Trump as the Trojan Horse
Something that puzzles me about the way the Democrats are going after President Trump is that they seem to believe that if they somehow drive him out of the White House, someone like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would be taking up residence.
Something that puzzles me about the way the Democrats are going after President Trump is that they seem to believe that if they somehow drive him out of the White House, someone like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would be taking up residence.
Don’t they understand that Trump would be replaced by Mike Pence? If anything, Pence is more conservative than Donald Trump, he doesn’t stay up all night tweeting and, moreover, unlike Trump, whose weight and flushed face make him look like a coronary just waiting to happen, Mike Pence is the guy Central Casting sends over when a Hollywood production company puts out a call for an actor to play the president.
Whereas I now have no doubt that only Trump could have defeated Mrs. Clinton, I also believe she may have been the only Democrat who could have lost to him. The fact is, when Joe Biden, in the wake of his son’s death, announced he wasn’t running, I let out a huge sigh of relief.
Before you inundate me with all the reasons that Biden would have been a lousy president or why you don’t believe he could have defeated Trump, keep in mind that Hillary Clinton had so much baggage, it would have taken two dozen redcaps to cart it around and they would all have wound up hospitalized with hernias. And even so, Trump barely squeaked by.
One of the ironies of Chuck Schumer’s using Merrick Garland’s being denied a hearing by the GOP as an excuse to oppose Neil Gorsuch is that the Republicans were merely abiding by Joe Biden’s rule, which stipulated that nobody should be seated on the Supreme Court by a president in the final 18 months of his second term. The other irony is that during her campaign, Hillary Clinton indicated that if elected, she wouldn’t nominate Judge Garland.
Rep. Jim Jordan, a conservative I had always liked until he joined with a few other obstinate types in the Freedom Caucus to shoot down Trump’s replacement for ObamaCare, insisted that the Caucus had to deliver on their promise to the voters. But they also spent the last eight years saying they’d get a whole lot of things done if only they had control of the House, the Senate and the Oval Office. In the wake of the Waterloo they delivered to President Trump last week, the question now is whether they will get anything done.
And while I stand in awe of their noble principles, the 30 of them represent fewer than seven percent of the population, so their first order of business should have been to support their party’s man in the White House, not to send his first piece of legislation down in flames. While it’s true, they garnered a great deal of applause, most of it was coming from the left side of the aisle.
In the wake of the bill being pulled by Paul Ryan before it could face certain defeat, one of my readers let me know that he stood by the Freedom Caucus. In response, I wrote that normally I would, too, especially if a Democrat was in the Oval Office.
I went on: “But I recognize that conservatives constitute a tiny percent of the nation’s voters. Once FDR got us hooked on Social Security and welfare, we became, for all intents and purposes, a socialist country, and not even eight years of Reagan could rescue us.
"Even the fact that we have a graduated income tax stinks. Whether the tax rate is 10% or 30%, rich people will always pay more than other people because they make more. Why should they also have to pay a higher percentage? And why should more than half of us pay no income taxes at all? Whatever became of people paying their fair share?
"I was opposed to the bill that Trump and Ryan came up with because I don’t believe the government has any role to play when it comes to health insurance beyond making it possible for people to purchase their own policies across state borders. Beyond that, the government is infringing on our freedoms. To adopt a phrase from the past, Uncle Sam is your uncle, not your nanny.
"The reason I lost all patience with the Freedom Caucus is because they refused to recognize reality when they came face-to-face with it. I describe myself as a conservative, philosophically, but a Republican, politically, and I understand that there is an abyss as wide as the Grand Canyon between the two. When I cast a vote for a Republican, I hope he shares my conservative principles. But I also hope that he understands politics, and that for no better reason than to establish his purity, he doesn’t shoot himself in the foot or knife our president in the back.”
With that out of the way, let’s get back to attacking leftists. You would think that even college students, as dumb as they are, would have been smarter than to line up behind Pied Pipers like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
I suppose if your parents have spent 18 or 20 years feeding you, you could come to believe that there is such a thing as a free lunch. But are they really so ignorant that they assume there is some entity in Washington that makes trillions of dollars and, out of the generosity of its heart, decides to treat the young simpletons to free tuition and the other goodies of life?
When they scream for higher taxes on, say, corporations, whom do they picture paying those taxes? Don’t they understand that the federal government prints money, it doesn’t make money?
When taxes rise, there are only three sources from which they get paid. One, they’re paid by stockholders, a group that probably includes their parents and certainly includes their colleges; two, they’re paid by the company’s employees in the form of lower wages, the very workers whose plight is already keeping Bernie Sanders awake at night; and, three, the customers, a group that definitely includes themselves, causing them to pay more for products ranging from beer to Smart Phones.
Racism is alive and well in L.A. Back in the 1970s, a court order was established that provided bonus-funding for any public school whose student body was at least 70% non-white. So, when a local school, Walter Reed, saw its percentage dip slightly under that magic number, the school lost its bonus, resulting in its dropping a few teachers, a librarian and a school nurse.
Back in the 70s, when desegregation was the hot item that gender-neutral bathrooms are today, I had a son in grammar school. Even though one of the attractions of the area where we purchased a home was the local school, he was suddenly being bused out of the neighborhood. Fortunately, it wasn’t too far away. But the court order had black kids being bused clear across town from Watts to the upscale Pacific Palisades.
That was a bit of social engineering that saw scads of white parents yanking their kids out of Palisades High and sticking them in private schools. It also caused an outcry from black parents who didn’t like their kids winding up 20 miles and an hour-and-a-half away from home. It also resulted in a major uptick in vandalism and shoplifting in the Palisades.
It’s fortunate that liberals rarely engage in any sort of engineering besides social, or buildings, aqueducts and bridges, would be collapsing all over the place.
I find it interesting that it took a professor, Daniel Dennett, to highlight one of the problems with so-called higher education when he observed: “The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the ocean searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it relies on a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it. It’s rather like getting tenure.”
Or, for that matter, registering as a Democrat.
