Mountain Views News          Saturday, March 5, 2016

15

OPINION

 Mountain Views News Saturday, March 5, 2016 

QUITTING THE GOP

John-William Schiffbauer is what Republicans, at least 
on paper, say they want their party to look more like. He’s 
31-years-old (a coveted millennial), socially liberal, fiscally conservative 
and not totally white. “My grandmother was from Japan,” 
he says. He’s a New York City playwright who’s into cool 
whiskey bars and heated policy debates. He sees himself as what 
the future of the Republican Party ought to be. 

“Did you read the GOP post-2012 autopsy report? The ‘Growth 
and Opportunity Project,’ as it was dubbed?” He asks.

Yes, I answer.

“That’s what I wanted,” he laments.

After losing the presidency again in 2012, the Republican National Committee’s 
autopsy was honest and brutal about the state of the Grand Old Party: “If we want 
ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them, and show 
our sincerity,” read the report. “We must embrace and champion comprehensive 
immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its 
core constituencies only.” 

The report also warns: “When it comes to social issues, the Party must in fact and 
deed be inclusive and welcoming. If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract 
young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but 
not all issues.”

This candor inspired John. “I’m a Jeff Daniels’ Newsroom character Republican! I’m 
an Aaron Sorkin Republican!” declares Schiffbauer. It gave him hope that his party 
understood their problems and had a blueprint on how to fix it. John was so taken 
by this idea of a new, diverse, more inclusive, more liberal Republican Party that he 
went pro. In January of 2014 he became the Deputy Communications Director for 
the New York State Republican Party.

Then at 2:21 a.m. in the morning after Super Tuesday, moments after it was apparent 
John Kasich split the vote in Virginia and Vermont, killing possible wins for Marco 
Rubio, millennial Republican Schiffbauer emailed his boss his resignation and quit 
the GOP. If you ask him why, his answer is fittingly monosyllabic, “Trump.”

He quit mere days before the New York GOP State Convention in Buffalo, where 
Trump enjoys widespread support. “I don’t trust myself to keep my mouth shut,” 
admits John.

What does a party loyalist have against the frontrunner and nearly universally assumed 
nominee? “Liar. Bigot. Demagogue. Pretty much any beef the establishment 
has with him, given that I am 100 Percent Unapologetic Establishment GOP,” John 
continues. “Also his buildings make architects and artists cry.” He says he doesn’t 
want Trump to have the nuclear codes. When he mentions “the wall” he punctuates 
it with the word “moron.”

“Show me a 20-foot wall and I’ll show you a 21-foot ladder!” exclaims John. He 
grumbles that a wall won’t solve our immigration issues.

“Also,” he continues, “He’s carpet-bombing anyone who disagrees with him.”

John mentions the thinly veiled threat to Paul Ryan in Trump’s Super Tuesday victory 
speech. “I’m going to get along great with Congress,” Trump said to his rabid 
fan base. “And if I don’t, he’s [Paul Ryan] going to have to pay a big price.”

What’s next for John? He says he’s debating on staying registered as a Republican 
and voting for Hillary, or registering as an independent and voting for Hillary. In 
short: He’s voting for Hillary.

Moments later he waffles on quitting the GOP entirely. He wants to write speeches, 
change his party for the better, be a part of something he believes in. He still holds 
out hope it’s the Republican Party but, for him, it’s definitely not the party of Trump.

“But congratulations to you guys,” he bristles. (“You guys” meaning Democrats.) 
“You guys just won the White House for another four years and probably a majority 
in the Senate.

“This is great for you guys.”

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

DICK Polman

WHY WE WANT OUR 
POLITICIANS TO LIE

TINA Dupuy

Mountain 
Views

News

PUBLISHER/ EDITOR

Susan Henderson

CITY EDITOR

Dean Lee 

EAST VALLEY EDITOR

Joan Schmidt

BUSINESS EDITOR

LaQuetta Shamblee

PRODUCTION

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SALES

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WEBMASTER

John Aveny 

CONTRIBUTORS

Chris Leclerc

Bob Eklund

Howard Hays

Paul Carpenter

Kim Clymer-Kelley

Christopher Nyerges

Peter Dills 

Dr. Tina Paul

Rich Johnson

Merri Jill Finstrom

Lori Koop

Rev. James Snyder

Tina Paul

Mary Carney

Katie Hopkins

Deanne Davis

Despina Arouzman

Greg Welborn

Renee Quenell

Ben Show

Sean Kayden

Marc Garlett

Pat Birdsall (retired)


Three studies provide insight into something we all 
know to be true: Politicians lie. 

The Daily News reports that politicians are good at 
yarn spinning “because they convince themselves they 
are telling the truth.” That was the finding of a lying 
study at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy. 

A second study, conducted by Millikin University and 
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, finds that the 
more long-winded the point a politician is making — 
both off-the-cuff and in prepared statements — the more likely he or she is 
spewing a mistruth. 

I know what you’re thinking: Of course politicians lie. When negotiating 
with thugs around the world we want our politicians to outwit them, and that 
usually requires deception. When waging war, we want to hear the good news, 
not the gory details. And during elections, we never vote for the candidate 
who tells the truth. We want the candidate who tells the most colorful yarns. 

The truth is lying is one of the great cottage industries in America. We all do it. 

When a lady asks you if you like her new haircut — one that gives her the look 
of the Chihuahua in the Taco Bell commercials — do you tell her the truth (as 
I made the mistake of doing only once) or do you smile and say she is more 
gorgeous than ever? 

The fact is she wants to be lied to and your level of skill is a measure of how 
much you care for her. My old comedian friend Chris Ciardi has a great line 
about that. He got home late one night half in the bag. His wife demanded a 
reason. He told her it was best he get a good night’s sleep and in the morning 
he’d come up with an excuse they both could live with. 

We expect the same from our politicians. Did anyone believe President Obama 
really would bring hope and change to Washington — that he didn’t want to 
pit red America against blue America but be the president of the United States 
of America? 

Did you really believe that if you liked your doctor you could keep your 
doctor — or that the average American family would save $2,500 a year on 
health insurance premiums? 

President Obama may not have believed he was being truthful when he said 
these things. But he seemed to believe the falsehood that ISIS was the JV team 
that we had contained. 

There’s a reason politicians lie to us — we want them to. 

That was the finding of another study on lying at Britain’s University of 
Strathclyde. It found that voters not only expect to be lied to, they sometimes 
demand it — which is why our politicians conceal, deceive and mislead. 

Our politicians know many Americans are ignorant about many issues. They 
know voters disdain complexity and want promises that resonate. 

They want to believe the reason they are struggling is because some rich fat 
cat is hoarding all the cash — and that taxing the bejesus out of the rich will 
solve all of their problems. 

Politicians know that we prefer Santa Claus, not the high school coach who 
makes us do wind sprints. 

They know we want more free government goodies and less government 
spending — and that we want fatter Social Security checks and reduced 
withholding taxes. 

The politician who can promise the most somethings for nothing is the one a 
growing majority of voters will go for. 

That means our next president may give incredibly long-winded answers to 
simple questions and actually believe the nonsense he or she is spewing is 
actually true. 

Tom Purcell is a columnist nationally syndicated columnist. Send comments 
to Tom at Tom@TomPurcell.com.

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LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN 

MAKING SENSE

MICHAEL Reagan

HOWARD Hays As I See It


“We do not need a 
militia of toddlers.”

Democratic State Rep. 
Kirsten Running-
Marquardt, on the 
Iowa House’s passage 
of legislation allowing 
anyone under 14 to 
handle firearms

 Last week began with 
coverage of Republican 
presidential candidates Donald Trump and 
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) exchanging barbs 
over each other’s make-up. Rubio followed 
by suggesting the front-runner may have wet 
his pants during the debate in Houston. In a 
related development, the Republican National 
Committee adopted a resolution encouraging 
states to restrict which restrooms those in need 
of one are permitted to use.

 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), accused Trump of 
having mob connections. He also did what 
he could to block a bipartisan Senate measure 
to help residents of Flint with their poisoned 
water supply – until news of his “hold” leaked 
to the press. (We’ll see how that plays out in the 
Michigan primary next week.)

 Progress may be blocked in Washington, 
but things are getting done in the states. The 
West Virginia Republican House of Delegates 
succeeded in rejecting new science standards for 
schools because they fail to cover “both sides” 
in a “debate” over the connection between 
human activity and global warming. With a 
97% consensus among scientists, Scientific 
American equates this with now demanding 
“both sides” be aired in a “debate” over the 
connection between smoking and lung cancer.

 In Georgia, Republicans are pushing a bill 
allowing state workers to discriminate by 
claiming “religious beliefs”. A taxpayer-funded 
shelter, for instance, could turn away a family 
headed by unmarried parents, a social worker 
could deny counseling to a single mother and an 
adoption agency could refuse placement with 
a gay couple. Meanwhile, a growing number 
of employers (Twitter, Chase, UPS, Delta, 
Dell, Virgin, Microsoft, etc.) warn that state-
sanctioned bigotry does not suggest a suitable 
place to set up shop.

 Addressing another urgent matter, (male) 
Republican lawmakers in New Hampshire seek 
to criminalize female toplessness. There’d been 
an appearance of it at the beach, so action was 
needed to prevent the inevitable spread of the 
practice to “public libraries and Little League 
baseball games”. Men, they warn, would (by 
nature) be unable to control themselves and 
it would harm the state’s tourism industry. 
(How?)

Other news may not have gotten as much 
attention. A week ago Thursday, twelve people 
were shot and wounded in Kansas with four 
killed at a company where the gunman worked. 
Cedric Ford’s ex-girlfriend was later charged 
with having provided him with the AK-47 and 
Glock .40 handgun. Ford was an ex-felon who’d 
had a restraining order filed against him for 
domestic abuse. He was shot dead by police.

 The next day in Washington State, a gunman 
killed his wife, her two adopted sons, a neighbor 
and then himself. A local sheriff called it a 
“family-domestic situation”. This was just 
a week after that Uber driver in Kalamazoo 
shot and killed six and wounded two. Robert 
Dear, the guy who killed three at the Planned 
Parenthood clinic in Colorado last fall, also had 
a history of domestic violence. The day after the 
Washington shooting, a Virginia father shot 
and killed his wife after she’d called police on a 
domestic dispute. When the police arrived, he 
shot and killed a young officer – her first day on 
the job.

 The news last week from the Supreme Court 
was Justice Clarence Thomas asking questions 
from the bench for the first time in ten years. He 
broke his silence to object to laws taking guns 
away from those convicted of violent domestic 
abuse. (A RAND study found that twice as 
many women are killed by husbands/lovers 
with guns than by strangers using whatever 
means.) 

 There was news from academia. A report 
from John Hopkins School of Public Health 
on causes of injury-related death found 
that in states with the weakest gun laws, the 
leading cause was (surprise) - guns. The seven 
worst states (Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, 
Louisiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and South 
Carolina) are also the states with no laws on gun 
storage; states where the argument, as reported 
by NBC, is that “safe storage laws are being used 
by the government to take people’s guns away”.

 Out of the University of Texas comes fear of a 
“brain drain” – prized faculty and administrators 
leaving for elsewhere with a new Republican law 
requiring gun-toting students be allowed in the 
classroom due to take effect August 1. Private 
schools are exempt and all have opted-out – but 
public universities are stuck with it.

 University of Virginia professor Siva 
Vaidhyanathan, a University of Texas grad and 
finalist for a dean’s position at his alma mater, 
turned it down because it could come down 
to having to choose either to obey state law or 
instead “protect the security and sanctity of the 
classroom” - and be fired as a consequence. “In 
the absence of any evidence beyond Hollywood 
movies starring Bruce Willis, we have leaders 
basically capitulating to fantasy and stupidity 
in this weird belief that untrained, unprepared 
individuals can somehow react to the most 
horrible and sudden of circumstances in a 
sober and appropriate way. For an institution of 
higher learning to be forced to capitulate to such 
stupidity is truly shameful.”

 Meanwhile up north, the Republican Iowa 
House passed a bill allowing kids under 14 to 
handle guns (under adult supervision). Iowa 
City Democrat Kirsten Running-Marquardt 
(quoted above) questioned the purpose; “We 
do not have handguns that I am aware of that 
fit the hands of a 1-or-2-year-old”. Addressing 
another pressing need, the bill also permits the 
carrying of loaded firearms on snowmobiles.

 There’s been a lot of talk In the Democratic 
debates about guns, and measures supported 
by the vast majority of Americans; Republicans 
and gun-owners alike. Republican candidates 
have been silent. Once nominees are chosen and 
we get closer to November, however, they’re not 
going to be able to get by on make-up, mob ties 
and wet pants. The Democratic candidate will 
insist they address issues that matter, like guns 
– and so will the American voters.

‘SOUL MURDER’ IN ALTOONA

If you’ve seen the excellent movie “Spotlight,” you know what it 
takes for a newspaper to expose the sexual abuse of children by 
priests in the Catholic Church.

“Spotlight,” which won the Academy Award for best picture of 
2015, is the true story of how the Boston Globe’s investigative 
Spotlight team uncovered the massive scandal of child molestation 
and cover-up within the Boston Archdiocese.

Challenging one of the most powerful institutions in Boston, digging 
up the ugly truth and detailing it on Page 1 took a strong mix 
of principle and guts by the Globe’s editor, Marty Baron.

Many journalists and editors around the country before him had heard similar charges 
about priests repeatedly molesting children in their cities and towns, but they had done 
nothing.

The Globe’s in-depth investigation, which began in 2001, made headlines around the 
world, shamed the Boston Archdiocese and shook the entire Catholic Church to its core.

It set off a series of exposes in other cities that proved that the problem the Catholic Church 
– my church – was having with serial pedophiles was nothing new or restricted to Boston.

Soon after, the L.A. Times, my hometown paper, showed that for decades the hierarchy of 
the Los Angeles diocese “plotted to keep law enforcement from learning that children had 
been molested at the hands of priests.”

In 2005 and 2011 grand jury probes found rampant child abuse in the Philadelphia Archdiocese, 
which included moving known pedophiles around from one unsuspecting parish 
to another.

What went on in L.A. and Philly fit the pattern described in the 2012 HBO documentary, 
“Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God.” 

As I wrote in the 2013, that powerful documentary proved that from Ireland to Wisconsin 
“the church’s bishops and cardinals have a long and disgusting history of protecting pedophile 
priests, ignoring children’s allegations of sexual abuse, paying the parents of victims 
to keep quiet and keeping the sex crimes of priests secret from law enforcement.”

We can now add the diocese of Altoona, Pa., to the Church’s list of sins against children.

The headlines in Tuesday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette told a familiar story: “Grand jury: Altoona 
diocese concealed sex abuse of hundreds of children by priests.”

According to a graphic 147-page report by a state grand jury, at least 50 Catholic priests 
and other Church members in the western Pennsylvania town had molested and raped 
hundreds of kids between the 1940s and the 1980s.

What the pedophiles did to kids at summer camp, in their own homes and in Altoona’s 
cathedral was not only covered up by their bishops and their immediate superiors, it also 
was abetted by judges, sheriffs and other law enforcement officials in two counties who 
knew about the abuse.

The grand jury report said the sleazy church-state conspiracy to avoid public scandal and 
protect known and dangerous pedophiles in Altoona amounted to the “soul murder” of 
the victims.

As someone who was molested by a day camp counselor in third grade, I understand what 
that term means all too well. 

The most frustrating part of the Altoona investigation, which is ongoing, is that the abusers 
and their enablers – though known -- are never going to be indicted or punished. 

Some of the guilty are dead. Some of their victims were too traumatized to testify. 

But in most cases it’s too late to prosecute because the statute of limitations for criminal 
and civil cases that was in effect at the time of the crimes was only two or three years.

The law has been changed. Victim now have until age 30 to sue for child abuse in civil court 
and in some cases are able to file criminal charges until they turn 50.

But Pennsylvania should join other states and do what its grand jury report proposes – 
completely remove all statutes of limitations for child abuse.

If the Catholic Church is sincerely sorry for its sins, and truly interested in preventing future 
victims of pedophila, it will publicly support that idea.

Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author 
of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.
com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. 


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