I intend to answer on our blog site, two letters to the editor of the Prairie Press, Paris, Illinois’ sole remaining newspaper, now a weekly. Because the editor did not want pro or anti-Trump letters appearing every week, she has limited each individual to one letter a month. My letter appeared the first Saturday in August so I find myself hamstrung from answering two blatantly wrong letters. Thus, I will do so in a couple of blogs. This is an answer to a letter by Anita Griffith of Vermilion.
She informs us that “our country will not survive another four years under Trump” but that we will be saved by “voting safely and securely for Joe Biden.” Her reasoning?
- We cannot survive our health crisis without Biden at the helm. Oh yes, the same Biden that called President Trump a racist for stopping flights from China early in the pandemic, saving, according to Dr. Fauci, millions of American lives. Biden would obviously not have taken such a draconian move, but would have let all those COVID-19 infected Chinese enter the country at will. Biden will also get rid of the wall on the southern border, another mark of President Trump’s “racism.” Thus, the 3.3 million crossing the border now, infecting over 1800 Border Patrol agents with COVID and killing 10 of them, will go back to the over 8 million entrants before the border was closed and skyrocket from there. Oh, yes, we will be safer with Biden at the helm, as long as we don’t live in border states who are currently overwhelmed by the illegal COVID patients.
And the President is doing such a horrible job, that there are only several drug companies with vaccines in the last stage of clinical trials, vaccines that are so far proving successful and may well be available to the public this fall. The President has ordered these companies to manufacture millions of doses of the vaccines, even before they know if they work, so that the minute one or more is deemed to guard against the virus by the FDA, military planes and soldiers will immediately transport those doses all across the country.
One should also remember the track record of Democrats with this virus. Everything that the President has done has been upon the advice of Dr. Fauci and the CDC. Democrats in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan decided, against the advice of their own state health departments, to send COVID patients back to nursing homes. They literally FORCED the nursing homes to accept them into what we already knew was the most vulnerable population in the country. As a result, in New York alone, thousands of nursing home patients died who most likely would still be alive otherwise. Are we really safer in the hands of a Democrat?
- She also suggests that under Trump we have “economic upheaval.” Where was she before the pandemic struck? Living on Mars? Our economy was booming. The unemployment number was low towards the end of Obama’s presidency, but only because it counted just those who were still looking for work, not the millions who had given up in despair. And minorities remained unemployed in high numbers. Under President Trump, the unemployment rate not only dropped far lower, but women, blacks and Hispanics saw historical lows in unemployment. Jobs were going begging for workers and the unemployment rate fell to what statistically is considered “total employment.” President Trump had brokered new trade deals with Canada and Mexico and the EU and had nearly completed one with China, all of which protected U.S. workers and benefited Americans more than previous trade agreements had. Because of the tax cut and jobs act, companies found it profitable to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., jobs that former President Obama said we would never see again. Americans were confident in the economy and pleased with the direction in which the country was going.
The stock market surged, and through the pandemic, has remained high despite some dips due to the first pandemic fears. The economy is slowly starting to improve again as more businesses are opening and hiring again, and though unemployment caused by the pandemic remains high, is it is slowly decreasing. What President Trump did once for the economy, he can do again. Biden’s track record with former President Obama is the slowest recovery from a recession in the history of the United States. Before the election in 2016, the Dow Jones was 17,888. The day after the election it hit 18,589 and before the pandemic, it reached 29,000. Today it is 27,831, nearly 10,000 points higher than just before the election. If this is economic upheaval, I am all for it!
- She also speaks of a vast cultural divide, and she is correct. There are those who love America and those who kneel to disparage the National Anthem. There are those who admire the founders of our country for the good that they did while accepting their faults, and those who see only the faults, magnified a thousand fold. There are those who believe this is a great country, President Reagan’s “Shining City on a Hill,” a beacon of freedom to the world, and those who hate American and believe it is not and has never been any greater than communist China or North Korea. There are those who believe in free speech and those who believe free speech is only for them and those who share their beliefs. There are those who believe we should follow the Constitution and those who want to chuck it out the window as being too old fashioned. There are those who believe in God and try to follow the example of Jesus, and those who sneer at religion and believe only in themselves. There are those who know there are only two genders, male and female, and those who believe there are multitudinous genders. There are those who believe that, as science has proven, gender is determined by DNA, and those who say you can change your gender any time you want into anything you want. There are those who believe in science and those who claim they do, but then make up the science to fit their agenda. There are those who believe peaceful protests are where you carry signs and march in a park where you don’t disrupt traffic, carefully picking up your trash and carting it off with you, and those who believe peaceful protests include throwing bricks to break windows of other people’s stores and homes, stealing things that don’t belong to you, beating up policemen or innocent bystanders, setting fires, tazing policemen or throwing bombs at them. Yes, there is a cultural divide, but President Trump stands on the side of the first group, the patriots, the peace-lovers, the law-abiding citizens who just want to live their lives without people screaming at them in restaurants or beating them up because they are patriots, peace-lovers, and law-abiding citizens. Biden represents the second group. Ask the people in Chicago, in Seattle, in Minneapolis, in Portland how safe they feel with Democrats in charge.
- She concludes that “our national government is in hopeless disarray.” Indeed, at times things have seemed chaotic in the White House with leaks and changes in members of the Administration, but in large part that was due, not to President Trump’s lack of capability, but to the number of Obama hold-overs who still worked in the White House and who leaked information constantly and otherwise worked to undermine his administration. If you wonder at his ability to run the government, remember that he was a successful CEO, who inherited some of his money, but then used that money to expand his business and make more and more money. This is a man who knows how to organize and delegate, but a man who imagined he would be afforded the loyalty and respect past presidents have gotten from the hold-over White House staffs. He was totally unprepared as were all conservatives, for the malicious and endless attempts to destroy everything that he did and everyone who worked for him.
But that the government is in “hopeless disarray” can easily be countered by the accomplishments of his administration, both at home and abroad. I will only mention a few here, due to space. At home, he oversaw the appointment of countless federal judges and two supreme court justices who will follow the Constitution and not their own whims. He saw the passage of a tax cut bill that put money in 90% of Americans’ pockets and heralded an increase in jobs as companies put their savings into investing in America. He okayed the building of the pipeline that Obama had dithered over for years, allowing the safe passage of oil through the country. He encouraged fracking which has made the U.S. energy independent for the first time in decades and an exporter of oil. Abroad, he defeated ISIS, destroying their caliphate and scattering their surviving members. He ordered the assassination of two high ranking terrorist leaders. He convinced many NATO nations to begin to pay more to maintain their own security, relieving the U.S. of paying for all of the costs. He got out of the Paris Accord on climate change, saving the taxpayer countless dollars while still reducing our carbon emissions by more than any of the countries remaining in the Accord. He moved our embassy to the Israeli capital city of Jerusalem, something Congress had voted to do years ago but no other president had been brave enough to accomplish. He recently brokered a peace agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel, two of our allies in the Middle East. And he has kept us out of any new wars. If that is a government in disarray, give us more disarray!
Many of the good things that the President has accomplished have been downplayed or not mentioned at all on the major news channels. Thus the media has created a world in which half of the country believes the other half is lying when they talk about things that the President has accomplished. Those same news sources have blatantly lied and either refused to admit the truth when confronted with it, or given a short, self-excusing correction that most people either didn’t notice or didn’t understand. They have carefully edited portions of sentences or speeches to appear to say exactly the opposite of what they were saying. And they have ignored the equally blatant wrongdoing of anti-Trump members of the government. Given all this, I suppose it is little wonder that many Democrats and never-Trumpers actually believe the drivel that they repeat.
My answer to Ms. Griffith is that to vote for Biden would be the absolute worst thing that a freedom loving American could do. The forces propelling the Democrat Party— BLM, Antifa, the far-left socialists and communists—will destroy America as we know it. Perhaps in ten or twenty years, we would get over the shock enough to fight back, but it would take a fight and with guns that the Democrats would already have confiscated from us. A Biden vote will raise your taxes, raise your heating and electrical bills, cause you to pay for some kid to go to Harvard to major in gender studies and then give him a living wage while he stays in his parents’ basement because there are no jobs for gender studies majors. Ah, yes. Vote for Biden, and you will pay for that vote dearly!