Gingrich may be right, but voter turnout in Iowa was down from four years ago and the lowest in more than a decade. Sub-zero temperatures were likely a contributing factor, as might a view by some that Trump had the race in the bag so why go out in freezing conditions? It is also a caution to recall that not every GOP winner of the Iowa caucuses in recent years has won their respective party’s nomination.

In his victory remarks, Trump displayed a rarely seen quality – kindness and praise of his opponents Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. Following the vote count, Ramaswamy announced his withdrawal from the campaign and support for Trump.

Trump, who has trafficked in division and name-calling for years, suddenly called for unity in a low- key (for him) victory speech.

Establishment pundits remain shocked over Trump’s continued appeal to a large swath of voters, including an uptick in support among Blacks and Hispanics. People may have short memories but four years isn’t that long ago when one considers gas prices and mortgage rates were lower during the Trump presidency, the U.S. was not involved in foreign wars, inflation was down, and migrants weren’t flooding over our border in record numbers.

It isn’t difficult to understand the reasons Trump continues to have a firm grip on his supporters, despite his rhetoric and legal challenges. They include an establishment that has refused to acknowledge the anger felt by many Americans over a dysfunctional Congress, the $34 trillion debt, and the constant bickering among politicians, though it is largely the fault of we who elect them. They see unequal justice, political agendas instead of addressing the real concerns of voters and what they believe is persecution of Trump by liberal Democrats. Add to the list of outrages felt by Trump supporters who see unequal treatment in the handling of Hunter Biden’s tax issues and in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ hiring of special prosecutor Nathan Wade with whom she has been rumored (by the Trump camp) to have had an affair. Willis has vehemently denied the accusation and showed up in an Atlanta church to blame racism for the criticism directed at her.

In an extraordinary statement, Gingrich said: “Trump is not a candidate. Trump is the leader of a nationwide movement to take back power from the Establishment.” If that sounds like hyperbole, consider the number of states that have approved a convention of states to invoke Article 5 of the Constitution with the goal of enacting term limits and a requirement for a balanced federal budget. That would be 19 states, according to the Convention of States website with other states either having passed the resolution in one legislative chamber or are considering it. Thirty-eight states are needed. A Trump victory might encourage more states to sign on.

Instead of dwelling on Trump’s personality, Washington politicians and the media ought to be examining the reasons behind voter anger and desire to move the country in a different direction. That’s what Trump is promising. It is the reason he won big in Iowa and may run the table in every other primary state.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).

After watching too many of the Republican non-debates and the insults each of the candidates (and former candidates) have thrown at each other, along with the especially demeaning characterizations by Donald Trump of his rivals, it’s time for a dose of reality. For the sake of accuracy and truth the Republican Party should exchange its elephant symbol for one that is more reflective of today’s GOP.

One candidate might be Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

Consider some of the puppet’s best insult lines as you imagine them being directed at a Republican presidential candidate. To an overweight man, Triumph said: “Are you a separatist? … Maybe you should try separating yourself from donuts first.”

Addressing a French person who spoke no English, Triumph said: “Pardon me, I only know your basic French expressions like ‘I surrender.’”

Speaking to singer Bon Jovi, Triumph said: “So you’re acting now, you’re in a vampire movie, yes? That’s good. Finally, a role that requires you to suck.”

The difference between these comedic taunts, as well as those by the late comics Don Rickles and Rodney Dangerfield and the political insults, is that with the comedians people were usually in on the joke. While sometimes sounding caustic, the comical barbs are meant to produce laughter. Even the targets of the jokes often laughed. That’s different from repeatedly calling your political rival a liar.

Where is the noble rhetoric from campaigns and presidencies past? Why the constant putdowns? Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Iran’s ayatollahs don’t get smeared as much as the presidential candidates who revile each other. We’ve regressed from the schoolyard to the barnyard.

John F. Kennedy had some good lines, including:“We can no longer afford to be second best. I want people all over the world to look to the United States again, to feel that we’re on the move, to feel that our high noon is in the future.” And the well-known one from his 1961 Inaugural Address: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

Ronald Reagan always saw America as“a shining city on a hill” whose best days are ahead of us. When Reagan spoke of his political opponents, he often referred to them as “our friends in the other party.” During a 1984 debate with Walter Mondale, Reagan joked that “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Mondale laughed, seeming to acknowledge the cleverness of the barb. His campaign manager, Bob Beckel, later told me, “Right then we knew we were going to lose the election” because the issue of Reagan’s age (he was 74 at the time) had been laid to rest with that one line.

Here are a few more among many others: “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” — John Quincy Adams.

This from Franklin Roosevelt would be a good one for modern presidential candidates to embrace: “If you treat people right they will treat you right … ninety percent of the time.”

President Harry Truman said: “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” Reagan liked the saying enough to have it on his desk.

In modern politics, debating the best way to make America better has been replaced by a war footing. It’s DEFCON 1. Sadly, insults and anger seem to appeal to some voters. The price we are paying for tolerating this behavior is a diminished politics, which can only lead to a diminished and further divided country.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).

A new USA Today/Suffolk University Poll reveals one in five Black voters say they will support a third-party candidate instead of the president. That’s down substantially from the 92% of non-Hispanic Blacks who voted for Biden in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.

The president’s strategy for shoring up his and Democrats’ most loyal supporters? Telling them their biggest threat is “white supremacy.”

Nothing about the failing schools so many poor and minority children feel trapped in; or violence in big cities that kill many young Black men most weekends and increasingly during the week; or the disproportionate abortion rate among Black women that has kept their percentage of the population mostly stagnant; or the necessity of putting more Black fathers in homes to provide loving disciple to their children.

Biden has a long history of using race as a political weapon while doing little to improve the lives of Black Americans.

Speaking at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where in 2015 a white gunman shot and killed nine members of a Bible study, Biden again demonstrated his insincerity about race by making statements that have been proven false.

He claimed to have been a “civil rights activist.” He wasn’t. He claimed to have “spent more time in the Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Delaware, than most people I know, Black or white.” He hasn’t. He also claimed that church was “where I started a civil rights movement.” He didn’t.

As a New York Post editorial noted, “(Biden has) pushed such baloney time and again.” He has claimed to have been arrested during civil rights demonstrations and while on the way to see Nelson Mandela in prison. Neither is true.

Biden claimed to have persuaded segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Wrong on two counts. Thurmond did not vote for the act and Biden was not in the Senate in 1964.

There was also his 2006 remark: “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” In 2020, he said if Blacks didn’t vote for him “you ain’t Black.” In 2010, he warmly eulogized Sen. Robert Byrd, a former Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan, saying he was “one of my mentors” and that “the Senate is a lesser place for his going.” As early as 1977, Biden said that forced busing to desegregate schools would cause his children to “grow up in a racial jungle.” In 2007, he referred to Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.”

So many more examples, but not enough space.

Democrats have played the race card for decades, even blaming poor performances (see former Harvard President Claudine Gay) on bigotry, not plagiarism and a failure to denounce antisemitic campus demonstrations. Their talk has been cheap and the results negligible. One wonders why so many still vote for them given their record. White Democrats only show up in Black churches at election time and are not seen for another two or four years. Shouldn’t that tell them something?

White supremacy is a minority view. Christians call it a sin. There are no pure-bred people. We are all mixed up in the great gene pool of life, as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has brilliantly demonstrated in several PBS programs on African American lives. To hate another person because of their race is to hate a part of one’s self.

Given the declining poll numbers for Biden, among especially young Black voters, it would appear they are starting to figure out how Democrats have duped them for decades. Biden’s out-of-touch speech in Charleston is likely to do little to improve his favorability among their party’s once solid voting bloc.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).

Donald Trump continues demeaning and defaming anyone who disagrees with him. He repeats unproven claims that the 2020 election was “stolen.” A myriad of other inaccurate statements has apparently had a negative influence on President Biden who has joined him in the mud pit. Recall it was Biden who promised to “bring us together” – always an impossibility given the conflicting ideologies of Republicans and Democrats.

In his speech last week near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, Biden invoked George Washington as an example of a selfless man who refused to be crowned a king, resigned his commission as an Army general following the Revolutionary War, and limited himself to two terms as president. An aside – Washington engaged in an insurrection according to the definition of that word: “an act or instance of rising in revolt, rebellion, or resistance against civil authority or an established government” (dictionary.com ). Wasn’t the British government “established” over the colonies, however tyrannical it was? Some insurrections turn out better than others. The insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 – whether one believes it fits the definition or not – was still a rebellion against a legitimately established government with the express purpose of changing the election results. But I digress.

Biden’s speech shows voters that 2024 is shaping up as a contest between two lightweights pretending to be heavyweights. If Trump is elected, Biden said, America will become like Germany in the ’30s. The very future of democracy is at stake, he claimed. This is how Democrats think. Only when they win elections is the country safe.

This isn’t Biden’s first trip into the mud. During the 2012 presidential campaign Vice President Biden told a Black audience that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney “would put you all back in chains.”

Biden apparently thinks his posturing as a pugilist, rather than a pragmatist, will allow him to out-punch Trump. That isn’t likely to happen as Biden has been viewed as a nice guy. No one calls Trump nice.

Where is this corrosive language getting us? Why can’t we have a true debate over the best ways to fix our problems? Claiming your opponent would rule like a Nazi, or that the other is a crook, solves nothing.

When polls show Biden and his policies are increasingly unpopular the president has two choices. One is to change course, which he is unlikely to do because that would mean acknowledging he has been wrong. When was the last time you heard a politician admit error? The other avenue is to ignore his failed policies – from the open border, to the national debt, crime, and foreign policy – and claim if he loses to Trump, it will be Armageddon time for the country. That strategy is not working, so far.

Polls also show most Democrats and Republicans prefer neither candidate. If Trump’s upcoming criminal trials result in convictions, that might diminish his appeal except to the Kool-Aid drinkers. Perhaps Biden’s potential impeachment, if the evidence of financial wrongdoing by his family can be proven, might have the same effect on some of the president’s supporters, but this late in the game it seems unlikely.

One scenario that could assuage voter angst: Could the rules be changed at both conventions this summer so that if Trump and Biden win enough of their primaries to claim the nomination of their respective parties, the delegates could vote to replace them? One might wish leaders of both parties could get together and offer a deal that promises “we’ll not nominate our guy if you agree not to nominate your guy.” That might sound appealing to some, but it also seems equally unlikely. Too bad for America.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).

Education, like a building or a life, must have a firm foundation or whatever is built on it will collapse when storms or other challenges come.

Ivy League schools, especially, were established on a foundation of biblical principles. From its founding in 1636, Harvard’s motto has been “Veritas,” or truth. It was meant to demonstrate not only that objective truth exists, but where to find it. A proper education was thought to require attention to body, mind and spirit. Today, the body is cared for at the gym, the mind has been poisoned by propaganda forged from a secular-progressive worldview, and the spirit is more likely to be found in a bottle of beer than in anything holy.

Yale traveled the same path as Harvard. Founded in 1701, the New Haven school has as its motto “ Lux et veritas,” or “light and truth.” It was believed by Yale’s founders that the essentials of proper learning should include the light of a liberal education (liberal meant something different then) and the truth could be found in New England’s religious tradition.

It was the same for Princeton and Dartmouth. Princeton, founded in 1746, subscribed to this motto: DEI SUB NUMINE VIGET, which means ” Under God’s power she flourishes.” Princeton seminary, built on a foundation of biblical truth, went liberal (in the bad sense of the word) with professors questioning the authority of Scripture.

Dartmouth, founded in 1769, had as its motto “ Vox clamantis in deserto,” which means “a voice crying in the wilderness.” It is a biblical reference to John the Baptist who introduced Jesus Christ to the world. While the school was originally established to educate Native Americans in Christian theology and what was called the English way of life, the university primarily trained congregationalist ministers during its early history before it gradually secularized like so many others, following the spirit of the age.

These and many other once great universities have departed from their founding principles and what once defined a well-rounded education. For this and other reasons, college degrees are seemingly not worth what they once were and that is why – along with increasing costs – many young people are pursuing other avenues, including trade schools.

Forbes magazine reported: “ Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022, with declines even after returning to in-person classes, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

American public schools have followed the path of these universities, incorporating subjects that have little to do with a proper education, and in too many instances indoctrinating young people with a secular progressive worldview that produces votes for Democrats.

Need proof to support that assertion? According to Pew Research Center,“ In 2022, voters with a college degree or more education favored Democratic candidates while those with no college degree preferred Republicans – continuing a long-standing trend in polarization among American voters by education.”

If you are a conservative parent, you would be wise not to send your child to one of these colleges and expect them to return with the values and beliefs you taught them. If you’re a liberal, sending your kids to these schools will simply reinforce what you and they already believe, which is not a real education.

Gay’s resignation will make no difference without a fundamental restructuring of what is taught. The same goes for other institutions of “higher learning.”

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).

The past is a better teacher if we will pay attention to successes and mistakes that we might avoid one and embrace the other.

A hundred years ago, the ’20s were roaring and President Calvin Coolidge did things the current president and Congress would do well to emulate. Coolidge won a landslide victory running on a platform of limited government, reduced taxes and less regulation. He followed through on all three, creating an economic boom. (Where have you gone, Silent Cal, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you).

Coolidge also signed an immigration law that regulated the number of foreigners who could come to America. Asian people were especially targeted, but one must understand the challenges of the time which involved civil war in China and growing unrest in Japan. According to Densho Encyclopedia, the announced motivation of the legislation was the “widespread fear of radicalism that contributed to anti-foreign sentiment and exclusionist demands. Supporters of immigration legislation stressed recurring themes: Anglo-Saxon superiority and foreigners as threats to jobs and wages.” Sound familiar?

A lot happened in 1924.

Vladimir Lenin died at 53 from a stroke. Lenin’s body was embalmed and put on display in Red Square for public viewing. He seems to have been reincarnated as Vladimir Putin.

Adolf Hitler is sentenced to five years in prison for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch. He is released after just nine months, but uses his time while incarcerated to write “Mein Kampf,” which, among other things, describes how he became antisemitic. His poison still infects us.

J. Edgar Hoover is named head of the FBI.

George H.W. Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts. Woodrow Wilson dies.

Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia.

Actor Marlon Brando, who would change the way many actors performed, was born in Omaha, Nebraska.

Also born this year is American novelist and playwright James Baldwin in Harlem, New York, as is Truman Capote.

The comic strip “Little Orphan Annie” debuts in the New York Daily News. In the 1970s it would become a hit musical on Broadway and a movie.

The first newsreel pictures of American presidential candidates are taken, forecasting the age of television and its use during election campaigns.

The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is held in New York.

In sports, Dallas Cowboys head coach Tom Landry was born, and the Washington Senators won their first World Series. It would be 95 years until they win another one under a different name (Washington Nationals).

Johnny Weissmuller sets the 100-meter world freestyle record at 57.4 seconds. His fame would increase when he played Tarzan in the movies.

Carol Taylor invents the ice cream cone rolling machine. Yum.

The first crossword puzzle is published, offering distractions from daily concerns to millions of people over several generations.

At the end of 1924, Judy Garland made her acting debut as a 2-½-year-old.

As with any other year, 1924 contained the good, the bad and the ugly, but it also contained lessons we should learn, because we sometimes repeat too many of the bad ones.

May those good lessons lead us to a happier, peaceful and prosperous 2024.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).

The consequences of that attitude are playing out across America.

There are two questions most reporters never seem to ask when it comes to mass demonstrations like the recent ones over the Israeli-Hamas War. One is whether they are spontaneous, or are they organized and subsidized by outside entities? Second, have large financial gifts from foreign entities and left-wing organizations compromised some universities that fear losing money should they speak up in ways that might offend the donors? Failure to ask these questions contributes to public (and student) ignorance and apathy.

Valerie Richardson of The Washington Times is an exception among journalists. She writes: “The same U.S. universities that increasingly are seen as breeding grounds for antisemitism have taken billions of dollars in previously undisclosed donations from the Middle East.”

This connection between donations and influence is claimed in a lawsuit by the Lawfare Project on behalf of Carnegie Mellon University student Yael Canaan. She says she has been the target of “pervasive anti-Jewish discrimination.” Canaan linked her allegations to the half-billion dollars donated to the university by Qatar since 2021.

Richardson writes about a report by the Network Contagion Research Institute which showed that “universities reported more than $13 billion … in gifts … from foreign sources” between 2014 and 2019. Kenneth Marcus, president of the Brandeis Center, told the newspaper, “What they want is influence.” Shouldn’t that be obvious?

During her recent controversial testimony before a congressional committee, Harvard President Claudine Gay claimed the school has “strict policies” on which gifts and contracts it accepts and that donors do not influence its policies. Is she saying that antisemitism is home grown? If so, what does that say about the biases of the professors who are transmitting ignorance and what some might consider propaganda to their students?

China has infiltrated American universities by making large donations that support “Confucius Institutes” which promote Chinese language and cultural programs. In 2019, there were a hundred such institutes. Today, there are reportedly fewer than five. Schools commonly “cited the potential loss of federal funding and external pressures as contributing to their decision to close” their institutes.

However, some critics say the institutes that remain are being used as part of a larger effort to advance the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, which include spying and the theft of intellectual property, stealing U.S. military secrets and harassment of Chinese students and others who are critical of the Beijing regime.

Three years ago, a Jewish organization conducted a first-ever survey in all 50 states to discover what adults under 40 know about the Holocaust. The survey, conducted by the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, found “sixty-three percent did not know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and over half of those thought the death toll was fewer than 2 million.” While more than 40,000 death camps and ghettos were established during World War II, “nearly half of U.S. respondents could not name a single one.” One in 10 respondents did not recall ever having heard the word “Holocaust” before.

Deliberate ignorance and false teaching about events here and in the Middle East and China, along with the refusal of American media to pay serious attention to the connection between foreign donations and university policies and teaching, plays into the hands of those who do not wish America well.

Clearly the history departments at many schools need a serious upgrade and a lot of reporters could use a crash course in history at a university that refuses donations from foreign entities that have agendas.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).

Often, this call to examine root causes is simply a distraction that avoids coming up with solutions.

Let’s not kid ourselves that the resignation of the president of the University of Pennsylvania for her refusal to unequivocally denounce genocide against Jews (though Liz Magill will stay on as interim president until a replacement is found and will also remain a tenured professor ) is going to solve anything so long as this attitude prevails among many faculty members and the boards that hire university presidents. The latest involves a medical school panel at George Washington University which has defended Hamas’ “right of resistance.” It will likely not be the last as other universities confront the issue and their conduct codes.

We are paying a price for the jettisoning of standards by which right and wrong, good and evil can be defined and judged. If everybody is right; if truth is subjective, then nothing can be said to be wrong which has brought us to the current moral chaos and intellectual flabbiness.

C.S. Lewis knew right and wrong and how the wrong dominates when standards disappear. In his classic book “The Abolition of Man,” Lewis wrote: “ In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

It’s difficult to improve on that critique, but Lewis does in this quote that also has modern applications: “For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”

The propagandists are in place throughout America’s education system, especially at the college level. The rotting intellectual fruit of their excesses can now be seen on campuses and in the streets as students and others who know little other than what they’ve been taught call for the elimination of the Jewish democratic state and the murder of Jews. Heil Hitler 2023!

Lewis isn’t finished in his critique of academia: “A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional or (as they would say) ‘sentimental’ values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.”

This book was written in 1943 in the middle of World War II, a war that united Americans and Britons. When pictures of German death camps were published, the country was shocked and revolted. The Nazi hatred of Jews 80 years ago has been resurrected in our day. This, too, is revolting, especially as it comes from what are supposed to be institutions of “higher learning.” More like lower learning.

If these excerpts leave you unpersuaded, try this one: “An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man’s mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut…”

Yes, a mind is a terrible thing to waste. It is also a terrible thing to lose.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).

It was titled “Merry Tifton” and it was a metaphor based on a popular television show in the’50s called “The Millionaire.” On that show, a wealthy man named John Beresford Tifton gave $1 million dollars to people he chose seemingly at random. The storyline highlighted the results the gift made in the lives of the recipients – some good and some bad.

The money was delivered by another fictional character named Michael Anthony. In his will, Mr. Tifton instructed that his and Anthony’s descendants should continue the practice.

Kennedy turned the story into a Christmas message about people who had received the gift in another land and came to America to see if they could find people who had received the gift here.

This is where the metaphor begins. The two travelers were astounded to hear people shout “Merry Tifton” in the streets of New York. They said to each other, “Ah, we are in luck. We have found a Tifton. But isn’t it strange that he calls himself Macy? Well, these Americans are an odd lot.” They saw “Tifton cards” and “Tifton specials half-off” in store windows, but with no mention of the gift giver.

They attended a Tifton Christmas party, but no one there could explain why people at the party were celebrating, or who Mr. Tifton was. One man who seemed “tipsy” to the travelers explained he thought it was about a big black book that contained information on how to become wealthy, but no one really believed a guy like Mr. Tifton existed. Still, he thought, the book which he admitted few had read, contained some good principles for making money. Or so he had been told.

While the party was in full swing and getting louder, there was a knock at the door. When no one answered, the door opened and a man entered wearing a bowler hat and carrying an umbrella and a briefcase. The two travelers were excited because they believed someone at the party was about to receive the gift of a million dollars.

“Excuse me,” the man said, trying to get the crowd’s attention over the noise of loud conversation and tinkling ice cubes. He said he was there to present a gift. He tried again and again but was unsuccessful. Disgusted, he left.

As Dr. Kennedy said, “No one saw him come, no one saw him leave and no one received the gift.”

It’s easy to get caught up in the superficialities of Christmas which have little or nothing to do with “the gift.” Receiving the real gift is the unchanging Christmas story – God reaching down to us through a baby so that we might be able to reach up to Him.

In preaching this message, Dr. Kennedy hoped we wouldn’t ignore the gift. Google the entire message and if you haven’t yet received the gift, you might consider doing so this Christmas.

Merry Tifton.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).

Lear also had a political side. It was politics that brought us together in the ’80s. He founded a group called People for the American Way, which was a counter to various groups on the Religious Right, including the Moral Majority, for which I was for a time a spokesman. We met in Washington when he graciously invited me to sit at his table and listen to his National Press Club speech. I joked if it might harm his career to be seen with me.

Lear was a World War II combat veteran. He told me he would fight in another war “if they would take me at my age” should America again be faced with a similar threat. He said he loves America.

In 1998 I interviewed him for my book, co-authored with Ed Dobson, titled “Blinded by Might: Why the Religious Right Can’t Save America.” It is fascinating what one can learn about political opposites when one takes the time to listen to them. In the interview, Lear said something that most conservatives could agree with: “I think the greatest reason for the decline of moral values has been the escalating short-term, bottomless philosophy ‘give it to me now.’”

Lear blamed some of it on a misuse of the free enterprise system where companies feel the need “to have a profit statement this quarter larger than the last at the expense of every other value. One sees this in the way tabloidism has grown, in the kind of television we all agree we don’t want to see anymore.” Ratings, he said, trump every value.

Lear lamented the number of ads in so many shows, including his own, which he said convey the message “you are what you own, you are what you drink, you are what you wear, you are what you smell, you are what you consume.”

On questions then and now about the proper role religious people should play in politics, Lear said, “They have every right and obligation to express themselves socially, culturally and politically,” but with a caveat, which he said should conform to the Constitution.

As a young Jewish boy growing up in Brooklyn in the ’30s, Lear said he listened to the radio broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin and Carl McIntire and their “rantings” about Catholics, Jews and Blacks. Lear said he felt “threatened” by such talk. I think I can predict what he might have said about the current wave of antisemitism sweeping the country. He would have felt even more threatened.

Lear noted the hypocrisy of some religious leaders at the time – he specifically mentioned Pat Robertson – “when one second he calls me ‘anti-Christian’ and the next he’s saying how he loves everybody.” Lear quoted from a letter he received from Robertson who touted his Golden Gloves boxing award and warned ‘The suppression of the voice of God’s servant (speaking of himself) is a terrible thing! God Himself will fight for me against you – and He will win.’” The last part was underlined for emphasis.

This kind of talk is what many Christians would call “a bad witness” when they are presenting the message of Jesus, which includes loving one’s enemies and praying for those who persecute you.

I shall miss Norman Lear, not only his talent, but his reasonable voice on the American political scene. Fortunately, his TV shows and the values they contain are still accessible if you can put up with all the ads that have the underlying message Lear hated: You are what you own, eat, drink, smell, wear and consume.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).