AN APPRAISAL OF HOW WE GOT HERE

Posted on January 12, 2021 by abyssum
A Tragic Day for America
BY: Thomas A. Saunders III, Chairman Emeritus, Heritage FoundationJanuary 11, 2021 January 6th was a tragic day for this Nation.    The losses in Georgia have struck a real blow to our Freedoms.    The objective for both sides was to win the Senate seats.  Democrats had to win two. We had only to defend one. Ours should have been the much easier lift given that we were ahead.  Between November 3rd and January 5th however, our advantage went up in smoke. While both sides saw lower turnout in the runoff than in the general, we lost far more ground. The Administration and the Republican Party’s management of the final phase was disappointing.    Republicans failed to understand the importance of unity, while Democrats stayed focused and stuck to the talking points like velcro. Lin Wood and Sidney Powell’s public decree that voters stay home was inexcusable. The President’s presence in Georgia did more harm than good. Trump’s feelings were not unfounded, but he got so wrapped around the axle with the presidential election that he lost sight of the fact that every moment he was in Georgia should have been devoted to the message of holding the Republican majority in the Senate.  Meanwhile, Stacey Abrams and Democrats never took their eye off the ball.  They had laser focus and registered tons of new minority voters.  They deployed armies of ballot harvesters into every church and nursing home in Georgia and followed the same playbook of corruption that they have followed for years, exploiting absurd and unnecessary mail-in ballot rules that promote fraud.  Now… we must move forward.    The invasion of the Capitol was unconscionable behavior and those responsible, unlike violent members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.    This behavior, however, did not materialize out of thin air on January 6, 2021.  The hypocrisy of media coverage this week has been staggering. Domestic terrorism exists on a continuum. The attack on the Capitol is an extension of the occupation of the state capitol in Wisconsin in 2011 where protesters refused to relinquish the people’s house for weeks, of Occupy Wall Street, of last year’s riots where mobs took over blocks of Seattle, barred police and deemed it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).  It is on the continuum of the Rodney King riots of the 1990s which morphed last year into the George Floyd riots where we witnessed the destruction and burning of police departments and private property in Seattle, Portland, New York, Kenosha, Minneapolis, and other major cities. No one did anything to stop the madness.  Mob violence is not new.  Domestic terrorism is an ugly reality. We must recognize that we are in a war—an honest to God war— for this Nation. It is a war that seeks to change the Constitution, our culture, our governance. Perhaps most threatening, it is an attack on what it means to be an American.  Now… we must move forward.  What we witnessed throughout 2020 and on January 6th in the Capitol building is not the solution. Fair dealing from the media is a farce.  A handful of players control the public forum and dictate our free speech: Joe Manchin (D-WV), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Mark Zuckerberg  (Facebook), Tim Cook (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Google), et al. We cannot depend on self-interested politicians to recalibrate our voting protocols. The party with the advantage will never consent to meaningful reform. The courts will continue to kick election reform grievances back to the states to clean up their respective messes, and corrupt state officials will be at the helm of those clean-up efforts.    Four years ago, Republicans held the majority in all three branches.    Our only solution is to control the Congress and advance legislation that will keep the country from ruin. Populism will continue. Americans do not like what they see and will not accept this vision of America advanced by the Socialist Left. In 2022, we must see even greater gains in the House and must retake control of the Senate.  
Thomas A. Saunders III joined the Heritage Board of Trustees in 2005 and served as its chairman for nearly 10 years. In 2018, The Heritage Foundation awarded Saunders its highest honor, the prestigious Clare Boothe Luce Award.

Rip McIntosh

About abyssum

I am a retired Roman Catholic Bishop, Bishop Emeritus of Corpus Christi, Texas
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