Category: political challengers

national politics & policies political challengers

Right at the Top of the Stairs

Post author By Redactor
Post date October 26, 2020
2 Comments on Right at the Top of the Stairs

“I’m appalled by the choice that we have been delivered,” political humorist P.J. O’Rourke told Reason TV last week, referring to the two major-party presidential nominees.

“Biden’s campaign platform is 564 pages long. It promises everything to everybody,” bemoans the 72-year-old author of a new book of essays, A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land. “It’s full of unicorns and flying ponies and candy-flavored rainbows and pixie dust.”

As for President Trump, “I think we’re done with this experiment of having the inmates run the asylum,” O’Rourke jabs, calling Trump a “dangerous and unpredictable man” and “rude.”

“It isn’t so much exactly what Trump has done,” admits the comedic writer, who while panning Trump’s immigration policies, lauded his lowering of corporate tax rates and his raising of “awareness that China is not our friend.”

Instead, O’Rourke argues “it’s a matter of what [Trump] can do” in a second term, calling him “a toddler at the top of the stairs.”

Speaking of … P.J. turned back to the Democratic ticket: “They seem to be wrong, all wrong, quite wrong, about everything.”

He’s not wrong.

“But” of Biden and Harris, O’Rourke contends they are “wrong between normal parameters of wrong.” Adding that, “There’s wrong and there’s damn wrong.” Meaning Trump is “damn wrong.”

But not wrong on taxes, right P.J.? Or China. Or picking Supreme Court justices — Trump has the best batting average for nominating to the High Court of any president in the last five decades.

And Mr. Trump is the first president in two decades not to drag the U.S. into a regime change war.

“Wrong on everything” or “a toddler at the top of the stairs”?

This P.J. thinks the better choice is Common Sense.

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The Devil Is in the Seat Cushion

Post author By Editor
Post date August 28, 2020
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A few weeks ago, I suggested setting up a betting pool for the upcoming presidential debates. How many would there be?

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe predicted that there would be three — “no more, no less” — but prescribed zero: “America’s quadrennial presidential debates have become an absurdity,” he wrote.

“They long ago devolved into shallow ‘gotcha’ contests, prime-time entertainments designed to elicit memorable soundbites — tart put-downs rehearsed in advance or the unforced error of an unexpected gaffe,” which is about right, though President Donald J. Trump excels at the spontaneous put-down.

Advisability to the side, Jacoby surmised what we all have surmised: that Democrats shouldn’t be pushing debates. That is, if they want their candidate, Joe Biden, to win the election. He is too off his game. Biden should take a hint from the name given to his generation: Silent.

Enter Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House and very rarely silent herself — and indeed older than Biden but as sharp as the proverbial tack the Devil is said to need to sit upon. She says that Biden should not debate President Trump.

“Don’t tell anybody I told you this,” she jests. “Especially don’t tell Joe Biden. But I don’t think there should be any debates.”

The president, she argues, has not “comported himself in a way … with truth, evidence, data, and facts. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t legitimize a conversation with him, nor a debate in terms of the presidency of the United States.”

She dubs a debate with Trump “an exercise in skullduggery.”

Good politics — realpolitik — but also horrific politics — setting up a transparent-but-serviceable CYA excuse.

But it is definitely 2020 politics.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies political challengers

Biden’s Big Lie

Joe Biden, good people hoax, liar, lies, DNC

“In war,” Aeschylus wrote in the fifth century BC, “truth is the first casualty.”

So, too, these days, in political campaigns.

Last week, in accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Joe Biden promised to “draw on the best of us” and “be an ally of the light.” But then the 47-year Washington veteran pivoted, waving the bloody shirt from Charlottesville by claiming that President Donald Trump had declared “neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists” to be “very fine people,” and therefore “we were in a battle for the soul of this nation.”

Did Trump dub some neo-Nazis “very fine people”?

“And you had some very bad people in that group,” the president explained to a reporter. “But you also had people that were very fine people — on both sides. You had people in that group who were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statute and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

Noting that “George Washington was a slave-owner,” Mr. Trump asked, “Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? …

“It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people,” he continued. “And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

Unequivocal.

Outraged by the Democratic contender’s false contention, cartoonist and podcaster Scott Adams called Biden a “Brain-Dead Race Hoaxer” … and worse.

But Biden is hardly alone. The Democrats and most of the media join in ignoring Trump’s explicit statements, pushing their myopically malevolent misinterpretation.

Should this smear defeat Trump in November, an era of political truth-telling will not be ushered in.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Months ago, the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org determined that Mr. Biden, in asserting that President Trump had failed to condemn neo-Nazis, had made false claims against the president — ignoring numerous recordings in living color of the president making those exact censures.

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ideological culture local leaders political challengers

Sans Champion, Again?

Rep. Justin Amash, democracy, presidential race,

For a moment there — a few weeks — a comparatively youthful candidate with a gentle, conscientious and respectful temperament seemed poised to challenge the major parties’ sausage-twisting septuagenarians,The Donald and Sleepy Joe. A congressman from Michigan had entered the Libertarian Party’s hat-strewn ring, offering us something serious for Death Race 2020.

Then, Saturday, Rep. Justin Amash sent a series of tweets announcing that he was ending his presidential bid.

Presidential campaigns aren’t easy. And between outrageous anti-democratic ballot access hurdles and the pandemic, it has gotten even more difficult.

Win or lose — and Amash was going to lose — I’ll miss what the Great Lakes State representative might have gotten a chance to say to audiences across the country.

About partisanship.

About political control.

In Washington.

“That’s why we have so much discord,” Amash told constituents at a 2019 town hall, “because members of Congress are just following the party line all of the time.”

Party bosses?

“Right now, you have a system in which the Speaker of the House controls the entire process,” charges Amash. “That was true under Republicans and it’s true under Democrats. Under [Speaker] Paul Ryan, for example, we had for the first time in Congress’s history an entire term where we weren’t allowed to amend any legislation on the House floor.

“And so far under Speaker Pelosi the same thing has happened,” he added. “No amendments have been allowed on the House floor.”

“You need the House to be a deliberative body where everyone participates,” Amash declares, “and everyone has a chance to offer their amendments, to offer their ideas.”

Great point.

We sure could use a champion for it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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political challengers

Torch Passing in a World Afire

Post author By Editor
Post date May 4, 2020
No Comments on Torch Passing in a World Afire

“Democrats and NeverTrump conservatives across the country freaked out,” writes David Byler, a data analyst and political columnist for The Washington Post.

Why?

Last week, Rep. Justin Amash (L‑Mich.) became the first official Libertarian member of Congress and, more importantly to those hyperventilating, also announced he was seeking the Libertarian Party nomination for president.*

Already the horserace handicappers of politics are galloping ahead. “[T]he only real effect Amash could have in this campaign,” NeverTrumper George Conway tweeted, “is to enhance Trump’s chances.”

A Detroit News poll conducted last summer in the crucial state of Michigan showed Amash “luring independent voters” away from Democrat nominee Joe Biden. The surprised pollster suggested that while “conventional wisdom would say he would hurt President Trump by taking away Republican votes,” Amash may instead “give independent voters … an outlet to not vote for the Democrat.”

In 2016, younger voters were especially interested in an alternative to Trump — but not Hillary Clinton. At 40 years of age, Amash’s youth could be a distinct advantage over President Donald Trump, 73, and former Vice-President Joe Biden, 77.

Speaking of older — though still active politically — happy birthday to 1980 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ed Clark! He turns 90 years of age today.

“Clark’s name appeared on the ballot in all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia and Guam,” David Boaz remembers at Cato.org, “the first third-party candidate” to be “on every possible ballot since Theodore Roosevelt in 1916.”

Ed Clark did not win, but he put Libertarians on the map. And I got to cast my first vote for president — proudly.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Not only do I share Amash’s basic political philosophy, I very much applaud his conscientiousness in publicly explaining his thinking behind every vote cast.

Note: I petitioned to put Ed Clark on the ballot around the country and, at 20 years old, served as campaign chairman in Arkansas. Years later, Ed would testify on my behalf at my draft registration resistance trial.

political challengers term limits

Coburn’s Terms

Over the weekend, as Rep. Thomas Massie (R‑Kent.) was single-handedly battling the entire Congress, another fighter with the inner courage to stand up against the Washington mob was sadly losing his battle with cancer. On Saturday, Dr. Tom Coburn passed away at age 72.

Honored in his day with the sobriquet “Dr. No,” Coburn the obstetrician had delivered 4,000 babies; Coburn the congressman had “frustrated Democrats and Republicans alike,” The New York Times explained, “with his propensity for blocking bills.”

When Coburn successfully blocked $150,000,000 in proposed new government spending, the Washington Post derisively called it “chicken feed.” In this space, we used this term: priceless.

“His contempt for [career politicians] is genuine, bipartisan and in many cases mutual,” noted The Times, adding that Coburn “once prescribed a ‘spinal transplant’ for 70 percent of the Senate.”

Dr. Coburn challenged the House rule prohibiting him from continuing to practice medicine while in office. “They’re really killing any idea for representation outside the clique of good old boys,” he argued. “It suggests people can’t believe in term limits and serve in Congress.”

He won.

Tom Coburn pledged to serve no more than three House terms and kept his word. Four years later, he ran for and won a U.S. Senate seat, likewise pledging a two-term self-limit* — becoming “The Conscience of the Senate.”

“One of the reasons I’ve been such a pain in the neck up [in Washington],” offered Coburn, “is because I knew I was leaving.”

Dr. Tom Coburn was one of us — a representative, and not a politician. He will long be remembered by those who love our Republic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “I believe more than ever,” Coburn said in keeping his self-imposed three-term House limit, “that our nation’s problems have been created because career politicians have set themselves apart as an elite class of people trying to dictate to us how we run our lives.”

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