At some point in the recent political past, it became acceptable or even desirable to stamp one’s feet and whine like a child as a public pronouncement of opinion.
Clearly this is so. Otherwise we wouldn’t be hearing Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard and syndicated columnist George Will both talking about drumming up a third party to oppose a Donald Trump as the Republican nominee.
Don’t take this piece as an endorsement of Trump; as previous offerings in this space have made clear, your author has a great affinity for Ted Cruz and struggles to understand why any self-respecting conservative would prefer a man of Trump’s spotty (at best) record of supporting the cause to that of Cruz. I’ve searched far and wide for conservative reasons to back Trump over Cruz and come away with the conclusion that there are none. Hopefully the Trump phenomenon is a pre-election fancy that will dissipate when actual elections take place and the Republican base will seek the more reliable and committed avatar of its philosophy.
But that’s beside the point here. If Donald Trump wins the GOP nomination I’ll happily hold my nose and support him, and any third-party petulance such as that offered by Kristol and Will will never enter my mind.
Will comes about the stamping of his feet honestly, I would allow. He touts a third-party opposition to a Trump-Clinton general election as the demand to have at least one conservative alternative on the ballot, and in joining that demand he is correct in identifying Trump as something other than a conservative. You aren’t conservative if you extol the virtue of single-payer health insurance, repeatedly paint yourself as pro-abortion, can’t get your story straight on the Second Amendment or shamelessly, whorishly defend the corporate welfare of ethanol mandates and subsidies – much less do all of the above. For those sins it is reasonable to be dour about the prospect of Trump as the GOP nominee if you’re motivated ideologically, and Will, for all his faults, unquestionably is.
But the problem is that taking one’s ball and going home doesn’t produce an acceptable result. Yes, denying a bad Republican the White House has admirable properties in producing an eventual good Republican. But what we know of the other side makes such esoteric considerations meaningless.
You cannot consciously do things that install Democrats in positions of political power. There is no “Not So Bad” Democrat, and that political party has long since gone over the cliff into Third World tyranny.
The current Democratic Party is about to give Bernie Sanders, an unreconstructed communist from the Cold War era and the poster child for why Joe McCarthy was correct, primary victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. That party is also likely to nominate for president a woman who handled hundreds or thousands of classified documents, including Top Secret documents, on an unsecured private e-mail server while Secretary of State for the purpose of masking that she was whoring out State Department policy for the benefit of donors to her family slush fund-cum-charitable foundation. And they might very well nominate her even despite the strong possibility that the current FBI probe into her corruption and negligence (the Russians and Chinese surely read every one of the documents on that unsecured server) will lead to her indictment on charges serious enough to potentially land her in federal prison for the remainder of her days.
My friend Michael Walsh said it years ago: the Democrats are a criminal organization masquerading as a political party. They prove this time and time again. Look, for example, at what they’ve done to the water supply in Flint, Michigan and are now engaged full-time in trying to blame it on Republicans. Look at Benghazi. Look at Solyndra. Look at Chicago.
Trump, or Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio or even John Kasich (who I would come awfully close to saying is unsupportable if only for the wild flailings of his hands while speaking) don’t threaten the wholesale corruption and abuse of power that is Democratic Party doctrine on nearly every issue.
And the hour is late. What Barack Obama has done to the public fisc, the rule of law, the concept of limited government, American prestige, and our national culture over the past seven years must be reversed starting immediately on January 20, 2017. How is that going to happen by allowing, through the positive action of trying to form or support a third party, one of Obama’s minions or ideological fellow travelers, to occupy the most important job in the world?
It is delicious to see members of the Beltway elite start to discuss a third party should Trump get the nomination after the pressure put on him to eschew such a possibility on his own, not to mention the fact conservative activists and Tea Party types who dared discuss migrating to third parties have been the subject of firm lectures from that elite. I won’t deny the irony is entertaining.
But at the end of the day we’re defined by what we can agree on, and that has not changed. We can all agree that Democrats destroy everything they touch, and it is a duty imposed on us as patriotic Americans to keep them from destroying any more of the country than they already have.
If that means swallowing hard to tolerate a Donald Trump as the GOP nominee, or a Ted Cruz, or a Rubio or a Kasich or a Jeb Bush, so be it. We are adults, and we owe it to our country to act as such whether it gives us pleasure or not.
