Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 112, No. 246, Ed. 1 Monday, April 4, 2016 Page: 4 of 16
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OPINION
4A
Monday, April 4, 2016
Denton Record-Chronicle
Denton Record-Chronicle
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ill Republicans learn the right les-
sons from the debacle that is the
Trump candidacy? I am doubtful,
because for many, it requires a good, hard
look in the mirror.
Donald Trump didn’t create the masses
supporting him, he simply played into their
fears and prejudices, which have been
nursed for the last decade by conservative
talk show hosts, cable news programs, web-
sites, grassroots groups and not a few GOP
elected officials.
Like Trump’s presi-
dential campaign an-
nouncement, it began
with immigration. It
seems like an eon ago
that Trump declared,
“When Mexico sends
its people, they’re not
sending their best. ...
They’re sending people
that have lots of prob-
lems, and they’re
bringing those problems with [them].
They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing
crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume,
are good people.”
This sweeping denunciation — not of ille-
gal immigration, mind you, but of Mexicans
and the government of Mexico — would
have been enough in normal times to sink
most candidates. But the media, including
the so-called mainstream media, gave him a
pass, and many on the right embraced his
supposed candor.
National Review’s editor Rich Lowry
wrote a column “Sorry, Donald Trump Has a
Point,” arguing, “For all its crassness, Trump’s
rant on immigration is closer to reality than
the gauzy cliches of the immigration roman-
tics unwilling to acknowledge that there
might be an issue welcoming large numbers
of high-school dropouts into a 21st-century
economy.”
I responded immediately with my own
NRO piece, “Stop Defending Donald
Trump.” But it took the magazine months to
decide that Trump was unhinged and a dan-
ger to the conservative movement.
The right has made opposition to immi-
gration — increasingly legal immigration as
well as illegal — the sine qua non of conser-
vatism for some time now. Conservatives
who argue, as I do, that our immigration sys-
tem needs a dramatic overhaul are routinely
denounced as open-borders traitors because
we favor making it easier for workers with
needed skills to immigrate legally and giving
legal status to those illegal immigrants
whose labor we depend on — and who have
paid taxes and broken no other laws.
There is certainly room for legitimate de-
bate about immigration policy among con-
servatives. One can argue for lower immigra-
tion levels, more diversity among the immi-
grant pool, and certainly for better border se-
curity in good conscience. But suggesting
that immigrants are “taking jobs from Amer-
icans” and that they have “high rates of crimi-
nality” — neither of which is true — feeds in-
to a narrative that was ripe for the extremism
that Trump has spouted.
Organizations like the Center for Immi-
gration Studies, the Federation for American
Immigration Reform and NumbersUSA
pump out mendacious studies purporting to
show that all the jobs that have been created
in the last decade have gone to immigrants,
and that immigrants disproportionally fill
our prisons.
These, in turn, make headlines on
Drudge, fill hours of rant on talk radio, get
serious treatment from conservative news
outlets and then turn into direct mail fun-
draisers from grassroots conservative orga-
nizations. Is it any wonder then, that when
Trump comes along and spews his venom, it
comes back to bite conservatives who would
never think of talking about the issue in
Trump’s vulgar, hate-filled rhetoric?
But the problem isn’t only immigration.
Government itself has become the enemy for
many conservatives. Instead of arguments
for limited government and smaller bureau-
cracies, many on the right have begun to
sound more like anarchists than Burkean
conservatives. Republican elected officials —
even staunchly conservative ones — get la-
beled as Republican In Name Only, so that
all who serve in public life become immedi-
ately suspect. If you can’t trust anyone who
holds office now, an outsider like Donald
Trump has a natural opening.
It is difficult to see an easy way out of the
morass that has become the conservative
movement. Conservatism has managed to
hold together despite the inherent strains
among its various elements, in large part be-
cause winning elections was considered im-
portant enough to minimize differences.
Libertarians and economic conservatives
might not have embraced social conserva-
tives’ agenda, (and vice versa) but they were
willing to make peace in order to elect repre-
sentatives who were at least marginally bet-
ter than the alternative Democrat.
No more. These arrangements now look
like quaint relics of a genteel past, not the re-
alpolitik of election victory. We conservatives
are likely to lose the 2016 election as a result,
and, frankly, we have no one to blame but
ourselves.
LINDA CHAVEZ’S column is distrib-
uted by Creators Syndicate Inc.
W
EDITORIAL BOARD
Bill Patterson
Publisher and CEO
Scott K. Parks
Managing Editor
Mark Finley
City Editor
Mariel Tarn-Ray
News Editor
PAST PUBLISHERS
William C. “Will” Edwards
1903-1927
Robert J. “Bob” Edwards
1927-1945
Riley Cross
1945-1970
Vivian Cross
1970-1986
Fred Patterson
1986-1999
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m
Time for countries
to foot own defense bill
Linda
Chavez
ahbelo.com NYSE symbol: AHC
t seems strange that so few of my fellow
TV binge-watchers have submitted to
the fascinating Norwegian political thril-
ler, Occupied. Friends, this is eight hours of
your life you won’t mind not getting back.
In the story, an idealistic Norwegian
prime minister stops
his country’s huge oil
production in the
name of confronting
climate change. To get
the oil flowing again,
the European Union
asks Russia to invade
and reopen the taps.
Russia complies and
proceeds to occupy
Norway in a humiliat-
ing velvet-glove man-
defense budget, is finally raising it.
Which brings us to one of Trump’s points
about NATO — a point all but glossed over
by those incensed by the word “obsolete.”
Americans are paying for 75 percent of
NATO’s military spending. And only six of
the 28 NATO members have met U.S. de-
mands that they devote at least 2 percent of
their gross domestic product to defense. We
spend 3.6 percent. For the record, the com-
bined GDP of our NATO allies is about
equal to ours.
Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. stop
buying Saudi oil if that country’s govern-
ment doesn’t start contributing ground
troops to the fight against ISIS was also
greeted with derision. “Without us,” Trump
said with a trademark threat, “Saudi Arabia
wouldn’t exist for very long.”
What he didn’t say was that the Saudis
have also refused to take in Syrian refugees.
Nor did he note that they are funding the ji-
hadis threatening the West.
And what about the West? Some of our
rich European allies have become so passive
and so lazy they’ve barely bothered monitor-
ing known terrorists living off their social
benefits. (Belgium, by the way, spends 0.9
percent of its GDP on defense.)
On the left, Bemie Sanders treads some
of this territory, rightly questioning Ameri-
ca’s seeming addiction to military interven-
tion.
Other voices
I
U.S. Soccer must
pay players equally
g.
uick: Name a U.S. national soccer player.
■ ■ The first to pop into your head was probably a
woman, maybe even one of the women who re-
cently filed a federal wage-discrimination claim against
the U.S. Soccer Federation.
The filing, with the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission, alleges that the organization pays its men’s
team nearly four times more than the women.
Among the figures cited: The women this year would
earn $99,000 apiece if they won 20 friendly matches, the
minimum they are required to play. Men, meanwhile, are
paid $100,000 each even if they lose all 20. If they won
out, they’d receive $263,320.
The action grew out of efforts by the players associa-
tion representing the women’s national team to draw up a
new collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Soccer.
But the unequal treatment goes beyond salaries and
bonuses. For example, the U.S. women have complained
for some time about unsafe field conditions. They are
frequently made to play on artificial turf; men generally
play on grass.
Carli Lloyd, Becky Sauerbrunn, Alex Morgan, Megan
Rapinoe and Hope Solo want an investigation. (Was Ab-
by Wambach the name that popped into your head? She
retired, but she’s among those making noise about equal
pay, too.)
“We are the best in the world, have three World Cup
Championships, four Olympic Championships, and the
[U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team] get paid more to just
show up than we get paid to win major championships,”
Solo said in a statement.
In U.S. Soccer, particularly, pay comparisons are apples
to apples. Men and women do the same job. They play
the same number of games with the same amount of
practice and travel.
Even if U.S. Soccer chose to pay players based on the
amount of revenue generated, the women would win.
They generated $18 million in revenue and profits of $5
million in fiscal 2017; the men brought in $9 million and
turned a nearly $1 million loss.
The women’s World Cup final last year drew the larg-
est American TV audience ever for soccer.
Paying women less than men for the same work has
been illegal in this country for more than a half century.
Even so, a wage gap persists. Women who work full time
in the U.S. earn, on average, 79 percent of what men earn.
And things aren’t improving much.
At the current rate, the pay gap won’t close for another
100 years.
U.S. Soccer said in a statement it is “disappointed” by
the complaint and noted its commitment to building the
women’s game during the past 30 years. We salute the
federation for building a profitable, popular and suc-
cessful women’s team.
But the only reason the soccer federation continues to
pay women less is because they can get away with it.
“At what point as a female are we going to keep letting
this happen?” Wambach said in an interview with CNN
earlier this year.
The answer must be “no more.”
Froma
Harrop
ner.
The United States plays a central role by
virtue of its absence. In this near-future tale,
America has become energy-independent
and left NATO.
Once expected to dive headlong into any
crisis, especially where the Russians are in-
volved, the U.S. has decided to watch from
the sidelines.
Such scenarios are sounding less fantas-
tical as populist American candidates ques-
tion the long-held assumption that the U.S.
military must maintain order everywhere.
They’re addressing the growing distress at
seeing rich allies warmly applaud or critique
our performance while happily not paying.
That the bombastic Donald Trump is
condemning this setup does not strip the
complaint of all merit. But it does give “re-
sponsible” opinion the luxury of bashing
Trump’s remark that “NATO is obsolete”
without much elaboration.
These days, our allies — spooked by Rus-
sia’s annexation of Crimea and its advances
in eastern Ukraine — are proclaiming the
Atlantic alliance anything but obsolete. Nor-
way, a preacher of peace, has rekindled its
love for NATO as the Russian military
swarms over the Arctic Circle (in real life, not
on TV).
Russian warplanes are flying down the
Norwegian coast with in-your-face impuni-
ty. And Norway, which had been cutting its
He does go off course in arguing that we
should spend less on the military so we can
spend more on social priorities.
The No. 1 job of the federal government is
national defense. We spend whatever we
have to. We don’t say: “Oh, there’s a budget
surplus this year. Let’s have a war.”
But both Trump and Sanders are solid in
asking what all this defense spending is do-
ing for us.
Are we Americans obliged to both police
the globe and pay for the service? We pick up
the bills that other prosperous countries are
perfectly content to leave on the table.
Let’s ask ourselves why.
FROMA HARROP writes for The Provi-
dence Journal. Her column is distributed
by Creators Syndicate Inc.
Letters to the editor
War not the answer
I wonder what has become of the men
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and women who served during the Bush
wars? I think they were there to protect oil
and gas. War is not an answer to problems.
Hillary knows that!
Dolores Vann,
Denton
Unthinkable terror
How do you stop an enemy who has no
fear of mortality and who welcomes death in
battle because it guarantees them instant ac-
cess to paradise?
Taught as toddlers that death in battle is
preferable to life on earth, not only do they
not fear death in war, but whatever they in-
flict on their adversaries, no matter how in-
human by our beliefs, is another feather in
their religious headgear.
ISIS has reached a state of depravity,
teaching the young to use decapitated heads
of those they have executed as soccer balls.
Five and 6-year-old offspring are being
taught to do this.
The object is to raise children who will
instinctively show no mercy when they gain
the size and strength to use a weapon; killing
will be as natural to them as eating, sleeping
or breathing, and they will not fear death.
ISIS has one fear and it transcends a nor-
mal apprehension of death.
If an ISIS fanatic dies in an unclean state,
paradise escapes him or her. That unclean
state at death exists in their mind if pig meat
has touched their flesh and they have not
been purified.
Savages who have shown no fear when
attacking our forces would flee like rabbits if
they were faced by a military armed with
bullets that had been greased with pig fat.
Bullets greased with pig fat could replace
the “death urge “in these fanatics with un-
thinkable terror. Why don’t we use them?
Let’s teach them fear.
— The Dallas Morning News
This day in history: April 4
In 1850, the city of Los An-
geles was incorporated.
In 1859, “Dixie” was per-
formed publicly for the first time
by Bryant’s Minstrels at Me-
chanics’ Hall in New York.
In 1865, President Abraham
Lincoln, accompanied by his son
Tad, visited the vanquished Con-
federate capital of Richmond,
Virginia, where he was greeted
by a crowd that included former
slaves.
Today is Monday, April 4,
the 95ill day of 2016. There
are 271 days left in the year.
On April 4, 1968, civil
rights leader Martin Luther
King Jr., 39, was shot and killed
while standing on a balcony of
the Lorraine Motel in Memphis,
Tennessee.
In 1818, Congress decided
the flag of the United States
would consist of 13 red and
white stripes and 20 stars, with a
new star to be added for every
new state of the Union.
In 1841, President William
Henry Harrison died from
pneumonia one month after his
inaugural, becoming the first
U.S. chief executive to die in of-
fice.
John Nance Gamer,
Denton
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off the New Jersey coast.
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ing the United States, signed the
North Atlantic Treaty in Wash-
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Parks, Scott K. Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 112, No. 246, Ed. 1 Monday, April 4, 2016, newspaper, April 4, 2016; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1127503/m1/4/: accessed June 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .