Tuesday, June 19, 2018

At Any Cost

It was in Billings, Montana on May 26th, 2016, when the President promised:

“We’re going to win. We’re going to win so much. We’re going to win at trade, we’re going to win at the border. We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning, you’re going to come to me and go ‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore.’ You’ve heard this one. You’ll say ‘Please, Mr. President, we beg you sir, we don’t want to win anymore. It’s too much. It’s not fair to everybody else.’”  

Intractable problems can be solved by moderates . . . or bullies!  Thanks to gerrymandering, there are not enough moderates in Congress to solve the immigration problem.  Maybe, we do need a bully?

I recall the logic of another president, who concluded it was better to kill a hundred thousand Japanese than to lose another ten thousand Americans.  Maybe, emotional scarring ten thousand brown kids is a small price to pay for making the President a "WINNER?"

That definitely would NOT make me feel like a winner.  John McCain is one of my personal heroes, and he described Trump's policy of separating kids from illegal aliens as "an affront to decency."  

Is "winning" really that important?  Who wants to win, if this is what you have to do?  What kind of ego demands "winning" at any cost?  Is the Wall really worth sacrificing our decency to get it?  

That is too high a price for solving even an intractable problem.