Really, Mr. Lieutenant Governor, you are too kind.
Really, really too kind.
Because the one thing wrong with what Utah Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox said the other day about the fight the president of the United States has picked with a growing platoon of professional athletes was that the flurry of tweets and comments was “diabolically brilliant.”
Diabolical, yes. The word means “of the devil.” And the president‘s penchant for scoring points for himself by demeaning others, particularly identifiable ethnic and minority groups, is one of the most evil things a nation’s leader can do.
Brilliant? Not so much.
Yes, the president did blow past a long list of Republican establishment candidates and defeat the women with the one of the most impressive political resumes ever.
But, in this case, it all smells of the gut feelings that enable him to push the right button at the right time, stoking the feelings of his ever-shrinking political base and distracting the global media spotlight away from other places and issues where it would more properly be directed.
Places like the hurricane-ravaged — and American citizen-occupied — island of Puerto Rico. Issues such as the failing of the Republican Congress to either shore up the flaws in the Affordable Care Act or to replace the whole thing with something else.
The president’s limbic-brain attack on the peaceful, constitutionally protected and wholly reasonable desire of professional athletes, mostly black professional athletes, to use their star status to draw attention to such injustices as the many instances of unarmed black men being killed by police has, as Cox said, mostly served to divide the nation.
Those who already thought the protests were inappropriate have had their feelings validated by the highest office in the land. Which would not be so bad if it were not for the fact that the benefit to the president is to play up, while pretending not to, the obvious racial overtones of the whole argument.
Those who already thought that going to one knee during the playing of the National Anthem is a very American form of protest are now even more upset with the governing party than they were before. And people who may have been on the fence, from fans to other players to team owners, have been moved to stand by their idols or colleagues rather than with a grandstanding politician.
Cox, meanwhile, is that rarest of birds, a self-deprecating politician. Even when disagreeing with someone, as he usually does with the president, he tries to give his opponent some credit, to find something good to say.
But the lieutenant governor is among the many Republican office-holders around the nation who should be -- and, in Cox’s case is -- ready, willing and able to call the chief executive out when he departs from his most important mission of being the president of all the people.