Marie Harf: “Democrats like Beto because he’s a very good politician.”

Isn’t this special?  Democrats are busy molding and shaping a heretofore unknown and relatively unaccomplished, pretty much random person to be their next presidential puppet hopeful.

Last night, in a segment on Fox News’ “The Story With Martha MacCallum,” this was how radio host and former Obama Administration spokesperson Marie Harf cheerfully explained Democrats’ enthusiasm and giddy presidential aspirations for losing senate candidate, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke:

“Democrats like Beto because he’s a very good politician.”

Well la-de-da!

By all means Marie, let’s make Beto president of the free world!  Because the first quality that America and its 330 million citizens really needs in a great leader is his or her talent as “a good politician.”  After all, Hugo Chavez was a very good politician, and we see how well things worked out for Venezuela.

In less cynical times Harf might have stunned Americans for her unapologetic absence of any pretense that good ol’ Beto is admired for anything other than his talents as a lying politician, and she would be the featured subject of Saturday Night Live; but after successfully electing the empty chair, Barack Obama, to two terms, it seems the Left no longer feels the need to pretend to advocate leadership qualities in a…um…leader, and this is perfectly acceptable.  If the Left gets its wish 2020 will come down to a mere contest of personalities, and any thought of what’s actually good for the country and America’s future will be trivialized to the best extent they can.  This is the Left’s great gift to us, such devoted patriots are they.

It’s a sign of the sad political times we live in that someone like Marie Harf gets handsomely paid to express her childlike opinions and that we, as the audience, are supposed to appreciate the Left’s canned opposition to truth and common sense; but we’ve really fallen deep into the abyss when a commentator can proclaim, on national TV, that a presidential hopeful is attractive because “he’s a very good politician,” and this raises the eyebrows and the conscience of virtually no one.

Meanwhile, Melania put up some Christmas decorations that Democrats took the time to sneer about….

So glad to see they’ve got their priories in line.

~CW

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Karl Rove: Obama’s redistricting idea would benefit Democrats – not democracy

By Karl Rove | Fox News

Since leaving office, former President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, have made congressional redistricting reform a top priority.  Saying that “protecting” democracy requires “rethinking the way we draw our congressional districts,” President Obama has lashed out at Republicans for supposedly gerrymandering themselves into control of the House of Representatives.

Gerrymandering involves manipulating the boundaries of districts represented by members of the U.S. House, state legislators and local officials to favor one political party over the other in elections.  By this practice, the Democratic former president asserts, the GOP “moves our debate from the rational, reasonable middle, where most Americans are, to the extremes. And that makes commonsense policies that most Americans support less likely.”

Then in a burst of typical self-righteous sanctimony, Obama argues that Republican dominance in redistricting is “not good for our children and regardless of our party affiliations, it’s not good for our democracy.” The former president asserts each party should get representation roughly equal to its share of the congressional popular vote.  To achieve this, Obama and Holder argue, Americans should elect more Democrats (how remarkably convenient) to state legislatures and create appointed states commissions to handle redistricting.

California and Iowa already have commissions like this in place. Voters in Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and Utah approved creating such commissions in the Nov. 6 midterm elections.  There are more problems with this than just the typical, stale attack on Republicans as “not good for our children” and “not good for our democracy.”  The results of the November midterms show that the former president and his attorney general are inaccurately describing the role of Republicans in redistricting.

As the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman reported this week, Democratic U.S. House candidates received 53 percent of the total midterm popular vote. So if you follow President Obama’s thinking, this should entitle Democrats to 231 House seats, while giving Republicans 204.  As of Tuesday night, Fox News pegs the new House as having 233 Democrats to 199 Republicans, with three seats undecided – all currently held by Republicans. So right now Democrats are holding slightly more seats than their share of the popular vote and will continue doing so even if Republicans win the three seats yet to be decided.

The results of the November midterms show that the former president and his attorney general are inaccurately describing the role of Republicans in redistricting.  That doesn’t mean that gerrymandering isn’t a factor. But if the measure of gerrymandering is one party getting a much bigger share of seats than its share of the popular vote, then it’s Democrats in California and Iowa who are getting more seats than they deserve.  And – irony of ironies – both states have supposedly nonpartisan commissions that draw their congressional district boundaries.

In California, Democrats received 65 percent of the popular vote in congressional races while Republicans received 34 percent. Yet Democrats won 45 of the state’s 53 U.S. House seats and lead in the remaining race not yet declared – for an 87 percent share of the state’s congressional seats.  In contrast, Republicans won only seven seats for a share of 13 percent of California’s U.S. House delegation.  But rather than splitting the delegation between 46 Democrats and seven Republicans (assuming Democrats win the one seat still undecided), President Obama’s popular vote standard would point to split of 35 Democrats and 18 Republicans in the state’s congressional delegation – more than twice the number of Republicans who were elected.

California is not alone. In Iowa, Democrats received 50 percent of the popular vote and Republicans 47 percent, yet Democrats won three – or 75 percent – of the state’s four House seats while Republicans won one seat – or 25 percent of the House delegation.  President Obama’s popular vote standard would suggest that Democrats should get two seats and Republicans should get the other two. A commission also does Iowa’s redistricting.

Here’s a good-faith test for Obama and Holder: Will they now strongly denounce the gerrymandering of California’s congressional seats and urge reforms that lead to Republicans gaining a proper share of the state’s congressional delegations?  If not, Americans can assume that the former president and his attorney general aren’t really trying to improve our democracy – they’re trying to advance the interests of the Democratic Party.

Should we be surprised?

**************************************************************************

No Karl, we definitely should not be surprised.  If the names “Holder” or “Obama” are attached to something you can rest assured that there is evil afoot, because true democracy is the last thing they want. 

Once again our republic is surreptitiously under attack by the wicked Left.  The promise of a “non-partisan commission” to draw redistricting lines probably sounded like a swell idea to unsuspecting Californians and Iowans and to the voters of the other four states that have now tragically doomed themselves to democrat domination, because the average voter sadly still does not understand who leftists really are.  They still believe what the leftists say, rather than learning who they are by what they do.  Too many Americans do not understand that the Obamas and the Holders of the world are criminals at heart.  Their mission is to steal your power in whatever ways they can, whether it be the piece by piece dismemberment of the Constitution (your Constitution!), the brainwashing of America’s youth through their control of our educational institutions, or the creation of “non-partisan commissions” (kind of like the “non-partisan” Mueller investigation) to decide voting districts which – just by coincidence mind you – dilute the voting power of Republicans who are a threat to the Left’s criminal ambitions. 

The leftists count on Americans to be too busy raising their families and trying to make a living to notice that we’re under attack.  It’s guerilla warfare at its best, and the Left is quietly winning.  When Americans wake up and see what’s going on, it will be too late.  Please open your eyes NOW.

~CW

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A Tale of Two Governments

Back in the days when I blogged at Townhall.com I regularly argued with anti-government types who alternately identified themselves as libertarians, anarchists, minarchists and anarcho-libertarians.  They weren’t quite sure what they stood for or precisely what they wanted, but they denounced me as a “grateful slave” to government because I was a conservative Republican.  Despite all of their angry fist-shaking, their attempts at debating me failed because they could not get around this one inarguable fact:  there will be government.

Thomas Paine said, “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”  The anarchists will quibble, pointlessly, about whether government is “necessary,” but this is like arguing over whether mountains are necessary or rocks are necessary.   Why argue whether something is “necessary” when it is going to exist regardless?  Government is a reality.  It is going to exist whether we like it or not, and whether anyone deems it “necessary” or not.  The reason I know this is because it occurs in every society, across geography and across time, from tribal chieftains to Pharaohs to kings and queens to prime ministers to presidents and congresses….. government has existed in one form or another.  This is the nature of the human race.  It’s why ships have captains, corporations have boards and CEOs, schools have principles and towns have mayors.  Society yearns for order and order requires leadership.  And the dirty little secret of the anarchists is that they don’t want to ban order, they want to define it.

The point of this tale is to explain the thinking of America’s great Founders.  The anarchists would argue that the Founders weren’t great at all, that they were just self-serving men who wanted to install a government of their own liking, and in doing so they empowered the power-hungry and set us up for the ongoing struggle against big government that has persisted ever since.  But I believe the Founders, knowing and living history as they did, were responding to the reality that there will be overarching government, and if they did not shape it, someone else inevitably would.  So they seized the moment and shaped a Constitution that, if adhered to, promised to protect liberty by limiting the reach and power of the federal government.  In doing so it’s true that they also created the means by which the power-hungry could worm their way in and take control, as we’ve seen others do again and again throughout history.  The fact is, though, the power-hungry are always lurking and would come no matter what.  Just as human nature prescribes that societies will instinctively sort themselves into leaders and followers, it also prescribes that a fraction of the population will be driven by an insatiable quest for power.  The Founders made no claims of having the magic to defeat them.  They could only set up a firewall and hope that we would have the wisdom, the fortitude and the perseverance to preserve it.  I think they would be disappointed, but not surprised, to see how the firewall is crumbling today, and how the power-hungry have seeped into the cracks like water through a compromised dam.

The two governments that I refer to in this tale, therefore, are the government of the Founders (i.e. The People) versus government of the power-hungry, both of which are waging a fierce battle for control of the means to carry out their mission, i.e. our federal government.  The Founder’s government sees itself as defined and limited by the four corners of the Constitution.  It’s job is to provide for the nation’s defense, our common welfare and to be America’s trustee when dealing the rest of the world.  The government of the power-hungry sees itself as limited only by what it can’t get away with.  It sees the federal government as a tool for forcing the American people to bend to the will of the power-hungry and to transfer wealth from one group of Americans to another so as to serve the ultimate interests of the power-hungry.  The government of the power-hungry performs the role required by the Constitution only to the extent that it serves the ultimate interests of the power-hungry.

So whether government is “good” or not all depends on which government you’re talking about:  the Founder’s government (good) or the government of the power-hungry (evil), though the great rub is that the same host makes it possible for either one to exist.  I’ve been accused by some of being “anti-government” and by others of being “a government slave.”  LOL.  They’re both right, and they’re both wrong.  That’s the nature of the times we live in.

~CW

P.S.

Keep an eye on the fight brewing in Florida.  Looks like it could come down to a battle of the Florida constitution versus the power-hungry who are testing the citizens’ will to enforce that constitution.  It may be the perfect micro-study of the battle described above.

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Will Democrats Cut Off Their Noses to Spite Donald Trump?

Have you ever seen a more self-destructive force than today’s Democrat Party?  We’re talking about people who look at the horrific mess and suffering that’s going on in the socialist experiment known as Venezuela and say, “Let’s do some of that!”  Or do CNN, Huffington Post, Mother Jones and The Guardian even cover Venezuela and the predictable destruction brought on by people who were sold on the notion of getting something for nothing?  My guess is that story gets very little play where it would do the most good.

What also gets little play, no doubt, are the economic and foreign policy successes of the Trump Administration.  Instead liberals and leftists are no doubt bombarded with a continuous stream of absurd scaremongering about “fascism” and “racism” as they are led down the path towards a bleak future for themselves and their children.  I might have given up caring by now, given how long this tiring struggle between liberty and tyranny has been going on, except that we are all tethered to the liberals and leftists by virtue of our shared citizenship, and when they foolishly jump into the ocean with the expectation that the strong swimmers will keep them afloat they threaten to drown us all.

The elections today are a proxy fight between Left and Right – between people who believe what they are told vs. people who believe what they can see with their own eyes.  “Fascism, racism, white supremacy, the threat to your healthcare…..”  None of that is real, despite what some would wish you to believe.  None of it passes the smell test.  But your jobs are real.  The want ads are real.  Your 401K’s are real.  And the threat of socialism and all its destruction is very real.

They say this election is a referendum on Trump – a judgment, if you will.  That’s only partly true, because judgment implies reason.  Judgment implies rationality and objectivity.  All of these things have been driven out of the Democrat Party and they’ve been supplanted by mindless rage, and thus we have not a referendum but a tantrum of monstrous proportions.

Will you be a child on election day?  Will you march to the polls and defiantly hack off your own nose to spite Donald Trump?  Will you “resist” the restoration of prosperity and strength for all Americans – yourself and your children included – for such empty and foolish satisfaction?  I have a better idea.  Why don’t you switch sides so we can all be winners?

Please restore the sanity.  Vote RED today.

~CW

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This is Why Democrats Will NEVER Solve the Healthcare Crisis

Chart by Evercore ISI

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/30/chart-of-surging-us-health-care-costs-explains-why-buffett-getting-involved.html

Comforting chart, eh?

When I lived in Texas a local radio station would often play commercials for a “healthcare sharing ministry” called Medi-Share.  It was advertised as a way for Christian members to lower their insurance premiums by “[sharing] their money to pay for each other’s eligible medical bills.”¹  One commercial featured a member who thankfully boasted that Medi-Share members had “shared” something like $150,000 in medical bills associated with an illness or procedure that had come on suddenly.  Upon hearing that ad I would always wonder to myself:  “Why would anyone who anticipates having minimal healthcare expenses himself want to potentially “share” in the outrageously large medical bills of others?”  It just seemed like an odd advertising strategy, even if the basic concept is essentially what the insurance industry is all about.  You pay monthly premiums, which often add up to a large amount of money over time, and you might not use your benefits at all or you may hit the benefit lottery, so to speak, if you have the misfortune of needing expensive medical care. 

What bothered me about the commercial is the same thing that bothers me whenever I hear Democrats’ ideas for “fixing” the healthcare crisis, namely the absence of appropriate outrage for the fact that routine procedures now cost thousands of dollars and often tens of thousands, and more complicated procedures can easily get into the hundreds of thousands even if we’re only talking about a week’s hospital stay or an illness that isn’t chronic. 

Democrats’ great solutions for ‘solving’ the healthcare crisis never address the real problem of spiraling costs.  Instead their plans focus solely on transferring the cost to someone else using the muscle of the federal government to extort the money.  Make your wealthy neighbor pay for it, that’s the ticket.  Nice, eh?

Putting aside how morally corrupt this great plan is and how inconsistent it is with the concept of individual liberty upon which America was founded, their plan has zero chance of “working” long term because it does nothing to address the systemic problem of price inflation.  Margaret Thatcher famously quipped that the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples’ money, but even she probably could not have envisioned how fast the money could be sucked away when routine care starts costing thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and then millions.  If the socialists truly believe that those who’ve spent their lives building their wealth are going to sit quietly by while it’s siphoned away for the benefit of freeloading strangers, better think again.  The scam might “work” for a little while, but eventually it will blow up in our faces like the scams of the socialists running Venezuela.  The socialists will do what they always do (it’s instinctive) and propose to solve the problem of runaway costs by imposing price controls, but we’ve seen how well such schemes work.  No thank you.

Republicans, at least the free-market conservatives, have a different idea for fixing the healthcare crisis in America and that idea is to bring prices back to sanity naturally through competition and reduced government interference.  That would make healthcare and insurance affordable, so that people could pay for their own healthcare.  With everyone sharing the burden (as it should be), each person’s share is light, and there is no need for the class warfare that socialists like Bernie Sanders are so desperately trying to gin up, and that can’t possibly end well even if a few can profit in the short term.  Voters, especially those who care about the futures of their children, would be well-advised to embrace the inarguable truth of the famous idiom:  There’s no such thing as a free lunch.  Really, there isn’t.  What terrible price will you or your children pay for the lure of trying to get something for nothing? 

If healthcare truly matters to you, vote “R” this election. 

~CW

¹ https://mychristiancare.org/medi-share/what-is-medishare/

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Donald Trump and the Phenomenon of Manufactured Hate

Donald Trump has been an American celebrity for nearly as long as I can remember.  Before he ran for POTUS if anyone had asked for my opinion on him as a person I would have said that I don’t find him very likeable, but certainly there was no reason to hate him.  I don’t think I’d be going out on a limb to guess that most Americans didn’t have a strong opinion one way or another about this outspoken, well-known mega-celebrity before he committed the unforgiveable sin of depriving Hillary Clinton and Democrats of their rightful entitlement to the office of the presidency.  But now, according to so many leftists opining in the comments sections on Fox News, Trump is the most hated man in the world.  “Everyone hates him,” one commenter smugly assured me, as if to suggest that he or she had personally polled every person on the planet.  Whoever said group think was dead? 

The Left’s hate factory has been working overtime since Trump’s election.  Terms like “fascist, racist and white supremacist” roll easily off the tongues of know-it-all college kids and apparently have taken on entirely new meanings as the Left resorts to their time-honored and generally successful practice of destroying our language in pursuit of their agenda, which currently happens to be their war on Trump, aka “the resistance.”  Oh what noble warriors are they, furiously crossing out words in our dictionaries and defiantly scribbling in their new definitions!  Hatred is being manufactured from whole cloth like Rumpelstiltskin’s fairytale spinning of straw into mountains of gold, and the righteous robots on the Left are, as usual, oblivious to their own Orwellian behavior.  

I could talk about the complete absence of evidence for the Left’s specious labeling or how peculiar it is that a popular, flamboyant celebrity who regularly hobnobbed with powerful politicians and influential celebrities apparently hid his fascism and racism from them so well until the age of 70, when it was suddenly and conveniently discovered by his enemies (like planted drugs discovered by crooked cops, lol).  Or I could talk about how Georg W. Bush was a “fascist” before Trump came along according to geniuses like Naomi Wolf,  Keith Olbermann and so many other leftists who like this game, or how Reagan was a “racist” long before Bush and Trump.  But nah.  Once again I think I’ll pass on following the Left’s trail of breadcrumbs into that rabbit hole where I’m supposed to play a silly game of arguing with liars as if they were the least bit sincere. 

The average leftist on the street or college campus knows that he or she is supposed to hate Trump for being a “fascist, racist and white supremacist” because that’s what they’ve been told by other leftists.  It matters not that they can’t define fascism, that “racist” means nothing as a consequence of the Left’s cynically evolving stance which says all white people are racists, or that the white supremacist charge is just laughable.  The powers that be blew their dog whistles, and the well-trained dogs obeyed.  If they are told they must hate Trump, then hate Trump they will.  Just don’t ask them to explain why.

Please don’t get me wrong.  This isn’t a post about hate per se.  Hate is sometimes appropriate, that’s undeniable.  This post is about manufactured hate.  It’s about a mindset that confuses the serious issue of politics and people with a frivolity that is better suited to fashion.  You know, like when you packed your beloved mini-skirts and bell bottoms off to Goodwill because the powers-that-be told you they were passé.  The styles of the day are dictated by a handful of so-called “trendsetters,” and that may be okay, but hate shoudn’t be dictated from on high. 

Some three and a half years ago I wrote a post entitled:  Obama Deserves to be Hated.  Growing up I had been taught not to throw the “h”-word around lightly.  To hate someone was serious business.  So I wrote that post only after some deep soul-searching about whether I wanted to go there.  My purpose was to let Americans know that it’s okay – necessary even – to hate those whose intent is to rob us of what is rightfully ours as Americans, even – no especially – when they do so surreptitiously.  I’ll leave it to you to decide if I was fair or not, but I challenge anyone to claim that I allowed myself to be used as someone else’s pawn. 

I’m not necessarily going to suggest that the Left’s hate for Trump isn’t real.  On the contrary it’s scary real.  But if it’s all justified on myths and lies, where is the hate really coming from?  First it comes from the Left’s insatiable craving for power, and Donald Trump had the audacity to deprive them of their satisfaction.  But to admit to hating someone for besting you at your own game, well that sounds a lot like whining doesn’t it?  And then, of course, there’s all that goes along with that power:  the opportunity to dismantle the Constitution by putting activist judges on the Supreme Court, by increasing taxes so that the government (i.e. them) spends your money instead of you, by over-regulating to micro-manage your every behavior, to neuter our military and to subjugate us to the global powers that be.  That’s what the anger and the hate is really about, but the leftists can’t say all that out loud.  It sounds kinda bad.  Kinda unamerican.  So if that means Donald Trump must be a white supremacist, then so be it.

~CW

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Dear Joel Mathis: Liberalism, Not Nationalism, Killed Compassion in America

         Here is a photo of what the “free” press allows me to freely share when I search for images of the illegal immigrant caravan/invasion heading to America.

In his essay published in The Week magazine, self-described “liberal” Joel Mathis ponders the question, “Has nationalism killed compassion in America?”  The piece is an unintentional tribute to Ronald Reagan’s famous quip, “It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”  Follow along, and you’ll see what I mean.  My remarks are in red.

There's been some heavy lifting lately, in the non-Trumpist precincts of our politics, to rescue the idea of "nationalism" from the clutches of President Trump and his alt-right followers. Lest liberals and progressives be tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we're reminded in books and essays that nationalism has its uses — forming the glue that provides us with social cohesion and a welfare state, among other goods.  These "nice-guy nationalists" make good points. There's just one problem: America's best-known nationalist is the president. And he's not much interested in social cohesion.

In the interest of time I’ll leave aside the bizarre claim that “a welfare state” is one of the benefits of nationalism in order to focus on the even stranger claim that it is Trump who isn’t interested in social cohesion.  Ever since Barack Obama emerged on the national political scene the Left has perfected the devious art of projecting their own sins on the opposition and then attacking them for it, and this notion that it is Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, who divide us is one of their most cynical projections.  Statistics show that race relations began their steep decline under Obama, the predictable consequence of Obama intentionally stoking racial tensions (“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”)  Moreover, who could plausibly deny that the entirety of the Left’s political strategy is vested in the politics of division when Democrats are continually pitting minorities against whites, women against men, poor against rich, and when it’s become the Left’s norm to openly disparage “old, white men?”  While the Right promotes the melting pot, the Left promotes multiculturalism, yet  history proves that social cohesion fails when immigrants reject assimilation or embrace the Left’s tales of perpetual victimhood. 

"You know what I am? I'm a nationalist," Trump declared Monday night in Texas. "Okay? I'm a nationalist."

To get a sense of what this means in Trump's hands, it's good to take a look at the so-called "migrant caravan" currently marching north from Guatemala to the United States border. From the accounts of people on the ground, it appears this caravan is composed largely of people fleeing deprivation and violence in their home countries. It's the sort of thing you or I would do if our families were similarly endangered; ardent nationalists have decided to treat these fleeing families like an invading military.

"An assault!" Trump told told the Texas rally.

"Migrant hordes," writer Rod Dreher blogged at The American Conservative.

Even The Associated Press got in the act, calling the caravan a "ragtag army of the poor" in a tweet that was later deleted.

But the people forming the caravan are not an army. They aren't seeking collectively to capture land or dislodge governments. They are merely individuals seeking a better life and traveling in the direction they think most likely to help them find it.

"Treating this as an 'invasion' is a bad idea, and it's going to end horribly if it is treated such as that way," an independent voter said Monday on Fox News, and that's perhaps the most sensible statement made on any cable news network this year. 

Parents sometimes refer to medicine as “candy” to entice their children to take it, and this psychology is not lost on the sly Left when they try to manipulate their way past our natural defenses by insisting that we not call things what they really are.  Illegal aliens are “undocumented,” insists the liberals in the Orwellian speak that we’ve become accustomed to.  And now an invasion is not an invasion.  It’s just an innocent, happy parade of people wanting a better life.  I might prefer to live on the French Riviera but I don’t gather 13,999 of my friends and march on France.  The U.S. has a process for considering applications for asylum.  Purposefully ignoring that process in a calculated effort to take advantage of loopholes in our immigration system and create chaos at our border is what makes this an invasion, and Democrats – always the useful idiots - are cheering it on. 

Nationalism may provide us with social cohesion — and that's good — but it is also a garment best worn lightly. That's a tricky, perhaps impossible, expectation: In many cases, nationalism asks us to disregard our own moral sense in favor of group loyalty.

Morality tells us that when people are hungry, we offer them food.

Morality tells us that when people flee violence, we offer them protection.

Morality tells us that all humans are worthy of moral consideration, no matter their origins or circumstances.

First, morality tells us that when you are hungry or need protection you don’t break down the door and help yourself to what others have worked hard for.  You knock on the door and politely ask for help, at which time it is the homeowner’s right to determine whether your need is genuine and whether you are an innocent victim or just looking for an easier way at someone else’s expense.  In America we call that respecting the rights of others, and that is the moral thing to do.  Another moral tradition we once had in America was to reject the evil temptation to falsely impugn – for political gain -  peoples’ motives by coyly suggesting that ethnicity or financial status is the reason for their objection to thousands of people marching on our border.  Never mind that this charge is rich coming from people who’ve popularized the denouncement of “old, white men;” it is the rejection of U.S. sovereignty and U.S. law that’s inspired Trump and conservatives to condemn the “caravan,” and it is Mathis himself who stoops to immorality by using the group’s shared ethnicity as an excuse to pull the tired, old race card.  By the way, wouldn’t you love to know how many poor, uneducated, non-English-speaking immigrants are included among Mr. Mathis’ close circle of friends? 

Nationalism often — not always, but often — asks us to disregard those moral considerations, or at least to quiet them a little bit, to place a higher importance on defending the integrity of arbitrarily drawn borders than we do the lives of people trying to escape inhumane situations. Nationalism tends to divide humans into "us" and "them" and tells us "they" are worth less. Frequently — and Trump has based his entire political persona on this idea — it tells us that "they" are probably bad people. Why? Mostly because they're not us. How do you get to be us? Well, it's all kind of an accident of birth, really. At best, it's absurd. In many cases, nationalism is simply racist.

There it is again of course – the race card.  The truth is, Trump has based his political persona on the concept of putting America first.  Not white America.  Not black America.  Not male or female America.  Just America.  You can see it.  You can feel it.  It’s palpable, and his focus on treating the country as a whole, rather than dividing us into subgroups as the Left always does, flies in the face of these trite accusations of racism.  Is he nationalistic according to its real definition?  Yes, in the sense that he wants to promote our interests and our culture.  There’s nothing wrong with that unless you’re a leftist mired in the standard creed of loathing America.  As for “arbitrarily drawn borders,” one could say that the borders of Mr. Mathis’ property are just as arbitrarily drawn, yet that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t fight for them if necessary. 

The nice-guy nationalists advocate a rather bloodless view of nationalism's benefits, but the history of the last century, with its wars and genocides, provides plenty of evidence that nationalism can turn very bloody, indeed. Still, it probably is utopian to think we poor humans can get very far without organizing along national lines. And "Morality Is Complex and Transcends National Lines!" is a poor riposte, politically, to the pithiness of "America First!" This column isn't going to win any elections.

The caravan keeps advancing north. So what to do? How do we balance the benefits of nationalism — and the legitimate obligation to protect our citizens and their well-being — against the need to look out for our neighbors beyond our borders?

In the short term, you can treat the caravan like what it is — a collection of needy, dispossessed humans fleeing dire circumstances — instead of as an invading army to be met with force. Instead of cutting off aid to the caravaners' countries of origin, let's figure out how to help them, now, where they are, before they get to our border. Difficult? Sure. Worth it? Probably.

In the long term, the United States can consider how its policies may actually create the refugees it so desperately wants to reject. U.S. policies, for example, helped create the circumstances that allowed the MS-13 street gang to flourish in Central America. Maybe we should do less of that kind of thing?

In the same vein, perhaps Trump — who needs to serve American interests — might come to understand he does not best serve an "America First" vision with his preferred "we-win-you-lose" deals with our allies and rivals. America's security and prosperity can best be enhanced by assisting the security and prosperity of people around the world. It's that vision, not some utopian altruism, that has guided much of the postwar world order that Trump seems ready to undo.

The migrant caravan is still hundreds of miles from the American border, but it's not too late to seek constructive solutions. Right now, though, it's the regular nationalists — not the nice-guy kind — who are running the show.

What intrigued me most about this piece was the headline asking if nationalism has killed compassion in America because I see things quite differently.  I think it is liberalism, not nationalism, that’s killing compassion in this country.  Liberals tell us that instead of teaching a man to fish so that he becomes self-sufficient that we must fish for him whether we want to or not.  We get no say in determining whether the man is capable of fishing for himself.  If he has no fish, that alone, we are told, is proof that he is entitled to our fish.  And if we have the nerve to point out that perhaps the man was napping rather than fishing or that he refuses to learn to fish, well then we are racists who should not be allowed to speak. We are told that our borders are “arbitrary,” that the people who come here by the millions to use our schools, our hospitals, our roads, our police, our courts and who – by virtue of evading the system – sometimes bring crime and disease, just want a better life.  Our own desires for a better life are of no consequence.  Conservatives’ accounting for the hundreds of billions of dollars illegal immigration costs us as Americans are rejected as “lies” by the Left, while they refuse to engage in any truthful accounting themselves.  The actions of the Left with respect to illegal immigration engender feelings of powerlessness in those of us who believe that we are entitled to have a say in the immigration policies of our nation, and who believe all our laws should be enforced, not just those that are convenient to the Left.  To whatever extent compassion is dead in this nation, THIS – this political game-playing with our laws and immigration policy – THIS is what has killed it.  Turn the mirror around, Mr. Mathis, and take a good, long look.  This is what you and your leftist friends have wrought.

One last question for Mr. Mathis and any liberals who happen to read this: 

Have you considered the moral implications of what happens now to the people truly in need of asylum after you’ve made such a mockery of our generosity?  No?  I thought not.

~CW

P.S. 

Links in Mr. Mathis' original piece did not come through when pasted here.  Follow the link in the first paragraph to see those, if you want to be extra bored.

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