This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write. I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf. The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie. And it is where you want to be on a golf course.
Don’t you like that word – equivocating?
Here is what it means:
To use ambiguous or unclear expressions, usually to avoid commitment or in order to mislead, prevaricate or hedge.”
That’s exactly what Donald Trump’s sycophants do. They equivocate.
Atlantic Magazine’s Tom Nichols made that point very well in a column he wrote recently.
It started this way:
“’I didn’t come here,’ Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina complained last week, ‘to have the president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, sound public policy.’”
Good for Tillis.
Nichols wrote that Tillis was referring to Republicans who were abandoning a deal on border security because they thought reaching a solution with President Joe Biden would hurt Trump’s electoral chances in the fall.
“’It is immoral,’ Tillis added, ‘to look the other way because you think this is the linchpin for Trump to win.’”
More from Nichols:
“In theory, Republicans care deeply about the situation on the Southern United States border. In reality, most of them seem to care only about whatever Trump wants at any given moment, and what Trump wants is to take refuge in the Oval Office from his multiple legal problems.
“Tillis’ outburst, although welcome, was a rare moment of candor from a senior Republican senator about the degree to which the party’s once and future nominee has gutted the GOP of any remaining principles.”
Nichols also criticizes, as I do, those “who remain quiet in the face of Trump’s ghoulish attacks on others rather risk Trump turning his ire – and his MAGA – on them.
“When challenged, they speak up only long enough to make excuses for Trump and engage in moral obfuscation over issues that they must certainly know are not remotely complicated, such as whether the presumptive nominee of the Republican party should defame a woman he’s been found liable for sexually abusing.”
To me, remaining quiet in the face of Trump’s criminal actions reminds of what it appears many Germans did in the face of Adolph Hitler. [I use the word “appears” because I wasn’t there and, thus, do not know first-hand.] Many Germans remained silent while Hitler killed millions of helpless Jewish people.
And, don’t forget – Trump welcomes comparisons to Hitler.
And, to conclude, this from Wall Street Journal retired editor Gerard Baker:
“Meatball Ron has done it. Ted did it years ago. Little Marco, too. Maybe others will prove to have more cojones than that growing parade of men who once asked us to believe they were leaders but turned out to be sycophants.”
I say enough of both: Enough of Trump and enough of those who equivocate on his behalf!