RUTHFULLY YOURS

The ideological crack-up between Left and Right was readily apparent when thousands of students marched against guns – guns that killed 17 Florida students in a violence that would awaken passion in even the most cold blooded. What it means, however, is seemingly less significant than the symbolism. Educators and politicians who should know better encouraged students to engage in protests. Mayor De Blasio in New York said students would not be punished if they left their desks to participate in the rallies.

Surely press notices and most spokesmen congratulated the students on their public consciousness. Yet for anyone observing this event without an ideological lens, you might ask what was going on. Students were demonstrating against guns, and the NRA was generally the target, but what was the legislative goal, a modification in the Second Amendment? Guns can kill, but so can knives. A gun in the hands of St. Francis is not a weapon. Therefore, the gun owner is the critical factor in this equation. All parties agree that a person with mental illness should not have a gun. All parties agree that criminals should not be able to obtain guns. Surely on those matters alone consensus can be achieved. But this is not the real issue.

These demonstrations are actually the full-throated anger of the Left organized in large part by instructors who are manipulating students during this period of grief and rage. Suppose, for the sake of argument instructors were to call for a national rally to protest abortions and the one million fetuses killed each year. Would there be any response?

“He is a forthright man of peace who understand the dangers of pacifism in a world where evil is rife. He would applaud, and rightly, the Roman military historian Vegetius: si vis pacem, para bellum: ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’.

The hysteria from the Left over Donald Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as National Security Advisor to replace Lt. General H. R. McMaster has been partly hilarious, partly alarming to behold. From The Guardian in this country to The New York Times, CNN, Slate, Salon, and beyond in the United States, we are presented with a scarecrow figure who makes Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove look like Albert Schweitzer after a nap. ‘Yes’, screamed an editorial in The New York Times, ‘John Bolton Really Is That Dangerous’. Bolton is a ‘hawk’s hawk’, an ‘extreme ideologue’ and ‘warmonger’ whose appointment ‘scares people’ and ‘puts us on a path to war’. Adds Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, ‘and it’s fair to say [sure it is, Fred] that President Donald Trump wants us on that path’. In short, ‘the time to panic is now’. Argh!!!

Hysteria has its pleasures. But if we step outside the echo chamber of this feverish anti-Trump mad house, we soon discover that John Bolton is not the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. On the contrary, he is an informed and thoughtful commentator on international affairs. The over-caffeinated chihuahuas yapping at his heels are in a panic because he doesn’t like the ‘deal’ (what some of us would describe as the craven capitulation) that Barack Obama made with Iran over its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Obama shovelled more than a billion dollars in cash to the Mullahs and said in effect ‘pretty please do not make any nuclear bombs’. The New York Times, in one of its excoriations of John Bolton, wrote that ‘The Iran deal has substantially halted the nuclear program and needs to be maintained’. But anyone not blinded by ideology knows that the third thing the Iranian leaders do each morning, after proclaiming ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Death to America’, is to chivvy their scientists to get on with their work making a bomb with which to obliterate the Zionist entity and threaten the Great Satan.

Some years ago, I wrote a column about adultery and politicians. In light of the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal interviews concerning their alleged (and probable) affairs with President Donald Trump, it is time to revisit the subject.

I do not agree with those—Right or Left, religious or secular—who contend that adultery invalidates a political or social leader. It may invalidate a pastor, priest or rabbi—because a major part of their vocation is to be a moral/religious model, and because clergy do not make war, sign national budgets, appoint judges, run foreign policy or serve as commanders in chief. In other words, unlike your clergyman or clergywoman, almost everything a president does as president affects hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of non-Americans. If a president is also a moral model, that is a wonderful bonus. But that is not part of a president’s job description.

But even anti-Trump conservatives still assert character matters a great deal in a president and other political leaders.

There are two problems with that argument.

The most obvious is that adultery is frequently an inaccurate measure of a person’s character. Indeed, many otherwise great men have been unfaithful to their spouse. And while it is always a sin—the Sixth Commandment doesn’t come with an asterisk—there are gradations of sin.

Last Saturday hundreds of thousands of high schoolers gathered across the country in a “March for Our Lives” rally. Organized and financed by anti-gun nuts and other left-wing outfits, and ornamented with Hollywood celebrities like George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey, the spectacle was filled with the emotional exhibitionism and juvenile policy recommendations one would expect from the most pampered and worst-educated cohort of young people in American history––the perfect shock troops for progressive propaganda.

Progressivism, like its totalitarian cousins, is an ideology of melodrama and moral exhibitionism. The complexity and mystery of a flawed human nature and its actions are reduced to Lenin’s simple analysis: “Who, whom.” In the fight between righteousness and evil, who will win, the oppressor or his victim? The revolutionary is strengthened by his perceived own moral superiority, his certainty that he on the side of history’s angels. After all, he is struggling for the brave new world: heaven on earth, the utopia of radical equality and social justice, and the final banishment of misery and oppression. In such a cosmic battle, who has time for critical thought or empirical evidence?

This leftist melodrama has always been attractive for the callow young, as the hinge-year 1968 showed. Teenagers are prone to grandiose self-regard, impulsive behavior, and a preference for feeling rather than thinking. They are attracted to sentimentalism and melodrama, the emotion that validates their inflated egos rather than the thought that challenges their exaggerated self-importance.