OK, I think I understand now. Your position is that some of the bystanders who were watching and listening to the marchers were only there to protest the removal of the statues and those bystanders were the "fine people" that Trump referred to.
And I would reply that if they remained there listening and watching the march, they were either ignorant of history--purveyors of "Lost Cause" ideology and ignorant of Nazi connections to the Confederacy--or even more cognitively impaired than the Democrats that node refers to if they stayed there. Or else they weren't very "fine people". And I would also say that, assuming he meant what you say he meant, Trump left his statement purposefully vague so that people like node could defend him while the people who sympathize with the marchers could feel he sympathize them too. Granted, politicians do that. Even "Honest Abe" did that kind of thing back in the day.
Excerpting the key points of your post:
So, in answer to your question, I'm not remotely arguing that the cohort "marching and chanting [blood and soil] were not neo-Nazis." Of course they were. But not everyone present at the event on the right-wing side was carrying tiki torches and chanting that. The neo-Nazis were not the only right-wing cohort present.
Neither am I arguing that the statue-only folks are "fine people" but only that Trump would consider them so and that's who he meant by "fine people," not the neo-Nazis....
All I'm arguing, then, is that Trump, at that time and place, did not say that the neo-Nazis were "fine people," as has been charged, and that it's incorrect, even a lie, to continue to repeat that he did. If 59% of Democrats believe that he referred to neo-Nazis as fine people in that statement, then they are either inattentive or mislead (as i-node claims) or cognitively impaired. |
