By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Arizona’s largest daily newspaper editorially approved deceptive tough talk on border issues by the “moderate” candidates it favors in order to defeat conservatives.
The editorial, representing The Arizona Republic’s official position and signed by “The Republic Editorial Board,” was published in the Sunday, March 25, edition and, including a photo of Arizona Cong. Martha McSally and the names of the editorial-board members, consumed the entire top half of the broadsheet-size page.
The pro-establishment McSally is the Republic’s preferred candidate to win the GOP primary for the Senate seat being vacated this year by unpopular Sen. Jeff Flake, another of the politicians the newspaper is partial to. It’s okay for McSally to dissemble like Sen. John McCain, the paper said candidly.
Citing McCain’s untrue border tough talk in his 2010 Senate GOP primary against conservative Cong. J.D. Hayworth, the Republic editorial said:
“The point was that every politician at some point makes an accommodation to the political winds. And in primary season in Arizona, the battles are fought in the lowlands of the extreme right.
“In the past, that has meant moderates like John McCain and Jeff Flake have masqueraded as hard-liners on immigration,” the Republic indulgently added. “. . . Now it’s McSally’s turn.”
Yes, that’s the leftist Republic’s attitude toward conservatives here, inhabitants of the lowlands of extremism who have to be deceived so the McCain types can win.
As for employing lies to make its own case, the editorial sneered at the conservative Cong. Hayworth as “a razor-sharp fanatic” whose putative belief in the “Americanization” of immigrants allegedly was the same as that of “famous anti-Semite Henry Ford,” the automobile industrialist of the first part of the 20th century.
Such was the Republic’s restraint that it didn’t say the American-born Hayworth was an actual German National Socialist, but if it left you with that shadowy suspicion, so what?
“Moderate” voices like the supercilious, open-borders Republic seem to contain plenty of venom in their poison sacs.
The editorial was published only two days after President Trump in Washington, D.C., left his own Republican base astounded and demoralized when he signed a profligate $1.3 trillion federal spending bill that opposed the president’s agenda in key ways, but made left-wing Democratic congressional mandarins jump for joy.
Telling tall tales to voters was coming from both political directions as March advanced.
The president signed the bill the day after the last hardcopy issue of The Wanderer went to press on March 22.
Trump had bragged repeatedly that he’d make Mexico pay for the U.S. border-protection wall, but he couldn’t even get his own GOP congressional majority to pay for much of it. Also, the bill tied his hands, not border jumpers’, as it restricted funding for legal enforcement and physical construction.
On the other hand, the Democrats’ mega-abortionist Planned Parenthood was awarded its customary half-billion taxpayer dollars in fungible funds to keep its slaughterhouses squealing along, killing preborn babies.
If Trump wouldn’t draw the line against this monstrosity, what could he ever really be counted on to do?
If there are two things the national corruptocrats insist on, it’s massive abortion and no enforceable national borders for the United States — no protection for preborn babies, and no security for legal U.S. residents. The corruptocrats think this recipe for destruction makes them morally superior.
Once again conservative activists saw that despite all their sacrifice and dedication to help save the nation, the D.C. swamp’s left-wing minority Democrats, slithering around in their Culture of Death, were allowed to coil around Trump’s writing hand.
Trump talked as if he somehow was forced to sign the bill, but this was a very old D.C. game that has come croaking through the swamp for years. It was played before Trump ever won the White House, and voters’ disgust at this trickery was a factor in their turning to the Manhattan multibillionaire in hopes he’d have the guts to end it.
The swamp denizens delay as long as they can, craft something huge and repulsive in secret, then screech that it has to be signed immediately or the national government will collapse.
This is Political Crime with a capital PC. That Trump, too, surrendered to it left conservatives pondering if too many of their number will be demoralized for November’s elections to be able to save the GOP congressional majority.
But what’s a majority worth having if it behaves like the opposition party?
Trump didn’t become a super-successful developer by signing horrible deals he didn’t want then asserting that he’d never sign one like that again. With all the power of the White House and Congress behind him, Trump crumpled to outmatched renegades — before he started talking tough on the border all over again.
National radio host Laura Ingraham was among many observers wondering why the president didn’t insist on a continuing resolution to tide the government over while he negotiated a better deal.
On the other hand, outrage against Trump didn’t last long in some quarters. When Trump signed the omnibus on Friday, March 23, Phoenix conservative radio-talk host James T. Harris lamented, “I’m here to tell you that today the winning stops….I can’t see celebrating wins in the future because of what was lost today.”
By the following Monday, March 26, Harris told his audience on KFYI (550 AM) that the anti-gun demonstrations over the weekend had got him back to being grateful Hillary Clinton wasn’t elected president over Trump.
Still, Harris said on March 28, as he cited Planned Parenthood selling the body parts of aborted babies, “Planned Parenthood should have been defunded 15 times over.”
Another strongly pro-Trump commentator, Wayne Allyn Root, posted on March 28 that he’d already changed his mind after initially feeling devastated by Trump’s signing.
“I disagree, I disagree. I was angry. I was outraged. The president should have vetoed that bill 100 times out of 100. That’s what I would have done,” Root posted at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nevada’s largest daily. But, he said, he soon heard from his D.C. insiders that because the money is in an omnibus measure instead of a budget, Trump can allocate it as he wants.
But even if things “aren’t so cheery,” Root said, Trump soon returned to “his real job — relentlessly erasing (Barack) Obama and fundamentally changing America back to the country conservatives once knew and loved.”
Among items on the president’s to-do list that Root listed were scrapping an Obama rule that prevented public schools from suspending minority lawbreakers, discarding Obama’s Iran deal, reinstating the citizenship question on the U.S. census, and getting results at the negotiating table with Communist China over tariffs.
Root concluded: “Mr. President, I’m sorry I ever doubted you. NBAT: Never Bet Against Trump.”
Congress Failed Trump, Voters
Northern California conservative commentator Barbara Simpson noted that Republicans failed to deliver the kind of bill Trump wanted.
“He hemmed and hawed — hinting he wouldn’t sign it, and then he did — surprising and infuriating conservatives and leaving elected Republicans doing their best to cover their tracks,” Simpson told The Wanderer on March 27. “They should have supported the president but, more importantly, should have supported the voters who put him (and them) into office, hoping for fiscal changes in D.C.
“With Trump’s signature on that $1.3 trillion bill, Democrats rejoiced because they got just about everything they wanted. But the goals of Donald Trump for a border wall, and dealing with DACA, and other immigration issues didn’t see the light of day,” she said. “Trump criticized the bill but said the critical part of it was that the military would get the money it needs for our defense.
“OK, but then what? Republicans in the House and Senate are scrambling like rats when a light goes on in a dark room. They know they’re in trouble and rumors of possible resignations are rampant,” Simpson said. “The upcoming elections will prove fatal for many of them, and it could result in the GOP losing what little control it has left.
“Trump will not really be hurt by the signature. I think voters will look at Trump as victim of the swamp, that he did what he thought was best for the military. He signed for them, willing to take the heat for the shortcomings of the rest. He still has two years in office and a lot can change during that time,” she said.
“I don’t believe his supporters have given up on his strength and his goals for draining that infernal swamp, which is still there, reflected in the gloating of the Democrats,” Simpson said.
A political strategist who asked not to be named because of his business ties told The Wanderer that some had warned “during the 2016 campaign that Trump was a lifelong New York liberal who would get along great with (Senate Minority Leader) Chuck Schumer,” but others insisted “that Trump was only going to make the best deals, and that we’d get tired of all of the winning.”
The skeptics of Trump appear correct lately, the strategist said. “Schumer and (Nancy) Pelosi and the swamp won this round, as they have won almost every round (except for tax reform).
“That doesn’t excuse gutless Republicans who funded Planned Parenthood, didn’t fund the wall, and spent like drunken sailors. But leadership starts at the top, and the president is a Republican, so he is responsible. You can’t blame (Paul) Ryan or (Mitch) McConnell for Trump not negotiating a better deal or using his veto pen,” he said.
Noting a rumor that Ryan plans to step down as House speaker, The Wanderer asked if the strategist thought that Ryan was feeling guilty as a Catholic for taking a major role in funding the nation’s leading abortionist. He replied, “Nope, just a fake rumor started by a backbencher. Sure doesn’t look like Ryan is feeling any shame. Sadly.”
Photocopies Coming
As for The Arizona Republic saying it was all right for McSally to tell falsehoods to win the GOP U.S. Senate primary, the editorial began by citing a tough-sounding recent remark she made about building a wall between California and Arizona in order to protect the Grand Canyon State from the criminals given sanctuary in the Golden State.
Don’t worry, the Republic said. “McSally is a moderate Republican who was doing her version of John McCain’s 2010 Senate campaign ad, ‘Complete the dang fence’,” where McCain actually felt he had to acknowledge “home invasions” and “murders” because of the porous border.
All the way across the newspaper page, the editorial was headlined, “In primary, McSally pulls a McCain.”
McCain hadn’t really “drifted to the dark side” or taken a “sharp turn to the right” in 2010, the Republic cooed while it explained that McSally’s current vinegary talk against “PC politicians and their BS excuses” is just necessary hot air.
“Actually, McSally is your fairly standard establishment Republican” who hasn’t “lost her marbles,” said the newspaper.
Well, if McSally was only feigning outrage previously, the Republic calling her a faker who needs to indulge in fakery to win might have made McSally start shouting some really sincere curses toward the Republic high-rise at 200 E. Van Buren St., located unfortunately within easy earshot of the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix headquarters.
Meanwhile, McSally’s two GOP primary opponents, Dr. Kelli Ward and former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, probably couldn’t make photocopies of the flabbergasting editorial fast enough to enlighten voters about her fakery.
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