Dick Cheney and Paul Ryan, along with John Kasich, Lindsey Graham, and many other Republicans, have condemned Donald Trump's most recent un-American screed, but I notice that the most viable GOP candidates for president--Cruz, Rubio--are equivocating while, on FB, there is a persistent meme to the effect that Jimmy Carter did it, too.
The "Carter Defense" of Trump suggests that a religious test for entry into the United States, and Carter's ban on admitting Iranians after Iran took American citizens hostage in 1979, are parallel cases. But, since Iran is a country and Islam is a religion, they aren't parallel at all. It's one thing for a president to impose sanctions against a hostile country. Denying to Iranians the benefits of travel to the US, which would include for example the chance to study at American universities, is, at least arguably, an effective means of exerting pressure on their government. It's also explicitly permitted by federal law. But to deny entry to people on account of their religion--well, when Ryan, Cheney, Hillary Clinton and I agree, and you are on the other side, you should reconsider.
I'm so unaccustomed to concurring with the likes of Ryan and Cheney that it's tempting to allude to the broken clock that is exactly right for two conceptual moments each day. Probably the best way to make sense of their lapse into reason, however, is to note again that the interests of ambitious Republican politicians diverge from what is in the longer-term interests of the Republican party. The party should moderate its rhetoric, give a rest to the hyperventilating and foamy idiocy, and it's comparatively easy for the Speaker of the House and a retired former vice president to advance that cause by condemning outrageous views. Similarly for Kasich and Graham, whose presidential campaigns are going nowhere. But Cruz and Rubio still have a chance of winning the nomination, and are as a result constrained from renouncing what's ridiculous. (I am assuming they have an inclination to do so, which, especially with regard to Cruz, is likely an unmerited compliment.) The root problem is that a Republican, to win any intra-party contest, is obliged to win the votes of people who are on leave from reality. The kooks and crackpots are too big a slice of the electoral pie to abjure.
Meanwhile, on the centenary of Frank Sinatra's birth, let's give him a call-out for something other than his voice. Though he possessed some of Trump's unsavory personal characteristics Sinatra, when it wasn't popular, insisted on performing before integrated audiences with an integrated orchestra and often with such fellow musicians as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. Yesterday morning, on NPR, Scott Simon suggested that one of his finest hours was a performance he gave at a high school in Gary, Indiana, in 1945, when white students were walking out after the school was integrated.
"The eyes of the nation are watching Gary," Sinatra told the students, according to a review in a Chicago newspaper. "You have a wonderful war production record. Don't spoil it by pulling a strike. Go back to school, kids." An unusual hush then fell over the audience as he sang "The House I Live In."
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