They tell us no two fingerprints are alike. And no two snowflakes are alike. I’m convinced no two takes on Donald Trump are alike. At least I can say I haven’t yet heard another one like mine, and as a lover of America who understands why it’s important to love America, that bothers me.
Like those odd insects that scurry for cover when the lights go on, all the birds and the beasts of the Republican Party are finding their own ways to scurry. Speaker Paul Ryan cancels a Wisconsin campaign rally amid volcanic denunciations of Donald Trump. New Hampshire GOP Sen. Kelly Ayotte vows not to vote for Trump but instead will write in Gov. Mike Pence’s name. Republican office-holders nationwide are excoriating Trump, refusing to endorse Trump and withdrawing earlier endorsements.
If Trump were to win, he’s already permanently scarred by this massive withdrawal of support. The only spark of humor in this lugubrious cavalcade comes from Democratic running mate Sen. Tim Kaine, who made sure all of us knew how uncomfortable he was repeating Trump’s words from the podium while his mother and daughter were sitting there in the front row! If any burglar targets Sen. Kaine’s residence, he’ll know he’s broken into the right house when he opens Sen. Kaine’s underwear cabinet and finds all that lace on his drawers.
I have only one complaint about all of the above. They don’t go far enough. Nothing approaches the roiling rage batting my lungs against my breastbone over Donald Trump’s ways-and-means with women. I remember as a boy equating sex not with feelings, closeness, intimacy, passion or even, above all, love. All the boys my age associated sex with achievement! To have successfully engineered a sexual encounter was rather like scoring a touchdown. We even used the verb, “to score.” That incredible Trump tape is 11 years old. I’d say the upper age limit for viewing sex as achievement is about 19. Donald Trump was 59!
My take-away from the reaction so far is that Americans dismally – perhaps catastrophically – under-view the danger confronting America. Somebody eight years ago managed to implant the cockeyed notion that to tell the actual truth about America is racist because the president who steadfastly led us downward is black. Briefly and bluntly, we no longer have the time nor the luxury of protecting our neat little names and reputations by nailing ourselves loudly to the right side of “social issues.”
There are moral reasons for dropping Trump’s candidacy into sulfuric acid and spraying it over Death Valley. There are vastly stronger reasons for electing him president of the United States. In the case of Trump, we’re talking about a few sordid words and deeds. In 1941 we allied with the murderer of hundreds of millions of people in order to destroy the even greater evil of Nazi Germany. If we hadn’t “endorsed” and supplied and supported Josef Stalin’s criminal Soviet Union, most of you would be speaking German today – and I’d be a lampshade!
To you, maybe, stomach-turning disgust with Donald Trump calls for abandonment of his election effort. I say the opposite. We don’t dare ease the victory of those who have led America to the edge of engulfment by evil.
Too many Americans are spoiled rotten by our earlier good leadership. In 1945 the victorious Stalin wasn’t satisfied with 80 percent of Eastern Europe. He wanted it all. “The hell you say!” said high-school dropout and failed haberdasher President Harry Truman, who dispatched Gen. Van Fleet to Greece to impose the Truman Doctrine, which helped contain the Communist takeover (and later led to the formation of NATO). Shortly thereafter the Communist leader of Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito, got into a blood-feud with his one-time champion Stalin. Truman sent Tito everything he needed to keep Stalin from invading and conquering Yugoslavia. Truman’s best friends were complaining, “Harry, why are you doing this? Tito is a Commie sonuvabitch.” “I know,” Truman would reply. “But he’s our Commie sonuvabitch!”
Strong American leadership kept Western Europe free and eventually freed Eastern Europe, too. That was then. Hillary Clinton is, not just utterly, but totally bereft of meaningful accomplishment. This is unkind, ungallant and uncomfortable, but a President Hillary Clinton would be an aggressor’s fantasy and a dictator’s delight.
Trump’s desperate defenders keep reminding us that Hillary’s crimes are vastly more important that Trump’s locker-room bragging, and that most men talk like Trump and worse. I don’t want that. I don’t need that. It’s enough for me to contemplate the quantum superiority of Donald Trump as a national and world leader. I can understand those who desire a different outcome. I can’t understand anyone actually disagreeing.
Donald Trump’s leadership would be better for America, much better. Not because he’s some kind of genius, merely because he’d be a welcome improvement over normal.
If Hillary had at least pretended to embrace a strong America, I would demand some evidence that would be a reasonable expectation. To my ear, however, Hillary hasn’t even pretended.
I speak to those Americans who refrained from criticizing President Obama because of his race. Will you now reject the superior candidate for fear we won’t know how holy you are?
Silence isn’t always golden. Sometimes it’s just yellow!
Media wishing to interview Barry Farber, please contact [email protected].
|
