Donald’s Diagnosis: Pede in Ostium, Sensit et Phantasticum, sed in Fine, Falsum Periculo
It happens to every candidate, in every election cycle. Put on the spot, candidates suffer from a malady, medically known as “pede in ostium,” what we call “placing one’s foot in one’s mouth.”
In 1976, when giving an interview to Playboy magazine, then-Governor Jimmy Carter said that he “lusted after women” in his heart, when the magazine openly challenged his born again, evangelical credentials. Women supporting Carter’s campaign took this misstep as a momentary lapse, but clearly it was his wife, Rosalynn, who took him to task about this faux pas. Luckily for Carter, he was a Democrat, so the media granted him much leeway for this error. Later, Carter went on to defeat incumbent President Gerald Ford in the general election.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan was preparing his weekly radio address on NPR, while he was running for his own re-election. In a sound check, prior to the broadcast, Reagan quipped,
“My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
Everyone who was on-hand knew that Reagan was making a joke, but the talking heads in the media, fully in the tank for his opponent, Walter Mondale (D-MN) who had been Carter’s Vice-President, made a lot of hay about Reagan being a “dangerous war-monger” who was supposedly clueless about the nuances of international diplomacy. The effort worked to the extent that later, that fall, Mondale was able to defeat Reagan…that is, in his own home state of Minnesota, and nowhere else. That year, Reagan won an historic landslide, defeating Mondale in forty-nine states- a feat that has never been equaled.
This week, under an aggressive, over-the-top, verbal inquisition on the part of the extremely and liberally-biased Chris Matthews of MsNBC News- the same Chris Matthews who once said that “he got a chill up his leg” when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, Donald Trump tripped and fell badly, saying “yes” to a question that, in a hypothetical world where all abortion was made illegal (which is never going to happen, by the way), that women would have to face legal consequences for having an abortion. Later, Trump walked that one back saying that, in such a scenario, it would be the doctor, and not the woman, who would face such consequences.
Not that it would matter in a world where conservative and mainstream Republicans have found common cause with liberals and Democrats, and all of the news networks, in seizing on any and every opportunity they can find to stop Donald Trump from being elected president. Fox News, which has this week spent ten minutes of every morning’s broadcast giving one Jillian Turner an opportunity to place Trump’s picture on a negative chalk board on issues of national security, has gone so far as to insert itself in the anti-Trump campaign. Turner, an operative who once worked in the White House National Security Council under Presidents Bush and Obama, has unloaded on Trump to a degree that none of the other candidates, Democrat or Republican, have had to endure. Her hatred of Donald Trump is so obviously intense, that her over-the-top criticism of this one candidate has marginalized her own credibility and, in so doing, that of the Fox News network, in an area where she (and they) otherwise might have such credentials.
For his own part, Matthews has accomplished his assignment from the Hillary 2016 campaign- to frame “the Donald” as a hater of women and given Hillary all of the ammo she needs to make this fall’s election a referendum on the “Republican War on Women.”
Now anybody and everybody, conservative and liberal alike, who can only agree on their hatred of Trump, are going around with the mantra “Trump is too dangerous to be president.”
Really? Is Trump more dangerous than a woman who would illegally set up a private server to cloak her selling of favors, vis-à-vis the Clinton Foundation, and thus allowing foreign governments to hack into top secret communiques, while she was Secretary of State? More dangerous than an admitted socialist who, if elected, would destroy the nation’s economy by taxing private business out of business, and render hundreds of millions unemployed, as a result? More dangerous than a sitting president who, through his own feckless and impotent foreign policy, has thus created an global environment that has given birth to ISIS, and given Iran both cover and treasure to enable that regime to develop a nuclear weapon?
Perhaps Donald Trump’s ailment of “pede in ostium” is a danger, but only to an extent that he imperils his own candidacy, and not the country. There are two types of danger. A real danger, such as ISIS acquiring a nuclear weapon, is what is called in Latin, “periculum.” Yet, there is also “sensit et phantasticum, sed in fine, falsum periculo,” which is a perceived, imaginary but, in the end, false danger. Such is the case with “the Donald’s” tendency to place his foot into his own mouth. At the end of the day, however, Trump is a capitalist first and foremost- far less dangerous to America than a socialist of any stripe.
-Drew Nickell, 1 April 2016
© 2016 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.