Posted on 01/30/2016 5:29:18 AM PST by Kaslin
Of all the many things said about Donald Trump, what was said by Roger Ailes, head of the Fox News Channel, said it all in just two words: "Grow up!"
It is amazing how many people have been oblivious to this middle-aged man's spoiled brat behavior, his childish boastfulness about things he says he is going to do, and his petulant response to every criticism with ad hominem replies.
He has boasted that his followers would stick by him even if he committed murder. But is that something to boast about? Is it not an insult to his followers, if it is true? Moreover, his cockiness is misplaced, because he still does not have a majority among Republican voters, while you need a majority of all the voters to win any state in the general election.
Trump has a showman's talent for telling people what they want to hear. But you can listen in vain for a coherent argument from him, based on facts and logic, much less an understanding of the inherent limitations of the office of president.
More than two centuries ago, Edmund Burke said: "Constitute government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of the powers which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of ministers of state."
In other words, the personal character of the people to whom you entrust the powers of government matters even more than what kinds of government institutions there are. There have been some good kings and some bad presidents, as well as vice versa.
In a world where the future of this country is threatened from within by increasingly angry polarization, and where external threats can become nuclear, are we really going to entrust the safety or this country to a man who still needs to grow up?
Is the fact that he loudly expressed our own disgust with the political establishment a sufficient reason to gamble the whole future of the country by putting him in the White House?
The White House is not a place for on-the-job training. You are supposed to be ready, or at the very least grown up, before you walk in the door. Aging happens automatically, but maturity is optional -- and it is an option that Donald Trump has not yet chosen to exercise.
The issue that Trump raised about Ted Cruz's having been born in Canada is not the first time he has tried to challenge where someone was born. "The Donald" was among those who tried to say that Barack Obama was not born an American citizen, and who disgraced themselves, while undermining other critics of Obama who had serious objections to his policies.
On the other hand, messianic demagogues have often spoken at least part of the truth. But they have also often led their followers to their doom, whether at Jonestown, Stalingrad or innumerable other places. That is a very high price to pay for an exhilaration of the moment.
Donald Trump is not the only one who needs to act like an adult. With this country starting to unravel from within, while ruthless enemies overseas are developing both nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles to deliver them, we face problems that cannot be solved by candidates with glib words or by voters who vote for whoever meets their emotional needs.
If you don't understand the issues, but want to do your patriotic duty, then stay home on election night, whether in the primaries or in the national election in November. Uninformed voters turn elections into a game of playing Russian roulette with the future of America.
Conservative candidates will also have an opportunity to show their maturity and their patriotism. This is not the first primary season in which the conservative vote has been split among so many Republican candidates that it virtually guarantees that someone who is not a conservative will win the Republican nomination.
At some point during the primary season, it becomes clear that some candidates have no real chance of winning the nomination, much less the general election. At that point they can either continue hanging on, keeping the conservative vote split, or they can withdraw and throw their support to some other conservative candidate who has a chance.
A lot of people need to grow up, and to do something for this country that has done so much for them.
Seriously ? Are you 12 years old ?
I suspect Sowell have more intellect in his pinkie finger than you were born with...
You may disagree with his opinion in this article, but maybe if you read Sowell writings for about 20 years like I have, your Trump like response would be more tempered...
The man has been exposing liberals/ progressive lies and demagoguery for a long time...
I’d like to see your brother debating Thomas Sowell. :)
If you think he is taking a pay cut he has YOU duped
He’d actually be a decent match, but his respect for him would likely keep him from doing an actual debate.
Count on the press to lie to you, consistently.
I had this as a tagline for quite a while: “It has gotten to the point that any report from a mainstream news source must be fact-checked.”
My bad, but you should have sent him a PM if it was a secret message meant only for his eyes.
I’m in Sowell’s corner here.
Sowell has always been measured and fair
Always
-—punk azz thug-—
Thomas Sowell was born in North Carolina and grew up in Harlem. As with many others in his neighborhood, Thomas Sowell left home early and did not finish high school. The next few years were difficult ones, but eventually he joined the Marine Corps and became a photographer in the Korean War. After leaving the service, Thomas Sowell entered Harvard University, worked a part-time job as a photographer and studied the science that would become his passion and
profession: economics.
After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University (1958), Thomas Sowell went on to receive his master’s in economics from Columbia University (1959) and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago (1968).
In the early ‘60s, Sowell held jobs as an economist with the Department of Labor and AT&T. But his real interest was in teaching and scholarship. In 1965, at Cornell University, Sowell began the first of many professorships. Thomas Sowell’s other teaching assignments include Rutgers University, Amherst College, Brandeis University and the University of California at Los Angeles, where he taught in the early ‘70s and also from 1984 to 1989.
Thomas Sowell has published a large volume of writing. His dozen books, as well as numerous articles and essays, cover a wide range of topics, from classic economic theory to judicial activism, from civil rights to choosing the right college. Moreover, much of his writing is considered ground-breaking — work that will outlive the great majority of scholarship done today.
Though Thomas Sowell had been a regular contributor to newspapers in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, he did not begin his career as a newspaper columnist until 1984. George F. Will’s writing, says Sowell, proved to him that someone could say something of substance in so short a space (750 words). And besides, writing for the general public enables him to address the heart of issues without the smoke and mirrors that so often accompany academic writing.
In 1990, he won the prestigious Francis Boyer Award, presented by The American Enterprise Institute.
Currently Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, Calif.
I think you’re right. At first I wasn’t sure but the longer I read the more I think you are correct.
Serious concerns are expressed and not like a five year old would express them at all.
You can do better than that. Really.
Very much unlike your inane post...
Don't you wish FR had a delete button....?
Kennedy was a drug addict, a sex addict, and had many other failings but it was his decision not to strike but to impose a "quarantine" and the subsequent decision to ignore Khrushchev's bellicose second letter and instead respond to Khrushchev's more conciliatory first letter that actually solved the crisis. Kennedy sought back channels to defuse the crisis and succeeded.
The removal of the missiles from Turkey was indeed a quid pro quo for the removal of the missiles from Cuba along with our promise not to invade Cuba. You have the timing wrong, the promise to remove the missiles from Turkey was withheld from the public and they were removed later in accordance with the undertaking. The trade-off of missiles from Turkey as compared to Cuba was wholly in our strategic favor because those missiles in Cuba meant the intimidation of Latin America and the inevitable intimidation of the homeland. In short, the world's greatest superpower would have been reduced to parity with the Soviet Union by that simple chess move.
The assertion that there would have been no missile crisis with Donald Trump is ludicrous in the extreme. You do not have the right to rewrite history, but you do have the right, as do I, to assess the character of Donald Trump and conclude whether a man of his sleazy, cruel, deceitful background and egotistical character would have had the forbearance which Kennedy exhibited that indisputably spared the world nuclear war.
I do
Trump has a tantrum every day and his supporters think that’s just fine. Sowell gives his opinion and all of a sudden he’s a bad person.
You guys aren’t going to have anybody to listen to, read or any channels left to watch once you have trashed everyone that doesn’t agree with you. What babies.
Go lift your leg somewhere else mutt.
Worry about your boy Ted Cruz, his campaign is circling the toilet even as I type.
There are far better tinfoil hat Trump theories to glom onto.
Timing. A deal was nonetheless made during the ‘crisis’. And yes, it was indeed secret. All the better to make Kennedy out as some sort of hero.
Unlike you, I don’t have a boy. I support a grown up adult, Ted Cruz.
You will get what you deserve and I will sit back and laugh.
Today it's Dr. Sowell's turn.
Who will they come for tomorrow?
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