Note: That is not Lindsay Graham on the left, and not Donald Trump on the right. But you get the idea…
“You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell. He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represents the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. … He’s the ISIL man of the year.”
—–Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), on CNN’s “New Day” turning Trump’s slogan, “make America great again” against him.
Graham is unelectable as well as un-nominatable, and he knows it, for no fool he. The GOP right wing regards him as a RINO like his pal John McCain, and also more than a little strange (why has he never been married, hmmmmm?); Graham is too Southern, too Senatorial, and too candid to have a chance in the general election either.
Graham is running as a truth-teller on foreign policy, and even that has been hard, since his poll numbers are microscopic and he has been relegated to the kiddie table in all of the debates. So it is true that he has less to risk being direct than the other candidates, but his undiplomatic, uncompromising condemnation of Donald Trump is exactly what the nomination race needs, and as I have written from the beginning, a well-executed, slashing, “Have you no sense of decency?” attack would both bring Trump to earth and enhance the candidacy of its Republican messenger. So far, nobody seems capable of delivering it effectively.
Trump’s latest envelope-pushing, evoking the worst of the U.S.’s domestic World War II bigotry as well as the early stages of Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitism, confines his candidacy to bigots, cowards and fools—admittedly a large constituency but a disqualifying one. The clear path to stopping Trump is making his supporters unwilling to look at themselves in the mirror. Democrats faced a similar challenge in 1968, when George Wallace was speaking before huge crowds.
Graham has neither the popularity, the charisma nor the platform to stop Trump, but he is showing the way. Republicans, Democrats, everyone should be grateful. At this point in the process, both parties have frontrunners who though very different, represent the worst of American politics and political culture.
At least one of the parties has a candidate willing to make it clear how disgusting and dangerous it is to have such a frontrunner. I am still looking for the other party to find even an imperfect messenger.
_____________________________
Pointer: Fred
Ethics Alarms 
“Graham is too Southern, [and] too Senatorial.”
Worth the price of admission.
“Graham is unelectable as well as un-nominatable”
I completely agree!! He’s just there to stir the pot.
I think that pot needs very much stirring.
Maybe Trump will spill out and dry up!
The other GOP candidates are lagging well behind Trump, and if any of the ones who might be able to tag him (Cruz, Rubio, MAYBE Christie) tries to do it, he’s going to say “unfair,” launch a third-party run, and it’s curtains for the GOP in 2016. But it’s not going to come to that. In the wake of San Bernardino, combined with the current administration’s foolish immigration policies, a lot of America is ready to say “Screw this. Muzzies go home, and stay home.”
It wasn’t too long ago that there was an organization in a nation that hated that nation and was determined to fight it, and if anyone got in the way, that was regrettable. That organization was the IRA, and the nation was the UK. The Troubles have been over for 17 years, and a lot of people, maybe even I daresay most, would just as soon forget them. While they were ongoing, though, there were plenty of shootings, bombings, and other random violence and plenty of innocent folks got caught in the crossfire. A big part of the reason the Troubles ended is that the UK stood firm and would not be defeated, so finally both sides had to come to the table and hammer out the Good Friday Agreement. (And if any Hibernians are reading this and want to list 800 years of the UK’s sins in Ireland, I’m not interested. Take a hike and don’t try to defend the indefensible)
Things in Northern Ireland eventually reached the point where no policeman patrolled without a flak jacket, no policeman patrolled without a rifle or submachine gun. Seen any pictures of the NYPD’s current Hercules unit? Similar, no? Right now they only come out for a major terror alert, but they are a permanent unit posted as guards, patrolling, etc., not just a unit for hostage situations and high-risk warrants.
I submit that if we don’t take commonsense measures to make sure that a community that hates this nation and is committed to not just violence toward a political goal, but violence for its own sake, to make society come unglued, is stopped from metastasizing to that point, the men in these pictures are the future. Is that what we want? An America where the police look and act like soldiers because they have to? An America where every monument, every public building, every simple flagpole could be a target? An America where ordinary places like railroad stations, malls, and schools could become graveyards in a minute? An America where we fear going out and jump at every unexpected noise?
I say hell no, and if for a while it means we have to shut the gates until we are sure there are no members of that community here who hate this country so much that they will go out and commit mass murder, then that’s what we have to do. We don’t have to risk our existence so we die with our progressive bona fides intact.
You are a bigot of the highest order. Just a stone cold stupid bigot.
You are not FIT to live in a country that Muslim Americans have fought and died defending.
I’ll come to Steve’s defense. He’s not a bigot. Bigot is the Molotov cocktail of terms these days. Blows the hell out of anything in its way.
Here’s a reasoned analysis of where Steve’s coming from: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428201/donald-trump-muslim-immigration-policy-discussion
Not to imply that Steve is not perfectly capable of defending himself better than I would ever pretend to.
I stopped at “Islam is no mere religion,” but I’ve never seen any “reasoned analysis” follow that sentence.
(Then again, I probably should have stopped reading at “written by Andrew C. McCarthy, for the same reason.)
That’s an awful essay. [No. actually it’s excellent. My mistake. See explanation below.]
How so?
Thanks for reminding me…I was in a rush and intended to elaborate. I have two answers to you, one for when I wrote that, and the other now. I’m embarrassed to say that I wrote that about an hour after reading a terrible essay, glanced at the URL, and assumed it was the same essay and author. It wasn’t. When I READ McCarthy’s excellent essay, I hated it for another reason: it rendered a post I had worked on for a couple hours redundant and inferior. Now that’s awful.
It’s a terrific essay, and dead on.
What essay were you thinking of that was the awful essay, now that our heads are spinning?
Never mind. I’m embarrassed enough. I’ll be using McCarthy’s essay in a post today. The other one wasn’t worth reading, debating, or remembering. I also apparently need to get my glasses strengthened.
I was going to send this as a private message but it needs to be in the public eye.
Jack,
It’s comments like that that maintain high levels of respect for you and what you do! Your ethical honesty is a breath of fresh air in a world full of thick unethical smog.
Thank you for this website, thank you for being who you are, and thank your parents for raising a truly ethical man.
Thanks. As I say to my wife, if you can’t trust an ethicist, who can you trust?
Whew. Glad to hear it. I went to bed mystified, to say the least (and feeling Jack Marshallized). And the passage from the article you cite in your following post is the most significant thing I’ve read about Islam certainly in the current immigration debate and perhaps since 9/11. It’s very edifying and useful.
Because a Columbia and NYU law grad who prosecuted the first World Trade Center bombers has NO credentials and couldn’t POSSIBLY write anything worth reading all the way to the end. Snark aside, if you’re going to take issue with something someone writes, it would behoove you to read it all the way through to the end so you know what the hell he was writing. Otherwise, you’re just spewing.
After reading the excerpt Jack cited in his recent article, you are right, and I should have read to the end. It went in a different direction than I expected.
Thanks, but there’s little need to defend oneself against simply insult-hurling. If you have a reasoned response, let’s hear it, otherwise, shut your trap.
Oh gee, I guess I’ll pack my bags immediately. Is that all you’ve got?
Who the hell are you to tell another citizen of the United States that they are not FIT to live here?! If you really understood the constitution and what the United States is all about, you never would have uttered such anti-Constitutional nonsense!
Steve-O-in-NJ has just as much right in this country as any other citizen. Steve-O-in-NJ has the exact same rights as you or any other citizen of the United States. Disagree with Steve-O-in-NJ all you want but what is truly UNFIT is you opening up your ignorant anti-Constitutional little mouth and telling Steve-O-in-NJ that he is not FIT to live here just because you don’t agree with his opinion.
You have the right to your opinion, but in this case, you’re dead wrong! Whether you like it or not; everyone of those Muslims that fought and died defending this country defended Steve-O-in-NJ’s rights just as much as they defended your rights. Now either you understand that fact or keep your anti-Constitutional pie hole shut!
You need to read the book The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech to help show the errors of your ways and hopefully correct your ignorant line of thought.
Good day.
http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~aherns/jmahearn.htm
To coin a phrase, so what? One soldier fell in love and converted, same as a sailor stationed in Italy or a pilot stationed in Greece might. That doesn’t mean a thing, nor does it take away the fact that 9/11, the shoe bomber, and San Bernardino were all Muslims striking for Islam.
https://ethicsalarms.com/2015/12/07/on-the-importance-of-christmas-to-the-culture-and-our-nation-an-ethics-alarms-guide/#comment-368693
I’m thinking of a word, it starts with H.
If you can’t see the difference between my saying citizens shouldn’t chip away at the rights of fellow citizens and my saying this nation should stop the feed-in of potentially dangerous non-citizens to feed a danger, then I’m thinking of a word for you, and that word is “stupid.”
Everyone is potentially dangerous are you going to shut the door to Christians too? You never know when one can become radicalized like the Planned Parenthood shooter.
If Christians had plowed two airliners into the World Trade Center, if a Christian had tried to blow up a plane with explosives in his shoe, if Christians had created a de facto theocracy where they were chopping off heads, if there were other Christian theocracies and monarchies that were looking the other way or egging this behavior on, and if Christians were regularly calling for violent anti-state action, then I might say yes. That is not the case.
The closest we ever got to this was groups like the IRA raising money over here to use against the UK, and maaaybe some of the early Zionist movement toward building a state in Israel. To their shame, a lot of Irish-Americans contributed or looked the other way, despite the fact that the IRA was fighting a close ally and some but not all factions of it were making common cause with the Soviet bloc. One thing the IRA never did, though, is bring the violence here. I submit if they had it would have been a very different ball game. Perhaps to their shame, a few Jewish Americans also looked the other way as the Jews blew up British police stations and hotels. Likewise, though, the Jews never brought the violence here.
The Planned Parenthood shooter was a lone nutcase. The last shooting like that was something like 15 years ago, and none of them were connected to any organization or organized activity. To say “well, maybe we should ban Christians too” is not even tit for tat. It is a specious argument, and reflects a very shallow understanding of the issues.
Well there were the Fenian Raids. I guess a century and a half can be considered recent! Maybe we could deport the Irish yet…
Plus, radical Christian murderers are promptly shot by police or thrown in jail and prosecuted. They aren’t praised as martyrs or secreted in churches or predominately Christian foreign countries. They are villified. Why doesn’t anyone on the left (or the right) ever point this out?
Check Matt Walsh’s latest article. Frequently I scoff at him as being a conservative Dan Savage without the profanity, but he at least tries to take on the question of why the left embraces Islam and hates Christianity.
I would rather vote for sack of runny dog shit than vote for Donald Trump.
The problem is that the Democratic front runner is not a runny bag of dog shit, it is Hillary Clinton.
It is a dilemma!
I’m hoping for either a complete turn around in the polls, or a decent 3rd party candidate so I can cast a responsible vote and then grumpily resign myself to rule by a demented liar. At least 4 more years of insanity. We are doomed.
I’ve been hearing more and more chatter and speculation that Trump is getting the coverage he is getting, not simply because he knows how to play bad press to his advantage, but because the media recognizes him as a terrible Republican candidate. It wouldn’t surprise me, I just can’t figure out a way to conclusively settle it one way or the other.
It’s kind of like the age-old question, “Is Obama TRYING to wreck the country/world, or is he simply that clueless?” No way to prove one side or the other, really.
Hanlon’s Razor.
Clarke’s Law?
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
I like that variation of Clarke’s Third Law — Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic — it comes off “trippingly on the tongue,” … And his 69th Law (he never published the other 66 for some reason) also speaks truth: Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
Hah! That explains a lot about computer nerds in the garage with pizza boxes and empty Mt Dew cans.
Was that biased and hateful or what?
Right on, I’d say. I always remember my cousin’s complaint when she came home from work the day they brought in the first PCs: “Some nasty little boys in a garage invented this keyboard; there’s no room for my breasts.”
Some still adhere to the notion that Trump is a hit job on the Republican Party. Just a democrat operative. Silly. But still. He’s doing a good jobs saying just enough right things to cause enough shmoes to ignore the utterly atrocious things he’s saying and implying.
I will own-up to having a notion somewhat like you describe, Tex. I really do believe Trump is much more of an enemy of the Republican Party than a top-choice candidate of that party. Whether that is by Trump’s design, or by someone else’s, we’ll just have to let the truth become clearer, if it ever will.
“Is Obama TRYING to wreck the country/world, or is he simply that clueless?”
My take is that the enormity, complexity, and responsibility of his position vis a vis his inadequacy to deal with any of it sent him into shock to begin with, and that he has been acting out of a tiny, personal dreamworld ever since. Semicomatose, he may have bounded entirely over the imagined yesteryears of his hapless presidency into the halcyon days of his ex-ness, already basking in the blacklight of his blind supporters.
It’s not that Graham is Southern or a Senator. He’s a dork. He’s also the poster boy for Rinos. The urgent needs of this country for vision and leadership out of the morass of threatening leftist dominion leaves Graham at the starting gate. His time and what he represents is past. Donald Trump- with all his faults- still possesses the virtues of vision and leadership. Ted Cruz possesses these traits minus most of the faults. Carson is a good man, but will have to grow and learn a lot before handling the challenges of the White House. Good Vice Presidential material, though. Marco Rubio will never get the nomination, given his stance and votes on immigration. Carly Fiorino has too much baggage, but might make a superb Secretary of the Treasury. The best bet for the Republicans? As I see it, a Cruz/Carson ticket would be the best for a number of reasons. Trump, as a chief of staff and designated troubleshooter, would be in his element.
Have you ever considered reviewing these old posts to see just how cognitive dissonance might change analysis?
Example?
Any of them pertaining to Trump. He would still have been clearly a disgusting candidate. But knowing just how ingrained and hidden beneath a thin veneer of acceptability that the Left was actually a roiling monster waiting to molt out of its shell.
Would future arm chair quarterbacking change any analysis?