When The Anthem Sounds In Politics, Culture, and Religion…
08 Sunday May 2016
Written by dennisghurst in Consequences
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Barack Obama, Beyond the Cosmos, Billy Graham, C.S.Lewis, Christ, Christianity, Conservatism, Constitutional Republic, Everlasting, Family, Fellowship of the Minds, Freedom, Genealogy, God, I Have A Dream, Jesus Christ, Lessons, Liberty, Life, Posterity, Teaching, United States, Wisdom
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Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor. ~ H.L.Mencken
Normally I like to preserve SONday Blog for subjects less likely to be political and more on the cultural and faith-based track of life. Yet this past week’s-worth of astounding revelations of real-people-based events and happenings particularly on the political front have caused me to cross over for maybe the very first time in the years of my blogging exuberance of preserving the “wall of separation between church and state”, especially on SONday mornings. On the contrary, the past week’s happenings on that front have been all consuming and somewhat surreal.
In a nutshell, consider this. The single biggest political lesson from Donald Trump to date in one sentence was written by a staunch, one might say, “former conservative Republican” by the name of Ann Coulter. As in: “A guy just won the Republican nomination for president by spending no money, hiring no pollsters, running virtually no TV ads, and just saying what he truly believed no matter how many times people told him he couldn’t say that”. And for that, Ann Coulter was rabidly excoriated. Yet consider her opinions …
For those of you not yet on the Trump Train, I know you don’t want to vote for Hillary, but all the pundits have been trying to convince you that Trump’s a complete fraud. (That was between their smug assurances that he wouldn’t make it out of Iowa.) It’s odd. When Trump launched his campaign by talking about Mexican rapists and the wall, his critics hysterically denounced him, rushing to TV to say he did NOT represent the Republican Party! Only after it became resoundingly clear that large majorities of Americans agreed with Trump did his critics try a new tack: He doesn’t believe it!
That’s what my friend Andy McCarthy at the now-defunct National Review wrote recently. I had to spend the weekend figuring out how to attack a friend without saying, “This is the most retarded argument I’ve ever read.” Here goes: This was not Andy’s best effort. Of all the arguments that could be made against Trump, McCarthy settled on: I don’t trust him on immigration. (I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at that pitch meeting.)
So is Trump lying about his signature issue, immigration? The countervailing evidence to that 2012 pop-off is:
- Nine months of Trump soaring to the top of the polls and slaying all comers by talking about how he’s going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it;
- His never, ever, ever backing down on the wall, sanctuary cities, anchor babies, suspending Muslim immigration, etc., etc., despite unprecedented attacks from both the liberal and “conservative” media;
- The fact that he talks about immigration at every single one of his massive rallies and always gets the biggest, most sustained standing ovations when he mentions the wall;
- The blizzard of tweets he sent out in 2013 denouncing Rubio’s amnesty bill as it was sailing through the Senate, supported by the entire liberal media, Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, most of talk radio, and every other GOP candidate for president this year, including, for a while, Ted Cruz (whose job was to know about bills being voted on in the Senate, unlike a Manhattan developer);
- Trump’s one and only policy guy is the magnificent Stephen Miller, who was Sen. Jeff Sessions’ main immigration guy. And so on.
Maybe Trump is the Manchurian Candidate and contrary to his entire life’s work he really just wants fancy people in Manhattan to like him. Maybe the window into his soul is what he said four years ago about Romney’s phrase “self-deportation.” Maybe 50 years of Trump’s talking about the working class was all a clever ruse leading to this one shining moment when he would trick Americans into voting for him, so he could sell us out, like any other candidate would. On the other hand, maybe he’s changed his mind about that 2012 remark.
I’m bitter and cynical enough on immigration that I don’t trust anyone not to betray us. But if there was ever a candidate we could believe will build a wall and stop the mass importation of the Third World it’s Trump.
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Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
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Then there’s this from the ever-prophetic Leonard Cohen…
We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every single government —
signs for all to see.
I can’t run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up
a thundercloud
and they’re going to hear from me.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
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You make a living by what you get; you make a life by what you give. ~ Sir Winston Churchill
Soli Deo Gloria!
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Full Ann Coulter article here…
H/T to Gerard Vanderleun and American Digest…