The American lunatic asylum needs a new political party
Can any of you still watch the evening news?
Here’s an encapsulation. America is becoming a gun-toting hellscape where every guy who gets fired from his job, or any teen who has been bullied at school, goes down to the local Walgreens, buys an AK, and blows away the nearest McDonalds.
This happens almost every day.
Literally.
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Does anyone give a damn?
No. Because no one really cares about America anymore, but instead their particular team within America.
If you’re on the Left Team, then you don’t mourn the children shot and murdered. You’d rather just demonize the Republican monsters who want every child in America registered at birth with the NRA. And if you’re on the Right Team, you don’t care about the teachers who are blown to bits using their bodies to shield their students; rather, you hate the Leftist, sissy commies who want to take away your guns so the government can enslave you.
Somewhere in no man’s lands are hundreds of people murdered this year whose souls are crying out, “What in God’s name is wrong with all of you? Don’t you realize we’re dead? Don’t you realize it’s not normal for a country to be a war zone? How sick are all of you that all you can do is weaponize our deaths to placate your particular political interests?”
At the risk of stating the obvious, let’s state the obvious.
America is in desperate need of a major third political party, whose main theme would be that a brain is not a political liability.
We need a party that believes in the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms, but not assault rifles and high-caliber magazines. And that checks you to see if you’re a certified lunatic before they sell you a gun.
We need a party that respects a woman’s right to choose — it’s her body after all — but only until the baby would be sustainable outside its mother’s body, as is the basic position of Jewish law.
We need a party that believes in a foreign policy that holds monsters like Vladimir Putin to account and that would kick Turkey out of NATO if a tyrant like Erdogan wins the runoff election.
We need a party that makes it mandatory for every high school graduate in America to give a year of national service — either in the military, working in hospitals and homes for the aged, volunteering in schools, or picking up the trash for a year — so that our kids learn that life is not just the narcissism they post on Instagram.
We need a party with fair taxation, that between state and federal taxes accounts for no more than a third of a person’s income in total, allowing people to give more charity and become more altruistic.
We need a party that has a sane immigration policy. That seals the southern border — because a country without a border is not a country — but offers the undocumented immigrants already in America a path to citizenship within 12 months. Rather than sanctuary cities, we should have migrants who are legal, paying taxes, and contributing to the country like everyone else.
We need a party that makes it clear to Mexico that if it doesn’t deal with the narco-terrorists on the U.S. border, who are raping and murdering these innocent migrants who are trying to enter the U.S., America will enact the harshest possible sanctions against Mexico. It has no right to engage in the most disgusting corruption — with elected leaders bought off by the cartels — and to create a refugee crisis on the American border.
We need a party that gives tax incentives to married couples to fix their relationships by getting the marriage counseling they need and reduce the insane American divorce rate of 50 percent.
We need a party that gives parents the choice to devote their hard-earned tax dollars to school choice, empowering them to make decisions about their children’s education rather than the teacher’s unions whose iron grip on the Democratic party has become a national embarrassment.
We need a party that refuses to indulge in the stupid, asinine political debate of the day and draws candidates of quality and character who focus on issues instead. The Republican obsession with trans would be comical if it were not so sinister. Are you seriously telling me that the threat to Western civilization is going to come from people who are nonbinary rather than from Islamist terrorists like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the mullahs of Iran?
We need a party that honors America’s military and transforms things like Memorial Day from a weekend to buy a cheap mattress into a true national day of remembrance. We need a party that bolsters our military and takes care of our vets not just as a form of false patriotism but as part of a true recognition that the U.S. military is, in practice, the single greatest force for good on Planet Earth.
We need a party that stands by Israel and all other freedom-loving democracies by cutting off all non-humanitarian U.N. funding every time that grotesque, obsessive, antisemitic body condemns the only free country in the entire Middle East.
We need a party that promotes the traditional family, not by scapegoating LGBT or trans individuals but by bolstering the main framework for the success of the family. We need to see a president and his family having weekly Friday night dinners — Fridays are perfect, as they are sacred to Jews, Muslims, and Catholics, and the beginning of the weekend — and not just annually, when pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey.
We need a party that is prepared to publicly repudiate — even evict — its own when they cross uncrossable moral lines. We need a party that will throw out a Marjorie Taylor Greene when she says that Jews shoot moonbeam lasers with their brains, or a Rashida Tlaib when she desecrates the name of Elie Wiesel by tying to invoke the Elie Wiesel genocide convention against Israel, as she did just last week.
We need a party that will tell every candidate for office that you cannot run in an election until you sign a legally binding declaration that if you lose, you have 90 days tops to challenge the results in the courts. And if you lose, you concede. And if you refuse to concede, you will be barred from ever running in an election again.
We need a party that inspires all of its citizens who are capable of working to work and not live off the government. Not only because that’s the quickest way to economic ruin but because all human beings need the dignity of self-sufficiency, without which we become not just indolent but spiteful. Like parents, the government should always be there to assist but not to support.
And we need a new party just so we can balance the two other parties. Keep them honest. Keep them sane.
Because it’s not normal to go the grocery store to buy lettuce and end up dead. It’s not normal for neo-Nazi white supremacists to take over the internet with their calls for the extermination of blacks and Jews.
It’s not normal for members of Congress to call for a Naqba Day, mourning five Arab armies’ failure to perpetrate a genocide against the fledgling State of Israel.
And it’s not normal for all of us not to care just how abnormal we’ve all become.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach of Englewood is the author of “Judaism for Everyone” and “The Israel Warrior.” Follow him on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.
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