"Leaders are not elected. Politicians are elected."
“After just a few minutes, I had no choice,” Cruz said. “I told them that if you will not stand with Israel, if you will not stand with the Jews, then I will not stand with you. And then I walked off the stage.”
Cruz’s action was an act of moral leadership.
Obama has denied the existence of the jihad, its ideology and the fact that it is a force shaping events throughout the world.
Wednesday’s speech was no exception.
At the outset of his remarks, Obama insisted that Islamic State, or (ISIL has he calls it), “is not ‘Islamic.’” Obama may be right, and he may be wrong.
Leaders are not elected. Politicians are elected. Their election in turn provides politicians with the opportunity to become leaders.
You don’t become a leader by telling people what they want to hear, although doing so certainly helps to you get elected. A politician becomes a leader by telling people what they don’t want to hear.
If they are lucky, politicians will never have to become leaders. They will serve in times of peace and plenty, when it’s possible to pretend away the hard facts of the human condition. And they can leave office beloved for letting people believe that the world is the Elysian Fields.
Certainly this has been the case for many American politicians since the end of World War II.
This is not the case today. In our times, evil rears its ugly head with greater power and frequency than it has in at least a generation. As Americans learned 13 years ago this week, evil ignored is evil empowered.
Yet fighting evil and protecting the good is not a simple matter. Evil has many handmaidens.
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