“WHO ELECTED THAT GUY?!”

By Edwin Cooney

Americans have been asking the above question since George Washington packed up his stuff and went back to Mount Vernon. (No doubt a few people asked that question even during the Washington administration!)

Millions of Americans ask that question every time  President Trump brings forth another tweet. I believe that there is a very simple answer to that question and I’ll answer it via a series of presidential “whys.”

(1.) Why Franklin Roosevelt? By 1932, almost everyone was a victim of the Depression. People were losing their jobs, homes, businesses, and their hope. The homeless moved into groups of cardboard shacks called “Hoovervilles.” In the summer of ’32, Herbert Hoover sicced the Army on the bonus marchers who’d come to claim the veteran bonuses that the Congress had promised by 1945. Business, bank,  and farm failures made it likely that any opponent of President Hoover would defeat him. Roosevelt had a magic name through his Republican uncle Theodore Roosevelt and he had a plan.

(2.) Why John F. Kennedy? It was a close one between the young charismatic Kennedy and the experienced, but rather solemn Richard Nixon. The turning points of the campaign reflected the temperament of the public in 1960. The dazzlingly handsome Kennedy outshone Nixon on America’s favorite toy — television — during the first debate between the two candidates. However, the action that gave the Kennedy campaign its ultimate boost was when JFK called Mrs. Martin Luther King when Dr. King was arrested and sentenced to hard labor following a sit-in in Atlanta. Black Protestant voters in the South, but more important those in the industrial northeast where electoral votes were packed, swung their votes from Nixon to Kennedy when a judge agreed to suspend Dr. King’s sentence.

(3.) Why Richard Nixon? By the close of 1968, Richard Nixon was ultimately the most solid and cerebral presidential candidate. Chaos ruled both parties. Assassination or fear of assassination, weariness and anger over the Vietnam War, and, finally, divisiveness over the struggle for black civil rights, led a sufficient plurality of his fellow citizens to settle for the rather dour former Eisenhower Vice President. After all, the man had a plan, didn’t he?

(4.) Why Jimmy Carter? By 1976, the public was clearly tired of “insider politicians.” President Gerald Ford was honest and decent enough, but he’d rubbed shoulders with old-fashioned politicians for too long. He proved that sufficiently when he pardoned former President Nixon after promising Americans that “…their long nightmare of Watergate was over.” Jimmy Carter was smart but simple in his bearing. Carter spoke plainly promising never to lie to the American people, offering Americans a government as honest and as efficient as themselves. Besides, he was deeply religious without imposing his faith on anyone else. He was a farm boy who had become a naval officer, a nuclear physicist, a fighter for human rights, and a successful Georgia governor. Above all, he was a political outsider who would go to Washington and make a real difference. Thus he went!

(5.) Why Ronald Reagan? Reagan persuasively offered to take government “off Americans’ backs.” Both exceedingly handsome and articulate, he inspired us when he talked, entertained even while feeding us his ideology and, most of all, was a culmination of the truest and best of the past and the most promising of the present.

(6) Why Bill Clinton? President George H. W. Bush committed a horrible political “no-no.” He promised that by reading his lips we could be assured he’d never raise taxes. Then, in the Fall of 1990, he broke his word. It was a perfectly sensible move to make insofar as our needs were concerned, but it was his political Waterloo. Bill Clinton was young, good-looking, and progressive but not too progressive. He came across as a politician willing to take a risk or two if it would be good for the country. Besides, the 16 years “granted” to one political party were up. Bill Clinton was as much a boy as he was a potential president. So, America tried him on.

(7.) Why Barack Obama? The need for change was the theme of 2008 and whatever he did, young Barack Obama would be a change. Like JFK and Ronald Reagan, Obama was both handsome and articulate. He was energetic and a family man. He was academics, political practicality and intellectuality all in one rare package. After dazzling liberal Democrats and turning them away from Senator Hillary Clinton during the campaign, his ultimate success was how he handled himself during the economic crisis during the campaign. While his honorable opponent sought to sooth the national mood with standard conservative optimism, Senator Obama began publicly articulating possible solutions to the looming bank failures. Although his solutions were controversial, he gave voters in 2008 substantial issues to chew on. “He may be black,” many Americans said to themselves (privately of course!), “but he’s smart and we need smart more than anything else.”

(8.) Why Donald Trump? Americans want what they want when they want it, not when some politician vaguely promises what they want will finally happen. Donald Trump promised a lot of impatient, frustrated, self-indulgent Americans that all answers to their worries would be dealt  with through executive decisiveness. He would “drain the swamp” of business regulations, unfair trade practices, and lawlessness. Business, as every true American knows, is more efficient and moral than government. It was expected that his presidency would be better than any of his predecessors.

In case you haven’t caught on, I believe that every successful presidential candidate, in one way or another, reflects the national mood. Today, with all of our comforts and social security, we are a self-indulgent, unhappy people. We minimize all factors that challenge our assumptions and beliefs.  Even worse, we have sufficiently criminalized all political opposition to the degree that politics, which could often be dirty, is now downright squalid.

Thus we have President Donald Trump. We will continue to deserve him so long as we fail to insist that genuine and continuous freedom means legitimate choice, and that it is vitally important that we perceive and treat others as we would like to be perceived and treated ourselves.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

I’M FINALLY OFF THE FENCE!

By Edwin Cooney

I suppose it should have been a “no brainer,” but it has been an intellectual and even an emotional struggle for this observer of American history and current events…however, I’ve finally abandoned my neutrality on this most crucial national issue of gun control legislation. 

As 17-year-old David Hogg of Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida who lost fourteen of his schoolmates and three teachers on Valentine’s Day put it, “we’re children, you guys are the adults.” Sadly, we adults have been quarreling long enough so that there have been 438 casualties in American schools since the December 2012 Sandy Hook, Connecticut killings of 20 children.

Look, I want to be rational or, if you prefer, reasonable, but this latest chapter in American Tragedies is especially galling. Of course, there are reasonable debating points on both sides of our national armaments tug of war. Gun owners are right when they insist that people and not guns kill. They’re also right when they warn us that we tinker with the Second Amendment at our own peril. Third, they’re also wise to note that limiting of individual freedom, or freedoms, can be a slippery slope. However, it ought to be clear that Americans are increasingly abusing the basic right to life of innocent children, all of whom they would eloquently and fiercely be protecting if they were still in the womb. Nevertheless, it appears that once a child is born, its value is secondary to the importance of a constitutional amendment or the right of arms manufacturers to make a profit.

Let me be clear. Had I been a policeman on duty in Parkland, Florida last Wednesday, I would have gladly put some hot lead in Nikolas Cruz’s physiognomy -- or elsewhere -- to stop him from acting out his rage. With each shot, not only was he destroying others, he was devaluing his own existence. He had to be stopped.

As the result of all this, the gun control debate has shifted in my mind. Gun rights’ advocates want to make this debate about the mentally challenged and the rights of their innocent victims. President Trump seems to be prepared to cast all of those who would conduct mass shootings as “mentally ill.” (Note: for a long time I’ve regarded all murderers as being mentally ill to some degree. However, when I offer this argument as an explanation, pro death penalty supporters reject it. Now it’s a convenient argument to protect gun manufacturers against the wrath of the victims of gun abuse.) Of course, some mass murderers must be mentally ill, but it seems to me that this whole argument misses the mark. Go ahead and ban all “mentally challenged” people from buying guns. As far as I’m concerned, gun ownership ought to be a privilege rather than a right, just as the right to drive an automobile is a privilege and not a right.

The right to own guns was never a hot political issue until the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy and the subsequent assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy.  As I finally join the forces of those demanding “gun control” regulations, I assert the following:

(1.) Opponents of gun control legislation have historically been guilty of the same logic as slave owners. Specifically, slave owners defended their right to own slaves because slaves were considered property. 

(2.) Guns, of course, are indeed property, and the right to own property in the minds of most Americans is absolute. However, how you use your “property” can come into conflict with the rights of others whether that property be your fist or your gun.

(3.) As a new supporter of “gun control,” I wouldn’t confiscate anyone’s gun without due process of law, but I’d regulate the manufacture of guns.

(4.) Unless I’m missing something, I find it strange that “right-to-life advocates” generally don’t join forces with pro-gun regulation proponents. Is it likely that pro-life advocates believe that gun ownership is more precious than life itself? Can they be sure that the unborn aren’t often the victims of gun owner abuses?

(5.) The only sure way to protect school children is to have police officers in our public schools. Officers on school campuses would be much better than encouraging teachers to carry guns!

(6.) If the placement of police officers in our schools seems strange or at odds with freedom, remember that throughout the nineteenth century, United States Marshals and army installations were established all over the west to protect settlers from marauding “savages” as Native Americans were often categorized. Indian fighters were as American as Buffalo Bill!

(7.) Ask yourself, whose rights take precedence?...the security and safety of children or the unregulated rights of gun manufacturers?

(8.) To whom do Conservatives and Liberals, Republicans and Democrats primarily owe their ultimate loyalty? Is it to those who bought their offices for them or is it their living-breathing constituents?

(9.) Getting a grip on these mass shootings affects our national security even more than the rantings of Kim Jong-un.

(10.) Let’s start being the adults David Hogg in his agony pleaded for us to be! Let’s police where we ought to police and regulate where we ought to regulate!

Issues such as the workability of gun control proposals are only legitimate questions so long as responsive and responsible legislators take seriously the pain such questions cause the people. To the degree that they remain unresolved, they are mere political fodder. 

Let us regulate gun usage and the behavior of the people will surely follow!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY