Absence of Honor – Enter the Politician
It can almost be universally accepted that the lowest form of human beings, when measured in terms of sheer honesty, is the politician. Let’s face it. A politician not only has an arm’s distance relationship with the truth, but lives in a universe where “truth” is defined as whatever is said which serves the purpose of the moment. Without truth, real truth, honor cannot and must not exist.
For instance, in an institution of learning which has an “honor code,” honesty and fealty to the truth is pre-eminent in the purpose and execution of such an honor code. Errant students have long forsaken continued attendance in such schools as the price of adherence to the honor code- a code which is as alien to our nation’s capital as, well, a businessman who enters a political campaign for the first time, only to be elected president of the United States.
Take for instance that man, President Donald J. Trump.
Having met last Tuesday with a bi-partisan group of legislators, and surprising all assembled as well as the media, the president decided to air the first hour of that meeting on camera. He reached out to members of both parties asking them to work together to bring forth a solution to the DACA issue regarding continued status of the so-called “dreamers,” brought into this country by illegal alien parents during the past decade and before. President Trump challenged those gathered, including Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Diane Feinstein (D-CA), along with a smattering of leaders of both parties and houses of Congress, to come up with a bi-partisan solution that included basic tenets of rescinding immigration via lottery, ending “chain” migration, which allows tangential flow of family relatives well beyond the individual selected in such lottery, and financial commitment to enhancing border security- security which includes construction of a wall along parts of the U.S./Mexico border.
Within forty-eight hours, a self-appointed sextet of senators, including Corey Gardiner(R-CO), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Bob Menendez(D-NJ), notable anti-Trump Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), along with Graham and Durbin, requested a “closed-door and confidential” meeting with the president, to discuss a proposal claiming to include all or the four elements which the president laid out. Also present at the meeting were Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and David Perdue (R-GA), much to the surprise of the self-appointed six. In short, the proposal they proffered was essentially a sham, which addressed none of these pre-requisites, but was nevertheless brought forth in an attempt to trick the president into approving. When the president recognized the obvious attempt to be flimflammed by the proposal, he bristled at the submission and things got testy between him and the six senators who requested this “closed-door and confidential” meeting.
Almost immediately after the meeting, it was Senator Durbin who said that Trump disparaged Haiti and several African nations, referring to them as “shitholes,” and that the president wondered why we have to take immigrants from those countries, as opposed to Norway whose prime minister Trump had met with, just before. Later, Senator Graham reportedly told his fellow Senator from South Carolina, Tim Scott (R-SC) that Trump made the same reference, and that he “got into the face” of the president regarding the reference. Amazingly, the two senators who were there (Cotton and Perdue) and who were not part of the “gang of six” did not recall such a reference by the president in the first place. Regardless, the die was cast to sabotage further DACA negotiations, under the guise that the president is obviously a “racist,” and the media was oh-so-delighted to jump on that bandwagon. Following a ceremony on Friday where President Trump signed an executive order to change the Martin Luther King, Jr. Birthplace National Landmark into a national park (substantially expanding the Atlanta site), at least one reporter repeatedly shouted, “Mr. President, are you a racist?”
Well, that only goes to show that the only thing lower than a politician on the honor scale is a politicized “journalist,” but we digress…
Regardless of whether or not Trump used the term to describe those nations whose immigration thresholds would have been expanded by the gang of six proposal, the point is that when the president declined to accept the proposal, the “closed-door and confidential” nature of the meeting was betrayed by the very senators who had requested such confidentiality in the first place- in essence, a failure of honor.
Then we have the House Minority Leader and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), referring to five of the six senators as “the five white guys” who should open a hamburger stand in an obvious reference to the east coast Five Guys hamburger restaurant chain… “Five White Guys,” and who is being racist?
All of this took place in the same week that Diane Feinstein (D-CA) leaked the entire closed-door testimony of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, a key figure in the fake Trump dossier which was used by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants to surveil the Trump campaign in 2016. Feinstein did this in spite of her pledge to consult her ranking counterpart on the investigative committee, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), before such release. She didn’t keep her word to Grassley and released the full transcript of closed-door testimony, later claiming that it was a head cold which had caused a momentary lapse in her mental faculties.
Wasn’t it just last week that President Trump’s own mental faculties were the ones being called into question by his political opponents?
A good idea would be for the president to air more of these bi-partisan outreach meetings, if for no other reason so that these damnable politicians can go on record for a change.
A better idea would be to record such meetings so that the veracity of claims following such meetings can be substantiated, without the filter of a complicit media bent on the destruction of a U.S. presidency.
The best idea would be to institute a code of honor on the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., but now who is the dreamer?
-Drew Nickell, 13 January 2018
© 2018 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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