Never Attack a Fellow Republican - Unless He's NOT a Fellow Republican

Ronald Reagan counseled Republicans not to attack our own people. I believe in that. Shoot your own side first is a terrible battle plan. So why am I picking on poor old Donald Trump, man of the people and voice of the downtrodden conservative?

Because he's no such thing!  This guy is not one of us! It takes precious little digging into his past to uncover things like his past donations to Hillary Clinton and to Bill Clinton back in the day. They attended his wedding for crying out loud and they weren't gate crashers. He supports a nationalized universal healthcare. He has shady business deals going back decades. As to his brilliance as a financial tycoon?  Bosh!  He's a silver spoon entrepreneur, having got his start with 300 million dollars his father left him. He's bankrupted 4 companies along the way, cost thousands their life savings and now wants to take a run at the US economy? And after 4 wives, you can hardly call him a "Family Values" candidate.

Trump enjoys golf with friends quite as much as Obama does.

We've got way better presidential choices out there with some actual depth of ideas and not just a loud angry voice. Trump's a one-hit wonder politically.  He appeals to the worst in us by categorically stating that President Trump will uproot eleven million illegal Mexicans in America and toss them back into the middle of the ongoing Mexican drug war going on south of the border. He plans to send them homeless, without food and broke, along with their children, without any support or personal assets to care for themselves back into a nation torn by violent clashes between the government and drug cartels. 

These wars are so violent that the El Paso city hall has pockmarks from stray machine gun fire from clashes between the Federales and drug cartel troops in Ciudad Juárez just across the border. People on our side of the border have been shot at, murdered and their homes vandalized. On their side of the border, the cartels leave human heads alongside the road as a warning to any who would oppose them.

Trump is advocating the creation of an epic humanitarian crisis in the country right next to us. Trump believes he can close the border successfully by suddenly putting eleven million desperate people on the other side of it - people who will want to come right back here for all the same reasons that they left Mexico in the first place. How many troops are we going to have to put on the border to stop the flood that will follow? 

Can you imagine what happens if 11 million people rush our Southern border all at once? Is Trump planning to mow them down with machine guns and drones; maybe some napalm? The man's advocating something far worse than what we did to my Cherokee ancestors with the Trail of Tears. He's all show, appealing to the worst prejudices in all of us and giving angry people what they want to hear. It's called pandering and it's a favorite Democrat technique.

So I have no compunctions about hammering Donald Trump. We've got enough trouble with the current crop of "Let's Make a Deal" country club Republicans in Congress and the Senate.  Do we really want to elect the king of "Let's Make a Deal" to the highest office in the land?

Tom King (c) 2015

Unraveling the Fabric: The Muslim Contribution to the "Core of our Democracy"

At first I was confused.  Recently in a statement released on the White House website to commemorate Eid-Al-Fatr, the conclusion of Ramadan, the President praised the contribution of Muslims to "...building the very fabric of our nation and strengthening the core of our democracy."

It took me a while to figure that one out, but now I realize what he must have been talking about. Back during the Jefferson administration, a helpful bunch of Muslims called the Barbary pirates escalated their habit of preying on American trade in the Mediterranean. It finally became so bad that Thomas Jefferson, who notoriously disliked the idea of a standing military of any sort, was forced to dispatch the frigates that President Washington had ordered built for just such an emergency, to the Barbary coast to quell the Barbary pirates. 


Sadly, the delay in responding happened because the Congress was considering whether paying tribute to the Muslim Pashas of North Africa was cheaper than sending the Navy. Fortunately for the Navy, Americans tend to be generally averse to the idea of paying "tribute" (except of course for pant-waist liberals who held seats in Congress even back in those days). Over the next decade or so, the new U.S. Navy took on the Barbary States and their pirate strongholds several times in an effort to convince the pashas that meddling with Americans could have negative consequences.

So you could say that Muslims gave us the most powerful navy in the world (at least until Obama finishes putting it into mothballs). It's ironic that the very Muslim threat that have the US Navy a kickstart back in the beginning, seems to be inspiring another president who distrusts the military to stand the Navy down to it's lowest levels in a hundred years. 

Oh, yes, the Muslims have contributed to the very fabric of our nation all right.~ Near as I can tell they've been doing their best to unravel that fabric. I'm not sure I'd call that a "contribution", though.

© 2015 by Tom King

*And before you whip off an angry "How dare you hate on innocent Muslims" comment, I am NOT anti-Muslim.  I believe in the free exercise of any religion, so long as it doesn't advocate blowing up buildings and replacing the constitution with some religious law that allows for the stoning of gays, lesbians, rape victims and saucy feminists just because. I like the Constitution and would like to keep it thank you very much. I AM kind of anti-appeasement, though.  Given that the president seems to be trying to rewrite history and to do what the Congress back in the late 1700's and early 1800s did (appease the nations of Islam), I am rather concerned with regard to Obama's loyalties. Appeasement doesn't work. (see Neville Chamberlain, 1939). I thought we learned that lesson in WWII. Apparently not so much.