Donald Trump provides a wonderful opportunity not to talk about all the problems America faces.
In this presidential campaign so far, are we talking about things like: The growth of government at the expense of individual rights, including property rights?
The unsustainable national debt? The dependency of our national currency on the often arbitrary, politically motivated actions of the Federal Reserve, including the possibility of Greek-style collapse or even hyper-inflation, since the laws of economics (and reality) apply no less to the United States than to, say, Greece?
The moral and nuclear give-away to Iran, still the world’s leading sponsor of anti-American, anti-Western Islamic terrorism (that our current leaders refuse to either call Islamic or terrorism)?
There’s so much to talk about, think about and confront — and so few prominent people doing it. Donald Trump is, to me, a sad reminder of how we’re not doing that; and to many, a ridiculous excuse for not doing so.
So far, the Republican Party has offered no alternative to Obama’s or Hillary Clinton’s socialism in economics and appeasement of terrorist regimes, such as Iran. Instead, all we hear is that marriage is between one man and one woman, and abortion is wrong. That’s what Republicans seem to stand for … that, and not much else. (Oh, and Jeb Bush also wants to make sure we keep public education as we know it.)
Donald Trump, although a former Democrat and possibly not a social conservative, is little better. We know he’s against immigration, at least Mexican immigration (not without reason given the corrupt Mexican government and our current, corrupt American government), and he’s rightly against the surrender to a nuclear Iran.
To Obama-supporting progressives, to question any aspect of immigration at any time, for any reason, or to suggest any changes at all to Obama’s policy, automatically makes you racist. End of debate, because that’s their only debating point, it seems, on any issue of importance. “Agree with me; unless you’re racist, of course.” In a way, who can blame them? What facts or logic do they have on their side? Donald Trump provides them with the perfect straw man for not having to face real arguments against Obamacare, indiscriminate immigraiton policies, handing over nuclear parity to Iran, the ruin of medicine, and so much else.
On health care, Trump’s against Obamacare, but only because it doesn’t go far enough with respect to the socialization of medicine, in his view. Beyond that, it’s not clear what Trump has to offer, other than a willingness (at times refreshing) to speak his mind, without fear of reprisal. It’s something you don’t find much in the hypocritical, duplicitous world that most of us witness around us, if not in daily life, certainly in the political-cultural-media realm, where not a single person who speaks in front of a camera ever seems to mean what he or she says, nor even expects you to think so.
At this point in a presidential campaign, you’d hope that a Republican front runner, such as Donald Trump, would be talking about the real issues. You hope he’d be saying what he’s for as much (if not more) than what he’s against. Yet it’s not what he’s doing. This will be his undoing, more than any (actual or perceived) outrageous comments he appears to make on any subject.
Yes, Trump’s comments get exaggerated and taken out of context because he’s choosing to run as a Republican, and most of the media does not like Republicans. However, people like Vice President Joe Biden say inflammatory things all the time — most memorably, perhaps, his statements that members of the Tea Party or others who opposed Obamacare are “terrorists” — yet those comments do not sustain nearly the outraged attention that Trump’s comments do.
To be fair, Trump’s most recent comments about John McCain are not totally wrong. CNN.com reports: “The spark for the latest political firestorm came when the New York real estate billionaire questioned on Saturday whether Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Vietnam War veteran who languished in a prisoner of war camp for more than five years, was a genuine ‘war hero because he was captured.’”
What Trump appeared to be saying was that we should not worship someone solely because they were captured in a war, solely because they were a victim. Wouldn’t the bigger hero be someone who evaded capture? This point is not without merit. Perhaps it’s half the reason it struck a nerve.
The bigger and real reason to challenge John McCain is what he chose to do with his career after having survived capture by a Communist enemy. He became a career politician who plays a significant role in making sure that Republicans are nothing more than tax collectors and custodians for the welfare and entitlement state. McCain appears to consistently favor ground wars, causing some (myself included) to wonder if he does not have some sort of deep-seated psychological issue making him so quick to be in favor of wars (particularly bloody ground wars) which are not in the interest of the nation’s security.
Perhaps worst of all, McCain supported and was the co-sponsor of the “campaign finance reform” bill which is nothing more than partial censorship, as any attempt by the government to control how much money people spend on political speech necessarily is. If you don’t want corporations to spend money on politics, then stop regulating and/or subsidizing some businesses at the expense of others. Just get government the hell out of the business sector.
Online and newspaper headlines are mostly written by people who don’t like persons who challenge Obama’s attitudes and policies — particularly when the person challenging them is a wealthy, outspoken Democrat-turned-Republican. Smart as Trump may be in some ways, he was not ready for the hostility he would receive from our media, political and academic establishment, manned overwhelmingly by HuffPost and New York Times kinds of Obama supporters; and he ain’t seen nothing yet.
Out of context, to people who only focus on headlines written by Obama-supporting journalists and writers, Donald Trump seems cruel and hostile by attacking a prisoner of war for having been captured. However, the real issue with John McCain is what he did with his career in the years since. He’s made the world safer for the high-taxing, high-regulating government establishment that now prevails over all American citizens from its Roman Empire-like headquarters in Washington D.C.
To survive a prisoner of war camp only to become just another career politician (with a seemingly endless term) is the real reason to question John McCain. If he once had or even still has any truly admirable qualities, he surely wasted them by becoming a handmaiden to the pressure group warfare of what might have been a great nation’s capital.
Donald Trump’s candor is in some respects refreshing and badly needed in our intellectually hollow, sadly dishonest and disingenuous times. But unless you stand for something that is coherent and objectively true, you will not get very far. Trump has the motivation of people who are willing to listen and who desperately yearn for some shred of honesty in today’s mindless, spineless cultural quagmire.
But Donald Trump’s got to tell us what he’s for; and what he’s for has to be right, and different from what Obama, John McCain, Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton and all the other profiteering denizens of corrupt Washington politics have to offer us.
