Rep. Ken Buck says the Republican Party is dead. Sen. Jeff Flake wants the GOP to turn on President Trump. Colorado commentator Jon Caldara suggests the party’s conservative and moderate wings get a divorce. All are friends of mine, but wow, guys, talk about overreacting.
To the boats, all is lost!
While I haven’t seen the new movie about British forces desperately fleeing Europe from Dunkirk beach as Nazi armies closed in, let me just assure these hair-on-fire alarmists on the right that Republicans are in no such condition, in fact nowhere near it.
Hang around long enough, as I’ve been fortunate to do, get into your seventies, and you gain a degree of perspective. You’re inoculated against the manic panic of a nonstop news cycle and flailing social media.
Some may think Obamacare follies in the Senate are a crisis, but excuse me, I don’t. I was alive when the Nazis still held all Europe, when America and Russia were allies, and when nuclear war actually occurred. You obituary writers just watch: this too shall pass.
Invited on a radio show to respectfully rebut Caldara, Flake, and Buck, I jotted down ten points of the Andrews credo for patient, persistent, positive, principled conservative citizens.
So rapidly did my pen fly, the list became a dozen points and then finally 13. Here they are, linked like a chain. A rescue chain for the despairing, if you will.
1- Governing is hard because
2- People are imperfect so
3- Change is incremental meaning
4- We have to go from where we are and
5- Play the cards we’re dealt since
6- Freedom is a marathon not a sprint in which
7- If your hair is on fire you can’t see or breathe therefore
8- Let’s all keep calm and carry on like Brits in the Blitz and
9- Quit majoring in the minors, no whining for
10- America remains the envy of the world and leader of the world thus
11- America’s open, resilient, self-correcting ethos won’t fail us now provided
12- Republicans, the one guardian of the US Constitution, stay in the fight but
13- All that said, I’m probably not as smart as I think I am — nor are you, right?
Wrapping up, let me repeat Point 13. Have you ever heard such a cacophony of yapping, yammering, yowling voices all in disagreement with each other about how politics and policy should be conducted, except for agreeing on the certainty that they could do it better than those in power?
Takes a lickin' - keeps on kickin'
The Dunkirk evacuation itself, with shells whistling overhead and sergeants shouting and bullhorns ordering everyone to the boats, couldn't have been more chaotic.
But please include me out. Count the aging Andrews undaunted and upbeat, a non-participant in the hysteria. The USA will get through this with flying colors. I guarantee it.