For those of you too young to remember, Joe McCarthy was a Senator from Wisconsin back in the 1950s who built his career by being a shameless demagogue and exploiting the fear of Communism. In 1950, he claimed to have a list of over 200 Communist Party members who were working in the State Department. A subsequent investigation found no such thing. But that didn’t stop McCarthy and in 1953 he became head of the Senate Committee on Government Operations which allowed to continue his witch hunts that cost over 2,000 people their jobs despite the lack of any real evidence against them. He then expanded his search for Communist subversives into the armed forces and this time those hearings were broadcast on television, which proved to be McCarthy’s downfall. Like Trump today, McCarthy attacked witnesses and tried to bully them into submission. But the end came when the general counsel for the Army, Joseph Welch, stood up to McCarthy, thundering, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy endured as long as he did because fellow Republicans refused to stand up to him, even though they privately opposed him and his hearings. President Eisenhower also acquiesced, saying, “I will not get in the gutter with this guy”. But Joseph Welch put an end to McCarthy’s bullying once and for all.
Today, it looks very much like Khizr Khan is playing Joseph Welch to Donald Trump’s McCarthy. Khan’s speech at the Democratic Convention where he asked if Donald Trump had even read the Constitution and then offered to lend Trump his copy so he could read about liberty and the equal protection of the law was one of the most powerful moments of the four day event. And Khan followed that up by asking, “Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of the brave patriots who died defending America — you will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities.
You have sacrificed nothing and no one.” Needless to say, a narcissist and a bully like Trump could not let this attack stand. He accused Khan of muzzling his wife who was silent at his side during his speech. Khan’s wife responded in an editorial about her still uncontrollable grief over having lost her son in Iraq, saying she could not speak about it without breaking down. Khan added that Trump’s lack of respect for a Gold Star mother like his wife showed he had a dark soul that could not be trusted with the Presidency. And he called out Republican leaders, in particular Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, to repudiate Mr. Trump, saying, “I am saying to them that this is your moral duty — and history will judge you. . . . This will be a burden on their conscience for the rest of their lives.”
Trump and his advisors still will not give up this ridiculous fight. Trump claims that Khan opposes him because he wants to crack down on all those radical Islamic terrorists who are apparently streaming into our country and his surrogates have suggested that Mr. Khan is a secret agent for the Muslim Brotherhood or some other Islamic terrorist group. Of course, as with all things Trump, those accusations are patently false. Perhaps the best note came from another Trump surrogate who claimed that Donald had “sacrificed” two marriages due to all the hard work he did building his business, as if this somehow equated with parents losing a son defending our country.
Trump’s attacks on the Khan family have even inspired the anger of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and veterans in Congress are calling out Ryan and McConnell to not only repudiate Trump’s statements but withdraw support for the candidate. The pressure on all those Republicans who say “yes what Trump says is despicable, but I still support the nominee” will continue to build until it is no longer a viable position. Already, at least one prominent
Republican House member, Richard Hanna, has now come out and said that Trump is a total embarrassment and that he will be voting for Hillary Clinton. I would venture to guess that there will be a few more who will join him by the end of this campaign.
The Republican party has completely gone off the rails – the reasons for that will have to wait for another post. But it is currently being led by a narcissistic, egomaniacal bully who thinks only of his own gain and interest. He is enabled by party leaders who have turned a blind eye or, worse, given a knowing wink to appeals to America’s worst instincts in order to further their own political power and careers. The party’s propaganda arm, Fox News, has been run by a serial sexual predator. It is long past time for Republican leaders, Romney, the Bushes, McCain, Ryan, McConnell, and other elected representatives to forcefully repudiate Trump and withdraw support from their nominee. It may be the only way for them to save the Republican party as they know it. As Khizr Khan so clearly states, “this is your moral duty…and history will judge you”.
