House Speaker Paul Ryan is “sickened” – sickened, I tell you – by Donald Trump’s “locker room” comments. So much so that he has backed out of a Trump campaign event that he was supposed to appear at in his home state of Wisconsin.
I wonder how sickened Ryan will be by a Hillary Clinton presidency. Mrs. Clinton, after all, is also guilty of “objectiying” women, which is the main thing Trump has done that sickens the speaker. And that’s the least of Clinton’s faults as a prospective president that Ryan will have to contend with if Trump steps down, as some Republican members of Congress are now urging.
It’s not just GOP leaders that are sickened by Trump. Some members of the commentariat are also sickened by Trump’s comments from eleven years ago. Jonah Goldberg, whom I greatly admire, attacks not Trump for being “a pig” but readers who are “deluded” enough not to recognize “what a hot mess Donald Trump is.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
“If you can see that,” Goldberg writes, “but still think Hillary Clinton would be worse. Fine. Just be prepared for an endless stream of more embarrassments in your name.”
Okey doke but how about the palpable dangers of sitting on your hands while President Clinton II performs her next feat of legerdemain? Shortly after she became secretary of state, Clinton pulled off a neat trick. She engineered a reset with Russia, and — presto changeo — Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. She and her boss both sat on their hands while the Arab Spring came and went in Iran, which was really OK because Secretary Clinton had a deal with the Islamic Republic cooking on a back burner. And look how that turned out. The U.S. has lifted sanctions, returned billions in frozen funds, and enabled the theocracy’s nuclear arms production.
And don’t think for a minute that Madame President doesn’t have plans to “fix” nation here at home. Last week, she penned an op-ed for the New England Journal of Medicine, where she explained who she would rescue Obamacare by restoring the public option. And if we can believe the newly leaked transcripts of her paid speeches to banks, she will open the U.S. borders wide to all comers. Imagine how diverse — and dangerous — life in the U.S. will become.
I appreciate that some of these pols are doing this in the interets of self-preservation; they want to keep their jobs, and one way of doing that is by distancing themselves from a toxic candidate. But is that really why the American people voted them into office in the first place? This is the career they’ve chosen. I believe they should do what is best for the country … by avoiding what is worst for the country.
