The Patriot Post® · In Defense of Contested Conventions

To hear the way that some people talk, you would think that a contested convention would be the worst thing to hit humankind since the black plague killed off half of Europe in the Middle Ages.

By “some people,” I suppose I mean Donald Trump and his consigliore, Roger Stone, who keeps saying he has no connection to the Trump campaign, but nevertheless took it upon himself to threaten delegates to the Cleveland convention with eternal damnation if they even considered abandoning Trump after the first ballot.

It doesn’t take any underhanded tactics by Reince Priebus, Karl Rove or Ted Cruz, to deny Trump the nomination. The rules are pretty clear. If you don’t show up with a majority of the delegates, even if you fall only one vote shy of the required 1,237, it’s up to the 2,473 party faithful to decide whom they’d like to see carry the GOP banner into battle. After all, if you can’t win a majority, it simply means more voters were against you than for you.

Soon after he’d been crushed by Cruz in the Wisconsin primary 48%-35%, Trump, with his customary grace, whined that Cruz had had the support of the state’s popular governor, Scott Walker, many of the state’s conservative talk show hosts and Walker’s entire state apparatus. I had to laugh. That lineup, I would have patiently explained to Mr. Trump, is what a GOP candidate for the presidency is supposed to have.

For those who can’t imagine a worse outcome than an open convention, they’re the reason that Lincoln, the first Republican president, beat out Seward in 1860 and that Eisenhower beat out Taft in 1952. In 1976, Ford unfortunately bested Reagan at the convention, but by ushering in four years of the inept Carter, it made it that much easier for Reagan to win in 1980. Clearly a case of all’s well that ends well.

My head came close to exploding when in the wake of Bernie Sanders burying Mrs. Clinton in the Wisconsin primary, seven percent of those polled said the biggest problem with Sanders is that he’s not liberal enough! Apparently, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Alinsky, are all alive and well and hanging out in the land of the cheeseheads.

When you realize how polarized America is today, I wonder if, knowing what the future bode, Lincoln would have been so quick to squander 700,000 lives to keep the nation united.

In my ongoing campaign to turn the spotlight on the sins being committed in the name of higher education, I’d like to focus on Prescott, a private college in Arizona. The administrators have decided that in addition to charging $28,000-a-year tuition, they’re levying a $30 fee on students in order to provide scholarships for illegal aliens.

For those who have never heard of Prescott, it offers degrees in all the trendiest areas, ranging from adventure education (apparently rock climbing is a major at the institution) and environmental studies to social justice, human rights and something called ecotherapy, which sounds like a course that prepares pinheads to psychoanalyze Mother Nature.

Any conservative parents who cough up $112,000 so their heirs can wind up voting for Bernie Sanders and sporting a Che Guevara t-shirt should be flogged in the public square on charges of child abuse.

His Evilness, Barack Obama, is pushing a plan to build public housing in affluent communities as a way for inner-city blacks to get out of blighted neighborhoods. Unfortunately, the blight isn’t the fault of a bigoted society, but the natural result of welfare recipients lacking the incentive to cast off their inbred dependency.

So, by pretending that lack of money is the only thing differentiating rich people from poor ones, Obama suggests that a change of scenery will magically transform the slothful and the criminal into productive, law-abiding, citizens. The reality is that it will simply expand blight from the inner-city to the suburbs.

Speaking of Barack Obama, a recent poll disclosed that by a margin of 47%-42%, Americans disapprove of the way he’s handled foreign affairs. However, when it comes to his handling of the economy, they approve 50%-45%. I want to know who these people are, and I want names.

Flying in the face of the laws of physics, my contempt for Hillary Clinton continues to expand on a daily, if not hourly, basis. But her husband actually said something the other day that made sense. When his address at a campaign rally was constantly interrupted by the hooligans from Black Lives Matter, instead of apologizing for being white, the way that Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley had, Clinton actually said: “I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders you defend, those who get 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and send them out to murder other African-American children. Maybe you think they’re good citizens, but I don’t.”

It played well. The only problem is that I was reminded of the moment in his 1992 campaign when Clinton confronted one of the more obnoxious black activists, Sister Souljah (born Lisa Williamson) who had said that blacks kill blacks every day, and should consider devoting a week to killing whites. By voicing his objection to her outrageous statement, Clinton went a long way towards reassuring white voters that “the first black president” hadn’t entirely taken leave of his senses. It was referred to by political historians as “the Sister Souljah moment.”

So am I fully convinced that he was serious when he took on the black hecklers and that it wasn’t a carefully choreographed event? I am not. But, then, even back in 1992, I figured that by the time the applause died down, Slick Willie was backstage with race hustlers Vernon Jordan and Jesse Jackson comparing sexual escapades.

A reader sent me a note calling for one day in the year when it’s open season on congressmen, politicians, professors and lawyers.

Considering the potential demand, I wrote back suggesting that if the hunting license cost enough, we could be well on our way to paying off the national debt.

If I could find the right lamp and rub it just the right way, I would ask the genie for just three wishes. Come 2017, I would want to see a Republican in the White House, Hillary Clinton in the big house and Bernie Sanders in the nut house.