David Irvine's Work To End Torture
In an op ed in the Salt Lake Tribune titledOp-ed: This lifelong Republican will be voting for Hillary Clinton. The author, David Irvine, is described as a Salt Lake City attorney, a former chairman of the Davis County Republican Party and a former Republican member of the Utah House of Representatives.
It is a well-crafted, thoughtful, and powerful argument of why Republicans, especially in Utah, need to vote for Clinton.
After explaining a trip to Ancient Greece, and a conversation in an airport in Germany on his way home, he offers the following paragraph:
I've been an active Republican for all of my adult life. That this venerable political party, once home to visionary thinkers and leaders, could hand its presidential nomination to Trump, who seems not to know how much he doesn't know and could not care less, is unfathomable to me. It is unfortunate that so many of those who claim to be leaders of the congressional and presidential wings of the Republican Party have long since made their Faustian bargains and are actively endorsing a totally self-centered know-nothing who behaves like the caricature of a banana-republic dictator.
After talking about Trump’s defects, especially his attacks on the Khans, he writes
There's a point where this failure to withdraw an endorsement becomes a self-indicting embrace of a demagogue's values.
The very next paragraph is key:
Trump is riding astride the Four Horsemen of Calumny he has resurrected from an earlier and equally dismal Republican playbook: Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear. Then-Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, R-Maine, coined the phrase on June 1, 1950, as the first in the Senate to oppose Sen. Joe McCarthy. Smith's "Declaration of Conscience" laid out four fundamental American values that McCarthyism and now Trumpism seek to trample: (1) the right to criticize, (2) the right to hold unpopular beliefs, (3) the right to protest and (4) the right of independent thought.
That Extreme Vetting Trump Wants For Immigrants? He And Melania Wouldn't Pass
Fabiola Santiago, The Miami Herald
That paragraph appropriately places Trump in the category of McCarthyite wanna-be demagogue. In repeating the words of Margaret Chase smith from more than 6 decades ago, Irving gives us appropriate labels for the approach not just of Trump, but of much of what we have seen in the political approach of the Republican party certainly of the past 8 years, and if we want to be honest in its approach to both Bill Clinton and John Kerry. So remember those Four Horsemen:
Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear
Note also the four fundamental values that Irvine emphasizes.
There is more. Irvine tries to argue that Utah’s electoral votes could be critical. Granted, it is possible in a close election, which this is not, the fact that Mormons do not like Trump could mean that this Republican state could become something of a battleground state, although I seriously doubt it.
So I will skip the parts of the final two paragraphs which focus on that to offer the rest of the words of those paragraphs that are relevant. Irvine writes
we live a political reality that unless Hillary Clinton gets more electoral votes, Trump and his tweeting fingers will be moving into the White House, where the nuclear codes also reside. There have been Utah voices urging Utahns to either not vote or vote for a third-party candidate — on "principle" — but it's really a binary choice…… every Clinton vote is crucially important. A nonvote or a Johnson vote is a vote for Trump.
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