A cacophony of liberal voices are crying that the current climate of rancor and divisiveness that permeates and seems to be splitting these once-United States is the fault of one man -- Donald Trump.

Really? How about a little perspective?

Ten years ago, many on the right, myself included, were horrified when Barack Obama was elected president because we considered him a lightweight, a career opportunist whose carefully managed resume touched all the right buttons but was so thin it could have been written on rice paper. Despite having written two books about himself by the age of 45, he hadn’t actually done much.

Leadership is honed, and for presidents, that honing can be done in only three places: business, government, or the military. Obama had no business experience, and he was certainly no Eisenhower, so that left government, and Obama’s record there was rather short and filled with an unusual number of “present” votes, meaning “I was there but didn’t want to commit.”

Even more troubling than Obama’s rice-paper resume was his ideological bent, which seemed to be straight out of Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, who, like Obama, had been a “community organizer” with strong socialist leanings.

What we on the right did not do, though, immediately after Obama won the election was start “resist” and “not my president” movements. We did not spend days rioting in the streets. We did not demand that he be impeached even before he took office so that he could not be sworn in, something that I’m pretty sure is a legal impossibility. And I’m not talking about internet trolls or political outliers, I’m talking about elected members of Congress, major media figures, and a shrill and vacuous cast of Hollywood halfwits.

Nor did we demand that Obama’s pick for attorney general immediately recuse himself from, say, the birther controversy. Nor did we insist on the appointment of a special counsel to investigate and prosecute him. We did not attack Obama’s family. Ninety percent of the media coverage of Obama during his first year in office was not negative. In fact, I suspect the ratio was just the opposite, if not even more favorable than 90 percent.

We did not use a bogus (you can call it unverified if you insist) document paid for by the failed opposition candidate to launch a months-long wiretap of one of Obama’s campaign advisors, with the obvious intent to capture on tape something that we could use to impeach the president.

The Left did that and more. A lot more.

I don’t see a climate of divisiveness so much as I see a climate of unhinged, unmitigated hate, not only for President Trump, but for any of us who voted for him and support him.

To you on the left, we’re not principled people who disagree with you on key issues like taxes, foreign policy, the environment, and immigration. We’re stupid, we’re evil, we’re racists, we’re Nazis, we’re deplorable; we hate women, children, and old people, we support mass shootings, and above all we want to destroy the earth (because we actually have another place to live just waiting for us). In short, we are monsters, at least in your eyes, and you remind us of it every single day.

So if you want to point the finger of blame at someone for this new level of divisiveness, I suggest you point no further than the nearest mirror.

Chuck Hustmyre; www.chuckhustmyre.com; www.imdb.me/chuckhustmyre