There’s no such thing as a perfect person. No one should understand this fact better than a Republican as the Republican Party consists mostly of Christians.
And yet, the Republican Party seems to demand perfection out of its political leaders, especially its candidates.
I have no problem with having high expectations for a candidate. Character is an important part of someone’s trustworthiness. If you’re going to hand power to them, you want to make sure they’re going to use it in a responsible manner. However, I feel Republicans take this to an extreme.
Too often, we end up gravitating toward people whom we’d consider the church’s best congregant. They are genial and intelligent. They don’t curse, they rarely drink if they do at all, and they spend a lot of time talking about traditional American values. They seemingly don’t have any problems in their past. You could wipe their personal history with a white glove and not come up with any dirt at all.
And then we elect them and they end up being horrible politicians. The kind who go along to get along, or adopt crusades of their own based on their own strongly held, squeaky clean beliefs that end up being counter-productive to keeping America on track.
We’ve been taught this lesson over and over again and yet Republicans still seem to have trouble getting it to sink in.
Mitt Romney, for all intents and purposes, is one of those candidates who didn’t really have anything that sullied his character in his personal life. So clean was he, in fact, that the left had to consistently invent things about him.
Romney ended up being a Republican-lite. He can often be seen siding with Democrats and can no longer be trusted to keep America safe from the ravages of radicals he’s supposedly against.
And then, there’s Donald J. Trump. Trump was unfaithful in his marriage, said off-color things about grabbing women by the genitals, and was constantly picking fights. He is abrasive, uncouth, and sometimes feels like he’d be more at home at a Playboy mansion party than the Republican Party.
And yet, under his leadership, the left suffered defeats as they’d never seen before and America was more prosperous than it’d been in some time.
These two men couldn’t be more different, and given the choice between the two in a blind pick, Republicans would have picked the squeaky clean guy over the one with dirt on him. Yet, it was the stereotypical choir boy that ultimately failed the American people and has become a pariah among his own people after he turned his back on them.
Meanwhile, people are just waiting to pull the lever for Trump the moment they get the chance.
The thing to remember is that Washington D.C. is not a church, it’s a battlefield. While sending people with good Christian morals is always a plus, you don’t want to send Ned Flanders, a Sunday School saint. You want to send the Boondock Saints, the guy who will head to congress hungover and tell the guy across the aisle that if he wants abortion on demand he can #$%@ his #&%$@& while he *&@$%! over the abortion clinic counters you $%*&@.
You want people who are willing to keep America fastened to its Judeo-Christian values while also being willing to get their hands dirty and fight like demons. Even Ronald Reagan, a nice man with superb American values, had a devastating wit and the willingness to throw punches.
The definition of insanity is attempting the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Republicans have got to stop trying to elect choir boys. Streiff, in his recent article about the ongoing character assassination of Heschel Walker, quoted a writer at Ace of Spades who wrote “I don’t need to prove that I’m better than them. I already know it.”
The left is consistently trying to make you adhere to the cleanest of standards because it’s what you strive for as a good person. They use this against you by accusing you of hypocrisy and bad character when you support someone who fails to live up to these squeaky clean standards.
Electing squeaky clean politicians isn’t the goal, the goal is electing someone who will keep America out of the hands of radicals. To goal is to have warriors go into Washington and defeat those who would take it over. I don’t care if the politician is a former prostitute whose nudes are readily available to everyone on the internet. If she sees to it that America stays free and frustrates the machinations of authoritarians, then she’s the woman for the job.
This kind of thinking may horrify some on the right, but the reality is that the Republican Party has continued to elect ineffectual leaders for decades, being saved only by the occasional warrior politician who manages to check all the right boxes, which is sadly rarer than we like to admit.
Don’t wait for the perfect candidate. He’s not coming. Vote for the guy willing to go to war on your behalf.
