Mountain Views News          Saturday, March 26, 2016

14

OPINION 

 Mountain Views News Saturday, March 26, 2016 

Mountain 
Views

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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)

DICK Polman

 WILL Durst RAGING MODERATE


GOP GAPES AT ITS 
EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

The “Stop Donald Trump” movement 
began as a gentle trickle within the 
Republican party. Now the number of 
GOP groups intent on preventing the 
New York real estate developer from 
becoming their presidential nominee is 
about to exceed broken March Madness 
brackets. Thanks, Michigan State.

 There’s the Never Trump Movement, 
the Anybody But Trump Group, Death 
Before Trump, Plump Grumps Humping 
to Dump Trump, the I’d Rather Chew 
Leeches Crew, People for Responsible 
Hair and a group opposed to anybody 
with “UMP” in their name.

 Rumor has it a group of Hollywood 
conservatives tried to recruit Tom Hanks 
to team with Sally Field and create a 
Super Pac called Forrest Trump, whose 
motto would be “Don’t run, Donald, 
don’t run.”

 As excited as Trump’s supporters 
are over his unorthodox candidacy, 
his detractors are equally passionate 
about its necessary demise. And with 
incumbent Senators, other down-ticket 
candidates and people who just enjoy 
a party, the Anti-Trump Express has 
gotten as crowded as the last free beer bus 
to the game.

 Chances are folks would flock onboard 
faster if the welcoming committee 
wasn’t hosted by Ted Cruz. To many 
Republicans, Trump versus Cruz is way 
beyond rock and a hard place. It’s closer 
to rampaging rhinoceros and train wreck 
on fire. 

 Each rival group has separate concerns. 
The establishment elites are naturally 
wary of any candidate not beholden to 
their help and influence. Especially since 
when discussing their raison d’etre- tax 
cuts, Trump has been all over the map. 
All over a lot of maps. Not necessarily 
English-speaking maps.

 Some worry he could permanently 
damage the party brand. Others disparage 
him as a bloated, bigoted, misogynistic, 
narcissistic oaf, but emphasize they are 
not opposed to other bloated, bigoted, 
misogynistic, narcissistic oafs from 
holding public office. It’s mostly a one-
time thing. 

 What we are witnessing is no less than a 
fight for the soul of the Republican Party, 
which, is like a 
jurisdictional 
dispute over the 
Poetry Wing 
of the Federal 
Reserve. Wrestling for the fur of an eel.

 Marco Rubio, speaking of Trump’s 
refusal to denounce David Duke, said, 
“There’s no room in the Republican 
Party for racists.” Wow. I knew there 
were a lot of them; who would of thought 
all the slots were full? Must be an 
affirmative action program. Go to Mitch 
McConnell’s office, take a number, wait 
your turn.

 All sorts of strategies have been floated. 
Manipulating the rules at a contested 
convention. Organizing a third party. 
Staging a write-in campaign. Exhuming 
the body of Ronald Reagan. Kidnapping 
the Donald then substituting Paul Ryan, 
John Kasich or Carol Channing. And 
something darkly referred to as “The 
Kennedy Solution.” 

 Activity intensified after an earlier 
strategy of the Anti-Trumpers 
backfired. Mitt Romney gave some 
silly sanctimonious speech patiently 
explaining to legions of insurrectionists 
why they should fall in line and take 
their marching orders from a loser like 
him. Wolves have given more charitable 
speeches to sheep.

 What these desperate party regulars 
fail to realize is getting Trumpeteers 
to toe the establishment line is beyond 
futile. You’d have a better shot of herding 
drunken cats on ice in a hurricane. 
Best to think of these renegades like 
venomous ticks. The harder you pull, the 
more tenaciously they dig in.

——-

 Copyright © 2016, Will Durst, 
distributed by the Cagle Cartoons Inc. 
syndicate.

 Will Durst is an award-winning, 
nationally acclaimed columnist, 
comedian and former Pizza Hut 
assistant manager. For sample videos 
and a calendar of personal appearances 
including his new one- man show, 
Elect to Laugh: 2016, appearing every 
Tuesday at the San Francisco Marsh, go 
to willdurst.com.

It’s thigh-
slappingly funny 
to recall that 
RNC chairman 
Reince Priebus 
said on the eve of this national race that 
“Republicans will choose from a deep 
bench of presidential material.”

 After the latest round of contests and 
the latest winnowing of the field, here’s 
what the GOP is left with: A celebrity 
hate-peddler whose agenda is built 
on bluster, a far-right government-
crashing ideologue who would lose 40 
states, and a governor whose primary 
season record is 1-28.

 Yes, folks, the GOP’s long-gestating 
existential crisis has finally arrived. 
What does it stand for as a party? Three 
years after vowing, in an official report, 
to adopt a more tolerant tone and 
nurture relations with an increasingly 
diverse electorate, is it now willing 
to let itself be trampled by Donald 
Trump? How hard is it prepared to 
fight (if at all) to regain its self-respect 
and retain its claim to being “the party 
of Lincoln?”

 The delegate math makes these 
questions ever more urgent. After 
winning in Florida, Illinois, North 
Carolina, and (apparently) Missouri, 
Trump is well-poised to reach the 
Cleveland convention with a solid 
plurality of delegates. His loss in 
Ohio, courtesy of home-boy Gov. John 
Kasich, is a stone in his shoe that slows 
his march, but he can still clinch a 
delegate majority if he wins 60 percent 
of those not yet chosen. That’s arguably 
a tall order. But his chief rival is Ted 
Cruz, who’s widely hated in the party, 
and who’s surely toxic in late-voting 
delegate-rich states like California, 
New York and New Jersey.

 Within the party, there’s still great 
unease about Trump. According to 
the Ohio exit polls, 43 percent of those 
who voted in the Republican primary 
said they would “seriously consider 
voting for a third-party candidate” if 
Trump wins the nomination. That’s 
significant, because no Republican has 
ever won the White House without 
winning Ohio.

 And similar sentiment was expressed 
elsewhere. In North Carolina, a state 
that went blue eight years ago, 39 
percent of voting Republicans said 
they’d seriously look at a third-party 
candidate if Trump gets the nod. In 
Missouri, a state that has tilted red in 
the last four elections, that share was 
43 percent. In swing-state Florida, it 
was 29 percent.

 So is the GOP prepared to blow up 
its own convention in order to thwart 
Trump? Under the current rules, only 
those candidates who have won the 
majority of delegates in eight states 
can be formally placed in nomination. 
Right now, only Trump meets that 
criterion. Cruz might hit that mark, 
but Kasich probably won’t. But if the 
GOP is serious about stopping Trump, 
it could vote to dump that rule — thus 
boosting Kasich, or perhaps paving the 
way for a late entrant who didn’t run in 
the primaries at all. 

 The hope — among saner, civil 
Republicans — is that Trump comes 
up short on the first ballot, so that 
enough delegates would be freed up for 
subsequent ballots. The hope is they 
would then rationally assess the race 
by looking at electability. And the fact 
is, Hillary Clinton has been beating 
Trump in virtually every poll.

 But if the GOP heeds the electability 
factor and somehow manages to come 
to its senses, what would happen then? 
Trump might well announce that the 
party isn’t treating him nice and bolt, 
taking his fans with him. Which would 
leave the party just as fractured.

 Still, maybe a Trump exodus is the 
best outcome — because otherwise, 
this autumn, all the down-ballot swing-
state Republicans will be compelled 
to say whether they agree with their 
nominee’s denigration of women, 
stoking of violence, endorsement of 
torture, exploitation of bigotry, and 
whatever acts of repugnance that have 
yet to be committed.

 It’s their soul at stake. Will they try 
to save it?

——-

 Copyright 2016 Dick Polman, 
distributed exclusively by Cagle 
Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

 Dick Polman is the national political 
columnist at NewsWorks/WHYY in 
Philadelphia (newsworks.org/polman) 
and a “Writer in Residence” at the 
University of Philadelphia. Email him 
at dickpolman7@gmail.com.

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LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN 

HOWARD Hays As I See It

SUSAN STAMPER Brown

“This is yet another 
attempt by the 
establishment elites 
and dark money . . . 
to maintain control 
of our broken and 
corrupt system.”

(attribution follows)
Less than a year ago, 
April 2015, a CNN 
poll showed Jeb Bush 
leading the race for the 
GOP presidential nomination at 17% support 
- followed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker 
at 12% with Sens. Rand Paul (KY) and Marco 
Rubio (FL) at 11% each. This was two months 
before Donald Trump entered the race and 
ten months before votes were cast at the Iowa 
caucuses (where Texas Sen. Ted Cruz came out 
on top). Now we have former establishment 
favorite Bush endorsing Cruz not because he 
likes the candidate (it seems nobody does), but 
because he regards Cruz as the establishment’s 
best hope for denying the nomination to 
current frontrunner Trump.

 Another former establishment candidate, 
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), says although 
he prefers Ohio Gov. John Kasich, he’s instead 
supporting Cruz, who he thoroughly dislikes, 
because 1) he has a better chance than Kasich 
and 2) he’s not Trump.

 Democrats have their own “establishment”. 
One candidate, after a youthful foray as a 
Goldwater Girl, has been a solid establishment 
Democrat ever since. The other, while running 
for the Democratic nomination, continues 
holding his Senate seat as an Independent. But 
the results will still depend on which candidate 
goes into the convention with the most 
delegates. With the Republicans, it’s instead 
shaping up as a matter of the establishment 
determining the outcome, regardless of who 
acquires how many delegates before the 
convention.

 The term “establishment” used to be 
reserved for party honchos. The big three 
Democratic candidates in 1968 were President 
Lyndon Johnson, Sen. Eugene McCarthy (MN) 
and Robert F. Kennedy. LBJ pulled out March 
31 and his VP Hubert Humphrey entered 
the race – after missing the primary season. 
RFK was assassinated June 5; his delegates 
then up for grabs. There were protests at the 
convention accusing the party establishment 
of having seen to Humphrey’s nomination, 
despite the anti-LBJ “peace” candidates, RFK 
and McCarthy, having together gotten more 
primary votes than LBJ did.

 (I shook hands with HHH at a rally in 
Seattle that year, and noticed the contrast 
between Nixon’s offering slogans – “silent 
majority”,” law and order” – and Humphrey’s 
offering pamphlets of detailed policy positions. 
In his one on foreign policy, he predicted that 
although attention was then focused on Viet 
Nam and the Soviet Union, in the decades to 
come the real threats to world peace would 
come from the Middle East. Nobody then 
seemed to know what he was talking about.)

Especially after the Citizens United decision, 
the ”establishment” now is not so much party 
bigwigs as it is whoever’s putting up the money. 
The Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity 
helps determine not only presidential 
outcomes but local races and down-ballot 
measures all over the country.

 A local referendum on the ballot in Plainfield, 
Illinois a couple weeks ago was one the Koch 
brothers had to get involved with, committing 
sufficient funds to ensure its defeat. The 
referendum, the product of years of “focus 
groups, surveys and public town meetings”, 
called for a 20-year bond paid for by a slight 
increase in property taxes. This measure the 
Koch brothers had to kill was for a new 
downtown library; “new technology, public 
meeting spaces, classrooms”, etc. Now, the folks 
of Plainfield will instead see a 20% cut in services 
just so their current library can stay afloat.

 This corporate establishment, though, is 
more concerned with the bottom line than 
any party line. Disney has joined Atlanta-
based companies Coca-Cola, Home Depot and 
UPS in warning the state of Georgia against 
enacting a measure allowing “religion” to be 
used as cover for anti-gay discrimination. 
Regardless of how popular it might be with the 
state’s Republican governor and legislature, 
this corporate establishment is letting them 
know that bigotry is bad for business – and 
states that condone it aren’t suitable to open 
shop or shoot a movie in.

 This week’s opening quote isn’t from 
Bernie Sanders or MoveOn but from Hope 
Hicks, spokesperson for Donald Trump. She 
was reacting to a campaign by billionaires 
and the Wall Street establishment to see that 
Trump doesn’t become their party’s nominee. 
They had their own fundraising challenges, 
as members had already sunk $100 million 
backing Jeb Bush. They came through, though, 
maybe not so much because of how a Trump 
presidency would ruin economy but because 
of how a Trump nomination would all but 
guarantee the election of Hillary Clinton, 
“loss” of the Senate and now, it appears, maybe 
even a Democratic House.

 As to how the establishment got in this 
mess, you could go back to their embrace of 
the Karl Rove–engineered gerrymandering 
of districts following the 2010 census. Then, 
especially since the Supreme Court’s gutting 
of the Voting Rights Act three years ago, 
there’s been establishment support of voter 
suppression efforts to limit participation of 
constituencies thought to lean Democratic; 
poor folks, students, the elderly, etc.; along 
with the strategy of “firing up the base” by 
appealing to fear, bigotry, xenophobia and 
religious zealotry.

 The result has been contests not between 
Democrat and Republican or right and left, but 
between the far right and the farther right and 
the outright fruitcakes. The real races are in 
the primaries, where reliable “establishment” 
conservatives are ousted for the merest 
suspicion of heresies like “bipartisanship” and 
“compromise”.

 Last week marked the 51st anniversary of 
the Selma to Montgomery march for voting 
rights, when Dr. King told us to “march on the 
ballot boxes until brotherhood becomes more 
than a meaningless word in an opening prayer, 
but the order of the day on every legislative 
agenda.”

 That might be some time coming. For now, 
the establishment is wondering who to blame 
for a situation in which the likes of a Donald 
Trump threatens the very survival of their 
party. In assigning this blame, they could start 
by looking in a mirror.


UNRESOLVED ANGER IS 
DESTROYING AMERICA


Left unchecked, anger is as 
destructive to a nation as it is to 
individual souls, always beginning 
with fear and ending with hate.

 As hard as this is for me to write 
on this fine Alaskan afternoon, 
when I’d rather be outside doing 
something else, I must get something 
off my chest after witnessing the 
riots shutting down a political rally 
in Chicago on March 11. 
How do we make sense of this? 

 How do we make sense of 
Americans physically attacking 
each other, and friends and family 
members turning against one 
another, in the name of politics? 
It is impossible to get to the root 
of the problem if we spend all our 
time blaming others. It seems we’d 
be better served looking a little 
closer to home, reflecting on what’s 
happening inside our own heart. 
I did. And as a result, I discovered 
something about myself I did not 
much like. 

 Like so many Americans, I’ve 
been angry about what’s happened 
to this land I love, which has 
deteriorated to the point she’s no 
longer identifiable. Rather than 
praying for those responsible for 
the mess, I allowed my anger to 
metastasize nearly to the point of 
hatred. When I realized how far I’d 
strayed, my knees hit the floor and I 
lifted prayers for forgiveness.

 If we proceed past what the Bible 
describes as “righteous anger” -- 
when we cross the line from “hating 
the sin but loving the sinner” to 
hating the sinner – we’ve journeyed 
to the dark side, whether we like it 
or not. That’s why some believe it’s 
okay to riot in order to silence free 
speech, or others have no problem 
punching the lights out of those with 
whom they disagree.

Americans are angry.

 In 2008, we watched Barack 
Obama rise to power on a wave of 
anger over war weariness and an 
economic crisis that spread over the 
United States like a tsunami. People 
blindly followed their proverbial 
knight in shining armor bearing 
glad tidings of hope and change, 
defending him at any cost, despite 
warnings from very concerned 
columnists like me.

 Today, we’re witnessing a 
similar scenario 
multiplied 
exponentially, 
now that the 
anger level’s been 
raised to fever 
pitch. Formerly “just angry” people 
are outraged -- while those on the 
other side of the aisle are equally 
stirred at GOP politicians and their 
failed promises to stop the wrecking 
ball set in motion by the left’s faux 
agent of hope. 

 How does this end? On one side we 
have an extremely divisive president 
who once told supporters to “take 
guns to knife fights,” and defines 
political opponents as “enemies.” 
On the other side we have a GOP 
frontrunner who has encouraged 
supporters to punch protestors and 
send them out of rallies on stretchers 
as the Washington Post recently 
reported.

 Healthy debate is necessary for a 
constitutional republic like America 
to thrive, let alone survive. We must 
agree to respectfully disagree with 
our opponents and be certain to 
choose our leaders wisely. In the 
end, politics won’t fix what ails our 
fragmented society. We all must 
drop the hate and learn to respect 
our opponents as Jesus directed in 
Matthew 5: “You have heard that it 
was said, ‘Love your neighbor and 
hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love 
your enemies and pray for those 
who persecute you, that you may be 
children of your Father in heaven.”

 Until recently, that is what 
conservatism was about. Now, rather 
than rising above the madness, too 
many Republicans have devolved 
into the same kind of punch-
counterpunch mentality that’s been 
going on between Sunni’s and Shia 
in the Middle East for centuries. And 
like in the Middle East, the unrest in 
America will only get worse unless 
Republicans and Democrats begin 
to love the children they’re leaving 
this mess to more than they hate 
their political opponents.

——-

 Susan Stamper Brown Susan lives 
in Alaska and writes about culture, 
politics and current events. She was 
selected as one of America’s 50 Best 
Conservative writers for 2015.

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