The president is not your daddy. Do I really have to say this? To supposed adults? To people qualified to vote in a democratic republic? There are two items I came across this week that seem to indicate that indeed I do. No one ever taught these people to reason their way out of a paper bag, or even told them why they should.
Instead, they were given a set of beliefs that define “good people” and if they stop believing in those things, they are “bad people.”
I’d say these are not adults in any sense of the word, but that’s not exactly true. Throughout most of the history of our species, adults had a set of beliefs it was best not to question, whether it be “our tribe is better than the next tribe” or “we have to eliminate all the suede-eaters” or even “this is how we tie our glurk and display our brek” because humans are tribal, and displaying your tribal loyalty has been way more important than actually being, you know, rational and asking if things really work that way for… most of history.
The problem is that we’re not in a society (or societies if you extend this to all of Western civilization) that can survive this kind of quasi-religious denial of logical thought. We’re not in a society (or societies) that can hold on tight to the idea that all cultures are the same, when, say, the Oktoberfest is being cancelled throughout many cities in Germany because migrants can’t get it across their heads that a woman not covered like a sofa is NOT, in fact, asking to be raped. We’re not in a society that can survive voters being misinformed by the high priests of the leftist religion on the nature of good and evil either, or the nature of the presidency. But that is the society we live in and misinformation is rife.
See, when you remove rationality and true research and information as a way of forming your opinion, and instead you know in your heart of hearts you have to believe a set of precepts to be a “good person,” you are not fit to live in a representative republic, or to have your vote counted.
But in our society, your vote does count. And chances are you’re not shy about displaying your infantilization on Twitter either. Note this, with name not removed because this person tweeted it for all the world to see.
Note this person has 495 retweets and 1858 likes for something that’s not just absolutely nonsensical but ridiculous and should be shameful for any free and thinking adult to proclaim.
This person thinks Obama was her father? Why? First of all, she could not have lit on a worse person than the child-president, himself forever ready to act like a peevish adolescent, to be her “daddy.” Second, seriously, you want the president to be your father? Why? He’s the executive of the republic at the federal level, a level that should be remote enough from your everyday life that you really have very little contact with him. (Yeah, sure, the feds have been getting their noses in everything. But they’re not supposed to.) Third, sure thing, some of the functions of the president, like the power to direct the military, are supposed to be protective and therefore “father like,” but then again, Obama was remarkably reluctant to protect anyone, so why this attachment to him as “daddy”?
Then Trump is going to rape us? How? I want an exact account of what way Trump is raping us that Obama didn’t. To the extent that he is cutting back on interference and regulation, it could be said he’s raping the Constitution less than Obama.
But then we get to the real doozy. The press is supposed to be our mother. Wait, what? The press is supposed to inform us about events too far away for us to experience and know directly. That’s all. That is all they are supposed to do. If that was the function of the mother in your family, you had a pretty strange family.
We’ll leave aside this bizarre idea that the press isn’t doing enough to bring Donald Trump down. We’ll say instead that they’re doing everything they can short of actually personally shooting him, but are singularly ineffective because they’re stepping beyond their sphere. They are in fact trying to protect these irrational people from reality by fabricating a more palatable one, that the left can wrap around itself as protection from the truth. Like the truth that socialism has never been (and never will be, at least not with humans) a system of anything but immiseration.
Instead, we’ll turn to the idea that the press is our “mother.” It’s hard for any thinking adult reading this tweet not to go “Good Lord. I don’t care how old you are, lady. You’re not a citizen of a free country. And I don’t care where you were born. You might be an adult under a totalitarian regime, but here you’re devoid of the most basic qualifications to exert the franchise. You want the president to be Daddy and the press to be Mommy. We want you to move out of our basement, get a job, and take down your Che Guevara posters already.”
However this illusion that the presidency should be exerted by people who are “good” – good for definitions of “good” accepted by the left, mind you. Real resemblance to good is not only not needed, but not likely to be present, since their system of values starts with making envy a core virtue.
The Wall Street Journal had to respond to the idea that presidents should be good people. Unfortunately, their reporter also seems to think we should choose people because they’re “good” for whatever the definition of good is. Or maybe he just felt forced to take a cheap shot at Trump so he can keep his job or find another one if he loses this one.
Mr. Trump is accused of “eroding the norms” of American democracy when in fact he violates them willy-nilly. Yet even during the primaries it quickly was clear that his success was no invitation for others to behave the same way. Mr. Trump spent 40 years developing and projecting the persona that would likely have disqualified him from consideration at any other moment against any other candidate.
Does Trump violate the norms of American “democracy”? How? Note nothing is given besides the fact that his persona should have disqualified him from consideration. Why? No one says. I mean, after Slick Willy, after President Pen and Phone, in what way does Trump’s persona disqualify him from consideration. Anyone?
Mrs. Clinton might have countered in myriad ways but opted for a campaign of “you have to vote for me because I’m a better person than Trump.” It turned out that voters had other issues on their minds, and also doubted the premise. And now James Comey, in his book and media tour, is making the same mistake.
It apparently falls to me to explain to the WSJ (who goes on to talk about this as though being a good person is indeed a prerogative of the left) that “good person” in every field I know of dominated by the left is a phrase that means “is a good soldier in the cause of progressivism.” I stumbled to this by overhearing conversations when I was just a freshman published author. I think most people have stumbled on to this. Cue a chorus of “we won’t be fooled again.”
Particularly when you’re talking of people as repulsive as Hillary and for crying out loud, Comey.
Pork futures Hillary? Clinton Foundation Hillary? Lost her law license Hillary? Made fun of a child who was a victim of rape because she got the rapist off Hillary? Left Americans to die Hillary?
By what definition, in any of the major world’s religions (we’ll ignore Satanism for this purpose), is Hillary a good person? Or capable of saying she’s better than anyone?
As for Comey, who leaked fake pee-pee dossiers strategically to try to circumvent the election of someone and corrupt the actual process of democracy, he doesn’t need a Marcus Anthony to proclaim, “But Comey is an honorable man.” Every purple sentence in his book reveals him for a narcissistic psychopath who used his office for his own personal purposes and who is now collecting the reward of that in a book advance that will never even remotely earn out.
In the middle of this, you want us to think that Trump is the worst person? Sure, he’s a serial adulterer and he has a brash manner. Oh, and he runs businesses in an autocratic way and was a reality TV star. And? What precisely does that have to do with leading a country? You could say that he doesn’t present a good image or whatever, but then you’re back at that “And? I’m not taking him on as a lover or a father. I’m just hiring an employee.” Yeah, sure, you could say that his divorces and infidelity mean he’s not a keeper of promises, except that in his circles – and in much of the country – marriage vows are no longer taken seriously in any way, shape, or form.
Look, he wasn’t my choice two years ago around this time, but so far Trump has done no worse than many others, and probably better.
The WSJ columnist intuits that perhaps what you choose as president is not necessarily a “good” person.
The former FBI chief invokes Reinhold Niebuhr, on whom he wrote his college thesis, but not as if he actually read Niebuhr. The famously verbose theologian and philosopher was not a conventional Christian with conventional beliefs. He was especially ungracious about the “stupidity” of the average man. His recurrent theme was the ethical murkiness of representative government, and how a democratic leader must be prepared to act in ways that are contrary to Christian ethics to meet the interests of his constituents.
Niebuhr wrote for a time, after all, when presidents were expected to be ready to incinerate half of mankind for the sake of U.S. interests and prestige. Even today, has any president been obliged to select as many specific, named individuals for death as Barack Obama did as commander in chief of the drone program? Niebuhr was definitively Protestant only in one way: his inclination to leave it to God to decide who among politicians is a “good” person and who isn’t. Unfortunately, it’s a principle Mr. Comey doesn’t pick up on.
But he still seems to miss the point of “Comey is not better than Trump unless the contest is ‘who has more sinful pride.'” He seems to miss the point that what is at stake here is “whose definition of good?” even if good had anything to do with the job.
Take President Carter. I was here for the latter end of his presidency as an exchange student. This man who handed Iran to the mullahs and vast portions of Africa to the Soviet Union—who had allowed gas rationing in America—was widely considered a “good” person. I have read a few biographies of him and from shooting cats to trying to get Russia to help him win the election against Reagan, I’d say Mr. Carter falls very far from “good” by any definition. (Though probably still better than Hillary. In the moral sense. Hard not to be.)
However, he embraced all the ideas of the left, from the idea that we were heading into a time of scarcity and nothing could be done about it, to the idea that government had the right and need to control the production of energy (don’t get me started), to the idea that we should disarm so the Soviets would take pity on us, and that we couldn’t challenge Soviet power grabs abroad because that might get a totalitarian regime run by kleptocrats “mad” at us. So by the left-speak definition, he was a “good person.”
And what was that “mommy” the press doing while America and the world were raped (sometimes literally under the Cuban mercenaries of the Soviet Empire?). They were propagating the idea that Carter’s failures came from his being a “good person.”
Yeah, the WSJ is right that being “good” in the traditional sense has very little to do with being a good president. But they seem to miss that “good” is a definition wielded by the left to mean “agrees with us.”
And we know what people who agree with the left do to the country and the rest of us deplorables at large. They tend to think their real enemies are conservatives and libertarians, not the people actually declaring war on the country.
We just want them to admit they’re a religion and retreat to the convent of Eternal Redistribution and leave the rest of us alone.
We no more have to accept their definition of “good person” than we do the definition of “good person” from the mad mullahs of Iran.
Both ideas are, ultimately, inimical to representative democracy.
For that matter, their ideas of “mother” “father” and “protection” are so alien that I return again and again to the idea they just landed from some spaceship.
If only we could send them back to their native planet, Che posters and little red book included.
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