A suggestion: post a link to this, or send it, to your Republican friends.
Before I start let me explain I’m not just another pundit seeking your total demise, or pretending to “care” about your party, give you fake “good” advice. In fact I tend to find that offensive when pundits like Limbaugh and Maddow attempt to do it. Why should the left or the right accept anything like that without at least some healthy skepticism?
They shouldn’t. And I would be disappointed if you responded that way to my suggestions.
What are my credentials? At 10 years old I worked on Goldwater’s campaign. By 14 I was working on campaigns for the Conservative Party in Rockland County and meeting; along with other in party campaign planners and workers, with Richard Nixon in Westchester County. We were supposed to actually sit with him and plan strategy, but for some reason he basically gave a talk then left. I’m not sure why.
By the 70s I had left the NYC area and moved to the Adirondacks. But I still voted Nixon, though I was starting to have some doubts. This column started in 72 because I had found Bill Buckley inspirational. Inspection started as my college version of his column.
During the late 70s I started to shift more to the left. Why? If you want to know that would take another column: an edition I have written many times before. If you want to know please ask me to write it again, or ask me directly via Facebook, or via comments on any of the sites where this column appears. You will probably need to register to make comments.
Republicans, and Conservatives, you have a decision to make. If you wish to stick with Donald Trump that, of course, is your choice. Increasingly it’s looking like a bad one. We shall see. But if you have your doubts about him, if you find his behavior increasingly un-presidential, dangerous to the nation, to world peace, the very nature of a free, representative, society, then, yes, you have a decision to make.
Now what?
The Nixon example is revealing. If those who think this will all work out are wrong, and you wait to deal with this, the more horrific the devastation will be to your party. Think loss of power for many years. A major image overhaul will needed, and as difficult a venture as that was after Nixon resigned this would probably be harder.
Other options?
You know, despite how damaging it would be these days to those with more leftward visions and their goals, the easiest path: IF it can be done, would be to have those close to him convince Trump to go back to the private sector. Convince him to tell the nation: perhaps in his address to Congress next year, that he has “put the nation back on the path to being “great again,” and will put it all into the capable hands of Mike Pence. He wants to go back to what he “knows” he “does best:” being a business man.
You know he really does, right? He can even add his trademark-able catch phrase, “Beh-leave-meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” Hey, lefties, doesn’t matter if you disagree with that. Stop laughing! You’ve got to know how appealing that might be to him.
Would the president actually do that? Yeah, I’m skeptical too. But, if possible, it’s the easiest path to retaining power. Pence would be more capable of fulfilling your every political wet dream. He also will have 3 years to heal wounds, if any, and prepare for 2020, and at least some lead time into 2018.
Do I want that? No. Not the point.
Look at it this way: if this needs to happen if you lose Trump you have Pence, if you wait too long and Pence becomes problematic, you have Ryan. If you wait until it gets all Nixon-ian then, at best, it gets Jimmy Carter-like or maybe even FDR. If you’ve read any of the more political editions of this column you know the longer you wait the happier many of my regular readers would be. But, again, those preferences aren’t the point here.
All the legal mentally unable/unstable options are worse, but better than waiting for that final flight out where, “You won’t have (Trump) to kick around anymore.” If we wait until 2018 and you do lose, the bigger the loss the more likely a successful impeachment would be, and it could end up being the first successful one in our history when it comes to removal.
Yes: impeachment is a political act. It’s also, society-wise and politically somewhat suicidal. It’s better to let the voters decide; if at all possible.
There are a lot of options between a quiet passage of power with a president leaving, proudly, claiming his work is done, and impeachment. Forced removal is obviously worse. How bad? Well, that depends on how soon and how “forced.”
This is where we are today. If you truly think Donald Trump will be successful to the point of settling most of this and leaving leftists in history’s garbage pit, either satisfying the increasing number of Republicans pols are disgusted with his behavior, or also dumping them into that same pit, have at it. I think that bar is so damn high you’re living in a La La Land, or if successful the end result would be more dictatorship than free. But, hey, as my grandfather used to say, “I could be wrong. I was… once.”
Either way you have reached Robert Frost’s diverging road in the woods. My last suggestion is to remind you: the clock is ticking, so decided you must, please choose as wisely, as honestly, as you can. Whatever the end result, your political future is at stake: more than perhaps ever before in recent history; more than even in the 70s. We live in an era now that will be decisive for a long, long time. And what may seem damn convenient now historically has a tendency to be worse than damn inconvenient later.
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Inspection is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 40 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks, and into the unseen cracks and crevasses, that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.
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Ken Carman and Cartenual Productions
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