Do not put your trust in princes, Nor in a son of man, in whom there is no help.
- Psalm 146:3
Left or right, if you invest too much in making your objects of admiration into heroes, you run an excellent chance of being let down.
Current examples abound.
Early on in the pandemic's rampage, New York governor Andrew Cuomo had a considerable number of people in his corner, due in large part to those who took his side when the Trump administration cast aspersions on the way the Cuomo administration handled things in that state.
The number of supporters had been dwindling, and I would imagine will be dwindling further after this revelation:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state’s nursing home death toll from COVID-19 — telling them “we froze” out of fear that the true numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors, The Post has learned.
The stunning admission of a coverup was made by secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because “right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting.
“He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes,” DeRosa said. “He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer.”
In addition to attacking Cuomo’s fellow Democratic governors, DeRosa said, Trump “directs the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us.”
“And basically, we froze,” she told the lawmakers on the call.
Granted, the Very Stable Genius never made it easy for anybody to proceed forthrightly with anything, but we''re talking about human beings with loved ones who became pawns in a numbers game.
The high-stakes Senate runoff races in Georgia went in favor of the Democrats, and, in spite of Raphael Warnock's track record of support for Palestinian radicalism vis-a-vis Israel, the nation generally made its peace with the results and he was sworn in. Now, it appears that he's in some hot water over possible funny business:
The Georgia State Election Board voted unanimously Wednesday to move forward with an investigation of U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) for his role serving as board chairman of a voter registration organization founded by Stacey Abrams that election officials say failed to follow deadlines, in what appears to be the latest legal step in the ongoing feud between the progressive Abrams and the state’s Republican election officials.
Before I yield to any temptation to be smug about the above developments, let us note that my bunch - that is to say, anti-Trump conservatives - is witnessing one of the major institutional players in disseminating the message of the Very Stable Genius's unfitness implode in real time. A lot of us had, early on, noticed an odor of unseemliness emanating from the Lincoln Project, and stayed away. Now it seems that what we were intuiting has been borne out:
Jennifer Horn, co-founder of The Lincoln Project, blasted her colleagues at the anti-Donald Trump Republican group in a blistering Thursday statement.
Horn, who resigned from the organization last week, suggested some people in the group had known about the sexual harassment allegations against co-founder John Weaver long before they were made public by The New York Times in a Jan. 31 exposé.
Horn, the former chairwoman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, also accused her colleagues of refusing to “properly address” the allegations against Weaver after the Times published its article — and said she was “demeaned and lied to” when she challenged the group on its response to the claims.
Ted Cruz, in whom I'd once placed my hopes for a nice, clean conservative renaissance, has, over the course of the last five years, made a steady descent into sycophancy and self-humiliation. Now, as a member of the jury in a very momentous trial, he's openly meeting (along with Mike Lee, whom I'd once greatly admired, and Lindsey Graham, whom I've never admired) with the defendant's legal team:
As House Democrats concluded their case Thursday against former president Donald Trump, Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz met privately with Trump’s defense team to discuss the status of the former president’s case.
Ted gave them a little strategy coaching:
Senator Cruz later said that he was the one who suggested the meeting, which lasted about an hour. “I just wanted to sit down and say, OK, what are you looking to put forward and to share our thoughts in terms of where things are,” Cruz told Fox NewsThursday night. He said he urged the defense team to focus on “legal standard.” While Democrats made their most graphic case to the American public, Trump’s lawyers and Republicans are focusing on legal rather than emotional or historic questions.
Nikki Haley was a pretty good South Carolina governor - no major missteps, anyway - and was absolutely thrilling to watch in action as US ambassador to the UN. I felt we had another Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick or John Bolton up there on the East River. But then came the suck-up years, in which she spoke glowingly about the Very Stable Genius, apparently hoping for his imprimatur when she made future political moves.
Now she's trying to walk that back, couching her effort in some kind of pretty lame he's-a-different-man-since-the-election expression of disillusionment. I mean, in the Politico article, she does forthrightly address Trump's disgraceful treatment of Pence, and I suppose a case can be made for letting her have the space she needs to make her public readjustment in perspective, but an equally compelling case can be made, it seems to me that it's a little late in the game for this:
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley issued stunning remarks breaking with former President Trump, telling Politico in an interview published Friday that she believes he “let us down.”
“We need to acknowledge he let us down,” Haley, who served in her ambassador role under Trump, said. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”
Haley’s remarks are her strongest yet against the former president in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and come as Trump's legal team is set to present its defense of Trump on Friday in his second Senate impeachment trial.
The House impeached the former president for a second time shortly after the insurrection, saying his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud following his election loss to President Biden and his comments earlier that day incited the mob that stormed the Capitol.
The former South Carolina governor told Politico that she has not spoken with Trump since the mob attack, further expressing her disappointment with remarks he gave at a rally ahead of the assault condemning his own vice president, Mike Pence.
“When I tell you I’m angry, it’s an understatement,” Haley said. “I am so disappointed in the fact that [despite] the loyalty and friendship he had with Mike Pence, that he would do that to him. Like, I’m disgusted by it.”
Haley said that the president "believes he is following" his oath of office by challenging the election results, adding, "There’s nothing that you’re ever going to do that’s going to make him feel like he legitimately lost the election."
I guess we'll take it, but the pronouncements of those who have publicly called out Trump for who he is for much longer have far more weight in my book.
Then there's this new revelation about an aspect of Marjorie Taylor Greene's lifestyle. I don't know that I find it surprising, exactly, but she's the kind of Trumpist whose constituents tend to be God-country-and-family types, at least in their own estimation (although the also dig the Very Stable Genius, and, as we know, he comes up woefully short in at least two of the three):
Controversial conspiracy congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene cheated on her husband with a polyamorous tantric sex guru, DailyMail.com has learned.
Then after ending her affair with him, the mom-of-three moved on to a gym manager behind her husband's back.
But despite the tawdry flings, Taylor Greene stuck with her husband Perry as she made her unlikely rise that has turned her into the most talked-about Republican in Washington, D.C.
Neither man denied the affairs when approached by DailyMail.com.
Craig Ivey, the tantric sex practitioner, said: 'I will not respond to anything about this,' while the other man, Justin Tway, said: 'I have no interest in talking about anything to do with that woman. Everything with her comes to no good.'
But others say the new representative from Georgia's 14th Congressional District was brazen about her affairs which she carried on a decade ago while working in gyms in Alpharetta, Georgia, some 35 miles north of Atlanta.
This next example of a disgraced object of admiration has deadly serious implications. Over the years, thousands of people had relied on him for encouragement in their quests to find spiritual grounding. He'd been entrusted with bringing the powerful message of the Gospel to those in deep existential need, and he betrayed them. I suppose prayer for him as well as his victims is the correct way to view this horrifying situation - he had obviously been losing the spiritual-warfare battle going on in his inner being for some time - but that does not diminish the necessity of exposing just what he did:
Afour-month investigation found the late Ravi Zacharias leveraged his reputation as a world-famous Christian apologist to abuse massage therapists in the United States and abroad over more than a decade while the ministry led by his family members and loyal allies failed to hold him accountable.
He used his need for massage and frequent overseas travel to hide his abusive behavior, luring victims by building trust through spiritual conversations and offering funds straight from his ministry.
A 12-page report released Thursday by Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) confirms abuse by Zacharias at day spas he owned in Atlanta and uncovers five additional victims in the US, as well as evidence of sexual abuse in Thailand, India, and Malaysia.
Even a limited review of Zacharias’s old devices revealed contacts for more than 200 massage therapists in the US and Asia and hundreds of images of young women, including some that showed the women naked. Zacharias solicited and received photos until a few months before his death in May 2020 at age 74.
Zacharias used tens of thousands of dollars of ministry funds dedicated to a “humanitarian effort” to pay four massage therapists, providing them housing, schooling, and monthly support for extended periods of time, according to investigators.
One woman told the investigators that “after he arranged for the ministry to provide her with financial support, he required sex from her.” She called it rape.
She said Zacharias “made her pray with him to thank God for the ‘opportunity’ they both received” and, as with other victims, “called her his ‘reward’ for living a life of service to God,” the report says. Zacharias warned the woman—a fellow believer—if she ever spoke out against him, she would be responsible for millions of souls lost when his reputation was damaged.
The findings, alongside details revealed over months of internal reckoning at RZIM, challenge the picture many have had of Zacharias.
When he died in May, he was praised for his faithful witness, his commitment to the truth, and his personal integrity. Now it is clear that, offstage, the man so long admired by Christians around the world abused numerous women and manipulated those around him to turn a blind eye.
The common thread among all these tales of various kinds of weakness is quite simply that the subjects of each were human beings. Human beings, even the ones we love and trust and call family and friends, are fallible. It's only by hanging on to God's grace that any of us can rise above our innate depravity.
The lesson is that it behooves us all to focus on principles and values, discuss principles and values among ourselves and pass them on to our children. Principles and values are immutable. They are not subject to change due to technological advancement or sociocultural trends.
We can spare ourselves a lot of disillusionment and bitterness if we make the message, not the messenger, the significant aspect of our engagement with the truth.
Best to save our worship for the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
The hard truth is that any of the Father's children may break your heart.
Grace be upon us all.
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