Vincent J. Curtis
4 August 2016
Earlier this week, President Barack Obama, in response to a
planted question at a press conference, declared Donald J. Trump, the recently
nominated Republican candidate for President of the United States, to be unfit
for the office. President Obama
directly, or through his spokesmen, has been saying this since January of this
year, when Trump was breaking out of the 17 person Republican field. Obama’s opinion is not new, but the
expression of it again at a news conference in support of the Trans-Pacific
Trade Partnership agreement with the Prime Minister of Singapore next to him
was extraordinary enough for the statement to make headlines.
With that statement, President Obama demonstrated once again
his own unfitness to serve as the President of a democratic republic. It is not for him as President to make
declarations concerning the basic fitness of office of a candidate, even if
that person is in some sense a rival. It
is permissible for a President to say that he is voting for his successor to be
the candidate from his own party, as that is a somewhat understandable and
therefore a forgivable engagement in partisanship. It would be fair for him to say that he has
policy differences with the candidate from the other party, for that may be no
more than a factual statement. However,
to say that a candidate for president of a major party is unfit to serve is to
express an opinion that, coming from Obama, would raise questions about the
integrity of the electoral process to replace Obama as president. Never mind the reflection it makes on the
millions of Americans who voted for Trump in the primaries.
Kevin D. Williamson of National
Review happens to think that Obama is right on this. So great is Mr. Williamson’s distain of Trump
that he looks past the incongruity of the President of a democratic republic
reducing the race to succeed him to one person, who happens to come from his
own party. Perhaps Mr. Williamson is so
inured of Obama’s own transgressions of propriety as the head of state of a
democratic republic that he misses this latest example of Obama’s own unfitness
to serve.
Let us compare Trump and Hillary and their own respective
unfitnesses to serve. The main argument
against Trump is that he is unstable, and worse, unapologetic. He can’t be trusted with his finger on the
button. He has no respect for political
correctness, and he is going to blow up the consensus on general issues that
has prevailed in Washington since the end of the Reagan presidency: on
immigration, on trade, on American involvement in world affairs, on government
spending, and the economy. He is going
to appoint justices to the Supreme Court that are in the mould of the Justice
Antonin Scalia, and not be apologetic about any of it. His bull in a china shop method is what makes
him unfit to serve. You would think the
United States had never been governed by the likes of Andrew Jackson! It is precisely his bull-in-a-china shop
mentality that has endeared him to scores of millions of Americans, all of whom
are distained with Trump.
Hillary’s unfitness to serve is of an altogether different
order from Trump’s. After her email
debacle, she would never be granted a security clearance ever again. Only because she is running for president is
she keeping one (for the present.) She
used her Secretaryship of State for personal financial benefit by granting the
favor of the US government in return for contributions to the Clinton
Foundation or for absurd speaking fees paid to her husband, Bill. Bill received over $15 million in pay for
being the “Honorary Chancellor” of Laureate International University, while the
university at the same time received $55 million in subsidies from the State
Department. As president, Hillary,
depending upon her greed and fear of impeachment, might well turn her
pay-for-play techniques into a billion dollar enterprise. The president of Mexico usually enters office
a pauper and leaves as a billionaire, so why not the Clintons?
Her habit of lying to the public has morphed into perjury
before congressional committees and before trial court judges. She was guilty of espionage for her handling
of government secrets on her own private property, not the property of the US
government, and the fact that a prosecutor could not get a conviction does not
mean that the crime was not committed. Likewise, her frequent argument that “you have
no evidence of that” is not the same as “I didn’t do it.”
This level of corruption would be validated by her election
to the presidency. What would the
consequences of that be, Mr. Williamson?
Validating corruption by the election of Hillary Clinton would change
the trajectory of politics and political discourse for the worse. It would change forever the understanding of
what the constitution of the United States actually means, from a timeless set
of principles to a relativistic matter of opinion to be decided by the might of
a voting block on the Supreme Court.
Their respective unfitnesses for office are of an altogether
different order. Hillary is corrupt
beyond imagining, and cannot be allowed to serve anywhere except, perhaps, in
prison. Trump is a bull in a china shop,
but his evident New Yorker personality places democratic and American limits on
how far he would go. If you are afraid
of his finger on the button, remember that it would not be Americans who get
hurt if he presses it. Hillary’s
corruption is so deep you simply can’t count on superficial assessments of her
probable actions. Remember, Bill started
cruise missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan and then Operation Desert Fox
in Iraq to distract attention from the Lewinsky scandal.
Hillary is far more unfit to serve than Trump is.
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