Wednesday, August 14, 2019

nationally-syndicated conservative talk show host Tea Party member and former U.S. Congressman Joe Walsh rips President Trump to shreds.


A bombshell New York Times "fake" news op-ed from the ultra right, blasting President Trump, showed up in my online news feed this morning:


Joe Walsh: Trump Needs a Primary Challenge

The case for a contender from the right.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/opinion/joe-walsh-trump-primary.html?fbclid=IwAR00PF7KHxKWMJ11tYgIlygH3cv2SP7dPvfUDH2PDfpGAkHtTn1JLziAbZc

In his repentance, nationally-syndicated conservative talk show host Tea Party member and former U.S. Congressman Joe Walsh rips President Trump to shreds.

Excerpts:


There’s a strong case for President Trump to face a Republican primary challenger. I know a thing or two about insurgencies. I entered Congress in 2011 as an insurgent Tea Party Republican. My goals were conservative and clear: restrain executive power and reduce the debt. Barack Obama was president then, and it was easy for us to rail against runaway spending and executive overreach.

Eight years later, Mr. Trump has increased the deficit more than $100 billion year over year — it’s now nearing $1 trillion — and we hear not a word of protest from my former Republican colleagues. He abuses the Constitution for his narcissistic trade war. In private, most congressional Republicans oppose the trade war, but they don’t say anything publicly. But think about this: Mr. Trump’s tariffs are a tax increase on middle-class Americans and are devastating to our farmers. That’s not a smart electoral strategy.

Fiscal matters are only part of it. At the most basic level, Mr. Trump is unfit for office. His lies are so numerous — from his absurd claim that tariffs are “paid for mostly by China, by the way, not by us,” to his prevarication about his crowd sizes, he can’t be trusted.

In Mr. Trump, I see the worst and ugliest iteration of views I expressed for the better part of a decade. To be sure, I’ve had my share of controversy. On more than one occasion, I questioned Mr. Obama’s truthfulness about his religion. At times, I expressed hate for my political opponents. We now see where this can lead. There’s no place in our politics for personal attacks like that, and I regret making them.

I didn’t vote for Mr. Trump in 2016 because I liked him. I voted for him because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Once he was elected, I gave him a fair hearing, and tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I soon realized that I couldn’t support him because of the danger he poses to the country, especially the division he sows at every chance, culminating a few weeks ago in his ugly, racist attack on four minority congresswomen.

The fact is, Mr. Trump is a racial arsonist who encourages bigotry and xenophobia to rouse his base and advance his electoral prospects. In this, he inspires imitators.

Republicans should view Mr. Trump as the liability that he is: No matter his flag-hugging, or his military parades, he’s no patriot. In front of the world, he sides with Vladimir Putin over our own intelligence community. That’s dangerous. He encouraged Russian interference in the 2016 election, and he refuses to take foreign threats seriously as we enter the 2020 election. That’s reckless. For three years, he has been at war with our federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as he embraces tyrants abroad and embarrasses our allies. That’s un-American.

And despite what his enablers claim, Mr. Trump isn’t a conservative. He’s reckless on fiscal issues; he’s incompetent on the border; he’s clueless on trade; he misunderstands executive power; and he subverts the rule of law. It’s his poor record that makes him most worthy of a primary challenge.

Mr. Trump has taken the legitimate differences that Americans have on policy and turned them into personal division. He’s caused me to change my tone and to reflect upon where I went over the line and to focus on policy differences moving forward.

We now have a president who retweets conspiracy theories implicating his political opponents in Jeffrey Epstein’s death. We now have a president who does his level best to avoid condemning white supremacy and white nationalism.

Joe Walsh, a former Illinois congressman, is a nationally syndicated conservative talk radio host.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email:letters@nytimes.com.


Just my own ignorant delusional personal opinion ...
Thank you, Mr. Walsh, for taking your own personal inventory, as well as President Trump's. I wonder, though, if you are an excellent example of what happens when you are so opposed to something (Hillary Clinton) that you cannot see the massive armada of red flags waving over, around, beneath, before and behind the candidate you vote for instead?

By the way, given how much President Trump detests the New York Times, and given how far right politically you are, Mr. Walsh, I can only imagine you presented your op-ed to the Times, or God somehow managed to get it to the Times, to make a point.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

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