The redefinition of good character that we so often see on the Trump right reminds me of the powerful words contained in the Southern Baptist Convention’s 1998 resolution on the moral character of public officials. At the height of the Clinton scandals, the Baptists rightly declared, “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”
Erick Erickson took this line in the Washington Post. How could any Christian worthy of the name of Our Lord possibly pull the lever for anyone as horrible as Donald J. Trump?
But here's the deal. Who's turning Trump's vices into virtues? Name them. And the other thing is that most of us Christians are well aware that all of our Bibles have Romans 3:10-12 in them.
"None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”
Which the Apostle Paul quotes from Psalm 14:1-3 or Psalm 53:1-3, whichever you'd prefer. So I don't care who you run, Dave. He or she is going to be flawed.
It's like this, Dave. You need some work done around your house so you go online to find a contractor. Whatever online database you check spits out two names.
You personally know both of them. One is a fine, decent, upstanding regular church-going fellow who is happily married but who is, quite frankly, a lousy contractor. Constantly late, shoddy work, constant complaints, etc. The other one's been married and divorced three times, he sleeps around with just about anybody but he does great work at half the cost.
Which one are you going to hire, Dave?
Who'd the GOP run in 2008? John McCain. War hero, decent guy by most accounts. Not a particularly strong Christian but hey, who is? McCain had a divorce under his belt but those happen. My family's had three of them, two with one sister.
But I still love them.
The most important thing, Dave, is that John McCain and his team had no idea how to successfully win an election against a Democrat when one considers that Democrats do whatever it takes to win and that McCain would also have to fight the
So McCain lost. But he was a decent guy.
Who lost.
Decently.
Fast forward to 2012. That year, the GOP put forward former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. And for all those conservatives at National Review and other places who later bellowed that "Trump's no conservative!!" the simple fact of the matter was that Romney wasn't either.
Mitt was a slightly taller William Weld, he was pretending and we all knew it. And that was why evangelicals sat out that race, Romney lost and gave us four more years of Barack Obama.
So we got eight years of Obama. Eight years of Planned Parenthood getting everything it wanted, eight years of groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor being legally forced to violate their consciences, eight years of abominations like the Syrian slaughter and the Iran deal.
But we got all that decently.
Decent losers are still losers, Dave. And losers influence nobody.
Fast forward to 2016. Who did the GOP put forward for president that year? John Kasich? Jim Gilmore? Marco Rubio? JEB!? Not to put too fine a point on it but any one of them would have been decently slaughtered by Hillary Clinton.
But there was also Donald J. Trump who sounded for all the world like he knew what beating a Democrat would require in this day and age and who was willing to do it. So it really shouldn't have surprised anyone when the GOP base rebelled, voted against the instructions of Professional ConservatismTM and gave Trump the nomination.
Trump won.
And once he won, Dave, he actually...did stuff. Take the US embassy in Israel. That was the easiest vote in the world, wasn't it, Dave, all those congressional votes declaring that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel, knowing that NOTHING WHATSOEVER WAS EVER GOING TO HAPPEN? Hell, even a leftist Democrat would have found that an easy vote.
Then Trump won the presidency. Israel's capital is Jerusalem? Move the embassy there. But...but...that will anger the Palestinians. Well, they're usually pissed off about something. Move the damned embassy to Jerusalem.
And then there was
But he's actually doing stuff, Dave. He's trying things. Things that Professional ConservatismTM repeatedly found excuses not to try.
Pay close attention, Dave, because Alexandria Brown is only going to say this once.
The Establishment never defunded Planned Parenthood. So. You know. Shut up. Seriously. Shut up. The soi disant Establishment has spent over 30 years not accomplishing anything other than Eternal War. Two years of Trump. Trump's done things. Shut. Up.
I was not at all enthusiastic about the idea of President Donald J. Trump, Dave. But I'm a whole lot less enthusiastic about people who claim to agree with me but can't trouble themselves to follow through. So I guess I'm going to be buying a MAGA hat pretty soon.
End of the day, it comes down to one word, Dave.
Results.
5 comments:
I agree. As a person who spent most of my working career in the insurance biz. I tend to be results oriented. Don't just tell me what you're going to do. Do it. Trump says what he's going to do, then he does it.
"Decent losers are still losers, Dave. And losers influence nobody." I cannot improve on that observation.
Chris, if you think about it, the only thing the Chamber of Commerce is interested is seeking rent.
Many presidents before Trump were unfaithful to their wives and misbehaved with women. Before Clinton, the press covered for them. After Clinton, the idea of the president as a moral model for the nation had to be set aside. I didn't vote for Trump to marry him or to have him be my spiritual mentor. I voted for him to be a chief executive for the nation, and he's done a whole lot better than his immediate predecessors.
That's exactly the way I saw it, Katherine. We were electing our First Civil Servant and not America's Presiding Bishop.
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