Protests: Trump unqualified for patriotic talk

The toxicity of our nation’s political divide seems to get worse every day. The present overblown controversy involving professional athletes, the flag and the national anthem is just the latest sad example.

I don’t pretend to be the arbiter of what is right or wrong here, but the comments I see are overwhelmingly black and white: people yelling past each other, never acknowledging that the other side has any good reasons for their views.

However, there is one thing I know for sure. A rich president, who dodged the draft by buying a phony medical deferment and who has bragged about spending the Vietnam era fighting the war on gonorrhea, is the very last person who should be impugning anybody else’s patriotism.

This story was originally published September 27, 2017 at 5:44 PM with the headline "Protests: Trump unqualified for patriotic talk."