Even in the face of a madman's nuclear threats, Democrats still take potshots at Trump

By Herman Cain —— Bio and Archives August 13, 2017

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There used to be an expression that said “politics stops at the water’s edge.” Some people took it to mean that you never criticized the president when he was out of the country, but what it really meant was that, when the president was facing an international threat or challenge and trying to protect the country, that was not the time to be taking partisan potshots at him. If we had a liberal president who was trying to impose single-payer health care, massive tax increases and crushing new business regulations, I would not with the liberal president success on any of those initiatives. In my view, they would be wrong for the country.

But if the nation faced a threat and we had a liberal president, I would wish him success and would support him in any way I could. We only have one president, and if it’s not the one your side wanted, you can’t send in someone else to deal with the threat. The president we have has to do it. We have to have his back. Now, a liberal president might take some approaches with which I would disagree. But the time to take shots at him would not be while the threat looms. The only thing that matters at that point is success in dealing with the threat. Imagine if Republicans had run to the media taking partisan potshots at John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, ripping him for the way he was handling it. It would have been outrageous. It would simply not have been the time or the circumstance for partisan politics. Well, we don’t have a liberal president now. We have Donald Trump, a president liberals can’t stand. He is now facing the very real threat of a lunatic, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, threatening to launch nuclear attacks against the United States. It is not a threat of Trump’s making. He inherited the problem. But he’s the one who ran for president, and that means he has to accept that the responsibility is now his to deal with.

Accept it he does, and he’s warned Kim that any attack against the United States will bring down hellfire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen. He has no choice but to do that. He must warn our would-be enemy of the consequences of the actions he is threatening to take. And as the opposition party, the Democrats should be reiterating that President Trump speaks for all Americans in warning of these consequences. They need to show Kim that, however divided we may be along partisan lines, we are totally united in standing up to this threat. But today’s Democratic Party doesn’t work like that. They put partisanship above all else, and they regard Donald Trump as more of an enemy than Kim Jong Un. So instead of a show of unity, we get statements like this from Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer:

“We need to be firm and deliberate with North Korea, but reckless rhetoric is not a strategy to keep America safe.”

Or this one from Senator Dianne Feinstein:

I wonder if the Democrats understand this: If Kim Jong Un threatens to attack us, and Donald Trump warns him of the consequences of doing so, it is Kim, not Trump, who has brought us to the brink of war. The left in this country seems to be getting this backward. Their hatred of Donald Trump is so all-consuming that they can’t stop attacking him even when he’s doing the one job every American must hope he succeeds at – protecting the security of our nation. If partisanship is more important to the Democrats than that, then you can’t even really call them a political party anymore. They’re just enemies.