Bloody awful

Fierce protest of the President of the United States is welcome — imperative, actually, when he’s wrong. At least until President Trump, who calls the “fake news” media the “enemy of the people,” manages to turn the libel laws into a weapon to quash dissent, it’s a free country.

But comedian Kathy Griffin has taken antiTrump animus to a downright disgusting extreme in a new shoot with photographer Tyler Shields.

Staring coldly into the camera, she holds the bloody, severed head of the leader of the free world up for all to see.

It’s free expression — political expression at that, which means it’s due the highest protections the Constitution’s First Amendment can afford. And it’s absolutely repulsive and Griffin’s apology after a justified uproar doesn’t make it any less repulsive.

Those who hate Trump with all their guts, and recoil at the crass and nasty direction he’s taken our politics, should be the first to condemn imagery that normalizes violence against him.

It discredits the cause more effectively than any attack from the White House podium. And it degrades any remaining hope for civil discourse.

Thought experiment, if you dare: Imagine if, in 2009, Ann Coulter had been pictured holding up the bloody severed head of Barack Obama. The howls of outrage would be positively deafening, the treatises on the death of civility encyclopedic.

When Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot by a deranged man in 2011, conversation quickly turned to the blind hostility nurtured by some in talk radio, and specifically to a Sarah Palin-led political action committee graphic in which key congressional districts were in metaphoric cross hairs.

“Don’t retreat, instead — RELOAD!” is how Palin introduced the map.

Gun imagery and electoral politics don’t mix, concerned liberal voices rightly said back then. The same surely goes for severed heads.