By DEXTER DUGGAN
Donald Trump’s former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis had been dubbed one of the adults in the room by Trump foes who painted the president as a tantrum-throwing child in need of mature supervision.
Trump’s defenders might reply that if these were tantrums, they’re a corrective that the U.S. sorely needed.
Whether or not Mattis agreed that he had been a necessary adult, the retired Marine Corps general expressed his concern on September 8 that one of the important threats to the United States today is the amount of sharp division between people here.
Asked by Face the Nation moderator Margaret Brennan on CBS News what he considered “the biggest national security threat,” Mattis broke it down to the external threat of Russia and China and two internal threats — “our growing debt that we’re going to transfer to the younger generation with seeming no fiscal discipline, and more than that it’s the — it’s the lack of friendliness.
“It’s the increasing contempt I see between Americans who have different opinions,” Mattis added. “I mean we’re going to have to sit down and remember if we want this country to survive, we are going to have to work together. And … there’s no way around that. That’s the way a democracy is set up.”
If Mattis meant “democracy” to be understood as simply the majority will of the people directly expressed, the U.S. has been sadly lacking in democracy for quite a bit of time. Moreover, as constitutionalists argue, the U.S. is intended as no pure democracy at all but a small-“r” republican form of government constrained by a written Constitution.
One might observe that the last thing the ascendant leftists in the Democratic Party want is either a democracy or republic. They prefer a managerial elite whose supposedly superior expertise entitles them to make the unchallengeable important calls that rule the “deplorables.” And establishment Republicans hadn’t seemed to disagree much with this system of governance.
Consider massive national permissive abortion imposed overnight in January 1973 by the U.S. Supreme Court, overriding every abortion law in the U.S. back then, from the most restrictive to the least. It’s hardly the only example of a U.S. elite gone wild but remains perhaps the most vivid illustration in a half-century.
Neither the majority of Democrats nor Republicans on the sidewalks back then had even dreamed of such an imposition, but their leaders went passive while dominant media even then glowed with delight.
“Working together”? “Reaching consensus”? “Reconciling viewpoints”? Not at all. It was a mandate slammed down from on high, and if anyone dared dissent, he was reviled as a “culture warrior.” Not surrendering immediately and cravenly to an abomination was equated with starting an aggressive war.
As a former Marine general, Mattis must know better than to think our recent decades’ major social disagreements were followed by negotiation over a treaty table that more or less pacified the disputants.
That’s the way so much contemporary cultural change has besieged the world, forced through from the top with no conciliation or moderation.
As just one small example, recall Pennsylvania Democrat state legislator Brian Sims last May, berating a few pro-life females for daring to try to stand up and pray for minority babies’ lives outside an urban Philadelphia abortion clinic.
They were racists and “Bible bullies,” Sims angrily insisted, while he obviously considered his left-wing self, promoting permissive abortion of minorities, to be a great hero.
It’s the topsy-turvy world of a ruling elite from Democrat-land being outraged that anyone else dare oppose their dictates, no matter how unhinged.
This bizarro world wasn’t arrived at by any democratic process that Mattis longs for — and Mattis would do well to realize this likely led to the “lack of friendliness” and “increasing contempt” that he lamented. Dare Mattis try being the “adult in the room” against this ruling elite? Now that’d be a battle for you.
Socialist presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders was only getting away with the extremism he knows he can, as long as it comes from the left extreme, when he called for the U.S. to be enforcing population control, including funding the abortion of minority babies in developing nations, as a way to fight his phantom of “climate change.”
Even if it weren’t a phantom, is the bloodletting of millions of defenseless pre-born infants the answer to the problem?
One of the major ways the Communist Chinese government aroused deep hostility among its own people was imposing strict family-size limitation. So now Sanders thinks the U.S. should wade in yet more — as it previously had — to tell other peoples to destroy their babies? B-I-Z-A-R-R-O.
Sanders didn’t get himself into any serious trouble with the abortion-loving media over this. But revise the situation a bit. Imagine that some Republican called for the abortion of U.S. black babies because they likely might grow up to vote Democratic, not GOP. Now there would be occasion for outrage.
However, come to think of it, when Democrats including Sims do all they can to have those very same babies aborted, even though that’s fewer potential black Dem voters in the future, that’s barely worth a shrug. Bizarro world indeed.
Moreover, socialist millionaire Sanders was telling poor African villagers to kill off their own children so he can continue to live his jet-set U.S. lifestyle with three separate homes. It can’t get more bizarre than this.
The treacly novel and movie Love Story, from nearly a half century ago, popularized the line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Revise that today to say, “Leftism means never having to say you’re sorry,” and you have the formula for never-ending successful escape from accountability, no matter how horrendous the leftists’ schemes gulped down by adoring media.
Northern California conservative commentator Barbara Simpson told The Wanderer: “Bernie Sanders is riding high on what he no doubt realizes is his last hurrah. Either he gets nominated and elected or it’s ‘bye-bye, Bernie.’ As a result, it’s a full-court press on issues he treasures as full-on socialist/communist.
“Population control is one of them, and abortion is the main weapon,” Simpson said. “He supports abortion rights in the U.S. and he wants this country to support the same thing in poor nations. Whether we pay for those abortions, provide the people to perform them or give them pharmaceutical means for the same result — which is the prevention of births or the killing of the child, before or after birth — Sanders approves it all.
“That Margaret Sanger supported abortion for blacks and other poor people or that China’s mandated one-child policy is a failure doesn’t faze him. Morality doesn’t enter his view,” she said, concluding that “this abortion extreme illustrates that if he were ever in power, he would be a cruel despot.”
Conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer: “Sanders’ call for taxpayer-funded abortions around the world combines his loves of spending taxpayer money, and aborting babies, and takes it global, so why should we be surprised?
“It is its own kind of insanity, I suppose, that requires adherents
to a leftist ideology to claim to prioritize climate change while opposing any and all clean nuclear power as a solution and propose that we kill tens of millions of humans instead,” Querard said.
“Hearing how so many need to die for the sake of the planet from a man with three homes is just another reminder of how morally bankrupt the left is,” he said.
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