Quddus Z. Snyder: The king wears no clothes

In 1837, Hans Christian Andersen penned the now classic short story about the emperor’s new clothes. In this story, the self-absorbed king, obsessed only with his image, is duped by a pair of swindlers into donning regalia made of nothing. The emperor’s officers, trying to preserve their own status and out of fear of being labeled stupid themselves, praise these new clothes made of air. Every citizen, high and low, extols this new garb as if it were made of the finest silk and gold-laced cloth. The emperor, revealed in his pathetic nakedness, is delivered before his subjects with great fanfare in the parade that follows. The entire kingdom, it appears, is convinced that their king has donned the finest clothes, until a lowly child points out: “the emperor wears no clothes!”

I am not this child. I give that title to George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks and Joe Scarborough, bona fide conservative intellectuals with the guts to call it how it is. As for the rest of the Republican fools still sporting a Trump-Pence bumper sticker on their vehicles: (a) either you’re an idiot, or (b) you willfully ignore the better interest of our beloved Republic — the oldest living Constitution in the world — a far worse crime! Time to wake up. This is no longer about your pet issue — whether that be taxes, abortion or coal — this is about the soul of our nation.