Posts Tagged → speaker
Speaker Johnson’s religious behavior
Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson is being widely criticized in the mainstream media for kneeling in prayer while on the job the other day. I watched one mainstream media TV personality take Rep. Johnson to task in an interview, about minding the supposed “separation of church and state,” and “keeping prayer in private,” and not letting it out into the public sphere.
Pretty curious approach, given that across America and Europe hordes of bloodthirsty primitives have also recently knelt in prayer in public spaces, promoting baby butchery, baby baking, and gang rape with a huge helping of subsequent mutilation and torture on Israelis, to the great joy of mainstream media. Why all these sincere people, just look at them, bless their hearts. Get them some brown shirts and night sticks.
The Left’s love affair with radical Islam is no secret, and it is just and fair to say this love affair exists because both the Left and radical Islam seek absolute destruction of Western Civilization with a resulting dominion over everyone and every thing on Planet Earth. The Left and radical Islam have a common cause, and whatever differences they have will be settled between one another once people like Rep. Johnson and his religion are out of the way. Keep this foremost in your mind as the drumbeat about Rep. Johnson’s Christian practice goes on.
Couple of things about this Mr. Smith Goes To Washington’s religiosity.
First, Christianity is the founding belief system of America, albeit that was a nascent and broad minded Protestantism that immediately resulted in the anti-slavery abolitionist movement. America’s pilgrims and Founders also identified strongly with the Jews’ quest for freedom from evil tyrant Pharoah, and with the Torah’s value-laden story of that quest. And so thousands of towns and locales across America are named after Biblical places like Hebron, Shiloh, Judah, Bethany, and Zion. Christianity’s sacred Judaic touchstone places, and their inherent unspoken values, are interwoven into the cultural fabric of America from our very beginning.
Second, Christianity is still the main and largest repository of morality and right action in America. This is a cold numeric fact, not a defense of or advocacy for Christian theology. As sad and deflated as American Christianity is right now, it is nonetheless still the biggest single force for all things good and for learning about good values in our nation.
You oppose Christian theology? OK, so what is your suggested substitute in its absence here in America? Atheism? Well, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Stalin are all great advocates for atheism and horrible, unjust places to live. Judaism? You think 200,000,000 Americans are going to convert to orthodox Judaism? Never! There would be an immediate and everlasting shortage of pickled herring, and so the rabbis would never allow it. Radical Islam will cut your throat, cut off your head, or throw you off a roof, sometimes all three, so nah, hard pass on that, right?
So, I say an occasional annoying knock on the door by some nice church ladies is a small price to pay for living happily in the most successful nation in the history of humanity.
The Left’s attacks on Christianity are strategic. If they can brow beat, shame, drown, flood, and eliminate Christianity, they will eliminate America’s renewable, sustainable, organic cultural source of opposition to the Left’s tyranny, immorality, and evil.
The Left has gotten really creative about their attack on Christianity, and they have only succeeded to date because of the long flaccid acquiescence of American traditionalists and Christians, and by the Left’s official enablers, the GOPe. By accusing Christians of establishing religion when they merely practice it, a la Rep. Johnson, the Left has appealed to the First Amendment’s clear prohibition against establishing a formal state religion for America. And yet, the truth is Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims all are merely expressing their First Amendment rights when they pray in private or in public. None of their public prayer behavior establishes any of these religions as the de facto state religion of America.
What the Left really objects to is anyone actually seeing the Christian religion practiced in public. Their message is it’s a dirty practice that people ought to keep to themselves behind closed doors.
Rep. Johnson’s public prayer on the US House of Representatives floor is an in-your-face to the tyrants and cultural Marxists in the mainstream media. And of course history is on the side of Rep. Johnson, because the US House of Representatives opened with public prayer for I don’t know how long, but for the vast majority of the chamber’s existence. And when inaugurated in 1789 as America’s first president in Manhattan, New York, George Washington led a grand procession to Trinity Church on Wall Street, where he led an hours-long prayer service.
It is only when America now finds itself in the throes of hypercoagulative materialism that its own long and deep religious roots, and religion’s fruit-bearing shading branches, become anathema. So what a breath of fresh air is this Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, this cherubic Rep. Johnson.
Don’t stop, Rep. Johnson, for all our sakes, I pray you, do not stop and do not back down, and may you shine as a beacon light to Christians everywhere, and may that rallying light shine and defeat the cruel darkness that is swallowing my civilization. I may not agree with you on the particulars, but by God I will defend your right and our collective necessity to have you pray in the US House of Representatives.
Either Christianity will save America as a free constitutional republic, or America and western civilization will die.
May God bless you, Rep. Johnson.
Democratic self-rule is not supposed to be easy
Up until Congressman Mike Johnson was unanimously elected as the next Speaker of the US House of Representatives last week, political watchers, news reporters, and insiders were in a state of panic, panic I tell ya.
The Epoch Times described the US House of Representatives scrum for selecting a Speaker, after China-owned RINO Kevin McCarthy was ejected by hero Congressman Matt Gaetz, as a time of “paralysis.”
The unreliable and constantly discredited New York Times called the blessed time without a Speaker of the House as “weeks of chaos.”
Conservative talk radio was filled up to puke-on-your-feet levels of “Gaetz should have had a plan,” and “You only remove the Speaker when you have a plan,” and similar Conservative Inc. mistrust of the essential democratic process and worshiping of the unnaturally smooth “normal” process that just has to be corrupt. Sean Hannity, Clay and Buck, Glenn Beck, and the rest of you radio guys, you know who you are.
The rest of the press/media/ political outlets, both establishment/legacy and new alike, were of a common mind: Washington works best when it works perfectly smoothly, efficiently, and there are no hiccups, apparently. And thus we conclude that apparently democratic processes of debating and voting and disagreeing are uncomfortable to political insiders. Isn’t that reassuring?
Thankfully, when Speaker Mike Johnson was eventually coronated, we had the Babylon Bee in the room to shed the most accurate light on the situation: Their headline “Smoke Rises Over Capitol Indicating Congress Has Resumed Setting Taxpayers’ Money On Fire” wasn’t really funny, because the truth is painful.
That Babylon Bee humor was an updated version of Mark Twain’s observations of Congress: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
And his “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
But wait, there’s more of how Americans then and now really feel about Congress when it is working properly:
“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer.” (Will Rogers)
“The taxpayers are sending congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be worth it except they keep coming back.” (Will Rogers)
“I love to go to Washington, if only to be near my money.” (Bob Hope)
“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.” (Ronald Reagan)
“Members of Congress should be compelled to wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers, so we could identify their corporate sponsors.” (Caroline Baum)
The truth is that self-rule by a group of citizens, by way of their elected representatives, is not supposed to be easy, or smooth, or efficient, or painless, or without occasional hiccups. To expect nothing but easy, smooth sailing when power and money are being fought over would be a childish fantasy. Or an evil wish.
Think about some of the total brawls we have witnessed in recent years from South Korea’s parliament, or Japan’s parliament. Chairs flying, punches thrown, martial arts kicks landing on unhappy faces! Likewise in a few European parliamentary democracies in recent years, where policy disagreements were settled with fist fights. Vive le human passion for truth, I say.
Well do I recall first seeing 18th and 19th century drawings and political cartoons of fisticuffs, cudglings, and canings in the US Congress, as well as accurate pictures of fatal duels among elected officials. These old drawings showed the true inner workings of representative government – members beating the snot out of each other. The other good side of these bloodlettings and drawn-out disputes is that when responsible people feel strongly about freedom vs tyranny, about slavery vs abolition, about fair taxation vs taxation without representation (which Americans are living under right now), they have strong disagreements. Government commensurately slows down and waits for the disagreements to get resolved. Good, this is natural and healthy.
You know what scares me in politics? Bipartisanship. Yep, that old let’s–reach-across-the-aisle crap means only one thing: Both political parties have reached agreement on mutually beneficial ways of wasting and pocketing our hard-earned tax money that the government coerced out of our pockets at gunpoint.
I was glad to see Rep. Kevin McCarthy ejected from the Speaker’s seat. Smoooooth McCarthy was an embarrassment in so many ways (not the least of which his evil role in covertly delaying and unnecessarily drawing out the selection process in the hopes of being re-installed as Speaker), and he smells of corruption.
I was glad to see Rep. Matt Gaetz and others (where was my US Congressman Scott Perry in all this?) demand that McCarthy be held accountable for breaking the promises he made to attain the Speaker’s seat. I was glad to see Rep. Gaetz eventually widely recognized and appreciated for having toppled the DC Swamp’s man in Congress and replacing him with Rep. Mike Johnson, who appears to be a decent person from East Succotash America and not yet familiar with greasy handshakes.
Overall, the shut down and gridlock in Congress during the struggle for the Speakership was a big gain for the US citizenry, and I would like to know what Mark Twain would have said about it. Whatever Mark Twain would have said about those glorious weeks of Congressional inaction, we just know he would have hit the nail on the head.
We The People 1, Uniparty 0
Overly preened, waxed, effete, phony pretty boy career politician and freaking corrupt as hell now former Speaker of the US House Kevin McCarthy was ousted from his brief Speakership yesterday. First time in American history, the vote on McCarthy represents a slowly turning tide in favor of We, The People as more and more of us American citizens struggle to regain control of our rogue government from an evil bipartisan Uniparty made of both Democrats and establishment Republicans.
McCarthy is the kind of flaccid, spineless, limp-wristed establishment career RINO “Republican” who does everything for his own personal gain, and for his party’s gain, and apparently zero for The American People’s gain.
Despite representing a majority in the US House, since becoming Speaker earlier this year McCarthy gave in on nearly every Democrat Party demand and Big Brother Government funding ploy. There was literally nothing the Democrat Party and the Biden White House demanded that McCarthy did not and would not cave to. An additional 87,000 heavily armed IRS agents? Sure, said McCarthy, why not have an even bigger helping of terrorized American citizens cowering from official jackbooted thugs in their homes.
Like most GOPe pukes, Kevin McCarthy is much more beholden to the politically partisan, far-left, America-hating, American-hating, Constitution hating, freedom hating establishment media like the Washington Post and the New York Times than he is to the US Constitution or even basic principles like individual freedom, small government, less intrusive government, etc. McCarthy is worried about what the partisan establishment media will say about him, and not about what his voters will think of him. His big dollar corporate donors make sure he has plenty of money to repel upstart challengers who might want more decision making put back into the hands of the American citizenry, and less in the hands of corporate lobbyists and their loyal lapdogs like McCarthy.
McCarthy did zero to represent his constituents or the tens of millions of voters who have increasingly voted to stop feeding the Washington DC beast, and apparently it was his secret deal with China Joe Biden to fund Ukraine yet again with billions of US Taxpayer dollars (as our bridges and roads disintegrate) that got him in trouble with his own caucus. Well, some of the Republican caucus, because there are waaaay too many “Republican” congressmen who are perfectly happy with the decisions McCarthy made. These are the congressmen who see themselves as the moderate wing of the Democrat Party, not as an opposition party. Gotta get these traitors out of office, Mister and Missus America!
Anyhow, kudos to Rep. Matt Gaetz for having the balls to take on McCarthy and hold him to the pledges McCarthy had made in order to become Speaker earlier this year. It is telling that McCarthy increasingly broke those pledges and seemed sure that he would not be held accountable. Unlike former speaker Nancy Pelosi, McCarthy had zero interest in unifying and holding his caucus together by giving in here and there to the conservative members by whose grace he ascended the throne (and by whose grace he was removed).
This is a telling fact: McCarthy had no interest in mollifying his conservative patriot wing. He gave them nothing, and gave the communist Democrat Party everything it asked for.
And thus it became apparent that McCarthy (and so many “moderate” “Republicans” like him) has no loyalty to a constitutional America. He blows bullsh*t up everyone’s butt, and then does the opposite. He ran as an R but acted like a loyal D. Hmmmmmmm, no wonder people ask how much secret payoff money McCarthy must have received from China or some other wealthy gift giver somewhere. Anyhow, it was time for McCarthy to be challenged and hopefully removed. Thanks to Rep. Matt Gaetz, We, The People scored 1 against the evil Uniparty.
I am surely not alone in being intrigued that GOPe Republicans and the New York Times alike are horrified, HORRIFIED at the “chaos” supposedly ensuing from McCarthy’s ouster. It is also intriguing that any action that goes against the interest of the bipartisan Uniparty, and which challenges illegal and increasingly un-checked Federal government power over us supposedly free citizens, or which legally challenges blatantly stolen elections, is immediately branded by the Uniparty and its establishment media outlets as an insurrection, chaos, illegal, etc. It is also intriguing that the Uniparty looooves a smoothly running rogue government, and hates anyone who questions it or challenges it.
Kevin McCarthy’s ouster from the Speakership is a really big deal. If nothing else it is a sign that there are at least a handful of patriots in the US House willing to take risks with their political careers for the benefit of We, The People. Turns out there are a few who understand that The Bigger The Government, The Smaller The Citizen. Turns out you and I are not completely alone in our dispute with our rogue federal government.
Some action items for the next Speaker: a) purge the US Capitol Police of lawless rogues who hate America, b) investigate and hold accountable all members of the US Capitol Police who committed unnecessary acts of violence against innocent protestors on January 6th, c) actually release all of the January 6th footage so that Americans can make up their own minds about what really happened, d) begin impeachment proceedings against lawless members of the Biden Administration, including FBI Chris Wray, AG Merrick Garland, DHS Alejandro Mayorkas, and others whose nonstop lying to Congress should land them in jail for the rest of their lives.
Trump wants to be liked by the mean boys
President Donald Trump is a good guy, and it is why he keeps making the same mistake over and over with people who are not good. He understandably sees himself as a reasonable person, a respectable person, a responsible person, and he also desperately wants to be somewhat, even a little bit, inside The Republican Club.
This is why he endorsed politicians who were openly antagonistic to him: Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) and Brian Kemp (Georgia), to name just two. Trump keeps thinking, and hoping, that the Republican politicians who hate him and reject him will nonetheless ultimately come to like him, admire him, and appreciate him. This is why he keeps on trying to play their insider game, and he keeps on losing at it.
The problem is that the career Republicans are mean boys (and a few mean girls), occupying their own little tree house club house. And while they may have vicious squabbles amongst each other inside that tree house, their hideout remotes a closed club to outsiders. Closed even to people who may think the tree house is plenty big enough for more people, and in fact might benefit from having more people in it.
We have seen this exact same dynamic play out even down to the legislative staffers in Washington and in state capitals across America. A sense of elitist prestige and exclusive specialness. These people have spent their entire careers knitting together personal power by carving out a niche for themselves inside the bureaucratic spiderweb, and by God, they are never ever going to share that power with anyone they don’t have to share it with.
President Trump’s latest mistake is constantly weighing in on behalf of US Congressman Kevin McCarthy, a highly preened, plucked, scrubbed, and unprincipled careerist from California who desires to be the next Speaker of the US House. We can see by now, after seven failed votes among US House members, that McCarthy obsesses over and craves the Speaker’s gavel and office like various brainwashed victims in The Lord of The Rings who are caught caressing The One Ring and calling it “My precious.”
McCarthy even moved into the Speaker’s office despite not actually being elected Speaker!
Anyhow, President Trump. What a window into his mind this endorsement business has been, this public craving of his to be accepted into the mean boy RINO club, or at least to be publicly valued and acknowledged by the RINOs. It is why he keeps giving them unearned endorsements. And he knows that even if he helps McCarthy prevail and become Speaker, he will still be ignored and cast off afterwards. It is like Trump is so loyal, and so earnest, that he simply cannot fathom the treachery and selfishness endemic to career politicians like McCarthy and McConnell.
No, President Trump, these careerist jerks will never change. Stop thinking they will.
The good news is that a cool black guy, Byron Donalds, got the most dissident votes for Speaker today. Smart, articulate, brave Byron Donalds is exactly what the Republican Party needs from top to bottom. But the bad news is that instead of grooming Donalds for future leadership, the so-called “leaders” of the House Republicans (Scalise, McCarthy) are running around twisting arms and trying to hurt and threaten fellow House members for not supporting McCarthy for Speaker.
Kind of interesting how this mean boys club works. It is almost like it doesn’t matter which political party these people are in, at the end of the day they are all the same: Mean, coercive, uninterested in listening to people who disagree with them, unwilling to negotiate a settlement, and vicious. They never back down no matter how much people reject them, they are always selfish and demand that we all acknowledge their selfishness and reward it. In short, McCarthy et al are gross yucky people. Not nice.
President Trump, this is not your fight and these are not your people. Forget about it, let this play out without your participation. You can’t win here, no matter what you do. You are not a career-long mean boy and you don’t belong in this squabble.
Kevin McCarthy is an evil DC swamp thing
Congressman Kevin McCarthy is a corrupt career politician from the Marxist state of California. To be a Republican from California in 2023, you would by necessity have to be really slimy and corrupt. McCarthy has been in Washington DC for a long time, and his ties to the evil DC Swamp run long and deep. Heck, just look at his shielded face, his hooded eyes. You can easily read McCarthy’s crookedness by his outward facial appearance and body language. In fact, he has a lot of Justin Trudeau’s same body language going on (Canada). And Gavin Newsom’s for that matter (California governor).
These people above all share a common lust for power and control that overrides elementary human decency and empathy. Anyone who wants that much control should never be allowed to have it, and yet, if McCarthy becomes the next Speaker of the US House, then he will have it.
My congressman, Scott Perry, has been wonderfully vocal about McCarthy’s cozy relationship with the DC Swamp, and how McCarthy refuses to make commitments to transparency and accountability that would change the way Washington DC spends our taxpayer money. Thank you, Congressman Perry.
What is really amazing is how weak willed and sycophantic most elected congresspeople are. They each want power and control so badly that they fall all over themselves to elect someone dirty like McCarthy. The people supporting McCarthy for Speaker are not conservatives, they are career politicians in search of wealth and power through a public service job. And this list of lame-os now includes Marjorie Taylor Greene, a freshman congresswoman who has raised hell with Washington DC criminality since the day she arrived.
How did fake Republican Liz Cheney go to Congress for just six years at an annual $175,000 salary, and emerge as a multimillionaire? What kinds of illegal, unethical, anti-citizen, anti-America back-room deals did she make to earn that kind of wealth? And it’s not just Liz Cheney, it is the vast majority of the elected officials in Washington that use their official office for personal gain.
Yuck!
So here we are today with RINO Rep. Kevin McCarthy trying to gain the speakership at all costs and with no commitments to advancing Republican values like good government, limited government, accountable government and public employees. I wonder if USA arch enemy China has purchased McCarthy like a sack of potatoes, too.
Like a lot of Americans, I am fed up with the political parties. They do not interest me, because it’s like watching two criminal gangs fight each other. The citizens lose no matter which gang is in charge. What does interest me is limited government, transparent government, accountable government.
Like: Why the hell is the IRS now empowered to track our $600.00 (six hundred Dollar) purchases and incomes, along with enormous destruction of our individual constitutional rights, but We The People have zero control or information over how the federal government, like its IRS, spends OUR money?
Kevin McCarthy is an evil DC Swamp Thing. He cannot be Speaker, and if he does become Speaker through the weakness of most GOP congresscritters, then America is done for, because he will protect the DC Swamp from being changed or challenged or held accountable. And America will never have another opportunity after this Congress to hold DC accountable.
The McCain in my soup
What seems like a hundred years ago, in the summer of 2000 I served as a volunteer at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.
Staying with my old Philly friends Mark and Bill in their back bedroom, I was able to easily access the convention center by foot.
Being a burly lad, I was put on “security,” which involved wearing a special yellow or red shirt, standing at certain choke points and doorways in the convention center, checking credentials before allowing people to pass to some next destination, and answering questions about the location of bathrooms.
Most of my security role was done at the entrance to the main stage, where speakers and media activists (“reporters”) entered and exited. From this doorway, the speakers walked out onto the stage to speak from the main podium, and the media things sauntered, pranced, sashayed their ways to nearby desks set up to look at the podium and speaker.
Cameras were set up to capture both the speaker and the media commenters looking at the speaker. Sitting en banc like a panel of judges, the media personalities were represented as a real-time source of expert analysis and useful commentary. Of course, that is exactly the role the mainstream media plays at a Republican convention: Judge, jury, and executioner, heavy-duty criticism. At Democrat conventions the same media people are giddy cheerleaders.
Why anyone thinks that these celebrity personalities add anything useful or valuable to the experience is beyond reckoning, except that the mainstream media have done a very good job of arranging their own roles at these conventions. The political parties do not necessarily need them there. The Republicans would do well to not have them at their conventions.
Anyhow, three distinct memories of that 2000 Philadelphia convention stand out in my head, all of them from my unique VIP security role at the entrance on to the main stage.
The first memory was NPR activist Cokie Roberts. Like all the other VIPs at that stage entrance, my job was to walk from the stage entrance and get her at the far end of the tunnel where a temporary FBI office was located in a small room. Police officers and FBI agents populated this end of the tunnel, providing heavy protection for the VIPs. From there I would then accompany her back down the tunnel to the stage entrance. Once there, the protocol was to look around and make sure everything was clear, no unpermitted people around, and then point the VIP toward their destination: the main podium, or, with Cokie Roberts, the press desk ahead and slightly off to the left.
Sharing the same physical space as Cokie Roberts is unpleasant. Her smug self-importance sucks up all the energy in the immediate vicinity. Cokie was like a saucy queen, and the air was full of expectation. I felt diminished in her presence. Yet I stayed close to her, walked her to the doorway, pointed her to the media desk, and there she sat, lips pursed, looking feline, watching her prey through slitted eyes.
OK, that is one memory.
The second memory is of that same exact location and security role. I walked Bob Dole down the tunnel to the stage entrance, looked around, and sent him out to the podium. I had never been in Dole’s immediate space before, but true to form he was clutching a pen in his damaged hand. Dole took a bit extra direction, and I had to step out onto the stage apron and take him by the elbow so that he was fully oriented toward the podium.
Dole spoke, and began walking back toward the doorway. I took a step forward and extended my hand to help him feel comfortable, and out of the corner of my right eye I saw a strange looking man slowly and very carefully edging his way toward us. I have no idea how this guy previously evaded my view, or how he even got there, given how well secured the back stage was. I am a keen hunter and my eyes miss almost nothing around me.
And yet here was this white haired but not terribly older man suddenly materializing out of nowhere and now bearing down on a frail Bob Dole. Dole was now a couple steps into the tunnel and heading back up toward the FBI office, where he would get an armed police escort to his next stop.
Like out of a movie, the white haired guy’s arm shot out toward Dole and the guy was suddenly hurtling through the air in a complete and very athletic dive towards Dole that did not match his somewhat older appearance.
Well, the old wrestler automatically took over in me, and just as the guy’s hand was about to grab Dole’s arm, literally just a few inches away, I was all over the guy. He was strong, but I was stronger, and within a couple seconds I body slammed him flat onto the concrete floor, his outstretched arm locked painfully sideways by my left arm, my legs intertwined with his and his struggling body splayed out and largely immobilized in a classic wrestling move.
The FBI guys came flying down the hallway and covered me in what is now called a dog pile. I was immediately suffocated beneath a steaming pile of heavy bodies smelling of dry cleaned suits and shoe polish. Whatever people may think about FBI agents today as a result of the corruption by Comey, McCabe, and Stzrok, those agents were super physical and aggressive. I loved it and hated it all at the same time. Loved it because the bad guy was stopped dead, hated it because I could not breathe, and then again happy to know the weird son-of-a-bitch underneath me was being turned into a pretzel by all the hands reaching around me. Within about twenty seconds I was pulled off by three FBI guys, while a uniformed cop and two other agents were cuffing the weirdo hand and foot.
The white-haired weirdo guy was trussed like a hog and quickly carried up to the FBI office. I, too, was hustled up there, pushed from behind as a wall of guys swarmed the tunnel and then pushed the weirdo and I into the little FBI room.
Once in the room, the guy was cuffed to a chair and the questions started flying. Within a minute or so he was identified as a Polish national who had a long history of stalking Bob Dole and trying to assault him, all around the world. The guy was an obsessive kook and already known to law enforcement.
I was asked my version of events, congratulated on stopping the weird guy, with one of the big Irish cops giving me a big smile and saying how much he enjoyed watching me slam the guy down so hard. A couple of the FBI agents said they didn’t know anything was amiss until they heard the guy’s body smack the concrete so hard.
During the melee just a couple feet away, Dole had shrunk back against the tunnel wall, still clutching his pen, looking scared (why not) and two agents took him by the arms and hustled him back up the tunnel. That was the last I saw of Bob Dole.
From the little FBI room, I was accompanied back down to my spot at the stage entrance, patted on the back, and instructed to stay vigilant. Hey, I was never so important before or again!
The third and last distinct memory I have of that convention also involved the VIP entrance, because it was from there that I got to watch Senator John McCain deliver an emotional speech about wanting the presidential nomination so badly, and yet being denied it.
McCain delivered an interesting and very personal speech. He had just been through hell, with the Bush team pulling a lot of dirty tricks to eventually stop McCain’s momentum late in that hard-fought primary race.
From my view at the edge of the stage, I could see in McCain’s adam’s apple a huge lump had appeared while he spoke. I actually watched it grow. I had never before seen such an enormous lump in someone’s adam’s apple. This moment was obviously much more emotional for McCain than I would have expected from such a battle-hardened candidate, and I doubt that the many TV cameras there captured it.
What that huge lump in his throat brought home to me was how heavily and personally invested McCain was in his pursuit of the presidency. As opposed to Senator Bob Dole, who had torpedoed the 1996 Republican challenge to Bill Clinton by insisting that it was “his turn” to run, despite his lack of emotion, lack of energy, lack of passion.
John McCain is now dead, and with him goes a large part of strange era in Republican politics.
Like a lot of American conservatives, I retain mixed feelings about McCain. He was good and bad. He was both patriot and sell-out, warrior against and enabler of our domestic enemies, and so on. I had supported him in 2000 and 2008, but in recent times I had really disliked the guy for his policy sell-outs. He was the fly in my policy soup.
But when I think back to that huge emotional lump in his throat at the 2000 Republican Convention, I think of a man passionate about America and his cause to protect and improve it. Whatever his reasons for taking such strangely contrarian, incongruent positions in the past couple years, McCain remains in my mind as a once-principled all-American who at one time had my strong support.
Rest in piece, Warrior McCain.
Time to primary challenge Rep. John Boehner
John Boehner used every trick, threat, and bribe possible to hold on to his role as Speaker of the US House. The man is a disaster, policy-wise. He says one thing to appease the people, then does whatever he wants to appease his political chums. That is not leadership, it is corrupt behavior, failed governance, and it is exactly everything that is wrong with politics and Washington, DC, a place I worked for seven years.
It is time that the fight was carried to Boehner directly. It is now time for a challenger to take him on in a primary race in his own district.