BY MIKE LUPICA
So many of the men and women running for President say they are running against Washington and all the meanness there, and divisiveness, and lack of civility. But they have somehow managed to make this campaign look even worse, without shame, as they continue to shame this country in front of the world in the process.
Donald Trump is the angry face of it all, able to out-talk everybody on radio and television, and out-tweet them, and shock the world with his theories about Muslims. But Trump isn’t alone. He’s just the one with the biggest bullhorn, able to out-shout even the bullhorn media.
There has never been a lower point than this in modern presidential politics. If you think there has been, name it. We see how desperate they are to win at all cost. But at what cost to this country? We talk constantly about how unsafe everything has become in a terrorist world. You know what is less safe these days, and more vulnerable than ever? This country’s good name.
“We all talk about how anxious our country has become,” Rep. Pete King was saying yesterday afternoon. “But you know why everybody is anxious? Because they don’t see any leadership from either party, at a time when we’re crying out for that because we’re getting no leadership from the President.”
Pete King, out of New York’s 2nd Congressional District, the son of a New York City cop, can turn politics into a bar fight himself sometimes, and you can look that up. But so often these days he seems to have more common sense than almost all of these people who want to be President, especially when he says this:
“Sometimes you worry that this is a campaign about the lowest common denominator.”
The rest of the world does not just see what happens in San Bernardino, in an America where we have a tragedy like San Bernardino every few weeks and sometimes every few days. The rest of the world also sees the response to San Bernardino and the loss of life there now that they can make it all about radical Islam and not an arsenal in the home of Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik big enough to invade Chicago. The outrage is always more righteous when it is about jihadists and not some redneck shooting up a church in Charleston.
The guns used to murder 14 people were purchased legally, a couple of the fast-killing weapons even purchased for Farook and Malik by some friend of theirs. So once again we heard that no laws were broken, until the body count because of guns grew a little more in America.
But there are never any solutions, just more shouting and name-calling andblaming of Barack Obama, as if the real battleground states are Twitter and cable television. Now members of an entire religion become suspects, or perhaps unindicted co-conspirators. And Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has the same solution that tough guys whose only active service was on the debate team always seem to have: Go over to Syria and blow all the bad guys to kingdom come.
“We will utterly destroy ISIS. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out,” Cruz says, apparently thinking that the mere threat of that will make Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of the Islamic state, just come out with his hands up.
In that moment, Cruz sounds like Gen. Curtis LeMay 50 years ago, talking about how we needed to do the same thing with North Vietnam.
“We’re going to bomb them back to the Stone Age,” LeMay said, a few years before he was the running mate in 1968 for Alabama Gov. George Wallace, back when it was the two of them who only seemed to be talking to the League of Angry White Guys.
Pete King is right. This has become a battle for the lowest common denominator, and not just with the Republicans. Democrat Hillary Clinton has a chance to stay above it all, but cannot resist making it seem as if all theRepublicans share the same feelings about Muslims and immigrants, as if they are all working off the same playbook when she knows they are not.
“You tell me which one of them is going to inspire us?” Pete King said. “Who’s going to lead in a country where we get the idea that we’re now following the lead of the president of France?”
This is the mud-wrestling Making of the President, 2016, against the backdrop of a world that becomes more dangerous by the day. This is all supposed to be about who would be best for America on the front line against terror. But it’s these candidates who are scaring us half to death.
