Keeping America safe: It’s no contest
I N ITS purest sense, politics is a contest of ideas. It’s been easy to forget that this year with celebrity candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump squaring off largely in personal terms, but the first night of the GOP convention was a reminder of the power of ideas.
The theme of “Make America Safe Again” was an umbrella for the gamut of security issues, from sealing America’s southern border to fighting terrorism, from condemning the murder of police officers to a detailed chronicling of the Benghazi attack.
The first-person presentations included parents whose children were killed by illegal immigrants and Marine corps vets who fought in Benghazi. An impressive display of diverse speakers sounded the theme of keeping Americans safe, although not all ended with every speaker hailing Trump as strong or bashing Clinton as weak.
It wasn’t necessary. The contrast was in the air, a reflection of how the two parties are reacting to the soul-shaking events erupting around the world and here at home.
Trump has lately taken to calling himself the “law and order” candidate and, like so much else this year, events are breaking in his favor. The ruthless terror slaughter in France and the coup attempt in Turkey are the foreign twins of the police assassinations in Dallas and Baton Rouge. They speak to a world spinning out of control, and a nation so bitterly divided that the Thin Blue Line now has a target on its back.
As Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, head of the House Homeland Security panel, asked, “Are you safer today than you were eight years ago?”
Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke wasted no time getting to his point, starting his passionate remarks with “Blue Lives Matter,” a line that earned a rousing ovation.
Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas promised that, under Trump, America would have a “commander in chief who calls the enemy by its name” and “enforces red lines ruthlessly.”
And Rudy Giuliani, in one of the most fiery speeches of his career, brought the crowd to its feet repeatedly with odes to the police. “What I did for New York, Donald Trump will do for America,” he pledged.
He also excoriated President Obama for failing to identify Islamic terrorists for what they are. “It is why our enemies see us as weak and vulnerable,” Giuliani said, adding Obama’s deal with Iran as another example of weakness.
Upturned noses in the liberal press echo Obama in routinely denouncing such language as “playing politics,” as if that’s a dirty and unfair game. The argument is worse than false; it’s a lie.
For one thing, Obama himself rarely misses an opportunity to lecture America on its shortcomings when he should be consoling and rallying his countrymen. That’s playing politics as he sees the game.
For another, his support for Black Lives Matter is the purest form of racial politics, although he and his media handmaidens insist he’s just preaching presidential gospel and arguing for social justice.
In fact, there is nothing wrong with “playing politics.” In a democracy, there is everything right.
It’s how we decide our nation’s priorities and decide whom we want to hire to carry them out. “Playing politics” is how we govern ourselves.
Indeed, the Democrats are planning to play their version of politics at their convention next week. The mothers of men who died at the hands of police, including New York’s Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, and Lezley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown, the teen shot and killed in Ferguson, Mo., are scheduled to speak.
That will present quite a contrast, with the Dems taking a risk of painting themselves as the anti-police party just as cops are targeted for assassination and Republicans nominate a law-and-order candidate.
It’s all politics — and it offers voters a clear choice.