My Parents fled Communism in 1941 under a Stalin death sentence and survived Hitler’s National Socialism by stealth. A year before, the Communists summarily executed my Uncle in the streets of Bucharest, and my Grandmother was imprisoned in a Siberian gulag for 13 years. Those life experiences have made me permanently and genetically allergic to socialist ideology. The Woke Politics remind me too much of what my family endured under the various flavors of Socialism. We have not taken the middle of the road as Biden promised but have taken a sharp left turn for the last two years. Biden and the “Squad” have shown themselves to have decidedly failed this country as I feared. The inflation, a looming recession, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the rise in crime, and the Covid-19 pandemic have not been handled with the results we were promised. I doubt we would have seen people falling off the evacuation planes in Kabul. We cannot sustain the steady influx of thousands of unregulated immigrants on our southern border. I do not think Biden knows how to deal with Putin. What happened to bringing the country together? The energy debacle alone and the gasoline prices are enough to prove the point. The 8.6% percent inflation rate results from a weak President who has been pulled further left by Bolshevik Bernie and the “Squad.” If the Keystone pipeline had been completed and none of our oilfields shut down, gasoline would not be $6.00 a gallon. We could supply oil to Europe, and we would not have to beg Venezuela or the murderer, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to give us more oil.
For a few years, I was in the Trump camp. His foreign policy with China, his economics, and his disdain for over-regulation was in alignment with mine. I was concerned about his praises for Putin and did not think we should abandon Europe or NATO. He was a President that had performed well enough up to the election, but then he had a severe mental lapse on January 6th. I cannot ignore what I saw with my own eyes. While Rome was burning, the President appears to have been fiddling. This was instigated and fueled by him with numerous testimonies from the right and the left. His Vice President refused to follow the illegal order to stop the Electoral College vote count. This opinion was backed by multiple Constitutional lawyers, including the former Vice President under George Herbert Bush, Dan Quale, who told him not to break the law. Furthermore, Trump’s attorney told him he could not reverse the vote. He said the Supreme Court would go against him 9 to 0 if he tried. Even his daughter, Ivanka, testified that he knew his actions were illegal. His Attorney General, Bill Barr, told him that he was not connected to reality. Despite his advisers telling him that he lost the election, despite the political leaders on both sides of the aisle trying to convince him that he lost, he persisted in claiming that he had won and was the rightful President. Prominent right-wing TV commentators, even family members, were frantically calling him to stand down and call back the rioters. Again he did not listen. Seven people died in this foolish effort. Sixty (60) lawsuits against the election results were either dismissed or lost. Many of those were under Trump-appointed judges. And the bags of fraudulent ballots never materialized. January 6th cannot be called anything else but an insurrection. I could no longer be a Trumpublican and had to join the other RINO’s, and now need to worry about all the RINO hunters with their AR-15s out there.
However, now, I am not sure if, indeed, I still qualify as a RINO. I consider myself pro-life, but logic dictates that there must be an existing life for which to be pro. For eight hundred years, the church was influenced by the three “Super Saints,” St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Thomas Aquinas, who all opined that personhood occurred at the time of quickening (when the mother feels movement), in alignment with the other world religions of Islam and Judaism that life could not be taken if no independent life existed. Then along came Pope Pius IX in 1869, who, now under trumped-up divine inspiration (pun intended), changed the assumption that life begins when sperm and egg meet. As a scientist who believes in logic and everything I have learned in embryology and medicine, it seemed a bit farcical to me that two cells constitute a person. I liked what the “Super Saints” said better. After all, do precedents not count anymore? And that was 800 years worth. And did someone forget to bring a dictionary for the Supreme Court Justices to look up the meaning of “Stare Decisis”? My short stint as an Altar Boy did make an impression on me, after all.
To add more controversy to my thoughts, I am forced to agree with Mitch McConnell regarding the background checks and red flag laws to keep guns away from the crazy people. I just hope it works.
Since I still believe that I am conservative by nature, I continue to have a lot of the party’s mascot, the elephant, in me, but now with RINO influences showing through at the rear. I think I have become an ELMO (an Elephant with a modicum of RINO butt).