By Edwin Cooney
As
those of you who regularly read these pages know, I’m an unapologetic Barack
Obama man! He’d be my candidate in 2016,
even with his imperfections, were he eligible for re-election. As I see it, his accomplishments, fundamental
in nature, far outweigh his misjudgments and his mistakes.
Like
most of my fellow citizens, I’m not looking for an idealist as much as I’m
looking for a problem solver. The fundamental
problem with our national leadership today is that it is so wrapped up in
political ideology, that it has lost touch with what the people worry about
most. Hence, the political path to 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. is wide open to candidates such as
Donald J. Trump and Dr. Ben Carson. Here
are the problems and solutions my candidate will tackle and apply once in the
White House.
Let’s
begin with ISIL. We have two legitimate
concerns in the Middle East. The first concern
is the safety and security of the state of Israel. The continuous availability of oil is the
second. ISIL is an international problem,
not merely an American problem.
President Obama is right about that!
My candidate will insist that we reassure Israel that anyone who seeks
to “push her into the sea” will be so pushed by us. At the same time, Israel needs to start
living up to her faith and be treating Palestinian refugees the way she knows
in her heart that they ought to be treated.
As for ISIL, my candidate will keep American troops out of the area and
act, as FDR once did for a time, as the arsenal of Democracy. More to the point, let “bad Vlad Putin”
handle ISIL. A number of Muslims in the
former Soviet Republics have more scores to settle with Mr. Putin and his
warmed-over Communism than they do with us.
As Teddy Roosevelt suggested long ago, Americans ought to “…speak softly
and carry a big stick.”
Here
at home, the problem of gun ownership is going from bad to worse. Let’s stop fooling around with gun
ownership. Let anyone who wants to own a
gun own one. However, let’s start
treating the ownership of guns as we do the ownership of cigarettes and tobacco
products and tax the hell out of their sales.
How about a one thousand dollar tax on every handgun and a five thousand
dollar tax on every rifle and shotgun?
What will be interesting to watch is the response many conservatives
have to such a proposal. After all, many
of those same conservatives joined liberals in support of banning public smoking. If public smoking is dangerous, isn’t public
gunfire downright catastrophic?
The
issue of immigration is largely an educational one. Most Americans don’t distinguish between
immigrants and refugees (although they should).
Even worse, too many Americans apply religious tests depending on the
color and culture of the immigrant or of the refugee. Historically, Muslims aren’t any more
dangerous to our unity and security than Baptists. (In case you want to look it up, the gravest
historical threat to our national unity was not led by Muslims. The Confederate
States of America was led by Protestants who demonstrated in more ways than one
that they were more Confederate than they were religious.) Even more to the point, I don’t recall any demand
to deny the admission of Protestants or Catholics to the United States during
the Irish/British terrorism of the 1970s through the 1990s. My candidate will recognize that ISIL is a
gang of international criminals. He/she
will work to dampen down the public fears rather than exploiting them as we have
seen just lately.
As
for national healthcare, it’s time that we institute a full single payer system
as they have in Europe. No one should be
denied medical care because they can’t afford it. If we are willing to pay for weapons systems
we will never need, as we have in the past, it is downright immoral not to pay
for medical assistance even for the least of us. Come to think of it, I never heard a
political advocate of a strong national defense assert that the poorest and
weakest among us shouldn’t be protected by the B-1 bomber or the MX missile.
So, if it is legitimate to protect the poorest or least productive of us from
foreign nuclear destruction, why isn’t it equally both moral and essential to
protect the least of us from catastrophic illness?
There
you have a taste of my ideal candidate’s approach to issues both domestic and
foreign. Now, where might I find that
candidate?
I
looked under my bed this morning and he/she wasn’t there! Who might that candidate be?
Perhaps
it ought to be you!
RESPECTFULLY
SUBMITTED,
EDWIN
COONEY
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