Colonel Roosevelt Would Have Approved
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
For all of Trump’s many manifest faults, underneath his narcissism, tactlessness, and foul mouth, he is basically a good man, and real patriotic people understand this. Yes, often Trump makes me cringe when he opens his mouth, but in contrast, today’s liberal progressive leftists are evil: baby murderers, sodomy sanctifiers, transgender child mutilators, communists, racists, etc.
BTW, King David had more faults than Trump, yet he was a man after God’s own heart. Just saying. So yes, Teddy would have approved.
Conservation?
TR’s politics are hard to fit into our political terms: Intensely nationalist and expansionist, in favor of more governmental controls over big business, a liberal on race relations in his day, he would be condemned as a racist in ours, a believer in a big Navy, believed that anyone could be an American, but demanded fluency in English in five years and the abandonment of any prior allegiances to becoming an American, a conservationist, a mild eugenicist. There is something to inspire, and outrage, all the spectrums American political beliefs today.
All of that is to miss the point about TR. Most presidents are smaller than their great office. A precious few, Washington and Lincoln for example, loom larger than the office. TR was in this class. The phrase bully-pulpit came about to describe how TR used the presidency as a giant mega-phone to get his views across to the American people and persuade them. He had a deep patriotism and a belief in the greatness of this country that resonated with the country. Some presidents debase us and some enoble us, and none were better at enobling us than TR. He understood that life is a grand adventure. Sometimes it is a hard adventure and sometimes a joyous adventure, but always an adventure. TR imparted this sense of wonder and grandeur to many of his contemporaries. As one of his worst enemies once said about him, “Someone would have to hate him a lot, not to like him a little!” This quotation from him is key to understanding him and why he is in the very forefront of our presidents:
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”