The Moral Case for the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

My dear brother Dominic,

I apologize for the belated nature of this kept promise. I promised you long ago that I would explain to you how the atomic bombings that have continued controversial after over 65 years, in a way that the bombings of Hamburg, Dresden and even Tokyo have not. The case can be made -- in fact my late father and I discussed the idea thoroughly years ago. I propose to tell you what we concluded then, as I have read or heard no arguments that have caused me to question the conclusions we reached in our discussions.

What awakened my slumbering interest in the subject was reading a remarkable book I received as a present from my sister Rosemary. The book is A Song for Nagasaki, by a Marist Priest named Paul Glynn. The book tells the story of a remarkable man named Takashi Nagai, a pioneer in radiology and a convert to Catholicism. Reading this book reminded me again how terrible and tragic war is, and of course a world war is the worst of all. Reading its description of the horrible wounds, deaths both instant and agonizing, and the horrible devastation caused by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, one is tempted to conclude that such a weapon and its use in such a way must surely be indefensible.

Actually, its use can be defended, although not briefly. I'll try my best to avoid writing you a book.

It is well known that war, like other disasters, brings out the best in some and the worst in others. In a man like Nagai we see the best produced. In a man like Joachim Pieper (the Waffen SS commander who ordered the Malmedy Massacre), we see some of the worst that sane human beings are capable of.

In a man like American President Harry S Truman, we see a man suddenly thrust into a situation where a brutal war nearly six years old had to be ended as quickly and bloodlessly as possible despite the fact that the losing side refused to recognize that their defeat was inevitable.

The war in Europe had already ended with the surrender of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945, although the most enormous clean-up project in the history of the world was just beginning. Worldwide the cataclysm had already claimed over 50 million lives. With the fall of the Nazis, Imperial Japan was left essentially alone in a war against the United States, the British, the Free French, and literally dozens of smaller nations. The Japanese Navy and Japanese Naval aviation had almost literally ceased to exist. The Japanese Merchant Marine was at the bottom of the waters around the country. The remaining Japanese forces were badly over-extended, trying to hold on to too much conquered territory with too few troops. Many of the garrisons were starving, as the Japanese Navy could not supply them in their far-flung island garrisons. Any sane person would have seen in an instant that it was time to make peace before total annihilation engulfed the Japanese nation.

Tragically, sane leaders were not leading Imperial Japan in mid-1945.

The Allies had every reason to conclude that the Japanese leaders were not rational. The fanatical resistance to the liberation of the Philippines would last from October of 1944 until September 2, 1945, the same day that the Japanese formally surrendered to the Allied Powers on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. This bitter, savage, hopeless struggle would cost the Japanese roughly 300,000 casualties -- and the Americans 60,628. (Casualty figures taken from http://www.ualberta.ca).

The infamous battle of Iwo Jima (February 19, 1945 to March 14) would prove another example of irrationally fanatical defense. For eight square miles of desolate volcanic rock, the Japanese spent 21,000 soldiers, with only 1,000 surrendering. This proportion of killed to surrendered is another indication of the berserker nature of Japanese fighting in the Pacific Theater of the war. The battle cost the Americans 7,000 lives (25,000 total casualties). This is about 875 dead soldiers, sailors, and marines per square mile. If the American military and civilian population (government and civilians) were getting rather bitter at this point it is scarcely surprising. (Casualty figures from the World War II database at http://ww2db.com.)

The Battle of Okinawa (1 Apr 1945 - 21 Jun 1945) would prove far bloodier even than the battle for "the Rock" had been, with over 12,513 acknowledged American lives lost (many of the 60,000 wounded would not survive their wounds). The Japanese lost a horrifying 107,000 men, and that estimate is surely low, as dead soldiers sealed in caves cannot easily be counted. (Casualty figures from the World War Two Database and wiki.answers.com.) Making the battle even more nightmarish was that 42,000 Japanese residents of Okinawa were also killed, many by suicide before American soldiers could reach them. It should be remembered that many of these casualties occurred despite the fact that the Japanese had lost their only remaining powerful ally halfway through the battle.

Clearly, Japan's cause was hopeless. Just as clearly, Japan could not or would not recognize this.

All of this meant a grim dilemma for the new American President, Harry Truman.

Having become President upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, Truman had had very little preparation for the role he so suddenly had been thrust into -- that of the man who must make a decision that might save thousands if not millions of lives in a war already the costliest in history. The fighting in Europe was nearly over, with the Nazis and their few remaining allies reeling toward final defeat. What fanatical existence that had remained died with Adolf Hitler, who shot himself on April 30th. The Pacific Theater was far different.

The Japanese still held large conquered territories in Asia and on many Pacific islands, and though it is often forgotten today, the Knights of Bushido had been brutal, scarlet-handed occupiers. Early in the war, in the Chinese city of Nanking, the Japanese Army "celebrated" their storming of the city by engaging in a six-week rape-and-murder festival, killing between 50,000 and 300,000 Chinese civilians in an orgy so atrocious that the appalled Nazis offered to mediate a truce.

“The Rape of Nanking” was just the worst in a series of appalling war crimes committed by the Japanese throughout the war. The Bataan Death March is well known. The history of Japanese war crimes makes for stomach-turning reading. Torture, rape, murders mass and individual, fiendish medical experiments ... the Nazis had nothing on their Eastern allies when it came to hot-and-cold blooded brutality.

Japanese brutality complicated the task of liberating occupied peoples. During the liberation of the Philippines, Japanese troops had ruthlessly and seemingly senselessly massacred thousands of civilians, many apparently just because they came within Japanese sight. President Truman and his war leaders had to consider when calculating the cost of forcing the Japanese out of their conquered territories not only the blood and treasure (wars are expensive in treasure as well as in blood) that the military forces of the Allies would lose, but also the likelihood that the Japanese would murder countless civilians during their hopeless but brutal and bloody struggle to hold the lands and resources they had taken.

Another factor that the President had to consider was war-weariness in all of the Allied countries. This war had already dragged on almost or over 6 years (depending on when you start counting.) Over 50 million were dead (the two main Allied combatant nations in the Pacific Theater, Great Britain and the United States, had lost over 850,000 lives, military and civilian), incredible losses in actual property and potential wealth had caused starvation and poverty in nation after nation, and an invasion of Japan itself might be more than anyone could ever recover from. Although it did not seem to bother them, the Japanese would risk being permanent pariahs, never to be treated as civilized human beings ever again. The military minds had calculated that an invasion, although sure to be ultimately successful by the mad calculus of war, could cost between 500,000 and 1,000,000 total Allied casualties, with perhaps 200,000 dead. The Japanese would lose millions of soldiers and civilians.

The scars already inflicted by this most dreadful of all wars would already certainly take decades to heal. A bloodbath of the scale projected would perhaps rip open wounds that could never heal.

In his post-war writings, Admiral Dan Gallery suggested that the Allies could have simply surrounded and blockaded the Japanese home islands with submarines and surface ships, and waited for the Japanese, who could not long survive cut off from foreign trade, particularly in foodstuffs, to give in. When I was young, I thought Gallery was right. Today, I recoil in horror from the prospect.

The problem, once again, is that irrational leaders were at this most critical time leading Japan. No one who has ever done even casual research into the wartime leadership of Imperial Japan can honestly doubt that the leaders of the state would have fought until the last Japanese peasant starved gruesomely. Crazy leaders are the worst kind, and crazy leaders with absolute power are every people's nightmare. Living in Japan in the summer of 1945 was a never-ending nightmare. A blockade of food and fuel, while safer in the main for the Allied militaries, would have killed as many as the forced famine in the Ukraine had in the early 1930s (including millions of women and children), and would have been nearly as unjustifiable.

President Truman, a military veteran himself (he had been a first-rate artillery captain in World War I), understood many things about serving in a war that many people never think about. One of them is that just being in the service kills some soldiers. Accidents happen, and diseases happen, too, especially in the unhealthy tropical climates of the Pacific islands and in Southeast Asia, India, and Burma. He also understood what it did to a soldier to be away from his home, his family, and his civilian life. (I say soldier for simplicity's sake, but separation is just as hard on nurses and other non-combat personnel.) Truman was determined to get the people who were saving our country and the world back to their homes as quickly as possible.

Another fact that such men as Truman and his predecessor Ulysses S. Grant had understood is that keeping large forces in the field is fearfully expensive. It is an amusing fact that one reason Ulysses Grant did not stay at Appomattox Court House for the formal surrender of General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was that Grant was commander-in-chief of the United States Army, the war was costing an immense amount of money every day, and it was time to get back to his office and start cutting expenses.

Another factor that Truman could not help but consider was that the Japanese still held large numbers of prisoners of war. A prolonged, civilization-destroying battle in Japan itself might cause the Japanese to massacre the prisoners rather than allow them to be liberated by their fellows. In fact, it had been ordered by the Japanese high command that all prisoners were to be killed as soon as the first Allied soldier set his boot on Japanese soil. Truman did not know this, but at this late hour of the war it was not difficult to predict.

The Japanese government (meaning mainly the military leadership, still largely in command) was preparing a horrifying defensive plan. It would involve thousands more of the dreaded Kamikaze, the suicide planes that had taken so many lives already. It would involve suicide weapons, including manned torpedoes and frogmen who would carry explosives to Allied landing craft, detonating them manually. Appallingly, it would even involve women and children attacking Allied soldiers with bamboo spears and knives. All of these would be combined with the tactics that the Japanese had been using throughout much of the war -- the apparently surrendering soldier followed by another with a grenade, which he would detonate when the Allied soldiers approached to accept the "surrender", the midnight throat slitting attacks by Japanese soldiers who had hidden in underground tunnels by day, and other "dirty" tactics. (One of the reasons so few Japanese were taken prisoner was that after a few such tricks, the Allies reasonably concluded that taking prisoners was too risky.)

So, driving the Japanese from every possession would take months if not years, and would be expensive in blood and treasure as well. A blockade of the Japanese islands would leave large populations in occupied countries in continuing danger from their occupiers, and would also cause perhaps the most gruesome man-caused famine in world history, while serving their countries in unhealthy climes would continue to cause death and suffering to soldiers who had already seen too much of it. Invading the mainland would initiate an unprecedented carnival of blood and death from which mankind and civilization might never recover, and would also cost the lives of every prisoner of war who had managed to survive captivity by the brutal Japanese prisoner-abuse system, which featured starvation, torture, forced labor, and executions, often by decapitation. It seemed that Truman might have no way of ending the war that did not involve oceans of blood and dehumanizing brutality.

As history records, however, Truman had one ace up his sleeve.

An immense wartime effort had turned the theoretical possibility of an atomic weapon into a physical reality. The American effort had been triggered by a letter from the great physicist Albert Einstein (a refugee from Nazi oppression of Jews -- showing just how expensive bigotry can be) to American President Franklin Roosevelt, telling him of the possibility of a bomb and warning him that the Nazis would almost certainly try for the bomb whether the Americans did or not. Roosevelt heeded the warning, and the Manhattan Project was born. After years of effort, the first nuclear weapon was tested on July 16,1945, ironically too late to use against its original intended target, Germany, who had already surrendered over two months before the test. Perhaps the shock of this new and amazingly powerful weapon could persuade the Japanese to surrender when "mere" conventional weapons had failed.

We must remember that the firebombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945 is believed to have killed at least 100,000 people, and the Japanese stubbornly continued their hopeless struggle. At this point, the Allied leaders must have concluded that only the threat of complete annihilation (or perhaps, horribly, actual total annihilation) could end Japanese resistance.

Once the atomic bomb had been added to the American arsenal, it opened up options that might render the other shocking options unnecessary. It was proposed that an atomic bomb be dropped, with prior warning given, on an unpopulated area, so that the Japanese might see what awaited them if they fought on. This idea was rejected both because the Americans in fact only had two bombs available, and thus would lose half of their supply on a demonstration, and also because in those days before the Internet, the Japanese might have been able to deceive their population as to what that terrifying flash and roar had actually been.

The Allies did warn the Japanese government that unless they surrendered, a new and devastatingly destructive weapon would be used against them. The Japanese refused the ultimatum. Alone, defiant, they prepared to face the unknown peril.

And the bombs dropped.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9 of 1945 killed over 100,000 people immediately and many thousands more later. (It should be remembered that at that time the dangers of radiation sickness were little understood, and the dangers of nuclear fallout not even anticipated. It is sadly ironic that Dr. Nagai would die not of the atomic bombing, but from the radiation he absorbed in his work in radiology research, which caused the leukemia which would kill him.) Even then it took the tradition-defying personal intervention of Emperor Hirohito to accomplish a Japanese surrender. (Number cited above from AtomCentral.com, the Atomic Bomb Website.)

The fact that the bombings were successful in their goal of forcing the Japanese to give up is indisputable. I believe that they also were correct morally.

The first fact to remember is that a person killed by a block-buster bomb in Hamburg or an incendiary in Tokyo was just as dead as a person killed by a nuclear blast in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The atomic bomb is not inherently more evil than any other type of bomb, or indeed any other type of weapon. If radiation is the difference between the evil atomic bomb and the less-evil high-explosive bomb, then should we try to replace the use of radiation for medical purposes with some sort of treatment with high explosives? You may have some research, development, and testing troubles with that idea. Good luck getting test subjects, too.

The second factor to remember is that actions and their morality can only be judged by the circumstances in place when the actions were taken. Shooting another human being may be wrong in the abstract, but I would see the shooting of another human being who is about to kill my mother in a rather different light. In that circumstance, I would see the shooting of that person as a moral imperative. Likewise, dropping a bomb (of any sort) on a Japanese city during peacetime would be a shocking crime against humanity. In August of 1945, given the mad circumstances of the time, it was a better moral option than the others available.

Both of the other options available to President Harry Truman in the summer of 1945 would have taken many months and cost millions of lives. The atomic bombings cost 102,000 or thereabouts, ended the war, and sent all of those soldiers home to their families and friends. As a melancholy bonus, it also got the Japanese an earlier start on rebuilding their country as a successful democratic state. History tells us that their efforts succeeded.

The morality of all actions taken must be measured against the morality of all other reasonable options available. Given the situation he inherited and the choices available, and in the cold light of rational analysis, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the best and most moral option that Harry Truman could choose.

I praise his courage and logic in taking it.

ESPN's This Magic Moment

I watched ESPN's This Magic Moment recently, about the Orlando Magic NBA team.  A few observations:

I wanted to punch Leonard Armato in his smug lying face every time he showed up in shot.  He is the personification of every reason so many sports fans hate agents.  Agents spoiled many teams by promoting an individual's pursuit of the biggest bucks over the goals of team harmony and the resulting team success.  He even looks like a slimy, slithery, mendacious self-seeker.  Go away, you creep.

Nick Anderson is a stand-up guy.  Even though he is the lead character in the the most painful moment in Orlando basketball history, he appeared throughout the documentary and was candid and forthcoming throughout.  I have a good deal of respect for him.

I also enjoyed the on-camera appearances of Brian Shaw, Horace Grant and Dennis Scott.  They gave enjoyable and informative insights into what it's like to be professional athletes under the microscope and what it's like to deal with momentum shifts during a game, and to be forced to deal with dizzying successs followed by shattering failure.

Watching This Magic Moment reminded me how much I HATED the "Little Penny" commercials.  It turns out my distaste for Chris Rock is older than I thought.

Penny Hardaway is another matter.  He says that Nick Anderson, after his agonizing failures at the free throw line at the end of the first game of the championship series against the experienced Houston Rockets, failed to step out of bounds on the in-bounds play.  If you watch the replay in the documentary, you see that Anderson does step out of bounds before the Houston player in-bounds the ball, but the call isn't made.  Interesting, but not what really struck me.

Hardaway said that the players all relaxed on the in-bounds, knowing that Anderson would step out of bounds and draw the delay-of-game call.  He claims that's why he let Kenny Smith get that little space he needed to hit the 3-pointer that tied the game and forced overtime.  He claims unconvincingly that if he he known the play was coming he could have kept Smith from getting the shot off.  Of course, if the Rockets changed the play (and Rudy Tomjanovich was a smart coach), he still wouldn't have known what play was coming.

What he doesn't seem to realize is that he just told the camera why the Magic lost the game and the series.

Winning players know that you NEVER assume what will happen in the game.  You don't relax on the court, because you don't know what will happen (or not happen).  You don't relax your guard.  Hardaway did.  Of course, he claims all of his teammates did, too.  (It's hard to picture Horace Grant making such a mistake.)  Of course, his teammates weren't covering Kenny Smith - he was.

And that's why I never liked Penny Hardaway.

Suicide on the Bounty and other matters before us

Conservative/Tea Partiers who are supporting life long crony leftist Donald Trump to "teach the establishment a lesson" are like the mutinous sailors on the Bounty -- except that these modern mariners have elected to depose the Captain Blighs running the GOP ship by sinking the ship -- in mid-ocean, with all hands aboard.



Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush must be incredibly frustrated by now.  Being called a liar by a known liar is bad enough (rather like having Bill Clinton call you a faithless husband), but to have so many believe the liar when he lies about you is intolerable.  For all of Trump's screaming that Ted Cruz is a liar, it is striking that he has yet to point out even one actual lie.

(And yes, Donnie Truther, there were WMDs in Iraq.  We found them.



I may have to hedge my bets.  So far the only campaign donation I've made has been to Ted Cruz.  From now on I may be donating to organizations supporting my views, like perhaps CatholicVote or the Susan B Anthony List.  If you can't find a candidate you're comfortable supporting, I think this alternative approach may be worthy of your consideration.



It's embarrassing being a Republican sometimes.  Every November and December of every presidential election year, I hear and read GOP leaders and allied pundits announcing that next time we can't afford to make the same mistakes that just cost us so dearly this time.  Despite the declarations, it is the safest bet in America that the Pachyderm Party will forget their resolutions in plenty of time to blow the next election the same old way.  Consider:

After the 2000 primaries, in which John McCain openly urged Democrats to pretend to be Republicans so that they could vote for him to be the nominee, many of us hoped that the GOP leadership would dump open primaries, since obviously (to us, anyway) only Republicans should help select the Republican nominee.  16 years later we're still waiting.  I'm glad we weren't holding our breath.

(Democrats, who are more sleazy-smart than we are, are now using their assets to nominate the worst GOP nominee for their candidate to run against.  Have you already forgotten Todd Akin?)

Another reform I am wishing for would be the elimination of winner-take-all primaries, in which a candidate who receives a plurality of the vote (a majority is not necessary) receives all of the state's delegates.  This silly practice is said to prevent slugfests and backroom deals at our sedate (if not somnolent) conventions.  Given that we have lost four of the last six presidential elections, maybe a knock-down drag-out at the convention is what we need.  At least it would give people something to watch at our quadrennial Party party.  At any rate, this practice usually results is making a very beatable candidate opposed by 60-75% of the party faithful look like an unstoppable force, just before the election stops him (and us).

Can you name one state that has eliminated winner-take-all primaries?  Me, either.



After 2012's election I remember a veritable chorus of pols and pundits declaring that we must never again have so many GOP debates, in which our candidates would make each other look like villains and dunces.  We certainly won't book so many debates on hostile networks, since their immoderators would vie with each other to make every Republican look like he belongs in an asylum or a prison.  (He or she, actually, since Sarah Palin and Carly Fiorina certainly haven't received favorable treatment from the MLM*)

The more things change,...

Of course, some of the pundits haven't been much better.  Ann Coulter was just one of many conservatives scribblers to insist that we HAD to nominate a governor or "at least a Senator" this time around.  We started this process with several fine governors and senators (current and former) in the running, including Bobby Jindal and (my first choice) public union tamer Scott Walker of Wisconsin,  Then Donny Sue Trump entered the race, and the smartest girl in school fell in love with another troglodyte.

There are others.  Radio host Jim Quinn spent 3+ years insisting that the perfectly capable Mitt Romney had lost the election because he didn't inspire confidence in the "conservative base", and now he's plainly supporting the Megyn Kelly fearing Trump, who makes Romney look like Barry Goldwater.

Ditto self-hating Catholic Sean Hannity, who all but called for the crucifixtion of Pope Francis for daring to slander the prophet of Sean Hannity.

Yessir, it's my party and I'll cry if I want to.

*  Media Lynch Mob

Post South Carolina Primary Hangover

Q:  How can you tell who defeated or finished second to Donald "I am a GOD!" Trump in the last  primary?

A:  He's the candidate whose eligibility to be President is being questioned by Donald Trump.

Has anyone else noticed that Trump appears to have borrowed the strategy by which Obama became Senator from Illinois?  From the invaluable DiscoverTheNetworks.org:

But in November 1995, Jesse Jackson, Jr. defeated Palmer in a special election for Reynolds’ empty congressional seat. At that point, Palmer filed to retain the Democratic nomination for the state senate seat she had encouraged Obama to pursue; that seat would be up for grabs in the November 1996 elections. She asked Obama to politely withdraw from the race and offered to help him find an alternative position elsewhere.

But Obama refused to withdraw, so Palmer resolved to run against him (and two other opponents who also had declared their candidacy) in the 1996 Democratic primary. To get her name placed on the ballot, Palmer hastily gathered more than the minimum number of signatures required. Obama promptly challenged the legitimacy of those signatures and charged Palmer with fraud. A subsequent investigation found that a number of the names on Palmer’s petition were invalid, thus she was knocked off the ballot. (Names could be eliminated from a candidate's petition for a variety of reasons. For example, if a name was printed rather than written in cursive script, it was considered invalid. Or if the person collecting the signatures was not registered to perform that task, any signatures that he or she had collected likewise were nullified.)

Obama also successfully challenged the signatures gathered by his other two opponents, and both of them were disqualified as well. Consequently, Obama ran unopposed in the Democratic primary and won by default.

...

U.S. Senate Campaign (2004):
In 2004 Obama ran for one of Illinois’ two seats in the U.S. Senate. The Chicago Tribune endorsed Obama’s campaign. More importantly, the Tribune persuaded a Democrat-appointed judge in California to open the sealed divorce records of Obama’s Republican opponent to the media. The resulting sex scandal, based on allegations in the divorce records by a Hollywood actress eager to prevent her ex-husband from getting custody of their children, prompted the Republican to resign from the race.

Human Events magazine provides the details:

One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader. But then the Chicago Tribune leaked the claim that Hull’s second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.

Those records were under seal, but as The New York Times noted: “TheTribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had ‘worked aggressively behind the scenes’ to push the story.” Many people said Axelrod had “an even more significant role — that he leaked the initial story.”

Both Hull and his ex-wife opposed releasing their sealed divorce records, but they finally relented in response to the media’s hysteria — 18 days before the primary. Hull was forced to spend four minutes of a debate detailing the abuse allegation in his divorce papers, explaining that his ex-wife “kicked me in the leg and I hit her shin to try to get her to not continue to kick me.”

After having held a substantial lead just a month before the primary, Hull’s campaign collapsed with the chatter about his divorce. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.

Obama then used similar techniques to win the general election, as Human Events again explains:

As luck would have it, Obama’s opponent in the general election had also been divorced! Jack Ryan was tall, handsome, Catholic — and shared a name with one of Harrison Ford’s most popular onscreen characters! He went to Dartmouth, Harvard Law and Harvard Business School, made hundreds of millions of dollars as a partner at Goldman Sachs, and then, in his early 40s, left investment banking to teach at an inner city school on the South Side of Chicago.

Ryan would have walloped Obama in the Senate race. But at the request of — again — the Chicago Tribune, California Judge Robert Schnider unsealed the custody papers in Ryan’s divorce five years earlier from Hollywood starlet Jeri Lynn Ryan, the bombshell Borg on “Star Trek: Voyager.”

Jack Ryan had released his tax records. He had released his divorce records. But both he and his ex-wife sought to keep the custody records under seal to protect their son.

Amid the 400 pages of filings from the custody case, Jack Ryan claimed that his wife had had an affair, and she counterclaimed with the allegation that he had taken her to “sex clubs” in Paris, New York and New Orleans, which drove her to fall in love with another man....

Ryan had vehemently denied her allegations at the time, but it didn’t matter. The sex club allegations aired on “Entertainment Tonight,” “NBC Nightly News,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” and NBC’s “Today” show. CNN covered the story like it was the first moon landing....

Four days after Judge Schnider unsealed the custody records, Ryan dropped out of the race for the horror of (allegedly) propositioning his own wife and then taking “no” for an answer.

Alan Keyes stepped in as a last-minute Republican candidate.

And that’s how Obama became a U.S. senator. He destroyed both his Democratic primary opponent and his Republican general election opponent with salacious allegations about their personal lives taken from “sealed” court records.

With a $10 million campaign war chest from contributors, and with no Republican opponent who could garner much support, Obama had an open road to become the next U.S. Senator from Illinois. His friend and political supporter, the longtime Chicago alderwoman Dorothy Tillman, helped him win the voting in Chicago’s predominantly black wards. He also received valuable backing from the Jesse Jacksons, Junior andSenior, and Rev. Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.

Donald Trump and his Brownshirts

The disagreement between Pope Francis and Donald Trump has again aroused Trump's many venomous followers to heights of fury and (sadly) anti-Catholic bigotry.  Those Americans who wonder at how an Adolph Hitler raised an army of brown-shirted thugs need only look at Trump and his brutal followers today.  Not every Trump supporter is a thug; far from it.  But it seems that all of the thuggish behavior in this campaign has been provided by the Trumpzis.

When Donald Trump declared he was running for President, many of us thought "Well, I guess every circus needs a clown."  It never occurred to us that this perpetual braggart, sleazy businessman, and reality-TV "star" could possibly be taken seriously by the Republican voters.  We failed to understand how many Republicans were willing to let their anger with the leadership of the Republican Party short-circuit their brains.

Harsh, you may say?  How else can you explain the support for a man as personally disreputable as Bill Clinton, as vain as Barack Obama, and as dishonest as Hillary Clinton?  A man who has in the past and perhaps in the present supported single-payer health care, which would end liberty in America, because if the government controls your health care, they control you?  A man who viciously and falsely slanders the last GOP President, the thoroughly honorable George W. Bush?  A man who is only wealthy today because he was born that way?  Didn't we detest that about Ted Kennedy?

The man is a juvenile and a lout, who reacts to every criticism with vile insults and cringe-worthy name-calling.  From Megyn Kelly to the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, from Hugh Hewitt to the National Review, anyone who dares to point out the flaws in Trump's character or his statements will be met not with refutation, but with simple abuse.

Consider this - perhaps the reason Trump never refutes the actual statements of his critics and opponents is because he can't.

When Megyn Kelly asked Trump if his knuckle-dragging troglodyte past treatment of women would make a too-easy target for Democrats in the fall campaign (an entirely reasonable question), Trump stayed up until 4:00 AM sending out loutish, filthy tweets about Kelly.  Is this an action of an adult?

What about his followers?

Many are decent people, but the Trump for President movement has a disproportionate number of vicious, nasty venom-spewers.  They see every attack on their idol the way Mohammedans see criticisms of their prophet.  The critics must be vilified, ostracized, destroyed!  Not by logic, mind you, but by means of foul epithets, falsehoods, and Internet abuse.

Do you not believe me?  Go to any political site that permits comments on their articles, find an article critical of Trump on any issue, and then scroll down to the comments.  Read the pro-Trump comments.  You will find very few well-reasoned arguments. You will find nasty, often obscenity-laced posts demeaning the author, their character, their intelligence, and other characteristics not germane to the article or the discussion thereof.  Supporters of the other Republican candidates will carry on a reasonable discussion with you.  Trump's followers would rather throw verbal bricks at you.  (They're verbal at the moment, anyway.)

My sister in Florida saw a man on a news broadcast say that he's supporting Trump because he's "voting with his middle finger."

There are no brains in middle fingers.

Another Republican mistake

Of course it should surprise no one that the Senate Republicans (both the leadership and the rank-and-file) screwed up in the matter of nominating a replacement for our dear departed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.  They should not have announced their belief that President B.O. should leave the nomination to his successor, whoever that may be.  Truth be told, they have no legal or Constitutional footing to make such a demand.  Of course Mullah Obama can nominate someone.  That doesn't mean that a Republican Senate is under ANY obligation to approve the nominee. They are under no obligation to treat the nominee with any more courtesy than Robert Bork and Charles Pickering received from the Democrats.

What the Republicans should have said was nothing.  This of course is a lost art these days, so an acceptable alternative would have sounded like "We will treat any nominee with the same scrupulous objectivity with which our Democratic colleagues have treated past candidates nominated by Republican presidents."

And we all know what THAT would mean...

Quick thoughts on the Progressive leading the GOP Presidential nomination race

David Brooks of the New York, Same Old Agenda Times has threatened (offered?) to leave the country if Donald Trump is elected President.  It's a tempting offer, David, but I still must oppose the American Sukarno.



The Republicans have long had specific reasons for opposing and in some cases loathing our liberal Democrat opponents.  Some examples:

We despised Ted Kennedy not only because of his politics, but also because of his supreme selfishness and his having been an inherited wealth brat.

We detested both Clintons not only for their politics, but for their rampant greed and dishonesty.  (Yes, that includes Chelsea.)

We loathe Barack Insane Obama for many of his beliefs and actions, his betrayals and his Constitution-defiance, but also largely because of his Jupiter-sized ego.

All of these loathsome traits are also perfect descriptors of Donald Trump.



Matt Walsh makes a good point.  (Actually, a great many of them.)  Donald Trump is a man who is willing to slander Megyn Kelly on Twitter until 4:00 AM after she dares to not genuflect in his presence, but is unable to face her again in a debate setting.  We're supposed to believe he could face down Vlad the Impaler Putin and his ilk?  Really?



When precisely did Ted Cruz become "the establishment"?  Also, who could be more establishment than a politically connected multi-millionaire who cheerfully admits his history of buying off politicians of both parties and his penchant for abusing the eminent domain power to steal the homes of widows and other "ordinary people" in order to enrich himself?



For my entire life I have bristled at hearing my Republican Party derided as "the Stupid Party".  If we really nominate this foul-mouthed petulant demagogue who has spent a lifetime opposing everything we believe in, we will deserve the epithet.

I have a campaign ad idea for Ted Cruz

Just a thought - Ted Cruz's campaign people should compile a collection of Donald Trump's non-stop bragging about himself - his "genuineness", his respect for women, his brilliance as an interviewee, his poll numbers, etc.  Cut it down to about 55 seconds.  (Trust me, the biggest challenge will be editing the massive amounts of boasting they will find.)  Then have a narrator say "Imagine having to listen to that for four years."