Lessons to Be Learned
For some Democrats this fall, I suspect the hardest thing for them to keep in mind during their campaign is that their major foe is supposed to be Donald Trump, not Nancy Pelosi. Easier said than done, I’m afraid, because Pelosi is one of the most despised politicians of our time.
For some Democrats this fall, I suspect the hardest thing for them to keep in mind during their campaign is that their major foe is supposed to be Donald Trump, not Nancy Pelosi. Easier said than done, I’m afraid, because Pelosi is one of the most despised politicians of our time.
It’s not just the stupid things she says, things like telling her colleagues that they would have to vote for Obamacare before they found out what was in the 2,000-page bill; telling voters who hadn’t seen a raise in a decade that the $1,000-$2,000 bonuses doled out by corporations grateful for the tax cut bill were “crumbs;” and perhaps my all-time favorite: “Every month that we do not have an economic recovery package, 500 million Americans lose their jobs.” It’s also the way she says them, with her eyeballs darting around like pinballs and those little head jerks that make her look like a puppet whose strings are being pulled by the town drunk.
The problem for Democratic candidates is if they don’t attack her, their opponents will tie them to the madwoman of San Francisco. If they do attack her, they may win their elections, but find themselves serving their terms in the House equivalent of Siberia.
Anyone who believes the House Democrats will dethrone her is kidding himself. She may have a loose grip on reality, but anyone who decides to break her hold on House leadership will have to pry it out of her cold dead hands.
When it comes to blatant hypocrisy, you need look no further than the way the media treated John McCain. When he reached across the aisle to work with Democrats, they hailed the man as principled and statesmanlike. But when he dared to oppose Barack Obama in the 2008 election, they labeled him not only a political hack, but a racist, even though he refused to allow his campaign to run TV ads connecting Obama to Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Now that Sen. McCain has passed away, the Democrats and their lap dogs in the media are tossing verbal bouquets on his casket, pretending there’s nothing they appreciate more than a political maverick who calls them as he sees them.
But who else fits that description? Why, none other than Donald Trump. Like McCain, he is just as likely to hurl brickbats at Republicans as he is at Democrats. He even spends time attacking people he himself hired, people such as Rex Tillerson, Michael Cohen and Jeff Sessions.
I have heard that, much like the late senator, President Trump has an explosive temper. And again, like McCain, the word is he swears like a stevedore who’s just hit his thumb with a hammer. It strikes me that if President Trump wants politicians from both sides of the aisle, along with the nattering nabobs of negativism in the media, to praise him, all he really needs to do is follow Sen. McCain’s example, and die.
The problem with the mainstream media isn’t simply that they tell lies or at least fudge the facts, it’s that they censor themselves rather than tell the full story.
For instance, when John Hodgkinson opened fire on a baseball field full of Republicans, nearly killing Rep. Steve Scalise, it’s unlikely that you knew he was a Bernie Sanders supporter who hated Donald Trump. When David Katz opened fire at a video game tournament in Jacksonville, Florida, recently, killing two and wounding 10, it wasn’t over politics; he was just a sore loser who had been eliminated from the competition. However, the 24-year-old was apparently a proud Never-Trumper. Do you think for even a second that if he’d been wearing a Make America Great Again cap, it wouldn’t have been in the headline or at least mentioned in the first paragraph of the news story?
It seems like every day, you hear about some conservative being deprived of free speech because the honchos at Google and Facebook have decided they don’t like what he’s saying. You would think that a constant violation of an American’s First Amendment rights would grab the attention of our representatives in Congress, all of whom have taken an oath to defend the Constitution. But with few exceptions, they maintain a creepy silence.
Could it be that people like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, all agree that conservative voices should be silenced, and that definitely includes the President’s?
Bob Hunt, a Vietnam vet from Arcadia, California, shared a story, perhaps more of a parable, I had never come across before.
One lazy Sunday afternoon in a small town in Iowa, a couple of junior high school cut-ups, having nothing better to do, rounded up three goats and painted the numbers 1,2 and 4, on their sides. That evening they snuck the goats into the school.
The following morning when the teachers and administrators showed up, they quickly realized from the aroma and goat droppings that something was amiss. A search was immediately launched and soon, the trio of goats were rounded up. But where was that elusive number three?
They spent the entire morning searching. When the lunch bell rang, it was decided to send the students home, so the search could continue with fewer distractions. They looked everywhere they could imagine a goat might be hiding, but being non-existent, it continued to elude them.
As Mr. Hunt points out: “Those among us who in spite of having a good life feel they are somehow missing out, are wasting their time seeking goat number three. Those who can’t get over the fact that they don’t have a perfect job or a perfect car or a perfect house, are foolishly allowing the absence of something that probably doesn’t even exist overwhelm the reality of what they do have.”
I suspect that most of us spend our youth seeking that particular goat; later on, if wisdom doesn’t prove to be as elusive as number three, we come to understand we’re better off coming to terms with reality and acknowledging that goats are rude and smelly creatures and are pursued at one’s peril.
A golfing friend of mine related a time when his drive left him 176 yards from the hole. He felt good about his approach shot, but when he reached the green, he couldn’t find his ball. “I instinctively went to the back of the green, assuming it had rolled downhill into the rough. By the time the rest of the foursome reached the green, I had just about given up looking when I peeked into the cup. There was the ball.”
He had an eagle on a 375-yard par-four hole.
My initial reaction was to observe that, as usual, the ball was in the last place he would look. Then it occurred to me that everything, be it your wallet, your car keys or happiness, is always in the last place you look because once you find whatever it is, you stop looking.
Unless, apparently, you happen to be searching for a certain goat.
