Betrayal
April 12, 2014
[J.P.’s Moment of Common Sense. For a list of subscribing radio stations, click here.]
A Frenchman, an American, and a Brit are having a drink in a bar when the subject of savoir faire comes up. The American says, “I know what savoir faire is—that’s when a man comes home early from work, catches his wife in bed with another man, and says, ‘Oops, pardon me.’”
“You’re close,” says the Brit, “but a bit off. Savoir faire is when a man comes home early from work, catches his wife in bed with another man, and says, ‘Oops, pardon me, please continue.’”
“Gentlemen!” objects the Frenchman, in high dudgeon. “Please, only the French can understand this uniquely French expression. If the man came home early from work, caught his wife in bed with another man, said, ‘Oops, pardon me, please continue,’—and the man in the bed, he does continue? That is savoir faire!”
I thought about that old story while watching an interview with a Frenchman convicted of murdering his wife. Just like the story, he came home early from work and caught her in bed with another man. Unlike the story, he promptly killed her. Not the man, interestingly—he only killed his wife.
“Why did you do it?” he was asked. “Surely the French are sanguine about these things.”
“It wasn’t that she was in bed with another man,” replied the Frenchman. “I could accept that. What sent me into a rage was hearing her talk to him—in my bed!—saying bad things about my love making. That I could not accept!”
Betrayal hurts most when it comes from the people we trust the most, the people upon whose loyalty we depend. For the Frenchman, the real stab in the back was learning that his wife only pretended to enjoy his love making, that she’d been lying to him, that she was disloyal on the issue he valued most.
American conservatives have been experiencing a lot of that lately. We keep getting stabbed in the back by Republican politicians—people who ran for office pretending they shared our viewpoint. Many of them, it turns out, were lying and it hurts. It hurts worse than watching what Democrats do because we feel betrayed.
(Plus, nobody expects much from Democrats in the first place. Not even Democrats.)
Lately, there’s been a rash of Republican traitors. John Boehner, who once again burst into tears Tuesday—this time at a Taco Bell—was scheduled to be at the Amelia Island, Florida, Ritz Carlton this weekend for a private meeting with establishment conservatives like John McCain, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Mark Kirk, Susan Collins, and Fred Upton (the light bulb destroyer)—in other words, a regular Who’s Who of RINOs and leftwing wolves who dress like conservatives whenever it’s an election year. The conference is put on by a group called Main Street Partnership which gets its money from leftwing sources like labor unions and George Soros, and the goal of the participants is to defeat actual conservatives who decide to run for office.
What else can you call these people except traitors? What else can you call politicians who pretend to share your viewpoint but openly conspire against that viewpoint?
Then there’s Vance McAllister, the brand new Republican congressman from Louisiana who was elected in a special election last November. He ran as a conservative Christian family man with a wife and five children but after one month in office, during which time he repeatedly voted against conservative issues, a security camera caught him embracing and kissing a part-time aide in his Washington office. The phony didn’t make it through his first full month.
Over in New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie is mired in a scandal about closing a bridge to punish a mayor for not endorsing his re-election. Last week, Christie was in Las Vegas making another revealing mistake: he went there to kiss Israeli billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s butt but instead irritated the guy by labeling Israeli territory “occupied,” as though it really belongs to Palestinians. Christie quickly apologized because Adelson is the Republican Party’s answer to George Soros as a source of money—that’s why Christie was there, angling for some money—but Adelson himself is another traitor. He’s only conservative when it benefits him personally. He lobbies against online gambling and lobbies for amnesty for illegal aliens because he doesn’t want competition for his casinos but he does want cheap labor.
Adelson isn’t a conservative—he’s a crony-capitalist foreign invader raping the United States for his own financial gain, exactly like Soros.
Down in Florida, Jeb Bush, threatening to run for president (as though we need another Bush), is also lobbying for amnesty for illegal aliens. Even worse, Jeb has been pushing the hateful progressive-influenced federal-government-controlled Common Core curriculum. Here’s an idea, Jeb: why not just run for president as a Democrat?
In Washington, Paul Ryan designed a Republican budget which continues the rampant out-of-control spending started in 2009 with Obama’s inauguration, a rate of spending even Ryan himself admits is suicidal for the nation. Even worse, Ryan has the gall to claim he’s cutting spending.
Maybe the worst stab in the back is what Republican Mike Rogers has been doing. Rogers, as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is charged with investigating the adequacy of security at the Benghazi consulate. Conservatives have been pressing for this investigation ever since the consulate was attacked in 2012. We know there’s something hinky about Benghazi because of all the lying Obama has been doing about it—but Mike Rogers has been stalling and stonewalling. Well, guess what: turns out the CEO of the firm hired by the State Department to provide security at the consulate, the woman Mike Rogers is supposed to be investigating, is his wife.
No wonder he’s stalling.
Mike Rogers has announced he won’t run for re-election this fall. He’s saving his wife at the cost of his career. Good riddance, you traitor.
That’s... today’s dose of common sense.
“Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me.” —Psalms 41:9
“You mustn’t think that even now Edmund was quite so bad that he actually wanted his brother and sisters to be turned into stone. He did want Turkish Delight and to be a Prince (and later a King) and to pay Peter out for calling him a beast. As for what the Witch would do with the others, he didn’t want her to be particularly nice to them—certainly not to put them on the same level as himself—but he managed to believe, or to pretend he believed, that she wouldn’t do anything very bad to them.” —The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
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