Too little, too late from GOP

Better late than never, I guess, but where exactly were Republican lawmakers Tim Scott, and Lisa Murkowski, and Pete Olson and Will Hurd when President Trump was debasing “s—-hole countries,” trying to ban Muslims and telling us that demonstrators at a white supremacist rally were “very fine people”?

Where were they, these Republican elected officials, these puppets on a string, when the leader of their party kept alive the notion that Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American president, wasn’t born in the United States?

Where were they? And while we’re on the subject, where are the rest of them?

Scott, Murkowski, Olson and Hurd were among a small group of Grand Ol’ Puppets who criticized Trump for his racist attack over the weekend on a group of first-term members of Congress — all women of color — and said they should “go back” to the countries they came from.

Never mind that Dems Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts were born in the U.S., and Somalia-born Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is a naturalized citizen who came to the U.S. as a child refugee.

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump tweeted Sunday. “Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough.”

A day later, Trump said the freshmen could “leave if they want to,” and insisted he is not a racist for saying so.

Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were quick to condemn the president for his comments, but Republicans had to let the bigotry brew for a little while before summoning their muted outrage.

But for every Republican lawmaker with a carefully worded statement about “inflammatory rhetoric,” there were four or five other GOP members of Congress who had nothing to say at all.

“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people but the appalling silence and indifference of the good,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once said. “Our generation will have to repent not only for the words and actions of the children of darkness but also for the fears and apathy of the children of light.” “Silence,” he said, “is betrayal.” We have been betrayed.