When discussing politics, the participants usually mislabel liars as partisans and bipartisanship as truth. Being a partisan does not mean you cannot recognize and acknowledge the truth. Straddling the middle line gets you hit from both sides. Most people are on a glide path to enlightenment that comes with age and maturity. At 17, I was waiting for Gil-Scott Heron’s revolution, which would not be televised. A few years later, I better understood nuance and poetic license. Over the years, my liberalism has been tempered by reality, but my overall sense of injustice remains “militant.” Having said all that, it will surprise some that I am praising Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford. Seldom, if ever, have I agreed with the ultra-conservative politics of Senator Lankford. Along with Mitt Romney and a few other Republicans willing to risk the wrath of MAGA, Lankford succumbed to the truth.
Since the day President Joe Biden took office, the GOP has warned of “vermin” and “invasion” at the southern border. Most of all, they scream from the top of every unconstructed mile of wall that we are in a “border crisis.” His home state’s legislature recently censured Sen. Lankford for the unpardonable sin of working with Democrats to solve what his party says is a crisis. Mr. Lankford is making the rounds on the cable networks, dispelling rumors he said resulted from people getting their information from social media. Lankford intimated that his party's titular leader [Donald Trump] does not know what he is talking about because he has not read the bill. “Well, I'm looking forward to President Trump having the opportunity to be able to read it like everybody else. There's a lot of misinformation right now that I hear this comment that it waives in 5,000 people, it hands out work permits that- all those things are not true,”Lankford told CBS Margaret Brennan last Sunday.
The danger of living life on the edge of the next lie is an accelerated fall into fascism. After the election of former President Barack Obama, Republicans tried to scare us every day by talking about a terror attack, mainly because the secret Muslim president was a Manchurian candidate. When asked about the most significant terror attack in the country’s history—when his predecessor was in office, Republicans would say well, except for that [one]time George W. Bush kept us safe. Obama was called weak and an appeaser for not starting a war over an imaginary red-line remark he made about Syria that eventually proved to be a success.
Currently, President Biden is being lambasted by Republicans—who have never seen a war they did not like because they want vengeance over common strategic sense. President Biden did not stand in a graveyard of rubble and make the glorious promise, “I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you,”said Bush. “And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” Instead, Biden is being measured, hoping to remind America how fraught rushing to judgment can be while infuriating the GOP. Compare that to the relatively tepid response by Republicans during the Reagan administration after the bombing of a barracks housing a Multinational Force in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 Marines in 1983.
Sadly, Republicans have convenient amnesia, ignoring the bombing and brain injuries to U.S. soldiers in Anbar province in retaliation for Trump’s orders to kill Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. Trump was campaigning for reelection and wanted an Osama bin Laden notch on his belt and divert attention from an upcoming Senate Impeachment trial. Trump’s claims that the soldiers were unharmed and just had headaches, which later proved to be brain injuries, were not only disrespectful but grossly incompetent. The attack on Anbar was revenge for the killing of Soleimani.The best way to keep our children and grandchildren from fighting another senseless war is to keep the White House away from a man who views them as “suckers and losers.”
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