0818blog

Thanks But No Thanks

Dear President Trump:

You are a sexual predator who has been sued many times for sexual assaults against women. You have shown disdain or worse for members of minority groups. And you have shown no remorse or reluctance to lie if it will further your cause, which is yourself.

And now you have posthumously pardoned me, a woman who devoted her life to the suffragist movement, who was fined $100 in 1872 for having voted illegally. At least you spelled my name right. But really, don’t you have better things to do, like work to end a savage pandemic that has killed thousands and thousands of Americans.

How dare you insult me with a pardon? Thanks but no thanks. You can take your pardon and put it where the sun doesn’t shine, if you excuse my French.

Adding insult to injury, it is the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, for which I worked so hard to attain, which gave women the right to vote. You probably don’t know what the 19th amendment was and think it gave people the right to bear arms.

For your information, you may not know as you’re not exactly a member of the literati, but I was a social reformer who played a pivotal role in the women’s suffrage movement. I shed blood, sweat and tears for the cause and I also collected anti-slavery petitions when I was 17, but that’s another story.

I was involved in many a march and protest to force this nation to grant women the right to vote, something that should have been done so many years ago. If you were president back then would you have sent in the National Guard to break up our demonstrations and restore so-called order and end the so-called violence wrought by all these angry women?

I understand that you are no fan of peaceful protest or civil disobedience. I saw how you treated the memory of John L. Lewis, one of the great humanists of this or any other period. You who have shown total disrespect for women. You who have been accused numerous times of sexual assault. You who bragged about molesting women. No, you are no champion of women or of protest in the name of a just cause.

And as far as voting, what’s up with you trying to upend the Postal Service. I assume you’re hoping to keep enough Democrats away from the polls in November so you can win. And even if you seem to lose, I have no doubt that you will do whatever is necessary, legal or not, to try to remain president. I remind you that you lost the popular vote for president to a real women’s activist by almost 2.9 million votes.

You have pardoned, among others, a longtime friend who was preparing to go to prison for lying to federal investigators, tampering with a witness and impeding a congressional inquiry; a former Arizona sheriff who was charged with criminal contempt for defying a court order to stop detaining people solely on the suspicion that they were undocumented immigrants; and a friend and former press baron who was sentenced for fraud and obstruction of justice.

Others who have gotten coveted pardons from you include a former Illinois governor who went to prison for trying to sell or trade to the highest bidder the Senate seat that President Obama vacated after he was elected president; and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, for his conviction for obstruction of justice, false statements and perjury.

Republicans all.

You did pardon boxer Jack Johnson, a world champion black man who was convicted by an all-white jury in 1913 of violating the Mann Act against “transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes.” I doubt you had anything but political motives for pardoning a black man. Dick.

Please leave me out of this company, sir.

I have the names of some people who actually deserve presidential pardons and who I expect will get pardoned sometime after the rapture.

There’s Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the former heavyweight boxer, who served 10 years in prison and was freed after a judge ruled that he was wrongly convicted of murder by an all-white jury.

Deserving of a posthumous pardon is Timothy Brian Cole, who died in a Texas prison while serving a 25-year sentence for a rape that he did not commit. Nearly a decade after, DNA evidence from the crime posthumously exonerated Cole and implicated another man as the perpetrator.

Why don’t you pardon everyone in federal prison who has been convicted of drug possession, a victimless crime?

How about a pardon for Kwame Kilpatrick, the former Detroit mayor, who was convicted in 2013 on charges of corruption that were similar in nature to Blagojevich? Oops, he is a Democrat.

And issue a pardon, please, to Chaka Fattah, a former longtime congressman from Pennsylvania who is in prison for corruption. Oh, never mind, he’s another Democrat.

Respectfully,

Susan B. Anthony

P.S. When I heard you had pardoned me, I turned over in my grave.