump never uttered a word in his remarks and tweets about the nature of the march, the source of provocation that by Saturday’s end had also left two police officers dead in a helicopter crash. He tolerated Duke’s support as a candidate and evinced no intention of shirking him now, with blood in the streets.

The President’s revisionism is of a piece with his move to revamp the federal Countering Violent Extremism Program to focus only on Islamic terrorism, excluding white supremacists, and his close counsel from Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and other White House advisers promoting a United States less inclusive than the one that thrives today.

Americans have come to expect from their President unequivocal denunciations of the separatist evil that once violently split this nation apart.

By now, an agonized nation knows all too well not to expect any such thing from the present holder of the title.