A Republican sympathizer commented (on Facebook) about my last blog entry, “You are much more interesting when you don't write about politics!” So, I’m not going to write about politics this time. I’m going to write about values.
These are not mine:
“We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot… get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”
"I'm also unemployed."
"There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip." Seriously?
"I get speaker's fees from time to time, but not very much." But, golly, put it in a little tin box and it adds up to $374,000 in one year!
“Well, there are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax.”
"I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there."
All from the mouth of one man.
But this isn’t about one man, it’s about values.
When Republicans were wise and reasonable, President Dwight Eisenhower,
said, “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses
both.” I knew some day I’d find a reason
to like Ike. I found two. In a 1954 letter to his brother Edgar, he
wrote, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security,
unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would
not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course,
that believes you can do these things. … Their number is negligible and they
are stupid.”
All right, it is about one man.
“My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
“And they will vote for this president no matter what.”
Which brings us back to values. What would Ike have had to say about his or any
political party’s schemes to deny the
right to vote to those, primarily minorities, deemed likely to vote for another
party’s candidate(s)? About one political
body’s obsessive campaign to prohibit and criminalize a woman’s right to make decisions
governing her own body? About a treacherous
cabal of an opposition party’s elected
representatives plotting, the night before a new president’s first day in
office, to obstruct and quash his
ability, hence the entire government’s ability, to accomplish anything for four
years? Sound extreme? It’s a matter of record: a party that
represents roughly half of Americans, and would like, at any cost, to represent
all, swore, on the night before the
president took office, to oppose every single thing the president did or wanted—in
sum, to see to it that he failed. Whose
Senate leader said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for
President Obama to be a one-term president.” The single most important thing!
What about the people’s elected representatives’ duty to make laws? To regulate interstate commerce? To coin money and collect taxes? To “provide for the common defense and
general welfare of the United States?”
To honor and uphold Article 1 of The Constitution of the United States! Values!
In the gutter.
And the candidate?—the standard-bearer of “the single most
important thing…”? He doesn’t stand for
anything—
"I'm not familiar precisely with what I said, but I'll
stand by what I said, whatever it was."
—and a man who doesn’t stand for anything will perversely stand
for anything under the sun, no matter how base and unprincipled, if that will get
him what he wants. He is an empty vessel,
wide open to being indiscriminately filled and emptied and refilled ad infinitum
by anything or anybody with an agenda, at whim or will.
Since this is about values, and one of mine is making an
effort to present a balanced argument whenever possible, I’ll let a Republican have
the last word. Writing for “Politico.com,”
Joe Scarborough, former congressman and current host of TV’s “The Scarborough Report,”
had this to say:
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