By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax —
Of cabbages — and kings.”
What do you think Hillary’s old mentor Saul Alinsky would say about the influence-peddling and money-grubbing couple Bill and Hillary turned out to be?
Don’t you wish you could ask the crowds that applauded wildly and squealed with delight when Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura announced their intentions to run for public office, to explain to us what they were thinking? We can see now that being a glib amateur, professing to apply common sense to the mess made by professional politicians, isn’t enough.
And aren’t you a bit — in the back of your mind — troubled that someone in the future might want to ask us the same question about Donald Trump?
Do you think Pope Francis ever ponders in his private moments why waves of illegal immigrants are seeking to escape the kind of planned economies that he favors in favor of the greedy and materialistic capitalist societies that he abhors?
What’s worse? If Hillary Clinton and her campaign staff really believe she lost to Donald Trump because of “Russian hackers” and the “racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia” of the American people? Or that they would make that charge as a purely political calculation?
How do you think Bernie Sanders explains to himself why he was treated so politely during his run for the Democratic Party nomination at Liberty University, the Christian college founded by the Southern Baptist evangelist Jerry Falwell, considering the way his supporters boo off the stage and threaten with violence conservative speakers such as Patrick J. Buchanan and Ann Coulter?
The scraggly hair, the unkempt beards, the tattoos — did someone send out a signal that modern baseball players should make themselves indistinguishable in appearance from derelicts?
Whenever I see the pictures of the young Barack Obama proudly posing for the camera smoking marijuana as a member of the “Choom Gang,” I think of how far we have come in just a few short decades from when Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee Douglas Howard Ginsburg was forced to withdraw from being considered for the position when stories surfaced about his use of marijuana as a young man. Not a good sign.
Recently, I talked to a family member who had just returned from a visit to San Francisco. She made an interesting comment about the bedraggled homeless men and women who roam even the best parts of the city: “I found out what became of some of the flower children who used to parade about San Francisco criticizing ‘the establishment’.”
The more I see all the incidents of voter fraud caught on camera, the more I am convinced that the Democrats’ opposition to voter ID cards is rooted in their desire to protect the viability of their “get out the vote” efforts.
Isn’t the “compassion” that liberals display for minorities, drug users, and people with irregular sexual appetites in large measure a way of demonstrating how much more “enlightened” they are than mainstream Americans?
It is true that members of the “alt-right” — racists, white nationalists, and anti-Semites — are a tiny segment of the American right, but they are an exceptionally unattractive bunch of folks. It would do conservatives and Christians well to make clear that they want nothing to do with them.
All the protests in reaction to Donald Trump’s election to the presidency have something to teach us. We have to steel ourselves for what is likely to happen on our streets and in our universities if a future Supreme Court were ever to reverse Roe v. Wade.
Speaking of the anti-Trump protesters: Some of them are contemptible left-wing radicals, but there is also among them a sizable number of naive, well-meaning young people who have bought the caricature of Trump and conservatism painted by their professors and the media. We need to make that distinction in order to determine how to deal with the brouhaha.
I am not yet ready to feel sorry for Hillary Clinton. Still, you have to admit that she is a sad figure now that her political career is reaching its end. If Donald Trump lost the election, he could have been able to return to private life without missing a beat. Hillary has no private life. She cannot anticipate the joys of family and community that most women her age look forward to. Who is she, once the cheering crowds and sycophants on her staff have left the stage? Is there any there, there?
During the presidential campaign I read stories nearly every day on the Internet about something shameful that Donald Trump had done. I routinely ignored them as hatchet jobs concocted by some sleazy group funded by George Soros. But I have a thought: Isn’t this the explanation for why so many informed and well-meaning liberal Democrats — maybe our friends and family members — reject all the stories about the underhanded wheeling and dealing by Bill and Hillary Clinton? Could it be they can’t imagine anyone being guilty of so many egregious acts, and assume the stories were made up — even, if in the case of the Clintons, many of the stories are true?
What should we think about the conservatives who are attacking Donald Trump because of his willingness to intervene to persuade American companies to stay in the United States? They say it violates the principles of free-market economic theory. Well, that’s true. . . .
. . . But the conservative movement from its earliest days has included people who are not doctrinaire about free-market theory. Catholics, for example, who favor the principle of subsidiarity enunciated in the papal social encyclicals, specifically its willingness to accept government involvement in the economy in those instances when it is necessary to achieve social justice and what people used to call the commonweal.
I am not going to tell North American Indian tribes that they should not take offense at college and professional athletic teams being named after them. If they find it demeaning, they find it demeaning. But it has to be said: People don’t name their teams after something they find contemptible. I am sure you have noticed: There are teams are named Tigers, Patriots, Hawks, Stags — none that I know of named Mice, Quislings, Anteaters, and Eels.
The Democrats seeking to undo Donald Trump’s victory are correct: The Electoral College was established as a check upon misguided public opinion and demagoguery. But do they expect us to forget that liberal Democrats have been instructing since the 19th century that this was a shameful remnant of aristocratic impulses in play at the time of country’s founding? Talk about flip-flops.
Imagine expressions of rage from the liberals in the media and the academy if Republicans had initiated an effort to convince members of the Electoral College to prevent Barack Obama from becoming president on the basis of his unsuitability for the office.
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