My kindly and forgiving editors understand that, from time to time, I can’t help myself from leaping atop my rickety soapbox to vent. And, like many other political commentators have already done, I could easily fill this entire missive with page after page commenting on a certain insecure and increasingly tottering orange-hued president who seems to constantly seek the lowest level of incivility and then keeps digging deeper.

This last week it was his one-hour (yes, one full hour. Actually, according to C-SPAN’s video, which I forced myself to watch in its entirety, 1 hour and 4 minutes) of unfunny and childish attacks on his perceived enemies. He managed, in those 64 minutes, to demonstrate his racist, homophobic, misogynistic and transphobic belief system, while constantly talking about him being the greatest president of all time. Even before he began speaking, he was offensive, shrugging his shoulders and smiling broadly when an award to a journalist about Trump’s past and ongoing misdeeds noted Trump authored a social media post attacking the reporter and explicitly stating said reporter’s home address. They had to move, due to death threats. And that amused Trump. He even, as part of a “joke” about CBS and how it, as an enemy of America, had been taken over by a new Trumpian leader, couldn’t help himself making a homophobic joke about the right-wing person now in charge. He thought calling her “gay” was somehow a clever putdown. Sigh…

But I’m not going to talk about that.

Nor am I going to talk about most of what appears in this week’s Colorado Politics Out West Roundup. I’m not going to mention the story reporting on the horrible wildfire situation in New Mexico (to say nothing of our own beloved Colorado). I’m old enough to remember when there was a “wildfire season” over the summer months, but now, with the effects of climate change becoming more and more obvious, the fire season is now essentially year-round. No state has all the needed resources, and thus the new normal may just be that we deal with wildfires throughout the calendar year. I still clearly remember the fear I felt when I had to evacuate due to the Waldo Canyon fire, as ash fell in my yard. Happily, the heroic firefighters on that blaze saved my home, though at great loss elsewhere. Those stories, now on steroids, are repeating around the western U.S. and now in several European nations, which are seemingly ill-equipped to fight fires on the scale that they are confronted with.

I’m tempted to write about the behavior of two plainclothes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at the Las Vegas airport, where they attempted to arrest and, well, pretty much kidnap, an Australian gent who may have overstayed his visa limit.

An Australian — you know, an ally.

They tackled him to the ground and as he yelled for help, others whipped out their phones to shoot video of the “arrest.” They got one handcuff on him and then, upon seeing the cameras, ran from the scene. The Vegas cops checked him for warrants and found no violations in the system. The cops removed the one handcuff and sent him on his way. As a former military cop myself, the idea of just grabbing a guy while not in any form of uniform strikes me as something one might see in newsreels of the 1930s in Germany, but not here.

But, as you might have guessed, I’m not going to talk about that.

Nor am I going to talk about the mystery bidder who, last week, bought a T-Rex fossil for a record $50.1 million. I’m thinking that guy could afford to pay more in Social Security taxes, but, as I said, I’m not going to talk about that.

What I am going to talk about is the Round Up story about, as the story reports, “A Utah man told police he repeatedly stabbed a Muslim man because of the man’s faith and intended to kill him, according to court records filed on July 14.” The poor guy was stabbed more than 15 times by the racist bigot who attacked him. He actually told the cops, after being seized by bystanders, he attacked the man explicitly because of his Muslim faith and had hoped to kill him. By the way, the attacker was already on parole.

Now, religious bigotry and violence is sown in the nature of man, I fear. But what is different now is with a profoundly bigoted president in office (remember the “Muslim ban?”), horrible bigots who used to have to at least hide their views because they were profoundly unacceptable in our once-civil society, now can proudly fly their traitor flags (the Confederate battle flag is the usual one) and demand our society be “protected” from diversity and such.

Many years ago, while a Senate staffer, I received an award from a veteran’s group for my casework on behalf of vets. At that dinner, I had the privilege of saluting George Sakato. Then an elderly man with a cane, but around his neck was our nation’s highest award, the Medal of Honor. During a time of Japanese internment camps and acute racism, Sakato served in the all-Japanese American 442nd Regiment, which as a unit received the most awards for heroism of any other. Sakato was an American hero by any measure, yet in today’s climate I wonder what the bigots who have crawled out from under their rocks would say about that Japanese-American fellow.

Attacking a person for his beliefs or national heritage is, frankly, about as low as it gets. I recently heard a commentator note those on the extreme right, currently embracing the new and highly aggressive “enforcement” techniques of ICE, argue the two people in Minnesota that were, frankly, murdered by ICE, deserved to die because they were attacking the police.

They weren’t, actually, but that brings up a rather remarkable point: if we take from those events the lesson people who attack cops should be killed, what the heck happened on Jan. 6, 2021? By current ICE standards, shouldn’t the Capitol Police have fired on those attacking and seizing the U.S. Capitol? More than 140 cops were attacked by Trump’s mob, yet they got pardons. One can’t help but notice the blatant and profoundly hypocritical views of those supporting the ICE killings and kidnappings.

Look, I strongly believe we need an ICE organization. We certainly need to be able to properly control immigration and asylum issues. But the current wild-west feel of so many (though, I’m sure, not all) ICE agents is deeply troubling to this former Air Force cop.

We are better than all this, despite what a certain president jokes about.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.