Cagle World

Now that the shock of the election results has subsided a bit, we can take a deep breath and rejoice that we’ve all returned to some semblance of normalcy.

Said no one, ever.

The last week has been filled with anger, desperation, accusations, pretentious pronouncements of moral superiority, threats of vengeance, attempts to flee the country and seek asylum in places where the government subsidizes Aperol Spritzes, and other such nonsense.

I have noticed on a list-serve maintained by immigration colleagues, there is an increasing number of requests for attorneys who help people obtain citizenship in other countries, like Portugal.

I have noticed women, in particular, have been doing things that make them lose their jobs, like the nurse in Philadelphia who posted on Facebook that she hoped any woman who voted for Trump would develop an ectopic pregnancy, and the special education teacher in Connecticut who threatened bodily harm to Republicans in a Tik Tok video.

I have noticed that a local official in my town called Trump voters “insubstantial minions,” and that his wife attacked a critic by accusing him of having a small penis, only she didn’t use that word.

I have noticed the Democratic senior U.S. Senator of my state, who has not held a private sector job in over three decades, desperately attempt to find votes to close the gap with the challenger who beat him. That is fine, because all votes should be counted, except the fevered desperation with which his team is operating makes me think that landscapers at local cemeteries might notice a few unexpected excavations in the next few days.

To be honest, none of this surprises me. I expected that people would be horribly upset if Trump won. The writing was on the wall, when the Harris team enlisted superstars like J Lo and Bruce Springsteen and that old geezer Robert De Niro (dude, stop having kids at 80!) to tell us democracy was in peril, and the “Handmaid’s Tale” was real. The feral social media posts from women who thought they were going to be forced to bear children for the patriarchy, and the threats issued to white women to vote for Kamala “or else,” multiplied like flies on a rotten piece of meat.

There was no way a Trump victory was going to be easily digested by that crowd. Initially, I tried empathy. I know a good many people who are sincerely devastated by the results of the election, people who believe the Republican winner truly is a threat to our way of life. They are not drama queens, they simply make the quiet but deeply-felt argument that he will turn back the clock on women’s rights, immigrant’s rights, the rights of minorities and cut us off from our allies.

To be honest, I don’t disagree with them about immigrant’s rights and our position in the world. There is truth in what they argue on those points. But we have dealt with disappointment before, and we have been forced to face the fact that half of the country doesn’t agree with us.

I had to stomach the presidency of one Barack Obama, who deported twice the number of immigrants in his first term in office than either Trump or Joe Biden. I remember the morning after Obama beat a war hero, I wrote a column about trying to find light in the darkness of that result. Of course I was called a racist because I used the word “darkness” to describe the victory of the first Black president, but that was predictable. My real point was that we have to figure out how to deal with the inevitable fact that democracies are messy things, and we don’t always get what we want. I’m not even sure, and apologies to Mick Jagger, we get what we need. But if we wait long enough, we will get something to make us happy.

That’s something I wish the apoplectic Americans would figure out. They did not obtain the desired results on election day. Some of them had their hopes dashed, some of them still cannot believe that over half of the country disagreed with them, and many of them are unwilling to face the reality of four more years of Donald Trump.

I am no longer willing to humor them with kindness and understanding. I’m just going to live my life and ignore the noise. They will eventually figure out that this is how a democracy rolls.

And if they don’t, there’s always Portugal.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

On election night, I was switching between CNN and MSNBC for election coverage, because my motto is the same as Ghenghis Khan (or was it Sun Tzu?)

“Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

I figured it would be instructive to watch how the networks that have exhibited a visceral hatred for Donald Trump since he came on the political scene described the trajectory of the evening.

The evening started with Jake Tapper and John King, on whom I have an inexplicable but major nerd crush, standing in front of the Big Board and discussing the mathematical possibilities for Trump and Kamala Harris. Unlike some of their colleagues, these guys played it fairly straight and didn’t show their hand about who they hoped would win. Of course, we already knew who Philly boy Tapper wanted to win, but he was admirably middle of the road, as he’d been in the ill-fated CNN debate between Biden and Trump.

And even though I’m sure King is a liberal, I never get the feeling that he’s rooting for a side. Which is why I have a crush on him.

As the evening progressed, however, Trump started racking up electoral votes. The CNN duo explained this away as exactly what had happened in the 2020 race between the former president and current President Biden. It was as if they were calming the nerves of an audience that didn’t want to see Trump with 105 votes and Harris with 25.

But when we started hitting 9:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., I noticed a definite shift in the way that Tapper was talking. His normally staccato intonations had become a bit more halting, a little flatter, and King had to jump in more often with comments like “Well this precinct is very blue but it’s still too soon to call because everyone in the precinct is out milking the cows and hasn’t voted yet.”

To be fair, I have to credit CNN for being very even handed in its coverage, even though their angst and upset became obvious as Trump started collecting more and more states, including big ones like Texas, Florida and Ohio. And yet they were able to tap dance a bit, since Pennsylvania wasn’t going to go gentle into that good night. Our beloved Commonwealth was going to give everyone agida, as it went first overwhelmingly for Harris, then Trump started closing the gap, and then he actually overtook her by a couple of percentage points.

Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, the Keystone State gave its 19 electoral votes to the former president. As this was happening, you could see the color drain out of the faces of Tapper and King.

But CNN was nothing compared to MSNBC. I switched over to that network around the time Pennsylvania was becoming “too close to call” and then “likely Trump” and then finally “in the Trump column.” At that point, panelists – including the predictable Joy Reid – started explaining why she thought Pennsylvania voters rejected Harris: race and gender.

While it’s no surprise one of the most racist and sexist women on television would immediately pivot to the old demographic tropes, it was still shocking to see how obvious she and her colleagues were willing to be. Bitter that their candidate was going down to defeat, they seized on the only reasons their limited life experiences could proffer: American voters couldn’t bear to elect a Black person, and a woman, to a position of authority.

And it wasn’t just any old group of Americans who were to blame.

Americans who looked like me were the worst culprits, “white women.” Reid conveniently forgot the fact that a majority of American voters, including those nefarious white women, have voted for Hillary Clinton over Trump. Before that, an even larger group of voters put Barack Obama into office, and kept him there for another four years.

A woman, and a Black man, got the popular vote in three consecutive elections. But somehow, the fact that Kamala Harris was unable to convince voters that she was a qualified leader had to be due to her race and her gender. It’s the woke, liberal fiat that it can’t be anything having to do with the resume or character of the candidate. It must be prejudice.

I almost feel sorry for folks who think like that. They are afflicted with a sort of blindness that will make it impossible for them to ever assess the humanity of a candidate, with a necessary x-ray vision that bores through the irrelevant and epidermal characteristics like biology and ethnicity.

On the other hand, it will continue to make for entertaining viewing on election eve.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Opinions are like an appendix: everyone has one, it serves no particular purpose, most of the time it’s completely ignored and you only notice it when it’s removed.

This is exactly what occurred to me when I observed the manufactured controversy involving Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post editorial board. The Amazon wunderkind’s decision to prevent the Oracles of DC from handing down their wisdom from Delphi on the Potomac triggered waves of outrage from the sort of people who take their marching orders from elite strangers with golden laptops.

These are the folks who treasure their appendixes and mourn the loss of something they just realized they needed to fully function in this democracy.

I have to say it was amusing to watch over 10 percent of the Post readers announce publicly that they were canceling their subscriptions. Social media was replete with the righteous indignation of (mostly) liberals who clutches at their pearls and acted as if Bezos had purchased the original copy of the Constitution from the National Archives and set it aflame while wearing a MAGA cap.

There is an arrogance to the suggestion the world needs endorsements from the Fourth Estate. This is not a violation of the First Amendment. The press is not being infringed upon by the government. If anything, it is the free market system at work, where a private owner is entitled to use his property as he sees fit.

The fact that the property is viewed as a public service does not change that principle. People have every right to send whatever message they want with their dollars. No one is owed loyalty.

I was once let go from a paper where I’d worked for almost 18 years. I was the one “notorious” conservative who supported police officers against claims of brutality, the Boy Scouts against claims of homophobia, unborn babies against claims of being expendable at momma’s whim and Bill Cosby against claims of being a rapist.

That last one triggered so much anger among the nice suburban readers that my editor was forced to write an editorial apologizing to them for running my column while regretfully reminding them about that annoying principle of free speech.

The subtitle was “An editor asks: How I can live with myself giving a platform to someone who stands for everything I abhor?”

Ultimately, even that limited level of tolerance fell by the wayside and I was fired for being a prolific social media presence. When readers wrote to tell me they’d canceled their own subscriptions because I’d been let go, it made me both happy and a bit embarrassed.

Happy, for obvious reasons. Embarrassed because no one’s opinion matters that much in the grand scheme of things. At least, it shouldn’t.

That’s why I’m completely bemused by the head banging and wailing from those who think they’re entitled to a Post endorsement or, to a lesser extent a Los Angeles Times or USA Today endorsement. Who cares?

Truly, who needs a disconnected voice with no expertise other than an ability to string words together slightly better than Joe Biden telling them who to vote for? Do these people not have eyes and ears?

What magic incantations are they expecting from the editorial pages?

Do they really need these opinions to become better informed?

Or, as I suspect, do they simply want some liberal intellectuals — and I use that term ironically and oxymoronically — to confirm the validity of their own views?

Opinions are completely personal. They have no inherent value to anyone other than to the opinionater.

They sometimes do have the power to trigger change like, for example, if you’re George Clooney and you commit elder abuse on behalf of Barack Obama.

That sort of thing gets people to pay attention because you have an Oscar and a very important human rights lawyer wife.

But in general, mature Americans shouldn’t need someone else to tell them what to think and how to choose their leaders.

And if they do, their votes are worth even less than The Washington Post’s editorials.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

About a month ago, I had lunch at a great diner in South Philly. My omelet was fantastic, oozing with cheese and fresh veggies and — dare I say it — bacon.

The place was plastered with political messages attacking Trump. There wasn’t even a shade of nuance about who the owners and operators are supporting in the upcoming election.

That’s fine. I have no problem with private business owners making whatever statements they think are appropriate. We are not living through Mao’s cultural revolution, and everyone gets the right to run their businesses however they choose.

Would I attack them for espousing views I find to be anathema? No.

I have the choice to walk away or ignore their politics and enjoy their gastronomy.

Harris supporters haven’t achieved that same level of maturity.

First, we have their anger at a Bucks County McDonald’s for allowing Trump to work the fryer and serve up orders at the drive-thru. Trump did what Trump does better than anyone, troll the opponent with humor.

This was a direct hit on Kamala’s as-yet-unsubstantiated claims that she flipped Big Macs in college.

More recently, an ad appeared depicting a few Jewish women in a diner, discussing the way Democrats had dealt with antisemitism and the assault on Israel since Oct. 7.

One of them is quoted as saying “I never voted Republican in my life, but I am voting Trump.”

The ad was sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition and produced by the Philadelphia-based Jamestown associates. It doesn’t specifically indicate where it was filmed, but anyone from this area can easily identify it as Hymie’s, the legendary deli in Bala Cynwyd.

The relevance of Hymie’s is that it is located smack dab in the center of the Jewish community in Montgomery County, and that is a demographic that the Trump campaign is seeking to target.

Not that they have to do as much heavy lifting as they would have, prior to Oct. 7. That event created a paradigm shift in Jewish communities across the nation, following as it did the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh in 2018.

There has been an increasing rise in antisemitic acts in the past decade, and they have exponentially exploded since the Oct. 7 massacre. There is also the perception, a not unfair one, that many high-profile Democrats have been too lukewarm in their condemnation of these attacks.

That’s precisely why the GOP thinks that Jews, and particularly those who live in a crucial area in the most important of all swing states are persuadable. Which brings me back to the ad.

Many people reacted with anger when they thought that Hymie’s was endorsing Donald Trump. The owner has been very clear that he is endorsing no one, and that his doors are open to Kamala Harris as well.

But that hasn’t pacified many of those who think that Trump supports Nazis and that anything that seems to favor him is anathema. They have called for boycotts of the deli.

As someone who has lived in the area for a long time, I know that’s not going to happen. Hymie’s will be able to weather this pseudo-storm just as Morning Glory will still be serving up omelets to pro-life Catholic conservatives who are not voting for Kamala.

But the controversy points to a deeper problem. The ad has been attacked almost as if it represented a betrayal of the Jewish community, as if the community owed its vote to the Democrats.

I reached out to Sam Markstein at the Republican Jewish Coalition, and he told me the whole point of the ad is to underscore a feeling that many Jews have expressed, namely, that they will feel safer under a President Trump than under a President Harris: “Those Jewish grandmothers depicted in the ad are afraid, and they are afraid for their grandkids who can’t walk on college campuses without being attacked for who they are. As the one woman says, ‘I never cared for Donald Trump, but he kept us safe.’ ”

It is clear that Jews, like every other demographic, are divided in this election. As a Catholic who cannot vote for Kamala because of her radical abortion stance but who knows others who have no problem with it, I understand that there is a multiplicity of views in each voting demographic.

The problem is when these divergent views are silenced or worse, attacked as being dangerous. That is what the Democrats call fascism.

The ad sent a powerful message: Some of us are voting for our very survival.

And that is a message everyone needs to take seriously.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

After complaining that Kamala Harris had not gone into the lion’s den of interviews, namely the Newsmaxes or the Washington Examiners or even the Salem Radios, the VP surprised me and jumped right into the ring last week with Fox News anchor Bret Baier.

Either she’s acquired a new sense of being able to persuade people without drowning the message in croutons and Thousand Island Dressing, or she’s panicking and thinks there might be some independents ripe for the plucking in that particular demographic.

The interview wasn’t enough to make any real impact, since 30 minutes barely allows you to scratch the surface of the most pressing issues, but it helped solidify the impression I’ve had all along, ever since the baton got shoved into Kamala’s hands: We see what we want to see, nothing more and nothing less.

It’s not just about the Democratic nominee. Donald Trump, JD Vance and Tim Walz are equally chameleonlike in their appeal, or lack thereof. We invest these men with qualities and characteristics that we want them to possess, not things that are quantifiably true.

But there is something about the woman that raises it to a whole new level. And it didn’t start with Harris.

I’m old enough to remember when Bill Clinton pointed to his wife and said that if you elected him, you would get the package: “Billary.”

He included her in cabinet meetings. He sought her counsel regularly. He freed her from baking cookies and listening to Tammy Wynette on a loop and he even gave her a dossier: health care reform.

She was as successful with that as Kamala was with fixing the border, which is to say she went down in flames.

But that set the stage for the country’s relationship with Hillary Clinton, making her into one of the most controversial and galvanizing political figures of all time.

Some women identified closely with her because of their age and shared experience. Hillary Clinton was a classic boomer, a member of my own generation who was born at its inception while I tagged along a year and a half before it ended.

Women looked at her through the prism of their own diverse experiences, and the Hillary that appeared to her friend Madeline Albright, she of the ‘there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support women’ is very different from the Hillary who referred to Pennsylvania mothers with five children and no desire to work outside of the home as part of a “basket of deplorables.”

It’s what I call the Rashomon syndrome.

Akira Kurosawa’s classic film introduced us to the concept that there is your truth, my truth, his truth, and her truth, and that there might not be a distinct truth that exists separate and apart from our personal prejudices.

Human beings are essentially incapable of stripping away our biases and looking at things as they are. We might think we can, but we really can’t. And that’s exponentially so with political women.

As I said before, we can have strong feelings about male politicians, but women trigger something tribal. Two words, besides Hillary and Clinton: Sarah and Palin.

For that reason, when I saw Kamala-and-Harris answering Baier’s questions, I saw a woman in the process of deflection. I saw a woman who showed false empathy for the mothers of young girls who’d been murdered by foreign nationals.

I saw a woman who laughingly suggested Trump was on the same page with her about transgender surgery for inmates. I saw a woman
who kept whining about being interrupted, an updated version of Elizabeth “Yet She Persisted” Warren.

But when I waded into social media afterward, I found that a lot of progressives thought that she had aced the test, and shown herself to be blessed with grit, resilience, and, God help me, joy.

Where I saw ying, they saw yang.

Where I thought she was weak, they saw a female Atlas, hoisting the hopes of the Democrats on her padded shoulders.

As I was saying, Rashomon.

I do believe that there is a separate and distinct truth. There are immutable verities.

But most of us are unfamiliar with them and have a hard time dealing with them if they challenge our biases.

So people who desperately want Kamala to win will see her as a winner. And those who want her to lose will find every reason to see the opposite.

I think that Mark Twain said it best: “But it was ever thus, all through my life: Whenever I have diverged from custom and principle and uttered a truth, the rule has been that the hearer hadn’t strength of mind enough to believe it.”

Or see it.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Kamala Harris is making the rounds to friendly media, which is what insecure politicians tend to do.

She hasn’t ventured often into the areas where she might not receive fawning attention and wholehearted appreciation. She will not sit down with Newsmax, or the Washington Times, or Megyn Kelly, or my radio friends Chris Stigall, John Steigerwald or Rich Zeoli because they are not her devoted sycophants.

She did manage to sit down with Bill Whitaker at 60 Minutes, and gave non-answer answers about her administration’s absolute malfeasance at the border, reinforcing this writer’s belief that the Border Czarina has a borderline personality when it comes to acknowledging her own failures.

While troubling, this does give us an opportunity to judge her willingness to be tested and her ability to react to possibly hostile questions. One would assume this could be a valuable skill when dealing with leaders inclined to bomb your military installations. This is also helpful when trying to navigate hypothetical meltdowns in, say, Middle Eastern countries named Lebanon. The fact she is somewhat afraid of that exposure says more about her than any canned debate gotchas, and doesn’t provide much confidence that she will be able to hold her own on the international stage.

But I’d be fine with the current vice president avoiding the media she doesn’t like in the same way she avoided the U.S.-Mexico border (until she was shamed into a visit) if she would at least draw the line at appearing on sex podcasts.

Looking incompetent is marginally better than looking like a geriatric Cosmo girl.

Last week, the woman who wants to become the first female leader of the nation went on a You Tube show called “Call Her Daddy” which usually contains clips of raunchy women saying raunchy things to a raunchy audience of pampered women-children. The show is so low rent and sex-obsessed it makes the roundtable of The View look like a conference of the G-7.

Kamala apparently thinks this is her target audience. Perhaps, tragically, it is. As an aside, she also went on Howard Stern’s show, which begs the question: is there any sexual libertine that doesn’t have a direct line to the Naval Observatory?

The idea that the Democratic presidential candidate spends her free time slumming with oversexed influencers is something we should all take into consideration when choosing the next leader of the free world.

I watched the interview, if you can even call it that, and 99% of it was focused on abortion. There were lamentations about abortion being “outlawed.” There were lies about imaginary “Trump Abortion Bans.” There were simpering segments about the attacks on women’s independence, and a deliberately dishonest suggestion there were no laws that “controlled men’s bodies.”

You know what law controlled men’s bodies? The military draft. A lot of men’s bodies were not only controlled, they were destroyed, by the U.S. government. So the tedious and eardrum-melting lamentations about not being able to control one’s own destiny would have been hilarious were they not tragic.

Most women are so much smarter than Kamala gives us credit for being. We are also significantly less slutty than the “Call Her Daddy” lady presumes. While I am sure that many of the viewers of this show think being able to have sex without consequences is a hallmark of their value and a keystone of their autonomy, most of us, even those beyond the fertility years, have more respect for ourselves and our political options.

I wonder what would have happened if JD Vance had chosen to venture onto the Howard Stern show and discuss the circumference of his wife’s breasts, or talked about vasectomies as a sacrament, or lied about laws that were designed to keep children safe. Would we be as sanguine about it? Doubtful.

Kamala is allowed to get away with this incredible foray into the crass and the embarrassing because people seem afraid to state the obvious: women who abandon all pretense of dignity and self-respect, and who center their lives around the unfettered ability to dispose of an unwanted pregnancy, are not worth listening to on the internet, much less from the resolute desk in the Oval Office.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I am a white woman, who spent 80% of her life in the suburbs. I taught high school in the suburbs to young white girls who are now young white women in the suburbs.

That gives me the right to an opinion on white suburban women.

A few weeks ago, I participated in a televised panel discussion where the moderator asked about the “suburban woman” vote.

The “white” part wasn’t focused on, but it was implicit in the question. When you hear the phrase, you conjure up Karen with her blonde pageboy, her two tween-aged children, her SUV Beemer and her distaste for conflict.

That, however, is no longer representative of the demographic, if in fact it ever was.

As one of my co-panelists mentioned, there has been a change in the complexion and character of the suburban female voter over the last couple of decades, so this idea that we have a homogenous group of females who share the same values and priorities is as passe as Geraldine Ferrara’s wedge cut.

There was the suggestion that we (I include myself in that group even though I now live in the city) were only concerned with one thing: abortion.

You wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that, given the sky-is-falling ads approved by Kamala Harris which conjure up images of women dying because of “Trump’s abortion ban.”

If they only knew how many of us are sitting on our comfortable recliners with our afternoon cosmopolitans and Greek yogurt snacks rolling our eyes.

We know the truth, and we know that there is no Trump ban and that no one died because of it.

I made the point that suburban women care about a lot of things, including the education of our children, national security, immigration and criminal justice.

In other words, we are not obsessed with reproduction or the lack thereof.

The idea that women are a monolith and that we owe allegiance to a particular person or cause is anathema, and about as anti-feminist as you can be.

Far be it from me to act as an apologist for Gloria Steinem Inc., but it does seem a little strange that people are preaching to us about what we should be doing as if there is some unspoken code of conduct we need to follow in order to maintain our legitimacy.

I thought it was all about independence and autonomy.

Can it possibly be that the only autonomy Democrats are willing to tolerate is reproductive autonomy, and that in all other respects the ladies are supposed to toe some invisible progressive line?

Never mind, it’s a rhetorical question.

And as for that sticky race question: If Condoleezza Rice was at the top of the ticket, any ticket, she would have my vote.

I would stand in a blizzard for 10 hours just to cast my vote for her, even if she had changed her registration to Democrat and wore a pink crocheted pussy hat.

That’s how much I loved the former secretary of state, the one who was never given the respect she deserved as an independent thinker.

There are many conservative minority women, Black and Latino and Asian, who reflect my values far more than the women who actually look like me.

There are also a lot of men who would get my vote before any of my progressive sisters.

I remember when Madeline Albright claimed that there is a “special place in hell” for women who don’t support women.

She wasn’t referring to all women, of course. She was talking about the sort of woman who wasn’t going to vote for Hillary Clinton.

This was a different form of prejudice, but equally toxic.

I don’t see race when I vote for candidates. I don’t see gender.

I don’t see nationality. I don’t see religion, particularly since that is no longer an indication that this person will share my values. See Biden, Joseph.

I see the person and their politics. And any suggestion otherwise is the real sign of bigotry, misogyny and ignorance.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Kamala Harris has decided, likely as a result of prodding from some very nervous handlers, that she should finally visit the border.

The Border Czarina, who refuses to accept the title thrust upon her by her current boss, has skirted around an issue that will be central in the upcoming election.

She even laughed when Lester Holt reminded her in a televised interview that she had not gone down to see what was happening in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and her home state of California, the one where she was attorney general and allegedly “prosecuted transnational drug traffickers.”

Her pithy reply was “well I’ve never been to Europe, either.”

As someone who actually has been to the border, I can tell you that it doesn’t look very much like Europe. It looks more like Afghanistan in its final days, with desperate refugees and overworked Americans trying to figure out how to handle the growing mass of humanity.

I take no pleasure in admitting that there is chaos down there, as someone who, like most Americans, has a vested interest in resolving the crisis at our southern flank.

But we have to be honest if we want to solve the problems, problems which are bipartisan in nature but which have increased under the Biden-Harris administration.

Yes, Republicans have failed to arrive at a solution that balances common sense, national security and compliance with international human rights treaties.

In fact, Republicans were the ones who scuttled a bipartisan bill that, while far from perfect, would have provided for measures that most Democrats opposed. But for the last four years, the Democrats have been in charge of the White House, and as we have been told over and over again, it is the executive branch that largely controls the implementation of immigration policy. We have seen the results.

The fact that Harris has taken this long to address the problem only serves to underscore the outsized importance she has placed on another issue, one that was never supposed to be her area of expertise but which she embraced with unseemly passion: abortion rights.

Harris might not have visited the border, but she is the first vice president and presidential candidate to have visited an abortion clinic. She and her supporters are quite proud of that fact.

This is an example of how radical the Democratic candidate is on an issue that, while admittedly important to progressive women and somewhat less important to those in the center, has deeply divided the nation.

Conservative women like this writer have long believed that the status of the law under Roe v. Wade went far beyond what most Americans believed was humane, providing greater access to abortion at later stages of pregnancy than any other civilized country in the world.

Conservative women saw that, and worked long and hard for decades to eliminate that precedent. We were successful with Dobbs, but we perhaps underestimated the reaction that it would trigger in those like Harris who are deeply wedded to the abortion industry.

Abortion has become, along with immigration, a flashpoint in this election.

There has been misrepresentation and dishonesty with both issues, including the rather ridiculous obsessing with pet-eating Haitians. It didn’t happen, and it shouldn’t have even been the focus of a two-minute joke, let alone an entire week’s discussion on cable news.

But the misinformation and deliberate lies with respect to abortion are even more galling.

Harris and her supporters have used the tragic death of a woman who died after taking the abortion pill to attack what they dishonestly call “Trump’s abortion ban.”

The facts are these: The woman was pregnant with twins, waited until late in her pregnancy to seek termination, obtained the abortion pill from an abortion clinic, which did not monitor her health but acted simply as a distributor, and when she developed complications and went to a hospital for a dilation and curettage procedure.

Sadly, the doctors were not able to save her life, and there is no actual indication that if they had intervened at an earlier stage instead of monitoring her condition and blood pressure, that she would have survived. There is also no credible evidence that they were skittish because of any abortion legislation and it’s possible repercussions.

She essentially died of sepsis, which had set in because she had not evacuated all of the fetuses after taking the pill.

The abortion rights lobby has tried to frame this as doctors who were too afraid to operate on her because of Georgia’s so-called “abortion ban.”

Every time I see a political ad exploiting the death of this poor mother, or using a teenager who was impregnated by her criminal stepfather in order to MAGA — Make Abortion Great Again — I tremble with anger at the dishonesty.

And when I consider that the woman who wants to be president is enabling these fallacies, I am not surprised that she prefers visiting abortion clinics to confronting the chaos that she, in large part, helped create.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

When I was in college, there was this campaign against what was just beginning to be called “slut shaming.”

I remember seeing flyers on campus that declared women should be able to wear anything we wanted, say anything we wanted and go anywhere we wanted without having to worry that we’d end up assaulted at the end of an evening.

That was common sense, although a bit naive.

I remember thinking at the time that no one deserved to be a victim, but that accountability mattered.

If you drank too much and hung out with guys you’d just met, you didn’t deserve to be assaulted. But forewarned, and completely sober, was forearmed.

But even with that Catholic sense of “be a good girl and nothing will happen to you,” at some gut level I understood that people should not be punished for bad judgment to a degree disproportionate with any social faux pas.

In other words, there was no set number of inches above the knee that a skirt could be deemed to place a woman in the open target category.

Of course, I also noted as I matured and became more politically aware that there were double standards, and they had nothing to do with gender.

When a liberal woman was the focus of some salacious attention from the public, the media, as a rule, responded with outrage. How dare they, “they” being conservative pundits, suggest that a woman who “owns” her sexuality be subjected to such offenses and disrespectful treatment? The nerve!

Enter Sarah Palin, and the whole paradigm collapsed.

She was shamed, blamed and defamed for everything she said, did, or failed to say. I don’t need to run down the entire litany of attacks on the former VP candidate to prove that no one in the history of politics was more enthusiastically slut-shamed than Palin.

And when it was pointed out, commentators and a depressingly large contingent of Democrats shrugged their shoulders and essentially said she deserved it.

Not condemning that double standard is wrong. I myself made that mistake when Democrats attacked the admittedly repellent Laura Loomer, a woman whose views are anathema to decent human beings, accused her of sleeping with Donald Trump after they saw her emerge from his plane last week.

I didn’t defend her. I tweeted out that you need to actually have a good reputation to begin with in order to be defamed. I was legally correct, morally wrong. Slut shaming is as repellent as Loomer herself.

Which brings me, finally, to the former president.

In the past week, Trump was nearly assassinated for a second time.

After the initial, expected comments expressing relief that he was not hurt, the pundits pivoted to this: He brought it on himself.

Many on the left recycled their old “Palin asked for it” rhetoric by suggesting that when you act like Hitler, you deserve everything that comes to you,
including an assassin’s bullet.

After the assassination attempt on Sunday, Never Trumper pundit David Frum posted this on X: “The difference: The upsetting things said by Trump and Vance are not true. The upsetting things said about Trump and Vance are true.”

And?

Is that supposed to mean that attacking the former president is justified? That he brought it on himself?

And this was just a drop in the bucket of vile suggestions that Trump’s tongue will dig his own grave. In other words, his skirt is too short.

No victim brings his or her victimization on themselves. The skirt is not too short. The makeup is not too heavy. The relationship is not too familiar. And the words are not too sharp, unless they are used to dehumanize a human being.

After the last assassination attempt against Trump, and how pathetic is it that I can even write that phrase, I wrote that the continued attacks on the former president have the power to whip up a dangerous level of anger against him, a level that could trigger repeat incidents.

I cautioned Trump’s critics to rein it in. I take no pride in having been prescient.

My critics said words don’t matter.

Then they discovered the power of lies about pet-eating immigrants and decided that words do matter, as long as they can be used against the right target.

No matter what any woman wears, she does not deserve to be assaulted.

No matter what anyone says, they do not deserve to be killed.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I had so many ideas for this column. But every time I started to write, the sentences would fall flat.

Fortunately, as I sat at the keyboard, inspiration came to me in the most natural way. I was sitting at the same desk I’d been at on Sept. 11, 2001 as the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

It was the same keyboard I’d used to write an email to my brother Michael in Manhattan after the family couldn’t get through to him on the phone.

It was the same chair I’d collapsed into when NPR announced the crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, taking with it the most valiant Americans since the men at Pearl Harbor were murdered on a quiet Sunday morning almost 60 years before.

And I looked through the same window onto South Broad Street and saw the same brilliant sunshine streaming through the same majestic old tree, with the same branches dispersing flashes of gold through the morning air.

This was the story. This is the story.

I’ve lived almost a quarter century since then. My hair is grayer, and I have a few more wrinkles, but not that many. The Italian DNA is more powerful than the Irish. Apologies to my father.

The fact I’m still here, when thousands are no longer among us, doesn’t mean the world didn’t end. That world did. The one we now inhabit is not the same, regardless of the superficial signs and attributes of normality. I said that in a social media post on the actual anniversary, asking my friend to remember the way we were “before,” and try and get back to that type of person. I was actually referring to the people that we were on Sept. 12, the day after we woke up and realized that the smoke and the carnage hadn’t been a horrible nightmare. That was our new reality.

And the way we approached it was an example of the best that we were, and the best that we could still be if we stopped hating each other as much as we tend to do. Camus famously wrote this phrase which I have to reproduce in French because it simply falls on the ears with more grace: Au milieu de l’hiver, j’ai découvert en moi un invincible été (In the midst of winter, I discovered within myself an invincible summer).

On Sept. 12, 2001, I saw that principle manifest itself in my neighbors. I saw people jumping on trains at Suburban Station, headed to 30th Street where they would then catch an Amtrak to New York, to help. They didn’t have any other plans than to simply help.

I listened to the recordings from the people on Flight 93, calls home to loved ones, and then the struggle as they overpowered the hijackers headed towards the Capitol. They sacrificed their lives, for us.

I remember seeing the figure of Father Mychal Judge, chaplain of the New York Fire Department, who was killed while ministering to the injured and dying that morning, carried by the men who loved him.

And I remember that we became Americans, not Italian Americans or Irish Americans or African Americans or Indigenous or member of the LGBTQ community. In fact, Father Mychal was gay. No one cared about his sexual orientation. They cared about his humanity, which transcended it all.

We are now a broken nation, with some people calling other people traitors because they support Donald Trump, and other people calling their neighbors Marxists because they support Harris.

And there are people quibbling about whether allowing a child to suffocate to death after a botched abortion is “killing” a child or a candidate’s way of fudging the truth.

This is far from the America I experienced on Sept. 12, 2001. It is an America that I reject. And since, like Camus, I know that there is an invincible summer somewhere within us, I hope to emerge from this winter, and find it again.

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Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].