The Tears of a Clown

The Tears of a Clown

The year was 1970, and while we were all of eleven years old, America was enjoying Smokey Robinson and the Miracles new hit, “The Tears of a Clown.” Although it has been many a year since the song was last heard, it instantly came to mind when the news video caught Senator Charles “Chuck” Schumer (D-NY), arguably the most powerful Democrat official since the recent departure of former President Barack Obama from the White House, getting all choked up with tears on the plight of travelers being denied entry into the United States. Saying that President Trump’s momentary, 120-day stay on entry visas, for travelers originating from seven countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, the Sudan and Yemen), was “mean-spirited and un-American,” the Senate Minority Leader even evoked the imagery of tears running down the face of the Statue of Liberty, further recalling an uncle who was named “Ellis” for Ellis Island.

Where were the tears from Senator Schumer when the massacre in San Bernardino took place? Where were the tears from Senator Schumer when the massacre in the Orlando night club took place? Where were his tears when Nidal Hassan took many lives in the Fort Hood massacre? Or for the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have lost their lives since President Barack Obama bailed on his own “line in the sand” regarding chemical weapons?

Are we to believe that the inconvenience posed to 109 travelers inconvenienced by Trump’s executive order are worthy of the tears of a U.S. Senator, who was curiously silent when Barack Obama refused entry to ninety-seven Cuban refugees in one of his last acts as president?  Or when President Obama ordered such a temporary ban on Iraqi refugees in 2009, (following the discovery of two ISIS fighters who slipped past the borders and were living in Kentucky)?

Talk about the tears of a clown!

Whether Senator Schumer’s tears were theatrical, as President Trump has suggested, or genuine, is beside the point. Our guess is that the real source of Schumer’s tears has nothing to do with international travelers and everything to do with the fact that, once he has ultimately failed to stop President Trump from getting the cabinet he named, and once the President gets his nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, Schumer’s ability to effect policy will evaporate into thin air- and the senior Senator from New York knows this. Given an overwhelming Republican majority in the House, and a simple but ultimately impenetrable majority in the Senate, there is nary a way for Democrats to keep the new president from pursuing the agenda of his candidacy- and Senator Schumer’s tears are more about this, than anything else.

Further, if this is the best that the Democrats can offer as opposition to Trump and the Republicans (assuming they don’t backslide), the die has been cast on Donald Trump’s re-election in four years, and a continued erosion of Democrat seats in both houses of Congress.

Then again, why should the Democrats have such tearful angst about their own demise? After all, a third of their caucus in the House didn’t even show up for work on the day in which their nemesis, Donald J. Trump, was inaugurated as the forty-fifth President of the United States. Further, even more of these same Democrats have sworn not to be co-operative, in any way, to participate in the further functioning of government in our blessed republic…

…and in this regard, they’re all clowns.

 

-Drew Nickell, 31 January 2017

© 2017 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

http://www.drewnickell.com

Follow my postings on the RSS feed: http://www.drewnickell.com/?feed=rss2