HONORING ALL THOSE WHO SERVED

 

GUEST POST BY DAVE MILLER

 

In 586 BC, the prophet Ezekiel delivered a highly specific and bizarre warning against the wealthy, heavily fortified Phoenician island-city of Tyre. He declared that God would bring many nations against it, stating:

 

"They will destroy the walls of Tyre and pull down her towers; I will scrape away her rubble and make her a bare rock... They will throw your stones, your timber and your rubble into the sea."

 

The exiled people of Israel would wait approximately 254 years before witnessing an extraordinary realization of Ezekiel's words.

 

In 332 BC, Alexander the Great conquered Tyre, using rubble from the mainland city to build a causeway across the sea to the island fortress.

 

This story of enduring faith, and the long wait for the realization of prophecy, is one of many that Christians and Jews have turned to for hope in desperate situations.

 

Recently I found myself thinking of that prophecy and of the late Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina.

 

I remember painting houses by myself during the Clinton impeachment proceedings. Each day I would arrive at my job site, get my radio set up to listen to NPR, and get to work.

 

Graham, an Air Force lawyer, was one of the House impeachment managers. I listened as he prosecuted the case against President Clinton. Graham impressed me, and as a mostly conservative Democrat, I found myself agreeing with him.

 

I thought he had, as they say in politics, legs.

 

So when he decided to run for president in the 2016 election, I was listening.

 

In July 2015, Graham warned about Donald Trump…

 

"I think he's a wrecking ball for the future of the Republican Party with the Hispanic community."

 

And in March 2016, Graham was even more unequivocal.

 

He warned that Trump would be an "absolute, utter disaster" for the Republican Party, destroying conservatism as he knew it. Republicans, he predicted, would be wiped out, and recovery would take generations.

 

Another Republican presidential candidate, Marco Rubio, offered his own warning that March.

 

Speaking about Republicans who supported Donald Trump, Rubio said:

 

"For years to come, there are many people on the right... [who] are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump..."

 

In another interview, Rubio warned that Republicans were becoming a party driven by fear rather than optimism.

 

"If we're going to be the party of fear, we're going to spend some time in the wilderness."

 

He added that Republicans would pay a political price in November and beyond.

 

Those were remarkable warnings, coming not from Democrats, but from two men seeking to lead the Republican Party.

 

And yet, none of those words seemed to matter.

 

Donald Trump won the 2016 election, lost in 2020, then stormed back to power in 2024.

 

Along the way, both Graham and Rubio eventually became supporters of the man they had warned would destroy their party.

 

The prophets, it seemed, had abandoned their own prophecies.

 

Then the people struck back.

 

After a decade of frustration, setbacks, and occasional victories, Democrats broke through in November 2026. The United States of America prevailed.

 

The Democrats didn't just win an election. They won control of both houses of Congress. They captured governorships and legislative seats in places that had long been Republican strongholds.

 

And in state after state, the political landscape was mightily transformed from red to blue.

 

Consider:

 

•           Texas had not elected a Democratic US senator since 1988.

•           Democrats had not controlled Arizona’s state government since 1966, when Barry Goldwater was a US Senator.

•           Kansas had not elected a Democratic US senator since 1932.

•           Mississippi is on the verge of electing it’s first black senator since Reconstruction.

•           South Carolina, Lindsey Graham's home state, elected a Democrat to his former Senate seat.

•           In Georgia, Democrats swept all 10 statewide offices for the first time in over 20 years.

 

As Ezekiel prophesied about Tyre, The GOP walls were broken. The towers were pulled down. The stones and timbers were thrown into the sea.

 

That historic reality brought me back to the two men who, ten years earlier, had warned their fellow Republicans about the consequences of embracing Donald Trump.

 

Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio.

 

Prophets, in a political sense, who saw something coming that many in their own party refused to see.

 

In 2016, an angry country stepped forward and took a chance on Donald Trump, despite multiple warnings from people who knew the Republican Party from the inside.

 

Meanwhile after the devastating loss, Democrats spent the next decade organizing, campaigning and refusing to surrender their belief that the country could eventually take another direction.

 

That came true Tuesday, November 3, 2026. A political “wrecking ball.” An “utter disaster” for Republicans. And, in Marco Rubio's own words, a journey “into the wilderness” for the GOP.

 

There's one final irony in all this.

 

Both Graham and Rubio recognized the danger in 2016. Both warned their fellow Republicans about it. And both eventually embraced the very man they believed would bring disaster upon their party.

 

Perhaps that's the most remarkable part of this story. It wasn't that nobody saw what might be coming.

 

And ten years later, their prophecies came true.

YOUR SUNDAY MOMENT OF ZEN

 

FROM A FRIEND OF MINE ON FACEBOOK

 

I thought this was insightful.

“Matt Ford in the New Republic, anticipating Republican efforts at salvage of the brand after Trump, says that many will advocate a sort of Trumpism without Trump stupidity, restoring all that righty goodness while excluding the clownish, stupid buffoonery which sabotaged them.  He says it won't work because Trump/MAGA is stupid, ignorant, and fundamentally compromised in its effectiveness by its distance from fact and logic.  There were, of course, people who benefited from Trump, notably Musk and the techbros, and will seek to continue it all:

'There will be a temptation for Republicans to propose doing Trumpism the right way, to achieve their goals without the errors that beset Trump’s second term. This is a fool’s errand. Trump’s mistakes were not a deviation from Trumpism; they were Trumpism. His political movement is, at its core, based on a rejection of knowledge and expertise. As a result, it is inherently self-destructive...

'These actions have a dire cost for ordinary Americans, who are now on track to be poorer, sicker, and less educated at the end of Trump’s second term than they were before it. Even their “successes” are failures. In September, top Trump adviser Stephen Miller shared a graph on Twitter claiming that the country’s foreign-born population had dropped by 2.9 million over the past 18 months. “The first sustained negative migration in 100 years, and picking up speed,” he crowed. The graph also showed that the overall number of immigrants in the U.S. hadn’t dropped below the levels they were at in January 2024. In other words, the Trump administration has wrought all this damage and destroyed tens of thousands of immigrants’ lives to bring the number down to … Biden-era levels. They can’t even do mass deportations right.

'Someday soon, a Republican presidential candidate will campaign on the premise that he can deliver the “good” parts of Trumpism without the collateral damage of its namesake’s mistakes. They will be lying. All of this damage flows naturally from an exaltation of ignorance and the demonization of expertise. They will merely be promising easy solutions to make a quick buck and hoping to outrun the harms they cause. Hopefully, future generations of Americans will see through the con more easily than past electorates.'”

GUEST POST BY DAVE MILLER

 

Recently our friend Skud responded to a few questions I asked in a comment thread. I felt his comment would be better addressed in its own post.

 

Skud is an admitted cynic when it comes to public service in the federal government. He believes Congress and its members are corrupt, and that people run for office to get rich and become part of an “elected elite.”

 

According to Skud, little in America will change because Congress “is not about running the country for its citizens, it is all about running the country for [themselves] the politicians.”

 

One of the main things Skud thinks Congress is good at “is increasing their wealth.”

 

These are criticisms we hear frequently from Americans across the political spectrum. So recently, I asked Skud a simple question:

 

“What would you like our political leaders to do for America? For our people? For you?”

 

Here are his responses…

 

•   I would like to see out elected elite create a balanced budget and honor it.

•   I would like to see our elected elite protect veterans.

•   I would like to see our elected elite spend money to help with the homeless issue instead of building a bridge to nowhere.

•   I would like to see our elected elite vote for term limits and congress being on medicare and a federal pension not a four years and you are set for life.

•   I would like to see our elected elite work for we the people instead of we the elected elite.

•   Our elected elite are suppose to be smart yet they can't figure out how to provide for basic healthcare for all, how to provide for veterans, how o clean up our streets and control violence and enforce the law.

 

Skud, I see your concerns, and I agree with many of them.

 

You've said before that you'd like to throw everyone in Congress out and start over. But realistically, that's not going to happen. So we're left with the government we have and the challenge of making it work.

 

And that brings me back to my original question. How do we actually solve these problems?

 

Some are easier than others. Congressional self-dealing, for example, seems like something we ought to be able to address through bipartisan legislation. There's widespread agreement that something needs to change.

 

But balancing the budget, providing healthcare, addressing homelessness, and taking care of veterans are much more complicated. People disagree not just about the solutions, but about the proper role of government in addressing these issues.

 

We can’t simply say it’s complicated, or that Congress is corrupt, and throw up our hands. We can’t just complain.

 

Being a citizen requires more than just diagnosing our problems. That’s easy. Citizenship also requires thinking about and helping propose solutions to our problems.

 

And I believe that’s why many people run for Congress in the first place. To be part of the solution.

 

So here's my question to you Skud and the rest of our little band of commenters. Given the political realities we're dealing with, how would you address the problems you've identified?

 

Not by throwing everyone out and starting over, but by working within the system we actually have.