Ben Cline

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness.” So said the Army’s counsel, Joseph Welch, during the McCarthy hearings in 1954. And while Mr. Welch is better known for a later comment, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”, for me, despite the obvious poverty of decency in Vivek Ramaswamy’s political ad, still “cruelty” is its foremost characterization.

Think not? Social workers and prosecutors know children of abuse, horrific abuse both physical and sexual, are traumatized twice. Once by the event and secondly in the court process, in the recounting of the horror. It is into this dark place Ramaswamy has chosen to disturb one of God’s adult children’s peace by promoting the lies of an inhuman human.

It defies belief that Dr. Amy Acton could fight through a childhood that during the formative years, of 9 through 12, endured being raped and abused by a step-parent, then abandoned by a biological “mother,” to achieve a life of accomplishment and goodness. Her biography is heroic.

It is worth a minute to compare this childhood with that of her latest abuser, Vivek Ramaswamy. He is the son of accomplished Indian immigrants – his father, Vadakanchery Ganapathy Ramaswamy, a General Electric engineer, and his mother, Geetha, a geriatric psychiatrist for Merck and Schering-Plough.

One assumes this couple abandoned their native land to find a better life in the U.S. for themselves and their future children. And that they did, especially for their son.

It was private schools, private piano and tennis lessons, the best of American youth, leading to the best of our colleges, Harvard and Yale. He left college as a millionaire after interning with Wall Street firms while investing in pharmaceutical and bio-tech endeavors. The American Dream fulfilled. Vadakanchery and Geetha must be so proud!

Dr. Acton was not so lucky. Beyond the abuse by her mother’s boyfriend/husband, she at times lived in squalor, one Youngstown winter in a tent. It was not until young Amy was removed from the biological vessel that gave her life, did she have a stable, normal upbringing. A successful high school career gave rise to working her way through college and medical school.

Then instead of seeking a life of wealth she chose caring for others. After training at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Nationwide Children’s Hospital, she became Ohio State University’s “professor of practice” in public health. While grants manager at the Columbus Foundation, she was director of Project LOVE (Love Our kids, Vaccinate Early)

In 2019, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine looked past political affiliation to name her the first woman in the post of director of Ohio’s Department of Health. There she led the state during the Covid pandemic, fighting both the disease and political discontent. For what she endured during that period she received a Profile in Courage Award from Caroline Kennedy and was called “The Leader We Wish We All Had” by The New York Times.

Mr. Ramaswamy seems to have no fear from a core tenet of his parents’ Hindu religion: Karma, the universal moral law of cause and effect, in which every action, thought, and intention carries consequences that shape present and future lives. (If only.)

It should trouble us all, that the president and vice president, in cheering on the depravity of the ad, are so at odds with leaders past. And more frightening is the thinking Republicans and Democrats differ in knowing what is good and what is evil. Any person who thinks a rapist enabler, a mother devoid of maternal instincts should be given a platform in furtherance of her child torturing is evil. Vivek Ramaswamy is by definition, evil.

We long for better leaders. Abraham Lincoln spoke these words in concluding his first inauguration. “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature”

We once were that nation, back when our leaders sought everyone’s better days, rather than their own self-interest. Ramaswamy has prospered to the extent he is said to have over two billion dollars. Yet with his great wealth, and the enormous inherent privilege, he has failed to note it comes with expectations.

The French term is “noblesse oblige”: “… that people who hold wealth, power, prestige, or high status have a moral duty to act honorably, generously, and responsibly toward those with less”.

Luke 12:48 NIV said it first: “…From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded…” For Hindus seeking dharma, a way of life that emphasizes good conduct and morality is required.

Of course, becoming a billionaire in your 30s may require a blindness to whom loses from your gains.

Though promising to fully release the Epstein files in the run-up to the 2024 election, Mr. Trump has reneged. The closure sought by these once innocent young girls preyed on by soulless men, like Dr. Acton’s stepfather, is denied by a convicted sexual predator, a self-proclaimed “grabber of women’s ______” and his fellow-travelers.

Three times Ben Cline voted to keep the perversions hidden. Three times our Congress said to the victims, “What’s the big deal? Boys will be boys!’’.

It is time, it is past time, to vote to end this cruelty. Beth Macy will. Ben Cline won’t.

Tracy Pyles is a former chair of the Augusta County Board of Supervisors. He represented the Pastures District on the Board of Supervisors for 22 years.

Eight games into a lost season, UVA Football fans, understandably, are overreacting, because that’s what college football fanbases do when things go sour.

NC State, which lost to league doormat Stanford last night on the Left Coast, has fired head coach Dave Doeren, finally moving on from a guy who led the Pack to four nine-win seasons, but never could get the program to an ACC title game.

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