Tag Archives: Marco Rubio

The desperate candidates – and their party

gopPresDebateWhen did the Republican presidential primary become a Bravo Reality TV series – “the Desperate Candidates?”

We have trash talk from a bombastic billionaire developer, Donald Trump, putting down the “Republican Establishment,” and those, who he convincingly says, are his “establishment” competitors.

In the latest round of churlish misconduct, Trump blasted one opponent based on his height (“little Marco”), countered by the charge that Trump was a crook (“con man”) according to Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, prompting Trump to come back on Senator Cruz (“lying Ted”), and Senator Rubio’s toe-curling grammar school innuendoes followed, knocking Trump’s face, hair and, the most controversial, Trump’s sexual prowess (“small hands”), causing Trump to offer a national on-air description of his private body parts (“no problem there”).

In Loudoun County, despite Senator Rubio’s “below the belt” rhetoric, he was enthusiastically invited to Patrick Henry College to rally his true believers at a school founded “to impact the world ‘for Christ and for Liberty.’”

At the rally, Senator Rubio promised to compromise the medical care anyone was receiving under the Affordable Care Act, to step up the war on terror, to keep Guantanamo open and to “find out everything they [the prisoners there] know,” without saying precisely how he’d make that happen within the law and “as a devout Christian.” Congresswoman Barbara Comstock touted Rubio as “the most conversant on all of the top issues of the day.”

The Republican presidential candidates, including those deeply mired in this dehumanizing dialogue, undeservedly affect a moral superiority as compared with Trump. Continue reading

Civilizing the savage man

leoRevenant“Revenant” is a gritty and terrifying western about Hugh Glass, a 19th Century frontiersman, left for dead after a mind-chilling, grizzly bear attack.

Glass crawls and limps, near death, bleeding from open sores, suffering unremitting pain, across hundreds of miles, to find and to kill the man who abandoned him who was charged with keeping him alive; Leonardo DiCaprio gives an Academy Award-winning performance as Glass in Alejandro Inarritu’s amazing movie.

It’s a primal story of survival, devotion, relentless cliff-hanging danger, disaster, betrayal, torment, violence, revenge, and human savagery.

This is a vivid rear view reflection on a society with little use for law or custom.

This is a world, both primitive and elemental, played out before sweeping scenic panoramas so wild and untamed that life is continuously at risk, both from the natural surroundings but also from the savage man.

Aristotle wrote that, “At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separate from law and justice he is the worst.

In the movie, Revenant, man is at his worst.

Revenant is an excursion into savagery and teaches the value of law and civility. Continue reading