Mountain Views News          Saturday, February 13, 2016

15

OPINION

 Mountain Views News Saturday, February 13, 2016 

TINA Dupuy

TOM Purcell

Mountain 
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Dr. Tina Paul

Rich Johnson

Merri Jill Finstrom

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Tina Paul

Mary Carney

Katie Hopkins

Deanne Davis

Despina Arouzman

Greg Welborn

Renee Quenell

Ben Show

Sean Kayden

Marc Garlett

Pat Birdsall (retired)


HATE-WATCHING THE ELECTION

“I love Bernie! I’ve donated to his campaign! He’s great!” my 
super conservative Beltway establishment Republican friend 
says. “Feel the Bern!!” He texts me with a snicker during all 
of the Democratic debates. The night of the Iowa Caucus I 
retaliated, texting, “Cruz! I’m so happy!!” I knew that’d make 
him cringe.

So while Republicans are swooning over Bernie, I’m obsessed 
with the GOP field for the same reason I spent a year getting 
into Real Housewives of Whatever Awful Place: I loathe all the cast members. 
They’re disgusting, short-sighted narcissists and I just can’t look away. 

In the immortal words of Twitter beat poet Donald Trump: They’re all horrible. 
Total losers.

It boggles the mind to think of all the incompetent, unimaginative, unaccomplished 
and unintelligent Republicans who decided to sit this one out. One has to 
praise Michigan Governor Rick Snyder for staying home and merely poisoning his 
own state instead of the entire country.

Wisconsin is way at the bottom (if not “dead last”) in job growth, and yet college 
dropout and wet cardboard impersonator Scott Walker still put his hat into the 
ring. This year Politico ranked Louisiana last in basically everything. Still their 
twangy “stop being the stupid party” exorcist-in-chief Bobby Jindal thought that’d 
be a great launching pad for him to be POTUS. 

GOP-gadfly and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina ruined a major 
American company, lost to Barbra Boxer by 10 points, was fired by the McCain/
Palin campaign for (wait for it) gaffes, yet she somehow got this idea that what the 
country really wanted in the White House was a Bizarro Hillary. I mean, Texas 
Governor Rick Perry, Mr. Oops himself, saw this pathetic clump of corporate-ese 
spewing militia-kissers and mused, “Even I could win this thing this time!”

But what’s really fun about this election is witnessing the coal-burning “with us, or 
against us” Nixon-Reagan-Bush Republican machine break down. Like everyone 
else in 2000 who saw the Brooks Brothers riot take over the country, I thought this 
“perception is reality” brand of the Bush-Cheney-Rove holy trinity would come 
back in full force for Jeb. I just assumed. I mean, “Fool me once, shame on — 
shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” Right? But no! Jeb has affluenza, 
a word someone came up with describing those who are wealthy and yet 
still pitiful.

Jeb Bush, everyone. Please clap.

Ted Cruz reminds me of the creepy film that develops on the top of mushroom 
soup. Marco Rubio’s credibility is on par with his personal credit score. Sorry, I’m 
not buying your plans to defeat ISIS when no one would let you finance a Honda.

So out of this compost pile has grown a monosyllabic, monomaniacal outer-borough 
sue-happy mutant man-child named Donald Trump. Every day he comes up 
with a new human right he’d like to violate: Bombing the hell out of civilians being 
held by ISIS; shuttering Muslim places of worship; killing the families (women and 
children) of alleged terrorists; or closing the Internet. In the last debate he got an 
applause break for the war crimes he promised to commit. The Party of Lincoln 
has devolved into the party cheering for torturing the right people.

Trump won 35 percent in New Hampshire, which means 65 percent of GOP primary 
voters don’t want him to be their nominee. But he’s still winning! The Republican 
machine that cut taxes while putting a couple of wars on credit cards, 
that buckled the economy, that waterboarded innocent people, that sat idle while 
thousands of Americans died in Hurricane Katrina, that had 9/11 happen on their 
watch, now can’t save themselves and stop Trump?!

This is fantastic!

Then there’s the delicious irony that because there are so many candidates still 
running—Trump will continue winning. So because the entire field is flawed and 
terrible and incapable of honest self-reflection they’re staying in and allowing 
Trump to sweep. The only way out of this mess is for the field to become selfless, 
think of the party over their own personal ambitions and drop out, allowing the 
least horrible candidate who’s not named Trump to win.

Trump is a goiter on the neck of the GOP. He’s sticking out because the party is 
sick. And they have no one to blame but themselves. (You know, personal responsibility 
and all.)

Go hate-watch 2016! Go Trump!

Tina Dupuy is a nationally syndicated columnist and host of the podcast, 
Cultish. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

THE KEYS TO HEALTH AND HAPPINESS

Get this: Wealth, fame and success don’t make us happy, but 
strong relationships do. 

That’s according to a 77-year-long Harvard Study of Adult 
Development that I read about in The Independent. 

The study began in 1938 with 724 men from two distinct 
groups. The first group included 268 sophomores from 
Harvard. The second group included 456 16-year-olds from 
an impoverished area in Boston. 

At the beginning of the study, the subjects were given medical examinations and 
researchers interviewed their parents to gain “a deep understanding of their lives.” 

Then, every two years, researchers surveyed their lives and “explored their attitudes 
toward their work and home lives… .” Every five years they were given medical 
examinations. Of the 724 subjects, 60 are still alive and still participating in the study. 

So what have researchers learned from the study about human happiness? 

According to Harvard Psychiatry Professor Robert Waldinger, the study’s fourth 
director, there are three key findings. 

First, loneliness can kill. 

“People with more social connections — be that to family members, friends or in a 
community — are happier, physically healthier and tend to live longer,” reports The 
Independent. But “those who are more isolated from others than they wish to be 
suffer with poor health and experience a decline in brain function sooner than those 
who aren’t.” But we know all this to be true. We know that the happiest moments 
in our own lives involved friends and family. These are the people who affect the 
deeper part of our nature — our spirits and souls — where true happiness resides. 
These are the people who can make us laugh so hard our guts hurt or help us when 
we’re down or engage us in deeply satisfying conversations. 

 And yet we spend most of our waking hours not nurturing our friends and families 
but chasing success and money and a bigger house. And the happiness that is right 
under our noses eludes us. 

The second key finding of the study is this: The quality of relationships matters. 
“While being lonely is harmful, being surrounded by people isn’t necessarily helpful 
in itself,” said Waldinger. “We know that you can be lonely in a crowd and lonely 
in a marriage.” 

In the era of social media, when we have more “virtual” friends than ever, why are 
so many lonelier than ever? 

The study’s third key finding should be obvious: Strong relationships are what we 
need to be happy, but they require work. 

“Waldinger said that people who feel they can count on another person when they 
face trouble have stronger memory, while those who don’t see this faculty decline 
earlier,” reports The Independent. 

The Harvard study validates what we all know in our bones to be true. But we’re a 
conflicted people in America. 

On one hand, we think wealth and fame are the keys to happiness. We want adulation 
and expensive cars and big houses staffed by a dozen servants. 

But on the other hand we know wealth and fame are bogus. You don’t know who 
your friends really are until your money is gone. And if you ever do anything stupid, 
the media will broadcast it all over the world. 

Well, nuts to that. 

If you want to be healthy and happy, follow the Harvard study’s findings and engage 
a handful of good people in high-quality relationships. 

Or, to put it another way, just follow the advice of the great singer-philosopher Kenny 
Rogers. He said that all anyone needs to be happy is someone to love, something to 
do and something to look forward to. 

Tom Purcell. Tom Purcell, author of “Misadventures of a 1970’s Childhood” and 
“Sean McClanahan Mysteries,” is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist 

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LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN 

MAKING SENSE

MICHAEL Reagan

HOWARD Hays As I See It


“It was really stressful and 
difficult, (a) headache and 
expensive, everything you 
could name.”

- Rosanell Eaton, on 
recent efforts to exercise 
her right to vote

Tina Dupuy had a great 
column last week (check 
it out on mtnviewsnews.com if you missed it). 
She wrote how the likes of Sens. Ted Cruz (R-
TX) and Marco Rubio (R-TX), in characterizing 
rights as somehow “God-given”, are summarily 
dismissing a history of American heroes; those 
who defined that history as one of struggle and 
sacrifice for rights we cherish as Americans – 
rights not “given”, but fought for.

 That struggle continues against efforts to 
restrict those rights; from the right to decide 
for ourselves whom we marry to the right of a 
woman to have the most intimate of decisions 
made not by the state, but between herself 
and her doctor. It continues among countless 
Americans who may not make the headlines, 
but whose contributions are nonetheless 
heroic.

 Such is the case with 94-year-old Rosanell 
Eaton of Louisburg, North Carolina. The 
granddaughter of a slave, upon turning 21 in 
1942 she sought to exercise one of our most 
fundamental rights – the right to vote. She took 
a two-hour mule-wagon ride to the courthouse 
and then, as recounted by Ari Berman in The 
Nation, “The three white male registrars told her 
to stand up straight, with her arms at her side, 
look straight ahead and recite the preamble to the 
Constitution from memory.” She did, and then 
passed the literacy test given her - becoming one 
of the few blacks to actually make it on the voting 
rolls.

 In addition to exercising her own right to vote 
over the next seventy years, Ms. Eaton saw to it 
that others could do so – registering some 4,000 
to vote before, as she admits, she lost count.

That seventy-year streak of direct participation 
in our democracy appeared to be ending with 
North Carolina’s passage in 2013 of new voter 
suppression laws, rammed through a month after 
being given a green light by the U.S. Supreme 
Court’s decision gutting the Voting Rights Act. 
New laws imposed restrictions on registration, 
wrong-precinct voting and photo-ID eligability. 

 It was ostensibly about combatting voter 
fraud but, according to a study out of Rutgers 
University, out of 35 million votes cast between 
2002 and 2012 in North Carolina, the number 
of cases of voter fraud totaled exactly two. 
Another study, this one from four years ago out 
of the University of Massachusetts, found three 
major factors behind states’ enactment of voter 
suppression laws: Republicans in control of 
statehouses; an increasing number of minorities 
turning out to vote; and an upcoming election 
that could go either way.

 North Carolina Republicans saw a threat and 
had to act. Through the efforts of civil rights 
groups over a dozen years, black participation 
in elections had increased from 42% in 2000 to 
69% in 2012. Latino involvement also increased. 
With no meaningful prospect of increasing 
white participation, something had to be done 
to reverse those numbers. By the following year, 
the new restrictions succeeded in cutting back 
minority participation by some 30,000 votes for 
the 2014 elections.

 For many voters, it meant going to where 
they’d been voting for years, then being directed 
to another location, and then another – until 
finally giving up. Ms. Eaton’s disqualifying issue 
was the name on her driver’s license (“Rosanell 
Eaton”) being different from the (married) name 
on her voter registration card (“Rosanell Johnson 
Eaton”). Ms. Eaton, though, wasn’t about to give 
up.

 She joined in the suit brought by the U.S. 
Justice Department and civil rights groups, 
asking for an injunction to prevent the new rules 
from going into effect for the November 2014 
elections. Also joining were college kids whose 
student IDs would no longer be accepted at 
polling places. (In Texas, a gun permit could get 
you into a voting booth, but not a student ID.) 
The court didn’t grant the injunction, but didn’t 
dismiss the suit, either – as the State of North 
Carolina had hoped.

 For her own photo-ID problem, beginning 
in January 2015 Ms. Eaton over the next month 
made four trips to the DMV, an additional four 
trips to Social Security offices and three trips to 
banks – a total of 20 hours’ travel covering 200 
miles. After seventy years, she wasn’t about to let 
her right to vote be legislated away.

 Many in Alabama had the same determination 
as Ms. Eaton - not to allow new photo-ID laws 
to take away their right to vote - so last summer 
the Montgomery statehouse responded by 
announcing the closure of 45 of their 49 DMV 
offices providing photo IDs; leaving just four 
offices to service the entire state in advance of this 
November’s elections.

 They were called out by Sen. Bernie Sanders 
(I-VT): “Anybody who is suppressing the vote, 
anybody who is intentionally trying to keep 
people from voting because the candidate knows 
that those people would vote against him or her, 
that person is a political coward. If you don’t 
have the guts to run for office on your ideas, then 
you shouldn’t run for office at all.” 

 Rosanell Eaton remains a plaintiff in an 
ongoing federal court challenge to North 
Carolina’s voter suppression laws, but with 
recognition for efforts begun with her reciting the 
preamble to our Constitution in that registrar’s 
office seventy years ago:

 “I am where I am today only because men and 
women like Rosanell Eaton refused to accept 
anything less than a full measure of equality. 
Their efforts made our country a better place. It is 
now up to us to continue those efforts . . . Rosanell 
is now 94 years old. She has not given up. She’s 
still marching. She’s still fighting to make real the 
promise of America. She still believes that We 
the People have the awesome power to make our 
union more perfect. And if we join her, we, too, 
can reaffirm the fundamental truth of the words 
Rosanell recited.”

- President Barack Obama

THE TRUMP LANE OR THE 

CONSERVATIVE LANE?

Goodbye, Chris.

 You did your best in New Hampshire.

And you sure did put a good New Jersey-style hit job on 
Kid Rubio, whom you out-psyched and out-boxed at the 
debate last weekend.

But the primary voters of New Hampshire sent you a clear message Tuesday night 
– quit.

 Gov. Chris Christie did the right thing for the Republican Party on Wednesday 
by taking himself out of the presidential primary race.

It was not a hard decision.

 When you finish 6th and can’t reach double digits in a presidential primary, it’s 
time to start planning your career as a future U.S. Attorney General.

Carly Fiorina also has finally faced reality.

She also “suspended” her hopeless campaign – which is a way to call it quits but 
still be able to raise money, pay your bills and jump back in if a miracle occurs.

Ben Carson needs to join the rush of losers to the exits – and soon. The good doctor 
never should have cluttered up the over-cluttered GOP primary race in the 
first place.

 As I said in last week’s column, Republicans are rapidly running out of time if 
they want to stop the Trump Express. They have to settle on one candidate so all 
of the party’s conservative voters can unite behind him. 

The media likes to say there are three lanes in the GOP primary – the Trump lane, 
the establishment lane and the outsider lane.

But there are really only two lanes – the Trump lane and everyone else

The everyone-else lane is now the conservative lane, which includes outsiders 
Cruz and Carson.

 Trump has his lane all to himself – and always will. Except for his own ego, he 
has no competition that can split up the Trump vote.

He has the same advantage my father had in the 1980 Republican primary, when 
he was the only conservative candidate in a sea of moderates who were splitting 
the moderate vote.

 The reverse happened in 2008 when John McCain, the only moderate in the primary, 
won because Huckabee, Romney and Giuliani split the conservative vote.

Meanwhile, this year, even with Christie and Fiorina gone, the remaining candidates 
are still be splitting up the conservative vote into six pieces.

Trump captured 35 percent of New Hampshire voters. Kasich had almost 16 percent 
and Cruz, Bush and Rubio virtually tied for third with around 11 percent. 
Fiorina, Christie and Carson collectively got almost 14 percent. 

In other words, about 65 percent of New Hampshire voters didn’t want Trump 
and voted for one kind of conservative or another.

Conservatives have to get out of their own way and choose their one hero to battle 
Trump before the wave of March primaries, when it’ll be too late. But it’s not 
looking good. 

 In South Carolina and for the near future, even if Carson and someone else quits, 
it looks like we’re going to have three or four conservative Republicans taking 
turns beating each other up, while Trump gets his automatic 35 percent.

With Hillary Clinton’s cruise to the Oval Office being sunk by a 74-year-old socialist, 
the Democrats seem to be trying their best to hand Republicans a victory 
this fall.

It’ll be a major tragedy if conservatives in the GOP blow their big chance and 
America ends up with President Trump.

But that would still be better than Hillary. 

——-

Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and 
the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). 


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