Newspaper Page Text
The ADVANCE, January 17, 2024/Page 6A
Stye Aiiuancg
OPINIONS
“I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his repute for the freedom to think,
And when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t’other half for the freedom to speak.”
-James Russell Lowell
editorials
Biden ’s Scare-The-Hell- Out-
Of-You Reelection Campaign
By Ben Shapiro
Joe Biden is fac
ing an uphill reelec
tion battle.
He is desperate,
and he should be.
The world is an uglier
and an uglier place
under Biden. Nearly
no one believes the
country is moving in
the right direction.
Americans are deeply
dissatisfied with the economy; America is
experiencing an unprecedented illegal im
migration crisis; and the world seems to be
on fire, from the Middle East to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Biden himself is clearly ail
ing; as comedian Shane Gillis recently said,
“My favorite thing about Biden is anytime
Biden finishes a speech, he transforms into
a Roomba.” This is clearly true. In fact, after
Biden’s recent diatribe against Donald
Trump at Valley Forge, Dr. Jill Biden — the
greatest physician in all the land — charged
up on the stage like a shepherd attempting
to pen in a wandering sheep, corralling the
president toward the back of the stage.
So, what can Biden do?
He can pull out all the scare tactics he
knows.
And that’s precisely what he’s doing,
fully 10 months from the 2024 election.
His campaign is predicated on two
main issues: Trump, and also Trump.
First, Biden argues, Donald Trump is
apparently a threat to democracy. Biden
stated at Valley Forge, “Donald Trump’s
campaign is obsessed with the past, not the
future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democ
racy, put himself in power.” He said this in
the middle of a speech about the evils of
Jan. 6 — while labeling Trump an insurrec
tionist, which presumably would disqualify
Trump from the ballot. Biden’s own De
partment of Justice has hit Trump with two
separate federal criminal cases, one in Flor
ida, the other in Washington, D.C.
It is, in other words, a tough case to
make that Trump is the true threat to de
mocracy, while Biden is democracy’s de
fender.
Second, Biden argues, Donald Trump
is a white supremacist. Biden stated at
Emanuel AME Church in Charleston,
South Carolina — the site of a white su
premacist mass shooting in 2015 — that
Trump’s election denial represented a “sec
ond lost cause,” somehow comparable to
the Southern Lost Cause narrative that
portrayed the loss of the Civil War as the
death of a grand and glorious way of life at
the hands of perfidious Yankees. Yes, Biden
suggested, Trump was akin to the Confed
erates. And he, Joe Biden, would stand in
their way.
Biden has made this case before.
Against — yes, really — Mitt Romney.
Back in 2012, Biden argued that Romney
would put Black Americans “back in
chains.” Suffice it to say that Biden has little
credibility trying to breathe new life into
that political corpse.
Joe Biden requires Donald Trump. He
needs him.
But he’s still unlikely to beat him.
That’s why Biden is steering so strongly
to his left rather than toward the middle. At
his speech in Charleston, pro-Hamas pro
testers began chanting for a ceasefire in
Gaza, which would leave Hamas in power
after the Oct. 7 massacre. Biden sheepishly
replied, “I understand their passion, and
I’ve been quietly working with the Israeli
government to get them to reduce and sig
nificantly get out of Gaza.”
Biden can’t leave any stone, no matter
how radical, unturned.
And that tactic will, in turn, drive away
many moderate voters who are sick of the
chaos the Biden era has ushered in.
In short, Biden is re-running his 2020
campaign. There’s one big difference this
time: This time, Joe Biden is the president.
And we all know it.
Ben Shapiro, 39, is a graduate of UCLA and
Harvard Law School, host of "The Ben Shapiro
Show," and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a
three-time New York Times bestselling author; his
latest book is "The Authoritarian Moment: How
The Left Weaponized America's Institutions
Against Dissent." To find out more about Ben
Shapiro and read features by other Creators
Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate website at www.creators,
com.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM.
Collectibles
By Joe Phillips
Dear Me
Cindi and I can
talk.
We speak the
same language on
china tableware in
Blue Willow pat
terns.
She collects Blue
Willow and has it all
over her house, even hanging on the walls.
Both my grandmothers owned Blue
Willow, purchased when a set was reason
ably priced.
Lois Milam Phillips received Blue Wil
low as a gift from her son, Ephraim Pray
Phillips, when he hired on with the Postal
Service to deliver mail to half of the Can
dler Building in Atlanta.
My maternal grandmother's son, Rudy,
served aboard the USS William T. Powell
(DE-213), a destroyer escort, making sev
eral crossings of the North Atlantic during
World War Two.
Uncle Rudy visited Ireland and Eng
land and once brought his mother a set of
Allerton Blue Willow when it was still avail
able there.
Allerton did not survive WWII. The
story I heard was that the pottery was
bombed, destroying the silk screen pat
terns. Another version was that during the
war years the potteries were banned from
producing “decorated ware” in order to
save fuel and resources. Only plain pottery
was allowed to be produced for the home
market. And, they were bombed.
Johnson Brothers produced Blue Wil
low that survived WWII.
Aunt Margaret Watts had Johnson
Brothers Pink Willow and I have no idea
what happened to it.
My first set of Blue Willow was from a
box store and I doubt there is one piece of
it anywhere.
James Wells was a Ham Radio Opera
tor who totally understood how radios
worked and during emergencies did what
Ham Radio Operators are supposed to do.
I never understood all the stuff in the room
attached to his house. He collected old ra
dios, any old radio, most were cannibalized
for parts.
He didn't bother with cabinets for his
hand-built radios, and you had to be careful
what you touched.
For an early hobby, I collected stamps.
My relatives collected post cards in large
scrap books.
A friend collects baseball caps and old
license plates; another collects little ele
phant statues and has hundreds.
My mother-in-law collected spoons,
not usable spoons but spoons sold to col
lectors of spoons. She wanted one from
each state, and I don't know how far she
got.
I am drawn to cookbooks, any cook
book, the older the better with scribbling in
the margins.
People collect little angels, thimbles,
hydrangeas, balls of string, barbed wire,
telephones, horse shoes, concert tickets,
vinyl LP records, coins, Civil War bullets,
airline stuff, dolls, snow globes, fishing
lures, walking sticks, electric trains, cars.
Yes, that is “cars,” plural. I don't know
how many 1957 Chevrolets he owns.
There isn't room around here for me to
collect anything.
Most of my spare space is cluttered up
with old pictures.
joenphillips@yahoo.com
“The next time some academics tell you
how important diversity is,
ask how many conservatives
there are in their sociology
department.”
-- Thomas Sowell
Voters, Not The
Courts, Should Decide
Presidential Choices
In case you
haven’t no
ticed, there is
an election
scheduled for
this November
to choose the
Leader of the
Free World. As
of this writing,
the choice is
between two
candidates that a majority of the Amer
ican people don’t particularly care for.
According to the latest Gallup Poll,
Pres. Joe Biden is viewed favorably by
41% of U.S. adults. Former Pres. Don
ald Trump’s favorable rating is 42%.
Maybe that is because one gives
new meaning to the term uninspiring
and seems more interested in transgen
der issues than in keeping our borders
secure. The other is a narcissistic,
mean-spirited misogynist. And these
are our choices? Alas, they are very
likely to be, and I oppose any effort to
deny us the right to pick between them.
So, too, does one of the most
prominent conservative voices in the
country, Yuval Levin. Mr. Levin is the
director of Social, Cultural and Consti
tutional Studies at the American Enter
prise Institute and a contributing edi
tor to National Review, the iconic con
servative publication founded by Wil
liam F. Buckley. In other words, he is a
thoughtful, articulate conservative.
These days, that sounds like a political
oxymoron.
As one who leans conservative in
my own political views, I wonder what
has happened to compassionate con-
servativism as evidenced by Ronald
Reagan - who in two presidential elec
tions never had to claim a stolen elec
tion because he won by margins Trump
and his loyalists can’t even compre
hend - and our own late U.S. Sen.
Johnny Isakson. They didn’t see the
need to threaten, bully, demean or di
vide.
Unfortunately, the term conserva
tive has been hijacked by right-wing
extremists just as left wingnuts couch
their liberal agenda as progressive. (I
find nothing progressive about social
ism.) I put no stock in the babble on
either side. However, I do listen to Yu
val Levin.
In a recent piece in National Re
view, Mr. Levin states, “After courts in
Georgia, North Carolina, Minnesota
and elsewhere dismissed or rejected
claims pursuing his (Trump’s) removal
from the ballot on the basis of the 14th
Amendment’s bar on individuals who
‘have engaged in insurrection’ against
the Constitution, the Supreme Court
of Colorado affirmed such a claim, and
the U.S. Supreme Court is now likely to
review that decision within weeks.
“The attempt to remove Donald
Trump from the ballot by recourse to
the 14th Amendment,” Levin writes,
“is the latest such assault because it
amounts to an abuse of the Constitu
tion in search of a shortcut to defeating
him. I think the Colorado court was
wrong and that the U.S. Supreme Court
will overturn it on the legal merits. But
perhaps no less important, I think the
By Dick Yarbrough
pursuit of such a strategy against Trump
is wrong, and that citizens who worry
about the health of our constitutional
order in an era when it has been under
profound stress should reject and recoil
from that strategy, regardless of what
they think of Donald Trump.”
And what does this eminent con
servative scholar think of Donald
Trump? Not much. “He was an unfit
president, lacked the character neces
sary for the job, operated without even
a basic sense of (let alone any respect
for) our system of government, and re
peatedly put that system under intense
stress in the service of his thuggish
narcissism and pathetic self-pity. His
ultimate betrayal of the constitutional
order — his refusal to accept the legiti
macy of his election defeat in 2020 and
his effort to prevent the certification of
his opponent’s victory — was the most
serious dereliction of the presidential
office in the history of our country, and
it rendered Trump one of the very
worst of our presidents. It’s an utter
disgrace that any American voter, let
alone one of our major political parties,
is even thinking about sending him
back to the White House.”
But, as Yuval Levin says, that
should be our choice to make. Not the
courts, egged on by those using the
14th Amendment as a vehicle to try
and disqualify Donald Trump from
running. I agree with Yuval Levin. Quit
using the United States Constitution as
a political tool and let the voters have
the final word.
Nov. 5, 2024 - Election Day - is a
long way off. A lot can happen between
now and then but, assuming the Su
preme Court gives the 14th Amend
ment argument the judicial heave-ho, it
looks as though we will be choosing
between duly nominated Joe Biden and
Donald Trump. If that’s the case, so be
it. The bigger issue is why we can’t find
any better candidates than these two.
You can reach Dick Yarbrough at
dick@dickyarbrough.com or at P.O. Box
725373, Atlanta, Georgia 31139.
0l,t A&uance
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