You get what you clap for

It looks like the spat between the president and the NFL is here to stay.

Ross: How can we face the flag with our heads on swivels?

I know that because on Sean Hannity’s show Wednesday night it was one of his biggest applause lines.

“You cannot disrespect our country, our flag, our anthem; you cannot do that,” Trump said.

And if there’s one thing everyone agrees on about President Trump, it’s that you get what you clap for.

But in case you’ve forgotten, Trump was not the first president to disagree with the idea of taking a knee during the national anthem.

“I believe that honoring our flag and our anthem is part of what binds us together as a nation. We recognize what it means to us, but also what it means to our men and women who are fighting on our behalf,” President Obama said.

Trump was also not the first to point out that taking a knee can be offensive to soldiers and their families.

“I want Mr. Kaepernick and others who are on a knee, I want them to listen to the pain that may cause somebody who, for example, had a spouse or child who was killed in combat and why it hurts them to see somebody not standing,” Obama said.

Those remarks by Barack Obama, by the way, were in front of an audience of soldiers in uniform at Fort Lee about a year ago.

Of course, I realize there’s a problem with Obama’s approach. That’s the approach you take only if the goal is for Americans to actually understand what the anthem and the flag mean to a soldier. It’s completely useless when you’re trying to make people angry.

When you ask people to talk to each other, all that’s likely to happen is that a few players take a knee, and then they just play the game, and everybody thinks, “hey, that’s America.”

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