The Case for Civility, Class, and Not Being a Deliberate Jerk All the Time

In this ugly age of political discourse we’ve been heartened in the past week by one Republican candidate’s magnanimity in victory and another’s graciousness in defeat, and thus we temporarily hold out hope for our once Grand Old Party.

The first touching moment came during the National Broadcasting Company’s “Saturday Night Live” program, of all places. The show has satirically skewered even the most unobjectionable sorts of Republicans since it ridiculed the famously athletic and conventionally wise President Gerald Ford as a stumbling fool, and on the previous Saturday cast member Pete Davidson went on its “Weekend Update” segment to ridicule Republican Texas congressional nominee Dan Crenshaw’s eyepatch, saying that “he looks like a hit man in a porno movie.” It might be a good line if the eyepatch were a mere fashion statement, but as Davidson briefly acknowledged during the joke it was because former Navy Seal and Lt. Commander Crenshaw had lost an eye to an improvised explosive device during his third combat tour in Afghanistan, which killed a couple of his friends and fellow American warriors, and we were heartened to see that commentators on both the left and right agreed that the joke was in poor taste.

To his credit, and to the credit of the show, the smart-assed Davidson showed up on the “Weekend Update” segment of the past “Saturday Night Live” to offer an apparently sincere and quite fulsome apology on behalf of himself and the show. Davidson’s often amusing comic persona is that of an admittedly neurotic New Yorker, and he started by saying that “It will come as a huge shock to no one who knows me that I made a poor choice last week.” He also apologized to his mom for offending almost everyone in America, which led t9 one of the “Weekend Update” hosts getting a big laugh by agreeing that it must suck to be Davidson’s mom. Davidson then hoped that “if any good came of this, maybe it’s that for one day the left and right finally came together to agree on something, that I’m a dick.”

At that point Crenshaw himself sat down next to Davidson and said “D’ya think?,” which was probably the show’s biggest laugh line of the year. Davidson then introduced Crenshaw as a Naval Lt. Commander Navy Seal and congressman-elect and acknowledged his undeniable war heroism, then offered a personal and live-on-air apology, and Crenshaw then shook his hand and accepted the apology and told him that “we’re good.” Davidson and “Saturday Night Live” generously allowed Crenshaw a couple of jokes about Davidson’s looks, which Crenshaw took well advantage of in a good-natured way. Crenshaw then acknowledged the heroism of that smart-assed Davidson’s father, a New York City firefighter who died trying to save others in the September 11th terror attacks on the Twin Towers, and gave a nice brief talk about Americans coming together despite their differences.

The reviews were boffo from both the left and the right, and the YouTube video of the segment had more than seven million viewers the last time we checked, and thus a new Republican star was born. Crenshaw’s a pretty-hard line Republican on taxes and regulation and the military and the rest of the traditional Republican agenda as far we can tell, but he’s also distanced himself from Trump’s rhetoric about Muslims and Democrats and other scary Others, and he’s a telegenically handsome fellow with a manly beard and Navy Seal physique who could clearly whip Davidson or even Trump in a fair bar fight even with one eye, and that eyepatch only enhances his sensitive machismo appeal, so given his good-natured sense of humor he might just be the template for a Republican renaissance.

We were also impressed by the performance of Arizona’s Republican Senate candidate Martha McSally, who has some pretty impressive military credentials of her own as one of America’s first female combat jet pilots and a challenger in the courts to America’s policy of making American servicewomen obey Sharia law regarding women’s dress in Muslim countries, but nonetheless was defeated by a centrist Democratic woman with her own compelling autobiography of childhood homelessness and overcoming odds.

That race was exceedingly close and hotly contested, but when Arizona’s Republican establishment followed the law and the vote counts and declared Democratic nominee Krysten Sinema the winner McSally and her dog Boomer gave such a gracious concession speech that it became a YouTube hit and put her in good position to win the seat of dearly departed maverick Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain in just two years. The formerly centrist McSally’s belated and obviously insincere attempts to align herself with Trump didn’t serve her well in this election in usually Republican Arizona, when she was trying to replacing retiring incumbent and Trump critic Sen. Jeff Flake, but we have hope that she’ll do well in a couple of years when she tries to replace the recently deceased but bona fide war hero and outspoken Trump critic and “guy who got caught” McCain in that reliably old-fashioned Republican state of Arizona.

In the meantime, the take-no-prisoners and shoot-the-stragglers and never concede defeat or admit a mistake style of Trump’s Republican party will probably prevail. That party’s not lately getting any boffo reviews from both the left and right, though, and it seems to have taken a licking in the past midterm elections, but its fans are satisfied that at least it never concedes defeat or acknowledges a mistake. They’re currently spinning conspiracy theories about the inevitably close races down in wacky Florida, even though a scrupulously legal counting of the votes will probably yield Republican victories there, which would be all the more impressive without all the conspiracy theories.

In the long run, though, we believe the Grand Old Party would probably do better with magnanimity in victory and graciousness in defeat and a good-natured sense of humor along the way.

— Bud Norman

Re-Negotiating the Cold War

America’s declaration of victory in the Cold War might have been premature. Cuba is still communist, and by the time its upcoming negotiations with President Barack Obama are concluded it’s likely that impoverished and totalitarian worker’s paradise will have the last laugh.

Cuban dictator Raul Castro has opened the bargaining about normalization of relations with demands that include America’s withdrawal from Guantanamo Bay and reparations for the past 55 years of American embargo and assorted other imperialist sins, and it strikes us as a shrewd negotiating tactic. Castro has apparently been watching America’s negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program and realizes how very generous our president can be when he’s eager to strike a deal, and he’s no doubt aware that Obama is a pure product of an American left that has always been sympathetic to Cuba’s communist dictatorship. We keep reading that Obama surely won’t cede to such outrageous demands, but we’re not at all confident that he won’t seize such a ripe opportunity to finally be rid of that Guantanamo Bay detention camp and spread some American wealth to an especially sleazy portion of the third world and prove his Nobel Peace Prize-winning solidarity with the oppressed workers of the world in the process.

Obama has already made a significant concession by telling the leaders of 35 nations at Summit of the Americas that “the days in which our agenda in this hemisphere presumed that the United States could meddle with impunity, those days are past.” This is an apparent reference to the Monroe Doctrine, which through 192 years of Democratic and Republican administrations successfully kept the European powers from meddling in Latin American affairs, then guided our efforts to keep the Soviet Union from meddling in the hemisphere, and has more lately prompted resistance to Iranian and Chinese meddling. The American left has long hated the Monroe Doctrine, especially when it was employed to thwart Soviet meddling, and will now be quite happy to leave all the meddling to Iran and the Chinese.

The Cubans will be eager to continue their own meddling in other Latin American countries, of course, and if they get another one of their demands met they’ll be able to do so without being included on the State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring governments. “We indeed have acted in solidarity with many peoples that may be considered terrorists” under the view of “imperialism,” Castro told the assembled leaders at the summit, adding that he was “referring to Cuba’s humanitarian missions in various developing countries.” These humanitarian missions have involved fomenting Marxist revolutions throughout Central and South America as well as Africa, and we suppose he’d also regard the Cuban dictatorship’s invitation to launch Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba as humanitarian, but almost all of it has met with favor from the American left and will no doubt continue to do so in the future. The promise that America won’t counter-meddle already constitutes a major victory for the Cuban dictatorship, and one can hardly blame them for pressing for further concessions.

The equally odious government of Venezuela, which was Cuba’s most important post-Soviet benefactor until America’s fracking boom lowered the price of crude oil and brought its economy to a Cuban level of despair, is also demanding an obsequious apology for all those years of Monroe Doctrine, but it seems they’ve already got that. So far Obama is insisting that there will be disagreements with Cuba and demands for greater freedom in prison nation, but except for Cuba’s horrific treatment of homosexuals we can’t see him finding much fault with the rest of its present system of governance. Obama also spent some of his time at the Summit of the Americas that domestic criticism of his negotiations with Iran “It needs to stop,” so the Cuban dictatorship’s habit of quashing dissent surely won’t be objectionable. There’s that communist economic system and all the material deprivation that it has imposed on the Cuban people for the past 55 years, but Obama will likely be obliged to note equality of all that poverty, and of course there will be frequent mention of the universal health care they’ve got down there. Castro has already absolved Obama of America’s sins, and Obama is likely to regard that as ample compensation for any concessions he might make.

Whatever problems Marxism has thus far encountered in Latin America, American meddling will no longer be one of them. Which is not to say that the commies will get the very last laugh in the western hemisphere. Whatever Obama wants to do will meet fierce resistance in Congress, even from some Democrats with large constituencies of refugees from Latin American Marxism, and even an American public grown inured to the administration’s obsequiousness will surely balk at paying reparations to the commie Cubans who stole legally contracted American holdings in Cuba and then pointed nuclear weapons at us. The green light for foreign meddling in Latin America might encourage the Marxists who are tyrannizing their own countries and supporting the terrorist assaults on freer nations in the hemisphere, but none have ever worked out, and none ever will. Even the most abject American apologies and bone-headed agreements won’t change that.

— Bud Norman