Tossing It All Away

It was a fun campaign.  It is no longer.

The most defeatable Democratic presidential candidate in recent memory, certainly since Michael Dukakis, is headed toward the White House, simply because the Republican establishment has shown itself to be everything I have complained about in this column in the past.

Over the next four years, several Supreme Court vacancies are likely to need to be filled.  Obamacare could metastasize into some form of single-payer behemoth sucking the financial life out of the USA.  ISIS legions will overflow our borders, many disguised as Syrian refugees, and will proceed to cause unimaginable harm to our basic way of life.  Our absurdly-high Federal debt may again double.

All of that needs conservative leadership in the White House to stop it.  At the moment, there is exactly one conservative running for president, and given there is only one month before the election, there is not going to be another one showing up in the near future.

That guy is Donald Trump, and he's not winning this election if things don't change pretty darn soon.  And one of the reason that's going to happen is that the Republicans who are crying their eyes out now about Trump and a bunch of irrelevancies, are so focused on their own political lives, and their own jobs, and their own security, that all the things that I just said needed to get fixed are not going to.

But they will have their jobs -- maybe.

I've complained enough in this column about the sad failure of the Republican leadership to execute on the mandate they were given in 2014 when the electorate gave them a Senate majority and a huge House lead.  We asked them to fix all of the above, and they fixed their job security.  We asked them to protect us and start working on the financial disaster that is the Federal budget, and they did neither.

So it seems particularly disgusting for those selfsame people to be distancing themselves from Trump in droves, when their own contemptible inaction, after the nation handed them power we begged them to use properly, is a big reason those problems are out there and in need of resolution.

They're making a huge mistake.  They need to stop worrying about the locker room and start worrying about the Oval Office and who is going to be working there.  There is no upside for the country in having Hillary Clinton, the incompetent, corrupt liar, handed the reins of power.  There is severe downside in having Hillary Clinton appointing political hacks and cronies to Cabinet positions, where they will be concerned only with power and not the good of the country.

Has power corrupted everyone at this point, to where the electorate is going to get the short end of the stick?  It certainly appears so.

Donald Trump is an imperfect, flawed candidate, but his appointees and advisors can, at the very least, be expected to represent a vision of the country's progress more in line with the electorate's vision than Hillary Clinton's.  He is what the alternative is today.

The suck-their-thumb Republicans off on their own trips this week are embarrassing, not just because they're doing things that ensure Hillary's election, but because they are the very people who walked out on their responsibilities when the nation gave them the power to try to fix them.

It is no longer fun.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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