Tuesday
It’s raining here in glorious L.A. I love sunshine. Hate rain. Puts me in a very bad mood. And frightens me.
Back up.
READ MORE from Ben Stein: True Facts About America
I’m a Republican. I have always been a Republican, ever since I learned that the GOP founded the moral and intellectual movement that ended by far the worst fact of the glorious United States of America, and that the GOP founded the most basic glory of the human race: the movement to end human slavery.
My father, Herbert Stein and my mother, Mildred Fishman Stein, were Republicans and so were my grandparents on both sides, also to end slavery, and also to end the cruel slavery of alcoholism and drug addiction. My family were Republicans as long as there were Republicans. The GOP has only existed in any meaningful form since the middle of the 19th century.
I love the GOP. It has shown great courage on every moral issue in my lifetime. It showed kindness to my parents in the Nixon and Ford days. It showed me great kindness in the months I worked at the White House for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford as a speechwriter.
It saved Israel. Literally saved Israel’s life in the Yom Kippur War — and saved the world from nuclear war.
But now, something has happened to the Grand Old Party. We as a party have swerved on the road of history. In recent decades and month and days, the GOP has set out on a frightening path.
For one important thing, the Party has blocked life-or-death military and financial aid to Ukraine as it fights one of the most inspiring fights of the century.
Vlad Putin has invaded the sovereign state of Ukraine just to prove he could. His troops have done mass murder. They have raped and then buried alive thousands of Ukrainian women and girls until they died horrible deaths. Republicans have declined to sell vital anti-aircraft weapons to Ukraine. The result has been that the Russians could do terror bombing to Ukrainian civilians at will.
Why? This is all currently being done under the tutelage of Mr. Trump. Why? The bravest resistance to dictatorship shown in my lifetime has been done by the Ukrainians in the recent past.
Why? Mr. Trump has always supported liberty-loving people. Why is he stopping now? Why has he turned away from the path blazed by the greatest of Americans, such as Abe Lincoln? Mr. Trump is far from Abraham Lincoln. But he has some greatness clinging to him from his peace-making efforts ending in the Abraham Accords, going some distance towards a generalized peace in the Middle East.
That proved a large-scale Middle East peace could possibly happen.
There is much more to be said and I will say it very soon. But Mr. Trump was a great President from 2017 to 2021. He was succeeded by a mischief maker. Let’s please see what the genius of the American people can yet dig up. We are not exhausted as a world leader. With the right leader, we are just getting started.
READ MORE from Ben Stein:
Everything Is Leading to a Bigger War
There Is Insanity — But There Is Also Love
