Bob Schwartz

It shouldn’t surprise you that after Trump’s criminal conviction, I’m not going to be supporting him or voting for him in the 2024 election.

It shouldn’t surprise you because…I’m dead! For those who say I am turning in my grave or crying, same thing.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t advise those in the Republican Party, since that was my party. Literally, “the party of Lincoln”.

I was never known to use much vulgar language, even when I lost my temper. Though times and politics have changed—not necessarily for the better—you won’t hear me say what I might say to these Republicans if I had 21st century sensibilities: What the **** is wrong with you!?

Current Republicans have missed everything I stood for. I was never an angel above politics. That’s not how you win two presidential elections. But I was a person and leader of principle. The Republican Party, the one prepared to nominate a convicted criminal whose crime was to subvert an election, is taking a torch to those principles. American principles, constitutional principles, principles of justice, principles of decent behavior, in and out of office.

I want out. I am begging the Republican Party to renounce me. Stop calling it “the party of Lincoln”. Please take my name off. I may be dead, but I hope my spirit lives on. Just not, apparently, in the Republican Party.

© 2024 by Abraham Lincoln

Political power is one of the great temptations. Read ancient or modern history, read the Bible, read today’s news.

That news includes Nikki Haley, who not long ago called Trump dangerous and demented, now says she will vote for him. This is only the latest example of these kinds of turnarounds. A roster of Republicans brutally criticized Trump while they were vying for the 2016 nomination. The moment he won the nomination and looked like a potential president, they changed their tune. None more radically than Lindsey Graham, whose unwavering support of all things Trump has led to speculation that Trump has some secret personal evidence about him. Pure speculation.

Democrats are not strangers to political expediency, equivocation and hypocrisy. Plenty of examples. But Republicans have taken it to a new level. The Trump phenomenon has laid bare that in the Republican domain, with a few exceptions, all elements of integrity are gone. Maybe sleeping, maybe on vacation, maybe wounded, but more than likely dead for now.

For those of us who are not politicians, just citizens and political observers, the question loudly arises: Is political office and power really so important that all vestiges of integrity can be sacrificed? There were moments in the Nikki Haley campaign when she sounded like she actually meant what she said. We now know she didn’t. Or if she did at the time, she has found something more important, like being president someday.

There are so many Christians who support Trump and so many Republican politicians who are faithful Christians. Which means they may have read the Gospel of Mark thousands of times, and quoted it just as often. Whether they understood it is a different question, as is the question of how closely they follow it.

It is worth, for them and anybody, recalling the words from Mark 8:36:

What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? (NIV)

There are a lot of souls forfeited along the Republican trail.

© 2024 by Bob Schwartz

“I have had many conversations, as you have had, with a lot of young people over the last many months now. They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history, in many areas of the world, including in our own country.”
Hillary Clinton, MSNBC, Morning Joe, May 9, 2024

I have not forgiven Hillary, or for that matter Bill, for being such a destructive force on the Democratic Party and America.

Without details about all these issues, let’s just say that Hillary is a terrible national politician and leader, who convinced the Democratic Party, against all observation and evidence, that she would be a certain winner in the 2016 election. She didn’t win, and her foreseeable defeat changed America for the much worse.

I have said repeatedly that the best thing for the Democratic Party, for America, and selfishly, for me, would be if Hillary would just go away. Partly so she would stop saying stupid and unhelpful stuff like this. Partly because, as noted, she is responsible for where we are now.

Apparently, my wish hasn’t yet come true.

If I were Israeli, and my leader and his braintrust were as incompetent, despicable and crazy as Bibi and his, I would be demonstrating too. Demonstrating to find out why they could not work out a way for the terrorists to finally release the remaining hostages, without literally alienating the entire world and killing tens of thousands of people.

The ongoing demonstrations in Israel had me wondering something that is absurd on its face, but maybe enlightening. Why aren’t there any protests in Gaza? Even if you believe the people in Gaza have nothing to legitimately complain about, you might understand the burdens of their situation.

You know the answer. Protesting against existential threats you can’t control is pointless, when all of your time and life force is used to survive, with a little left over for grief. It might actually get you jailed or killed as an enemy. Which is why others around the world are protesting for you. Contrary to the view that American and global protestors are motivated by some hateful, selfish, naïve, uniformed petulance, they are just doing what the people of Gaza can’t: Saying, shouting “no”.

In 2022 Ken Burns released the PBS documentary series The U.S. and the Holocaust:

The U.S. and the Holocaust explores America’s response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the 20th century. It dispels competing myths that Americans either were ignorant of the unspeakable persecution that Jews and other targeted minorities faced in Europe or that they looked on with callous indifference. The film tackles a range of questions that remain essential to our society today, including how racism influences policies related to immigration and refugees as well as how governments and people respond to the rise of authoritarian states that manipulate history and facts to consolidate power.

We consider it here and now because this is the week set aside to remember the Holocaust. It is the week that Biden remembers to talk about the Holocaust and about the antisemitism that drove it. He did not talk about Gaza.

What is missing, and what The U.S. and the Holocaust documents, is the inconvenient truth that America was ambivalent and late responding to the horror. Powerful politicians didn’t want to address it, because they didn’t like Jews, blacks, and anyone who wasn’t a white, right-thinking American. Journalists who tried to chronicle Germany’s program of hate were thrown out of that country.

There is a confusing conflation about Gaza. When those who were and are the victims of hate, then and now, respond to yet another massacre of hate on October 7, isn’t that hate—that antisemitism—the central and overriding issue, in Palestine and America? Doesn’t it push any other related horror to the margin and justify it?

That’s why The U.S. and the Holocaust is so important. For various reasons, we didn’t do more sooner, but we could have. For various reasons today in Gaza, we could do more, but we haven’t. Are those failures, then and now, missed opportunities for better and more humane outcomes? Or are those failures complicity?