It’s Time For Some Straight Talk

In a recent column titled “The Trump Rebellion,” syndicated columnist Doug Giles tells of a chance meeting with a Cuban friend in his favorite Miami cigar store.  The conservative Cuban asked Giles if he could really vote for someone like Donald Trump for president.  Giles replied, “Uh … yeah.  I voted for McCain.  I still haven’t forgiven myself.  Pray for me.” 

I can go Giles five better.  I voted for George H.W. Bush (once), George W. Bush (twice in the voting booth and twice in the Electoral College), and John McCain, and I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive myself for any of those votes.  I am tired of having to vote for nice guy Republicans who think that by meeting Democrats half way, or three-fourths of the way, they are somehow going to appeal to fence-straddling independents, or they’re going to convince liberals and Democrats to act like decent human beings.  They don’t seem to understand that the only thing that appeals to a Democrat is getting reelected; being nice or being decent is not in their DNA. 

Giles described his Cuban friend’s three main problems with Trump: 1) Trump is arrogant, 2) Trump is an adulterer, and 3) Trump is not serious.  His candidacy was a publicity stunt.

Responding to the three problems in order, Giles responded, “Well, if he is (arrogant), it’s not without cause.  He’s insanely successful.  There’s nothing wrong about being right.  As far as Trump is concerned, his business accomplishments are legendary.  Why shouldn’t he be proud?  (Obama’s) main claim to fame, before Soros put the first affirmative action president into the White House, was ACORN.” 

I agree completely.  Muhammad Ali was arrogant; Barack Obama is arrogant.  The difference is that Ali could always back up his arrogance with his fists; Barack Obama has absolutely no life accomplishment to validate his arrogance.  He is an empty suit claiming to be the leader of the free world.  He lectures Israel about returning to indefensible pre-1967 borders, but Benjamin Netanyahu is too nice to remind him that, while the Israelis were whipping the Arabs in a 6-day war, he was a 5-year-old boy named Barry Soetoro, living in Jakarta and taking out Indonesian citizenship.  Trump has built a multi-billion dollar real estate empire; Barack Obama has never run so much as a sidewalk lemonade stand. 

With regard to Trump’s adulterous episodes, Giles responded, “As a Christian and a conservative I’m supposed to shun Donald because he’s an adulterer, to which I say, according to the biblical maxim … well, aren’t we all?”  Patterning Jimmy Carter’s attitude, Giles said, “I believe Jesus said that if you look lustfully at a woman it’s the same as if you ‘shagged’ her.  One comedian put it succinctly by telling the sanctimonious who condemn those who’ve literally wandered from their marital vows by saying, ‘He that hath an empty hand, let him throw the first stone.’ ”

I would respond to that charge with just two words: “Bill Clinton.”  I use Clinton as an example, not because he was a far more serious philanderer than Donald Trump… which he was(is)… I mention Clinton only because nine out of ten Democrats who will swear that Clinton walked on water are totally dismissive of his serial philandering and are now dyed-in-the-wool Obama supporters who would have used Trump’s relatively minor record of philandering against him.         

Most Democrats these days are fond of comparing Newt Gingrich to Bill Clinton, complaining that, while Newt was Speaker of the House and Republicans were impeaching Clinton, Newt was involved in a love affair with a staff member, a woman who has now been his wife since August 2000.  Democrats view that as “hypocricy” on Newt’s part.  The fact is, it is almost impossible for most liberals and Democrats, and a great many Republicans, to create a simple declaratory sentence about Newt without including the word “baggage.”  It’s almost as if Newt has worked as a bellhop at a major hotel for the past forty years.

The fact is, little of the conservative and Republican animosity toward Bill Clinton was based on the fact that he had carried on an Oval Office romance with Monica Lewinsky.  The facts of the relationship were titillating, even disgusting, but they had little or nothing to do with the grounds for Clinton’s impeachment.  Clinton was impeached because he perjured himself before a federal judge, suborned the perjury of others, tampered with witnesses, and tampered with evidence.  Newt may have been guilty of marital infidelity, but Clinton was guilty of actual felony crimes.  

And finally, in response to the charge that Trump is not serious… that his presidential candidacy was just another publicity stunt… Giles responded, “Yeah?  Well, it’s a value-added punking as he is saying all the things to Obama and his ilk that Americans want someone with a big prime time megaphone to say… I think the Trump Rebellion is dee-licious.  It’s injecting attitude and information, not via some tepid politico, but via a mogul who has had enough of Barack’s bunkum, who gets the socialistic game Hussein is hoisting on us, and who hates countries who hate and use us…”    

He goes on to say, “Jesus was the only perfect person to schlep this rock.  However, comb-over be damned, I’d vote for Trump right now.  My perfect candidate, however, would be an amalgam of several candidates, a combination of Donald Trump with Mitt Romney’s hair, Newt Gingrich’s grasp of American History, and Mike Huckabee’s heart…” 

And although Trump is now out of the race… at least for now… Giles gives him high marks because “he sure as heck has shown the boys and girls looking on that you can take (Obama) on and not be McCain McNice about it.”  He predicts that “giddy Americans will line up” behind a strong Republican candidate because “they are pig sick of how Obama is destroying our great land.”

My own recent experience with a friendly Obama supporter was very much like Giles’ experience with his Cuban friend.  My friend is a lawyer who is married to a sitting district judge.  They are rare Democrats in that it is possible to carry on a relatively lucid conversation with them… so long as political topics are kept to a minimum. 

On a recent evening, as we discussed the weather and other important topics over snifters of Irish whiskey, my friend, an avid fisherman, launched into a tirade over a mutual friend, our resident “tree-hugger,” who tends to go bananas when one of our Club members dumps surplus minnows into our lake at the end of the day.  Why?  Because she fears those minnows may have genetic characteristics incompatible with the DNA of the minnows native to our lake.  (Really!  I don’t think she’s set fire to any new housing developments, as yet, but she actually said that.)

Since it was he who broached the subject of environmental extremism, I saw it as the perfect opportunity to challenge him on the refusal of mainstream Democrats to challenge the many radicals in their party who are responsible for national policies that prevent us, for example, from becoming energy self-sufficient or solving our illegal immigration problem.

To drive home my point, I compared “moderate” Democrats and the ban on the use of DDT with the so-called “moderate” Islamists and the radicalization of Muslim jihadists.  I explained that the relationship between moderate Muslims and the murder of tens of thousands of innocents by al Qaeda terrorists and suicide bombers is no different than the relationship between moderate Democrats and the millions of people around the globe who die each year because of the U.S. ban on DDT… the handiwork of radical environmentalists within the Democrat Party.

I pointed out that, since DDT was banned by a Democratic Congress in 1972, more than fifty million people have died of malaria.  The World Health Organization reports that, in the year 2000 alone, malaria infected more than three hundred million people, killing some two million… mostly in sub-Saharan Africa… and that most fatalities today are children, who die at the rate of two per minute, or 3,000 per day.  Yet, so long as Democrats have their campaign coffers filled by radical environmentalists, the ban on DDT will remain intact and millions more will die.

My suggestion to him was that, until non-ideological Democrats… those who are Democrats either because their mommies and daddies were Democrats, or because they earn their living though a government job or a patronage appointment… put a leash on the radical elements of their party, we will never be able to save the country from the economic calamity we now face.

To be quite honest, I fear that moderate Democrats have no more courage to deal with the radical elements in their party than moderate Muslims have to deal with the suicide bombers of radical Islam.  Experience tells us that moderate Muslims live in constant fear of radical Muslims so they make no effort to control them.  In that regard, moderate Democrats are very much like moderate Islamists.  They’re afraid to denounce radical elements of their own party because that might be seen as a tacit admission that they’ve been wrong about the party they’ve supported for most of their lives.  More importantly, it may cause them to lose an election or two. 

But now there is no more time for such foolishness.  Standing on the precipice of economic ruin, we have no more time for political gamesmanship.  Democrats in Congress make it clear every day that they see but two alternatives: 1) Republicans must either join them in a deficit/debt reduction plan that is certain to destroy the nation’s economy, or 2) We all join hands and watch as the nation goes down the tubes.  Their intransigence is rock-solid and patently suicidal.

The 2012 elections promise to be America’s D-Day, and, like those great patriots of the “greatest generation,” the grandchildren of that generation must step up to the plate and do what must be done in November 2012.  And while Donald Trump may be gone from the 2012 race, his brief candidacy proved one very important thing: Obama may have spent more than $2 million hiding his birth certificate from the American people, but Trump’s no-holds-barred attack on him got under his thin skin and forced him to publish a birth document, fake as it may have been. 

Either we give Obama the complete thrashing he so richly deserves and elect a filibuster-proof Republican majority in the Senate, or we don’t.  And if we don’t, we can be all but certain that this great experiment in self-government will come to a painful end within a decade.  If ever there was a time for some straight talk, the time is now.  It’s time to face liberals and Democrats with unflinching courage and determination.