Opinion
By Dave Scott, 5-22-25
Once upon a time not many years ago when Republicans ran for office and won they spouted conciliatory phases such as “reach across the aisle” and “find common ground.” It did no good.
No matter what Republicans said or did, Democrats never changed their tactics of reaching out to snatch the spoils, malign their opponents and squeeze the populace out of every possible tax dime. Even when they won Republicans never launched much of an opposition.
It’s obvious that with Trump’s victory those days of Republican timidity and pandering are in the rear view mirror. Americans, particularly Democrats, are not accustomed to Republicans taking advantage of electoral victories
Trump is like a victorious General George Patton, surveying the smoldering North African desert landscape of German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s defeated tank corps after the Battle of El Guettar. “Rommel, you magnificent bastard I read your book,” Patton exclaimed as he viewed the battlefield carnage following his victory.
Like Patton, Trump can stand over the smoldering electoral college, swing state, and popular vote landscape of the November 2024 election shouting “I read your book,” referring to the Democrat’s playbook, ‘Rules for Radicals’, by Marxist Saul Alinsky. Barrack Obama followed Alinsky’s book to win in 2008 and Alinksy was the subject of Hilary Clinton’s college thesis.
It’s become obvious that Trump and his corps of supporters are not the naïve, appeasing, turn-the-other-cheek GOPers of the past. Trump surveyed the electoral battlefield and he’s not taking prisoners. He’s telling his officers, “Run them down,” further expanding his control after victory.
The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins, neatly summed up Trump’s thinking writing: “Mr. Trump’s own defining political quality has been his cynicism about the game of politics and the people who play it, including the media. On this he’s proved right again and again.”
The days of reaching out to defeated, but still dangerous and devious Democrat opponents are over. Based on the frantic Democrat rhetoric it’s obvious they know it and have no options to combat the victorious pro-American Trump momentum sweeping the country and decimating their ranks. There is no Marshall Plan in store for these losers.
The Democrats’ crumbling infrastructure, open borders, rampant crime, drug addiction, lousy schools, inflation, high cost of housing, lack of employment opportunities, and a weak military and more are all being addressed by the Trump administration. The defeated Democrat opposition is helpless as the victorious Republicans rebuild the American landscape devastated by Democrats.
Trump and his cadre are also applying their “America First” victory campaign to U.S. allies around the globe signaling that there’ll be no more handouts and they’ll start paying and doing their fair share or be left out in the cold.
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Degrees, Grades, Nobody Cares: Not once in my almost 60 years of newspaper reporting and corporate working life did anyone ever ask me where I ranked scholastically in my high school graduating class, what courses I took in college or what grades I made. No one ever asked to see a degree or even proof of one. No one.
I’ve been a professional writer for almost 60 years and at no time in that long career in the writing field has anyone ever asked me about my grades. Not IBM, ITT, The Tribune Company, Gannett Corp., National Data Corp, or Coastal Corporation. .
The only employers that asked me to produce proof that I was a writer were news organizations. They had no interest in grades or diplomas. They wanted to see evidence that I could gather facts, assemble them in a logical, factual, and readable fashion and do it fast, very, very fast.
They wanted to see news clippings with my byline on them. They also contacted my former editors to verify that I wasn’t, as the trade magazine “Editor & Publisher” referred to many transient reporters in its classified ads at the time, “a drunk or drifter.” Nobody ever asked me about grades or degrees, ever. Grades, school performance, ratings and ranking, and degrees were all utterly useless. They were never looked at by anyone of consequence after leaving campus.
This approach obviously wouldn’t work in some specialized fields such as medicine, engineering, and law.
I was a reporter for two major daily newspapers in Florida and New York and ran media relations, public relations, and advertising activities for Fortune 50 companies in the U.S. and Europe. I eventually ran my own PR firm. The lack of any specialized degree, grades or course work was never a factor. The only things that mattered were talent, performance and results combined with congeniality and compatibility with internal and external audiences. Showing up on time, dressing for your audience and a willingness to stay late and finish projects on time or before they were due paid off handsomely. Common sense dictated that neither I nor my peers sported visible tattoos, piercings or wore clothing plastered with messages of any kind.
Based on what I’ve seen and read recently there is a great deal of skepticism among today’s high schoolers about whether they should go deep into debt to pursue a university degree that costs tens of thousands of dollars and burdens them and/or their parents with massive debt for years to come.
Many students are opting out. They’re looking at alternative careers in the trades, where they can earn salaries that exceed the pay of most of their college-bound peers who chose to become teachers, accountants, social workers, conservationists, loan officers, government employees, etc. while at the same time struggling to pay off their college loans. Pricey degrees in Sociology , Philosophy, Political Science, Art History, Literature, etc. buy nothing but massive debt and few job prospects other than becoming a disgruntled barista at Starbucks.
I was introduced to a young lady about three or four years ago who was about to graduate from Fernandina Beach High School. She was an articulate, well-mannered, attractive woman, with excellent grades. She was headed to a Jacksonville trade school to learn welding. Her enthusiasm was palpable. She had done her homework and knew how long it would take to learn the trade and the potential salary once she entered the field. I have no idea where she is today, but my assumption is that she earned her certificate and any company that hired her is probably as delighted as she is.
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“Oh, Look Honey – Sea Shells.” If Former FBI Director James Comey had stumbled over a sea shell arrangement reading, “1,2,3,4” would he have posted it online saying: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk”? Probably not. However, he did post that when he saw “8647” in the sand, claiming he had no idea what it meant. “1,2,3,4” would have been cool as it represented common numerals in logical order. If, as he claims, he didn’t know what 8647 meant why post it? This guy is an arrogant fraud, a liar, and a phony. He’s also dangerous and should suffer consequences for his actions, which could inspire other addle-brained nut cases like him to act on someone’s treacherous stupidity.
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Don’t Forget Dear ‘Ole Dad: Father’s Day is June 15 and for those progeny who don’t want to pay Hallmark or some other card company for a feigned sentiment for dad, here’s a few you can use or improvise on that are sure to get a chuckle or the back of a hand from the “old man”. No charge.
- Dad, you did great, I turned out perfect.
- Dad, I hope some day I’m as funny as you think you are.
- Happy Father’s Day dad, I wouldn’t trade you for anything. Of course, nobody’s offered anything.
- Dad today wouldn’t mean anything without me.
- Happy Father’s Day from your favorite financial burden.
- I appreciate that you always come back after going out to get cigarettes or a six pack
- I smile because you’re my father. I laugh because there’s nothing you can do about it.
- Dad, you gave me life, and I got you this coffee mug. Even Stephen?
- We have a perfect father-daughter relationship. You are my father, and I am perfect.
- Happy Father’s Day from one of your legitimate children.
- Dad, thanks for reassuring me that if I ever got kidnapped they’d bring me back after an hour.
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Remember When … during the 2022 Pennsylvania U.S. Senatorial campaign between John Fetterman and Dr. Mehmet Oz, Fetterman suffered a massive stroke? While recovering he was barely able to utter a sensible sentence.
Despite his obvious medical impairment, including when he started a debate by saying: “Hello everybody, good night!,” Democrats and their lefty media pals defended Fetterman, proclaiming that his obvious diminished motor skills and speech impairment were nonsense. They said he was perfectly OK.
Well, that was then, when the Dems needed him to maintain their majority in the Senate, even if he was clearly incapacitated.
Now that Fetterman has fully recovered they’re singing a different tune. In addition to altogether recovering from the stroke, he’s “gone rogue” Democrats now say. Along the way he’s acquired something none of them have ever possessed: “common sense.’
“He’s nuts,” they say in their panic mode. He’s not himself and needs urgent treatment they excitedly stammer.
“He’s disabled and needs help,” former disgruntled staffers and angry members of the Democrat party claim. The lame media sings along willingly spouting the opposite of what they wrote and said in 2022 when he actually was incapacitated. They quote former staffers, current staffers, and sitting Democrats. It’s odd that they are all quoted anonymously, every single one. Surely those reading this tripe aren’t so stupid as to believe any of this rubbish. Are they?
While Fetterman talks about the need for better border security, striking Iran militarily, voting to confirm Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel, and working with the Republican party to find common ground, his fellow Democrats now say he is addled and befuddled.
Being reasonable and stating the obvious rankles Democrats and their media pals, who all need serious group therapy.
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Meet One Of The Vilest, Nastiest, Most Inept & Dimmest Democrats: A Democrat that no amount of therapy will help is failed VP candidate “Tampon Tim” Walz. Dressed like a bottle of Crown Royal, at the University of Minnesota graduation ceremony recently, Walz compared Donald Trump and the current administration to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo, thus slamming the door forever on his future for any other elected office.
The babbling, arm-flapping, “Where’s dat wascal Trump” spouting Elmer Fudd lookalike told graduates: “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets. They’re in unmarked vans, wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons. No chance to mount a defense. Not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye. Just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans and disappeared.”
Walz also described Trump as a “tyrant” and told students they “are graduating into a genuine emergency.”
Where was this idiot’s voice this week when two Israeli diplomats were murdered by a crazed antisemitic left-wing lunatic in D.C. and American universities are being swarmed by foreign-financed pro-Hamas professional paid agents? Walz is publicly promoting the Hamas terrorists’ cause comparing the current administration to the initiators of the Holocaust. Walz is the human portrayal of the word “disgusting.” His public comments reveal a mental midget who is as dim as he looks and sounds. Nobody should take this vile nitwit seriously ever again.
While Jewish hatred, cultivated and nurtured in our universities by outside forces and financed by anti-American sources, continues to grow and spread like a devastating malignancy, Walz says nothing. He applauds vile congressional Jew-haters Pressley, Omar, Tlaib, Jayapal, and Ocasio-Cortez.
If the alarmists such as Walz, the media talking heads, and anxious news scribblers, who repeatedly insist that Trump is Hitler, are sincere why aren’t they scrambling to leave the country? Or are they waiting around to be sent to the next Dachau?
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Things I Wish I’d Said: “When a public institution says it is pursuing ‘diversity,’ it means that it will never again accomplish anything useful. Behind the euphemisms, ‘diversity’ means “we are putting in unqualified people and pretending they add value. Diversity is a tax on subsidized incompetence.” – anonymous.
Republished with the author’s permission. Read The Dave Scott Blog– subscribe Free
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
