Who’s The Crazy One?

Presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for a moratorium on Muslim immigration until we can figure out why Islamic terrorists have been able to enter our country and devised ways to protect ourselves. This has caused the left and right establishments to dogpile on Trump. Echoing the sentiments of virtually all Democrats and many Republicans, a Washington Post editorial has declared that Trump’s proposal disqualifies him as a candidate because in the Post’s view what he recommends is unconstitutional and therefore un-American. But President Obama has issued executive orders – as it happens orders that sabotage our borders - that he himself has called unconstitutional (“I don’t have the authority to stop deportations”).  Has the Post editorialized that this is un-American and disqualifies him for the presidency? Has it called for Obama to be impeached? Have Democrats ridiculed Obama for his un-American prescriptions?

Consider the nature of the threat. A 2009 “World Opinion” survey by the University of Maryland showed that between 30 and 50% of Muslims in Jordan, Egypt and other Islamic countries approved of the terrorist attacks on America and that only a minority of Muslims “entirely disapproved” of them. ISIS has acknowledged its plans to use refugee programs to infiltrate its terrorists into the United States and other infidel countries. In Minneapolis we have a Somali refugee community many of whose members have returned to Syria to fight for ISIS. Other Muslim immigrants like Major Hassan and Tashfeen Malik have carried out barbaric acts of terror here at home. Today Muslim terrorists are using assault rifles and pipe bombs, but we know they have Sarin gas and other chemical weapons which they might use tomorrow. The terrorists inexorably arrive along with the other immigrants, no one in authority apparently knowing who’s who. Who, then, in his right mind does not think that Muslim immigration poses a serious security threat to us?

The outrage against Trump should properly have been directed at our president who refuses to identify the enemy as Islamic terrorism, who has opened the door to nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to the Islamic America-haters in Iran, whose policies have created the vacuums that ISIS has filled, and who even after Paris and San Bernardino is determined to bring 100,000 immigrants from Syrian war zones to our unprotected shores. This outrage is missing and it is precisely because it is missing that Trump’s unconstitutional proposal resonates with so many rightly concerned Americans. When the man in charge of our security is by general consensus out to lunch in regard to fighting the war on Islamic terror, or protecting us at home, a proposal like Trump’s, which at least recognizes the threat, is going to resonate with the public.

In middle of a crisis of national security, the Democratic Party seems to think that climate change and especially gun ownership are greater threats to our survival than the one that comes from hundreds of millions of Muslims who think America should be attacked and who believe the whole world should be put under medieval Islamic law. In the face of this threat, the Democratic Party and its leaders seem to have no problem with the fact that we have more than 350 “Sanctuary Cities” that are dedicated to sabotaging our immigration laws; that we have no southern border and as a result have 179,000 illegal alien criminals and who knows how many terrorists in our country today.

Once again we have Trump to thank for changing the surreal conversation about whether having a border at all is compatible with American values, and forcing people to focus on the dangers we face. Republicans are generally defenders of this country, but not in this controversy over Donald Trump. Would that they would use the same ridicule and outrage over the Democrats’ many betrayals of our country and its citizens through proposals to expose us to our enemies as they do over a proposal to protect us from them. Trump’s idea may be unconstitutional and unworkable, but it springs from a desire that is honorable and patriotic. The appropriate response would be to propose alternatives that recognize the same dangers and serve the same ends but do so within constitutional limits.

Donald Trump’s great contribution is saying the unsayable; putting things on the table that would otherwise be buried; calling a spade a spade in a time when political correctness has made us unable to discuss things that have to do with our basic national survival.  This is the crux of the issue.  Every time he creates a controversy like this he also tells this country that its emperors, Republican and Democrat, have no clothes. That they prefer propriety over defending the country.  That they are dedicated only to keeping the lid on a cauldron of threat and challenge they have allowed to boil over.

The 2016 election will be a referendum on the defense of this country and its survival. Let’s see who answers the call.