{"id":32874,"date":"2022-02-18T18:00:11","date_gmt":"2022-02-18T23:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=32874"},"modified":"2022-02-18T18:01:06","modified_gmt":"2022-02-18T23:01:06","slug":"my-latest-reader-column-petes-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=32874","title":{"rendered":"My latest Reader Column, Pete&#8217;s Way"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not yet up online so here it is in Lincoln Democrat for you<\/p>\n<p><strong>Pete\u2019s Way <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/51876496967_3b6d4733a7_z.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out\u2014because I was not a socialist.<br \/>\nThen they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out\u2014 because I was not a trade unionist.<br \/>\nThen they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out\u2014because I was not a Jew.<br \/>\nThen they came for me\u2014and there was no one left to speak for me.<br \/>\nPastor Martin Niem\u00f6ler<\/p>\n<p>Congressman Pete Stauber wrote recently under the hashtag: #OurWayofLife,  \u201cTogether, let\u2019s defend our way of life, take back our country, and rebuild our future.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Whose way of life Pete? The trade unionists, the socialists, the Jews? How about the voters? Your President Trump, whose pocket lint you have been picking for five years, doesn&#8217;t like it when the voters call the shots. Your Donald Trump is an interesting animal .<\/p>\n<p>When an assortment of fascists marched through Charlottesville in 2017 carrying tiki torches and chanting \u201cJews will not replace us,\u201d how did our first President with Jewish grandchildren defend his little ones? He called the jew baiters \u201cgood people.\u201d I\u2019m sure Pastor Niem\u00f6ler was rolling in his grave.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike Trump in 2021 I accepted his victory in 2017. I didn\u2019t move to Canada. My country had not been taken away from me. But after years of watching Pete\u2019s kind of Republicans fiddle with elections I wonder if Pete\u2019s way is a country that includes me. Who else is unwelcome? Gays? Black Americans? Women? University grads?  Teachers? Pacifists, Agnostics? At least there\u2019s room for tiki torch bearers.<\/p>\n<p>As I write this Vladimir Putin\u2019s army and navy surround the nation of Ukraine that Trump leaned on to help him win the 2021 election. Poor Ukranians. By next week Trump\u2019s hero may plunge the world into the costliest war since my Dad went off to fight in 1943.<\/p>\n<p>Throughout his presidency Stauber\u2019s man Trump showed deference to a succession of the world\u2019s most corrupt dictators and strongmen like North Korea\u2019s Kim Jong-un, Brasil\u2019s Bolsonaro, Philippine president Duterte, \u201cJina\u2019s\u201d Xi, but above all Trump groveled at Vladimir Putin\u2019s feet. <\/p>\n<p>The British writer Lord Acton\u2019s warned us long ago that, \u201cpower corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.\u201d These men all fit that description and Donald Trump is not far behind. I have probably missed 40 to 60 mail deliveries since Trump appointed Louis DeJoy as\u00a0our nation\u2019s 75th\u00a0U.S. postmaster general. Evidently the President wanted to make sure absentee ballots weren\u2019t delivered to election officials in time to be counted. The man\u2019s a genius.<\/p>\n<p>As a kid I thought the glory days of such tyrants like Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo and finally Stalin were a thing of the past. Then we elected an unscrupulous narcissist incapable of telling the truth who wanted to get in on the act. <\/p>\n<p>Trump world has kicked American corruption to a level not seen since the Gilded Age between the Civil War and Teddy Roosevelt 1860 \u2013 1900. Until his election I wouldn\u2019t have guessed that Pete Stauber would willingly be an enabler to such a man. Pete\u2019s only infamy up his election was getting the smallest college hockey team in history the biggest prize in college hockey &#8211; a 1988 Division One championship by not getting caught cheating. Wikipedia quotes a sport\u2019s reporter as saying what Pete did was:\u00a0&#8220;risky, arguably crafty, and inarguably illegal.\u201d Cheating, like drugs, starts small. First its lifting your own goal post off its pins when the ref isn\u2019t looking, then its stealing an election. Pete\u2019s team visited the Reagan White House which Pete said set him on the path to Congress. He must have missed it when Ron told the Ruskies to \u201ctear down this wall!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So, what are the ways of Pete\u2019s kind of people? He hasn\u2019t said boo about the January 6th crowd who tore down the blockades in front of the nation\u2019s Capitol and beat his fellow police while boasting of their plans to lynch Vice President Pence. <\/p>\n<p>They are in hiding now disguised as anti-maskers blocking North American highways to cripple Biden\u2019s, and our nation\u2019s, economy. They are like BLM and anti-Vietnam war protesters only they\u2019ve been strangling the economy for a week. That\u2019s not my way of life. Whose is it? Hitler\u2019s people did Kristallnacht and burned down the Reichstag giving Adolph the Chancellorship in 1933. That was Hitler\u2019s way. The Ukraine is Putin\u2019s way. Uighur genocide is Xi\u2019s way. Extrajudicial murders of methamphetamine addicts is Duterte\u2019s way. Burning the Amazon for leather SUV seat covers is Bolsonaro\u2019s  way. What is Pete Stauber\u2019s way?<\/p>\n<p>If Pete Stauber fit into a set of Matryoshka dolls he would be the littlest. Me too, only my set would include General Dwight David Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln.<\/p>\n<p>Everything Harry writes that is not about the imminent destruction of Earth as we knew it is superfluous. But, he does prattle on at lincolndemocrat.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not yet up online so here it is in Lincoln Democrat for you Pete\u2019s Way First they came for the socialists, and I did&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,90,133],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32874"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32874"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32877,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32874\/revisions\/32877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}