Too Late To Stop Trump?;
Too Late To Fire DePinho?
By
Leonard Zwelling
If the GOP truly is not represented by the awful things that
Donald Trump has said about women, Muslims, immigrants, and Mexicans
specifically, the time for the party to say so has been over for quite a while.
The
GOP leadership is left with having to get on the Trump bandwagon because even
if he doesn’t get to 1237 delegates by the Cleveland convention, he is sure to
have a plurality of delegates on the first ballot. By contrast, if the party
maneuvers to deny him the nomination when he has over 80% of the delegates
needed and is ahead of his closest rival, likely to be Ted Cruz, by several
hundred delegates, how can the party’s leaders look the people in the eye
having denied them their choice? It’s their system and Trump followed the rules
established by the GOP to identify a standard bearer. If it blew up in the
GOP’s faces, tough darts!
If the rank and file GOP will not get behind the winner
their own process identified, then they need to say so and why. Former Trump
opponents like Ben Carson and Chris Christie have boarded the Trump 757. Rubio
is gone and Kasich has Boehner. Big deal. Cruz has Mike Lee and Dan Patrick.
With friends like that…of course now Cruz has Lindsey Graham. Shame on Lindsey.
The Republican Party as much as dared Trump to run this
hateful campaign as it hid behind the coded words of country club privilege and
good old American racism to oppose even the best of ideas that President Obama
would put forth. The GOP got nothing done when they held the Congress and were
pure obstructionists when they didn’t. In all this, the GOP ignored its
critical blue-collar constituency in favor of the Wall Street crowd and that
maneuver is costing them as Trump appeals to these exact voters, the Reagan
Democrats.
Now
admittedly there haven’t been all that many great ideas from the White House,
but imagine what could have been done by the Democrats in 2009 with a 60 vote
majority in the Senate and an equally dominant one in the House had those same
Democrats (like Mr. Obama and Teddy Kennedy) simply shown some courtesy and
civility to the losing GOP and brought them in on important issues from the
stimulus to health care reform. I was there. I saw it. They didn’t.
Instead
the Dems puffed out their chests like an 18-year old point guard on a winning
NCAA basketball team in the round of 32 and showed those they defeated no
consideration. There were many games left to go for the Dems and when Sir Teddy
of Kennedy died, the honeymoon was over in a hurry.
The same thing happened at MD Anderson. Imagine what
President DePinho could have accomplished after the mind-numbing ethical
challenges of the Mendelsohn years had he simply asked the faculty for help.
Instead, he ran off half-cocked to the moon using analogies describing this
program that were inappropriate and historically incorrect and scientifically
naïve. These nutty ideas had gotten him laughed out of the cancer community in
Boston. DePinho Boston exit is both our gain and is our loss, but certainly and ultimately Boston’s
gain.
There simply is no substitute in a complex political
environment for the lesson of The Godfather. “Keep your friends close and your
enemies closer.” If Sonny Corleone had had EZ-Pass, he’d still be alive.
The Stop Trump movement is probably too little too late. The
only thing that might save the GOP is the equally hated person against whom Mr.
Trump will likely run. My guess is that we know all the dirt about Mrs. Clinton
and all Mr. Trump will do is repeat the lines that have already been used on
her for 25 years. The lines she will use against him are new to most of us and
will include videos of him extolling the virtues of a host of Democratic ideas
including being pro-choice. It should get really ugly and really dirty really
fast. It should leave the country exhausted regardless of which one of them
wins.
DePinho has left MD Anderson either exhausted, fed up, or
intensely indifferent (“just let me do my work and then I’ll go home.”)
The GOP should have whittled down the candidates faster and
picked someone to go one-on-one with The Donald. As it is he has received far
fewer votes than Mrs. Clinton and never 50% in any state. He has culled a
fraction of a fraction of a fraction into an insurmountable lead due to his
mastery of the process and the media, with a great deal of cooperation from the
latter who cannot keep their cameras off the slow-motion train wreck that is
his campaign.
The faculty of MD Anderson should have risen like a
hurricane the moment their new President said he would cure five cancers in
five years, which he denies he said, but we all heard. Anyone who says such
nonsense about cancer is no more equipped to lead MD Anderson than a man who
uses religion as a litmus test for admission to the great melting pot that is
the United States is to lead our nation.
The lesson is don’t procrastinate. When you see, or hear
something, say something! And for those of us who have been screaming foul
since D-ePinho-Day one in 2011, we say to the rest of you, sorry, live with it
or do something. You already have a narcissistic leader. The US may yet avoid a
similar fate.
