The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Comments

1. Ray W. says

   January 27, 2022 at 2:17 pm

   For decades now, I assert that the so-called conservatives among us have selected candidates based on non-conservative principles. Where does that leave the true conservatives among us?

   As an example of the true conservatives among us, at the state-wide level, a candidate once ran for office with the following credentials:

   Raised in a blue-collar family, he excelled academically, being elected class president and Mr. Leesburg High School. Football, baseball and basketball star on his various high school teams. Four-year football scholarship to UF as a fullback, after playing fullback, linebacker and punter on his high school team, listed at 6’3″. He seriously injured his knee before his freshman season, ending his football career, yet his coach offered to continue his full scholarship status. Since he could no longer contribute to his team, he declined the offer and found three part-time jobs to pay for his college education.

   During the summer after his first year at UF’s law school, he left law school to voluntarily join the Marine Corps. After OCS training, and then completing the Army’s Ranger School, he was sent to Vietnam, where he took over a mauled company that had lost its lieutenant to wounds suffered in action. Marine fitness reports reflect that he quickly brought his company back to combat-ready status and effectively led his company into a number of combat situations, one of which involved his leading reinforcements to a scene of heavy fighting, where he found and rescued a wounded Marine who had lost a leg to a grenade during the heavy fighting and his subsequent return to the fight. He earned a Bronze Star with a V for valor.

   After he left the Marines, he returned to law school. Upon graduation, when the incoming President of the American Bar Association sought advice about hiring an assistant from UF’s dean of the law school, the dean recommended that he hire the young lawyer. After the president’s one-year term ended, the young assistant joined a fairly large Florida law firm. After some 20 years with the firm, he was elected managing partner by his fellow partners, which meant he ran the business side of the firm on behalf of his fellow lawyers. In nine years of his management, the firm grew from 275 lawyers to 1,200 and emerged as a national firm, being fifth largest in the country at that time.

   Married to an extraordinarily successful woman, who once served as President of NationsBank (now Bank of America), with two children who attended public schools, he and his family belonged to a Presbyterian congregation at the time of his run for office.

   In all my life, I have never seen a Florida Republican candidate who so admirably served his country and earned that many honors, plaudits and successes. If anyone fit the definition of a true conservative, he did. His wife, who served as Florida’s chief financial officer after leaving her banking career, guided Florida’s pension fund through the W-era economic downturn, earning national recognition for taking the proper steps the keep the pension fund healthy. Florida’s pension fund emerged from the downturn rated as one of the best-managed state funds in the country.

   His name? Bill McBride.

   The political cartoon depicts DeSantis as the one casting a shadow over Trump. Neither are even close to emerging from the shadow cast by McBride, but so-called conservative partisans depicted McBride as anti-business and the gullible accepted the lies.

   When gullible FlaglerLive commenters type in their beliefs that Democrats are socialists and communists, I often think of Bill McBride, who accomplishments outshone every so-called conservative I have ever met. That does not mean that so-called conservatives are unfit for office. I have voted for a number of Republican candidates over many decades whom I thought were better candidates than their Democratic opponent, though I have to concede that today’s Republican party has moved so far away from traditional concepts of conservativism that I now find it very hard to consider their platforms as good for the community, the state or the country.

   I have previously commented on how I contributed the statutory maximum to a very small number of Republican candidates, but I stopped after I began receiving an avalanche of mail and telephone calls seeking money for all kinds of causes. I particularly remember receiving several heavy packets from a group seeking money to fund an effort to uncover the “true” reason why Hillary murdered one of her assistants so they could file some imaginary lawsuit at some undescribed future date. I read the included proposed but unsigned lawsuit and knew that it would never survive a motion to dismiss. That was 25 years ago, but I never forgot the understanding that came when I realized that thousands upon thousands of these heavy packets containing nonsensical unsigned legal documents were being repeatedly mailed to Republican donors and that the goal was not to fund a lawsuit but to line their pockets with money contributed by the gullible.

   Today, hundreds of the gullible are being prosecuted for participating in the 1/6 Insurrection and Trump’s fundraising organizations have raised $82 million during the first six months of 2021. FlaglerLive readers, this is not about conservatism anymore; it just isn’t.