Mean and Heartless

 Although no longer recommended to induce vomiting, ipecac still finds its way onto crossword puzzles. Whenever I see the word, I immediately think of one much more efficient emetic: the sight of a smug, unctuous Chuck Schumer peddling his moralistic snake oil from the floor of the Senate. His over-the-top hypocrisy and cavalier disregard for facts should be enough to make anyone gag.

 

Schumer’s latest show of divisive demagoguery is leading a Democrat chorus branding the latest Republican senators’ health care proposal as mean and heartless, when its intent is to fix the problems of the disastrous ObamaCare that he and his Democrat cohorts foisted upon the American public.     

The Republican proposed legislation (ACA) is far from perfect; it must improve to earn the support of holdout senators. It needs to remove insurance subsidies, for instance. But even in its current form it is far better than ObamaCare. It removes job-killing employer mandates and fines on young people for not enrolling in the program; it eliminates mandates to buy coverages people don’t need or want; it retains coverage for pre-existing conditions; it reduces taxes and allows markets to work. That does not, in my view, meet the definition of mean and heartless.

What would be mean and heartless is leaving the shattered remnants of ObamaCare in place, a system that has broken its promises to the American people (If you like your plan, you can keep your plan….), increased premiums and deductibles by over 100% for many, and left an increasing number of states with no insurers at all.

ObamaCare is collapsing because its numbers are unsustainable and depressing the economy. Yet, when Republicans offer a plan to control the expansion of Medicaid, they are called “killers” by Democrats and the liberal media. When they look to cut costs, Senator Warren calls the cuts “blood money.” And the smarmy snake oil peddler from Brooklyn continues to smile and lie.

Hate, Rage, andd Violence

            Our country is in trouble. It is descending into a polarized climate of hate and rage, and, as we have seen so often in the recent past, violence. We have witnessed wanton destruction in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Milwaukee; we have seen anti-police riots and killings; we have watched masked thugs vandalize and burn to prevent free speech.

            Whatever happened to civil dialog? To friendly persuasion? To fair and honest debate? Instead we are treated to the bloodied head of a decapitated Trump and a play featuring the assassination of the President disguised as Julius Caesar? Is there no limit to the vulgarities and the outrageous lies?                       

            Last week a Bernie Sanders supporter and fan of Rachel Maddow fired his rifle into Republicans practicing baseball and almost succeeded in assassinating Congressman Scalise. For one day Democrats and Republicans condemned the violence and called for unity. But not two days passed before the New York Times resurrected the debunked canard of the assault on Gabby Gifford to direct the blame on Republicans. Right on cue, Congressional Democrats resumed their attack on President Trump, and the President fired back with a barrage of tweets to further inflame the Left. The war hardly took a breath.

            In this case, as in so many others, we can draw a straight line between hate, rage, and violence. What is truly appalling, in my view, is that this mindless assault on the fabric of our society is abetted by a biased mainstream media that has abandoned investigative journalism in favor of leftist propaganda.

            For the most part, the Left is focused on what it believes to be the illegitimate presidency of Donald Trump. It may very well be that nothing will change until he leaves (or is forced out of) office. What then? Will our Constitution have survived? Or will we be kicking around its ashes? The haters should think about that.

Killers

                        The greatest killers in the history of this earth have been: 1. Natural disasters (tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and giant meteors like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 60 million years ago); 2. Pestilence (the 14^th century Black Death that killed up to half of some European countries’ populations, and the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic that claimed 50 million victims; 3. Disease (cancer, heart disease, malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, and the small pox that decimated Native-American peoples); 4. Famine (many examples, but the tens of millions starved by Stalin and Mao probably the most extreme); 5. War.

            Of these killers, war is the worst because war is a conscious and deliberate act. From the beginning of recorded history, men have warred on each other for any number of reasons: conquest, power, subjugation, revenge, independence, self-defense, etc. Yet, the most irrational cause of many of history’s wars has been religion and its inherent bias.

            Would there have been an invasion of Canaan had the Hebrews not felt entitled to the land as God’s Chosen People? Would there have been multiple Christian Crusades if the Holy Land had not been occupied by Muslims? Would Catholics and Protestants have fought each other in the Hundred Years War without claims and counterclaims to divine approbation? Would there have been genocide in Armenia or holocaust in World War II absent bias against Christians and Jews? Would we be having massacres today in the name of Allah?

            The jihadist murders in London on June 3^rd remind us that religious fervor and malevolence have coexisted hand in hand for millennia. These two contradictions have given us persecution, torture, Inquisitions, beheadings, and exterminations on a ghastly scale. But none of the world’s religious wars have been as tenacious and unrelenting as Islam’s war of conquest of the Infidel.

            The civilized world is in a quandary. What are we to do about a religion whose large majority of adherents are people who only wish to worship in peace guided by Quranic precepts handed down by a loving God, while a minority find justification for terror in the same scriptures? How can we effectively excise this cancer from our midst while political correctness and accusations of Islamophobia prevent us from condemning the carnage as radical Islamic extremism and taking the measures necessary to end it?

            That is the defining question of our age.

Lies and More Lies

            Interesting coincidence.  The day I received my June issue of National Geographic in the mail was the same day Hillary Clinton delivered her commencement address at Wellesley College, her alma mater.  Why interesting?  Because the cover story in National Geographic was “Why We Lie,” while the theme of Hillary’s speech, as summarized by the Boston Globe, was “Clinton urges graduates to fight for truth.”  What brazenness: a speech about truth by the greatest pathological liar of our time.

            Hillary couldn’t help herself.  She wanted to disparage President Trump so badly—describing his budget, for instance, as “an act of unimaginable cruelty on the most vulnerable among us”—that she drew a parallel between him and President Nixon.  But she got it wrong by describing Nixon as “a man whose presidency would eventually end in disgrace with his impeachment.”  Except that Nixon was never impeached; the only president impeached since Andrew Johnson was her own husband!

            I love National Geographic. It’s a great magazine. But its writers are far too susceptible to Leftist propaganda, especially on environmental issues.  In this same June issue, it offers that sea levels will rise by 22 to 30 inches by 2100 according to some projections, a totally irresponsible claim ignoring scientific evidence to the contrary.

            On the subject of lying, National Geographic lists some of history’s most notorious liars.  Among them are Lance Armstrong (“I have never doped.”), Rosie Ruiz (“I ran the race. I really did.”), and Charles Ponzi.  When it comes to presidential politics, however, it gives us only Richard Nixon, Donald Trump, and Bill Clinton (!), but not Barack Obama (“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”), and not Hillary, the most prolific liar of them all.  So much for the magazine’s balance and objectivity.

Shape Up Or Get Out

            Republicans in Congress are starting to panic. And with good reason. President Trump is under siege by Democrats, Progressives, a legion of anonymous sources, and a media that a recent Harvard analysis shows is 93% anti-Trump. Worse, Trump’s base is wavering; his popularity polls among Republicans has fallen to around 70% and with the nation overall to the mid-30s. This is unprecedented for a president who should be enjoying a honeymoon, especially after an arguably superior start in delivering on the promises that got him elected.

            This means that even the President’s most ardent supporters are increasingly disillusioned. Congressmen facing re-election know that if the President’s base doesn’t show up at the polls in 2018, Democrats will take control of the House. They will blame Trump. And they will be right.

            What can the President do to halt this precipitous decline? Pulitzer Prize winner Peggy Noonan says in the Wall Street Journal that it would be a good idea if top Hill Republicans went en masse to the president and said: “Stop it. Clean up your act. Shut your mouth. Do your job. Stop tweeting. Stop seething. Stop wasting time. You lost the thread and don’t even know what you were elected to do anymore.” She goes on and ends with this: “Act like a president or leave the presidency.”

            Wow! It’s one thing for a rabid Maxine Waters to call for Trump’s impeachment. It’s quite another for a Republican advocate like Noonan to tell the President to shape up or get out. Or is she just putting into words what many his supporters are beginning to think?

Fulminations

            President Trump’s heart is in the right place, but his mouth keeps getting him in trouble.  He has done many good things in his avowed commitment to “Make America Great Again,” but his intemperate tweets have his most loyal staff members running for cover.  The President’s threat to discontinue daily press briefings may be the only way to save Sean Spicer’s dignity if not his sanity.

            Trump haters in Congress and the media are giddy with the daily fodder he provides them for their daily cannonades.  The sad consequence is that unrelenting, one-sided criticism is ultimately destructive of our democratic institutions.

            The obstructionism of Chuck Schumer and congressional Democrats—their opposition to anything Trump—is devoid of any consideration of truth and civility.  A perfect example was their monumental hypocrisy in the wake of the President’s firing of FBI Director Comey, the man whose decapitation they had called for incessantly in retribution for Hillary’s defeat.

            Some argue that Democrats are feeding the frenzy in the mass media, especially the hysterical fulminations of cable TV stations like MSNBC.  Others argue that the media are legitimizing the hyper-partisanship in Congress.  Either way, this symbiotic relationship of the Left is proving very harmful to what should be a constructive national dialog.  Worse, it is infecting other aspects of society, particularly among the young.

            We have had many examples of institutions of higher learning like UC Berkeley denying First Amendment rights to Conservative speakers.  Now we have the graduating class of black Bethune-Cookman University hissing, booing, and turning their backs on commencement speaker Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos for no apparent reason other than her association with Donald Trump.  This rudeness was an undeserved and misguided insult to a woman who is dedicated to improving the education of inner-city black youths through her advocacy of school choice. 

            Will the madness ever end?

           

Shameful Jones

            In the White House Rose Garden on May 4th, Republicans and President Trump celebrated the House passage of the American Healthcare Act, the legislation to repeal and replace ObamaCare. In my view, it was not the best possible bill, but at least a step in the right direction that had earned the support of warring Republican factions that recognized the need to move on.

            As expected, not a single Democrat voted for the bill after refusing for months to work with Republicans to come up with a better plan. Instead they clung stubbornly to ObamaCare, a failed—and unrepairable—disaster resting on a fuming pile of lies: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan…” 

            Even more disconcerting to me were the twenty No votes from Republicans who would not support the bill, unconcerned with the serious and possibly permanent damage their opposition might inflict on their party’s future ability to govern. One of these obdurate naysayers was our very own Congressman, Walter Jones.

            In a statement, Jones called the rushed process used by GOP leaders without a revised CBO score “shameful.” He argued, "As a result, no one has any idea how much those deals will cost the American taxpayers, or how they might affect the cost, quality and availability of health insurance coverage for American families."

            Jones’s argument is fatuous, a lame excuse for not having done his homework on the merits of the bill, while being oblivious to the history of the CBO’s notoriously inaccurate estimates. Or perhaps Jones is more interested in maintaining his reputation as a maverick, to hell with the consequences.

            Well, here’s what I think is “shameful”: Walter Jones. As I’ve argued before, it is way past time for Walter Jones to retire and save us, his constituents, from further embarrassment.