I realize how presumptuous it sounds for me to pity the president of the United States. After all, he’s not only the most powerful man on earth, or so I’ve heard, but he’s a billionaire. Moreover, he’s tall, rather good-looking and not only has all of his hair, I suspect he has some of mine.

Still and all, I’d hesitate to switch places with him. I’m not saying I don’t have my own critics who will occasionally take me to task over something I’ve said or written, but at least it’s not incessant. What’s more, I hear from a lot of people who actually agree with me. It doesn’t seem to me that Trump has very many defenders. Not even in his own party, and that even includes senators and House members who only won their own elections because of Trump’s coattails. The ungrateful wretches treat him like a pariah.

Political hacks like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, John McCain, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins seem to take every opportunity to slander the guy, spewing far more insults at him than they have ever done to Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal or Maxine Waters.

As you may have noticed, in the wake of the violent weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump came in for far more condemnation than the knuckleheads responsible for spilling all the blood.

Trump’s sin, apparently, is that he didn’t simply chew out the white supremacists; instead, he said there was plenty of blame to go around. It just so happens he was right.

Apparently, about 50 or 60 guys, some of them Klan members, showed up in town to demonstrate against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. They were greeted by a large mob who were spoiling for a fight, especially after they discovered they greatly out-numbered the white supremacists.

One lunatic, a 20-year-old creep from Ohio, decided he would drive his car into a crowd. But even he hasn’t been as roundly condemned as Donald Trump, who was minding his own business in New Jersey at the time.

It seems to me that there were, as Trump said, people on all sides who deserved to be blamed, including the jerks who decided that the statue of General Lee, one of the few on either side of the Civil War who emerged with his greatness intact, should be removed as a way to pander to the politically correct yahoos.

Foremost among Trump’s denouncers were the mayor of Charlottesville, Michael Signer, and Virginia’s governor, Terry McAuliffe. No surprise there. McAuliffe, in a former life, was the bag man for the Clintons. As for Signer, he has enjoyed close ties to Obama, McAuliffe, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, a rogue’s gallery of political villains if I’ve ever seen one.

Signer is also closely affiliated with the Center for American Progress, a group largely funded by George Soros, which has been virulently antagonistic to Israel and to Catholic conservatives and threw its considerable support behind Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy.

At the very least, in a battle royal in which the worst of the bad guys were greatly out-numbered, it hardly seems cricket to blame them entirely for the ensuing blood-bath. Or to condemn the president for taking that inconvenient fact into consideration in his post-riot remarks.

It is also worth noting that it’s no longer the 1920s or 1930s, when the Ku Klux Klan was a major cancer with a million members and the power to actually get mayors, governors and senators elected in certain states.

Today, it’s possible that the entire national membership showed up in Charlottesville, and it should be acknowledged that they weren’t there to lynch anyone. They merely showed up to show their support for a great American general who wasn’t a monster but merely had the misfortune of fighting for the losing side.

It’s the Democrats who need the Klan, not Trump. He didn’t win the election because of a handful of pinheads who mostly get together to drink beer and reminisce about a world they never knew. It’s the liberals who need to use the Klan as a boogeyman so that groups like the NAACP and Black Lives Matter can continue to pretend that America is a racist society and that urban blacks are under constant threat of annihilation.

---

I confess I’ve never been a fan of Mitch McConnell. I once observed that he struck me as someone whose first word as a baby wasn’t “mama” or “dada,” but “harrumph.”

But over the past six months, I have grown to absolutely despise him. He had the audacity to dismiss President Trump as an outsider, essentially an amateur, who didn’t know how things were done in Congress. What he should have said was that Trump, as a man accustomed to getting things accomplished, was in for a huge surprise if he expected Congress, especially one dominated by Republicans, to produce any positive results.

Not only has McConnell not been able to get any of Trump’s agenda through the Senate, but instead of handing the reins over to someone who might have more success, he has clung to those reins even more tightly.

For years, I have heard people claiming to be Washington insiders insist that McConnell is a political mastermind who works like a combination of Lyndon Johnson and a cat burglar behind the scenes. But now that he has someone in the White House who would actually sign the bills that Congress passes, he has shown himself to be no more formidable than a palace eunuch.

It’s Trump, the amateur, who seems to understand that politics is war, and that during wartime desertion is a capital offense. So why is it that Senators McCain, Murkowski and Collins are still sitting on influential committees after joining Schumer and the Democrats in killing the repeal and replacement of ObamaCare?

---

Recently, one of my subscribers sent me a picture or herself and her dog. I mentioned that her dog, Dolly, closely resembled our wonderful dog, Angel.

She wrote back to say how much joy our dogs bring us, and that, on top of everything else, if we breed them, we can even sell off their offspring without hurting their feelings.

To which I added: “They are very much like our children, but even better because they never become liberals, call us old fogies or ask to borrow money or the car.”