Gone to the dog

Even when the President is self-evidently trying to edit his Twitter impulses, he can't catch a break from his critics. Kathleen Parker, an anti-Trump Republican, sees  his labeling of former aide Omarosa Managault-Newman, a sort of Frankenstein monster of his going back to The Apprentice, as a "dog" for releasing clandestine recordings as of a piece with insults aimed at LeBron James, Don Lemon, Maxine Waters and others. In other words, to call a black woman a dog is worse than if he had used the word to describe a white woman or man -- critics of that complexion are usually dismissed as losers or failures -- because "dog" dehumanizes the person thus labeled. The sad thing about this tirade against Trump is how obviously "dog" isn't what he really wanted to say. Unless the President has read a lot of comic books or pulp fiction, "dog" is not an epithet that's going to flow naturally from his tongue or fingers. Do I need to spell it out further?  I'll do so only to ask whether Trump would get in worse trouble had he used more natural and characteristic language and called his nemesis a bitch as he probably wanted to. Parker probably still would have gotten a column out of it, calling Trump a sexist instead of a racist, but who can say what the final score would have been?  The President is much admired in some quarters for talking back to his critics, but in a time when criticism is mistaken for hate on all sides, he only guarantees more hate for himself by doing so.