We’re better than this

Our president, who’s practiced dog-whistle politics as an art, said in response to neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville that there were

“fine people on both sides.” It was reported by his first wife that he kept a book of

Hitler’s speeches at bedside. He apparently believes he should be president for life, just as is his beloved Putin in Russia.

His embrace of racists, even in his administration and party, and his use of code words from racist and antiSemitic sources have provided cover for American anti-Semites, racists and white supremacists. Perhaps he was forgetting or ignoring the millions of Jews killed by the Nazis.

In response to the killing of 11 in the synagogue in Pittsburgh, he’s said a few scripted words written by others before launching into his continued attacks on the free press and on Democrats. The man is incapable of being a normal American president. He has shamed us all.

One must wonder about Republicans. My dad was one. In the bottom drawer of our bureau when I was a child, he kept a scrapbook of images from the German concentration camp at Nordhausen. He, as an officer in the 104th Infantry Division, had to go there to witness the atrocity and to assist in the cleanup, ordering German citizens to go in and stack bodies that in life had been reduced to walking skeletons. My father would be shocked to see a Republican Party enslaved to dog-whistle politics, racism and anti-Semitism. He would be shocked by a leader casting himself in the image of the man who attempted to enslave Europe.

Will the Republican Party wake up? Early voting has started in Arkansas. I urge you to vote. If you are a Republican, please urge the leaders of your party to understand that we all are much better than what their party has become. DOUG STOWE Eureka Springs