The GOP's Character Cancer
Stuart Stevens
“The President is the symbol of who the people of the United States are. He is the person who stands for us in the eyes of the world and the eyes of our children.”
-William Bennett, “The Death of Outrage,” 1998
There was a time not that long ago, when American conservatives were obsessed with the public virtues of private character. Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan titled her biography of Ronald Reagan, When Character Was King. “In a president,” Noonan wrote, “character is everything. A president doesn’t just deal with the problems of the day; he sets the tone and spirit of the nation.”
James Q. Wilson, a longtime Harvard professor, wrote The Moral Self in 1993, a key text in the conservative case that character was the cornerstone of public and private life: “Human beings are endowed with a moral sense — an intuitive capacity to judge actions as fair or unfair, right or wrong.”
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Watching Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend launching a war with the Persian Empire and chortling over killing Iranians — “we might do it again for fun” — I’m struck by what the Trump era has done to our national sense of self. A president who treats war like a snuff film he would have enjoyed with Ghislaine Maxwell — “I just wish her well,” Trump said when the pedophile was arrested — is a cancer on the nation’s soul.
It’s no surprise that we keep hearing about groups of youngish Republicans who praise Hitler in chatrooms. It has been 2007 since they knew a Republican president who was a decent human being.
https://www.lincolnsquare.media/p/the-gops-character-cancer
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Dubya was NOT a decent human being by ANY standard. He was a warmongering POS. 