This is nothing new. This is how Democrats have been using blacks, sympathetic women, children, poor people, foreigners and other people in difficult or empathy-inspiring straits. They portray anyone who dares oppose their agenda as attacking or targeting these human shields, to put their critics on the defensive. If Trump has no other legacy, he has at least done this service - by being so personally obnoxious and distasteful to them, that they are tipping their hand at the degree of mendacity with which they are willing to stoop.

Honestly, they did all the same stuff to Sara Palin eight years ago. The story was that she was stupid or malicious, and everything was twisted to fit that narrative. When she referred to Obama palling around with terrorists, she was accused of racism, in the assumption by her critics that she was drawing some connection between Obama's middle name and Islamic terrorist, when in fact, she referred to his connections to domestic bomb-makers Bill Ayers & Bernadine Dohrn. When she told a Tea Party gathering to "party like it's 1773" a number of media commentators took to Twitter to scoff at her mistake, assuming she meant to say 1776 - instead of referring to the original Tea Party in Boston, in 1773. Among these critics was Gwen Ifil, who moderated Palin's debate, with a book due for release that had a vested interest in an Obama victory. Palin was expected to allow such a partisan individual to moderate her debate, so is it any wonder people don't mind when Trump refuses to play the same game and participate in a GOP debate moderated by one of his political enemies?

They've been doing this stuff as far back as Nixon, when he said in a speech that American cannot or must not "stand pat" and it was twisted into a play on the words, implying his wife, Patricia, was unpopular. It's racist against immigrants to say that their country isn't sending its best people, even though some of them are good, but it was not racist for national TV show hosts to mock the heavily ethnic name of Nixon's VP, by rearranging the unusual array of letters into obscene anagrams.

Democratic gaffes got buried, prior to advent of alternative media, while Republicans have been forced to make careful, measured statements whenever they open their mouths, only for the media to claim they meant something else entirely. Until he entered the media eye as Vice-President, Joe Biden had a reputation as an intellectual and an eloquent speaker, because that's what the media said about him. There were posters in this very community expressing their eagerness for the VP debate, where it was presumed he would completely outmatch and destroy that dumb hick Palin. Once the general public got wind of the kind of thing that routinely comes out of his mouth, his reputation plunged to something akin to a modern day Dan Quayle. Who, BTW, never apologized to a crowd of Latin Americans for not learning Latin, although that event has become firmly enshrined in his legend, just as the myths that Bush mispronounced strategy as "strategery" and that Palin claimed she could see Russia from her house have entered the public consciousness. Along with more substantive lies and distortions like the "October Surprise" or the "Southern Strategy".