Oh, Rep. Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, wants the President impeached? Oh. Wow!
But, uh, who exactly is Justin… a Rash? Like, really. Who is this character? Beto O’Rourke with the ear hairs still inserted?
Indeed — who are these characters and circus clowns who show up on CNN, MSNBC, and similar organs presenting themselves as Republicans committed to ousting the President? Are these really Republicans — or simply circus acts for new gigs now that Barnum & Bailey permanently has closed down?
Honestly — really, honestly — who ever heard of Ana Navarro before she became a CNN “expert Republican” on what is wrong with Trump and with the entire Republican political agenda? Sure, Mitt Romney reviles Trump, but at least Romney is conservative on several issues, even if he is the Father of Obamacare and soft on many other areas. But he is not against the entire Republican conservative agenda. The Mormons of Utah would not stand for it. Honestly — he believes in capitalism, the right to life, even spoke of self-deportation.
But when it comes to Justin A Rash or this Ana Navarro, what in the world are they doing, walking around and filing their fingernails as “Republicans”? They do not stand for most anything that even the most moderate conservatives advocate. Who are they? How did they pawn themselves off on the GOP?
Bill Kristol once was conservative on many issues, though too adventurist on the international front, but he now completely went off the deep edge. How sad! But we move on. George Will once was a go-to thinker for limited government and rock-ribbed conservative principles. He really was. What in the world happened to him? On the other hand, Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post never was a serious Republican, so no loss there. Same with David Brooks, the resident “Republican” at the New York Times. Baloney. He is no Abe Rosenthal or William Safire, never was. Same with Morning Joe. Even before he got an early show and got intimate with Mika, he never was a solidly conservative talk-show host.
Where do these people come off presenting themselves as “Republicans,” as “conservatives,” who “simply do not like Trump” or even find his personal failings un-Presidential? And how did so many of them infiltrate the only mainstream political alternative this country has to the Democrat Left?
Certainly, it is legitimate for a conservative to harbor concerns about a President who uses foul language in public. Even Richard Nixon, whose mouth was more septic than a sewer, kept his cursing behind closed doors, to be heard only by his inner circle and the microphone in the telephone and the one in the lamp and the one in the stapler. Joe Biden lets a “cuss” word slip here and there, like when he whispered to Obama, but that is because Biden is a patent-protected Gaffe Machine without a rubber gasket, with a word dripping out here, another there, whether profane or just plain moronic. He does speak very well in public, when he does not start repeating his same sentences over and over, but he always ends up saying something that raises questions about either his I.Q. or whether something irreversibly has happened to him. And then there is Trump’s Stormy Daniels stuff and the other Galaxy of Silicone-Implanted Minds with whom Trump has consorted after hours. Something obviously was amiss, whatever it was, because no guy as wealthy as Trump hires a lowlife sub-mediocrity like Michael Cohen for actual legal advice, like the stuff found in law books. Cohen obviously was retained to pass around cash.
So the concerns about Trump’s personal-character flaws are fair. But as so many prominent theologians throughout the G-d-conscious Christian community and the Orthodox Jewish community realize, our Presidents often have profound failings of character. Obama was a brazen liar, a financially corrupt cheat who got rich with the help of the felon Tony Rezko and who consorted with the worst racists in America: Louis Farrakhan, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Al Sharpton. Clinton’s private life was a stain on the American fabric. John Kennedy was a dossier that even Christopher Steele could not compile. By contrast, the two most honest and personally decent among the whole lot of them in the past half century were Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, and one can debate for years which of those two destroyed the American economy worse, presided over foreign affairs more disastrously and incompetently, and left behind a more bewildering mess.
Thus, on one hand, it is reasonable for serious Republican conservatives to harbor concern about aspects of the President’s personal demeanor. Yet he has proven himself to be a truly great President, one of our country’s ten best in more than two centuries. His policies are consistently better and more truly conservative than those of Ronald Reagan, the Republican Gold Standard, whether on border issues, the economy, staring down the enemy in the financial and trade sector, seeing the flaws of weakly negotiated free trade agreements, avoiding entangling Americans in areas overseas where we should not be (like 241 Marines blown up by Arab Muslim terrorists in Southern Lebanon), even on issues like social conservatism at home. Reagan condemned Israel’s bombing and eradication of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in Iraq; by contrast, Trump has recognized the Golan Heights as part of Israel, Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and has moved the American embassy there, something that Reagan promised to do but did not. Reagan extended amnesty to Illegals, setting in motion the border disaster that has unfolded over the next two generations and that has politically destroyed California and New Mexico, while politically imperiling Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas. Reagan advanced the Free Trade Agreements that drove so much manufacturing out of America and almost ended our steel and aluminum industries that are essential to our national security. Reagan used the most important opportunity a President gets — the chance to fill Supreme Court openings — to name Sandra O’Connor and thereafter to name Anthony Kennedy. Yes, Antonin Scalia was a great pick, but one out of three does not compare to Trump’s selections of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Reagan, then, was Mount Rushmore material, but Donald Trump’s still-emerging legacy is even greater.
When Donald Trump campaigned for the Presidency, he formulated several slogans that resonated with the Republican conservative base. One of the main ones: Drain the Swamp. But he and his public never realized how murky and dirty that swamp is, how severe and pervasive. In one arena, it took a Trump Presidency to uncover — to unmask — the swamp in the Justice Department and its slimy tentacles, ranging from Comey to McCabe to Strzok to Page to Ohr to Brennan and Clapper. The whole filthy cesspool lot of them. No one knew how far it went, how deep, how slithery, how far up.
In truth, it remains to be seen whether the President ultimately will succeed in draining that septic swamp or whether the swamp ultimately will overwhelm him, pulling him down like quicksand. Perhaps the IG Report soon to be published by Inspector General Michael Horowitz will shed some light. Perhaps not. Perhaps the declassification of documents that Attorney-General William Barr now is evaluating will reveal. Perhaps not. Perhaps those other two investigations now being undertaken by John Huber and John Durham, respectively the United States Attorneys for Utah and Connecticut. Perhaps not.
It is not yet clear whether Trump or The Swamp will win. So much will depend on the 2020 elections. If Trump is reelected and the GOP takes both legislative chambers, the Republic really can be restored, and the American Experiment revives. If not, the rot will worsen, like an osteoporosis of the national soul, fearfully irreversible, decaying, rotting.
Even as Trump — just by being Crazy Bulldog Trump — caused the haters, villains, and even traitors within the Justice Department to go mad, to expose themselves, so he has brought out the poison within the Republican Party body politic itself.
Take, for example, the vile and loathsome Ana Navarro. I have seen Navarro on CNN perhaps three or four times. That is because I stopped watching CNN several years ago, except once-every-two years on national election nights because I really like the way John King analyzes the votes coming in, precinct by precinct. But I have seen glimpses of CNN at my dry cleaner or at the airport. (When I bring my car in for servicing, they know by now to give me the remote so that I can switch the TV in the waiting room from CNN to Fox News — or, when Shepard Smith is on, to the MLB baseball station.) Between those rare glimpses of Navarro, and occasional snippets of that Thing that get aired on Hannity or Laura when that vile object is shown obnoxiously filing her nails during a “debate,” I have figured this out:
So the question persists: How did so many Leftists like that one end up as Republican insiders?
In thinking about it, one begins to realize why Ronald Reagan stood out as so unique for his day and time, and that we essentially have not had a truly conservative alternative political party in this country for close to a century before Trump. Neither of the George Bushes was dependably conservative. One lied, raised taxes, and devoted his one vanilla term to eradicating the Reagan Revolution. The other, not far from the apple tree, ran the economy into the ground just as Daddy had done, without ending the Democrats’ toxic economic programs that fatally destroyed the financial sector, as when they forced banks to lend housing-mortgage loans to thousands of people who never-in-a-million-years were going to be able to repay them. The first Bush named David Souter to the Supreme Court. The next one tried naming Harriet Miers and could not find anyone more conservative than John Roberts. (By some incredible good fortune, he later named Samuel Alito.) Similarly, Nixon named a boatload of shipwrecks to the Court. Ike named Earl Warren.
What kind of two-party system was this?
It took a complete outsider with political views no one completely knew, and in whose consistency no one could be completely certain, to come in and change not only Washington but to save the Republican Party. Most fair-minded sincere Republicans who legitimately doubted in 2016 whether Trump would be true to his promises and remain sincerely consistently conservative have come aboard, fully persuaded by now that he truly is the first real Republican conservative President since Reagan and thus only the second in nearly a century. But what of the others? Not merely the “Never Trumpers” but the outright RINOs, the absolute Counterfeits?
That may prove to be yet another of Trump’s lasting legacies. He drives them crazy, thereby driving them out of hiding to expose themselves so that they can be identified clearly. When future GOP Presidential candidates emerge in future years, the Counterfeits now are known. The kind of Counterfeit “Republican” who can say on Left media that Republican voters should select a Hillary, should vote Democrat, meaning that the Supreme Court would be lost along with the federal appellate courts and district courts… who could oppose efforts to control the southern border… who could oppose tougher trade policies overseas and more generous tax cuts at home. Such a person is a bane on the Republican Party, ruining it from the inside far worse than can any Democrat Left politician outside. Such RINOs and Counterfeits continually have prevented the emergence of a viable conservative mainstream voice in our country through the decades, resulting in so much of the corroded social and political infrastructure that exists today.
Like a strong but heavily toxic antibiotic used to fight Lyme disease or some sepsis in the body, but which causes real pain as it drives the embedded poisons out into the bloodstream, Trump has driven so much of the foreign RINO bodies out of their embedded cells, but they have not yet been extracted completely from the body politic of the GOP. More time is needed to extract it all as the RINO Underground and outright Counterfeits get exposed, one-by-one. That, too, is the swamp Trump has uncovered for draining. It yet may be Trump’s greatest contribution to making America great again.
