American Politics Today: Hate Thy Brother
Stop. Just stop.
I’m talking to you, the vindictive siblings and relatives of political figures. I’m begging you to stop airing your dirty laundry and family feuds in public in an attempt to humiliate a family member.
It’s distasteful. It makes you - not the candidate - look petty and small. It makes the rest of us uncomfortable.
Here’s an idea: If you don’t agree with your relation’s politics how about using your secret ballot on Election Day to vote for someone else? After that, keep your pie hole shut. No one needs to know how you voted.
In the past few months we’ve heard from a rogue’s gallery of classless political family members, determined to hurt a blood relative. They’re consumed by hate or jealousy or both.
For instance, Donald’s Trump’s nasty nephew emerged, looking for his 5 minutes of fame by disparaging his uncle.
Numerous members of the unsuccessful third generation of Kennedys have denounced and disowned RFK Jr. for refusing to tow the Democrat Party line. Yep, the same toothy gang of n’er do wells who revere their Uncle Ted who left a woman to drown in his car, can’t stomach that their brother is supporting a Republican for president.
Which raises this question: Are the Kennedys a family or a cult?
Earlier this week, Tim Walz’s disloyal brother came out saying he was voting for Trump and we wouldn’t believe the stuff he could tell us about Tim.
Have some dignity, brother of Tim. We already know your sibling is weird. Keep the details to yourself.
Not to be outdone, a group of Walzes from Nebraska commissioned matching T-shirts to advertise their distaste for the vice presidential candidate and their ignorance of apostrophes.
They proudly posed for a family photo of themselves in their ungrammatical shirts and tossed it on the internet.
Look, it’s tempting to enjoy a moment of schadenfreude when a Democrat gets some bad publicity after a solid summer of the press slobbering over Kamala and Tim.
Fact is, family is everything. Siblings share parents, childhoods and DNA. Yet some of us grow up to hold political views that are nothing like our sibs’ views.
So what? Politics isn’t what holds families together, love is.
Politics are slimy enough. Time to stop this tit-for-tat game of hate-thy-brother.
