valley views Tribute to Bob Dole W
ith the unrelenting talk about election fraud, I’ve decided now to clear my conscience and disclose that I voted twice for President in 1996. No, it wasn’t an act of voter fraud. As a delegate to the Republican convention that year, I voted to nominate Bob Dole as the Republican candidate. I voted for him again at my polling place in Whitefish in the general election. Colin Powell, who I felt could have been a great and unifying President, was my first choice that year, but I was more than comfortable with Dole. My primary reason for that was a personal not a
political one. A few years earlier, as a teacher at Flathead High School, I was the faculty sponsor of the Teen Age Republican Club when Dole was the keynote speaker at a Western States ReBob Brown publican Conference at the Outlaw Inn in Kalispell. As it turned out, his talk was scheduled for 4 p.m. so I was able to take about 15 of my students to the event after school. When we arrived, though, the large meeting room was packed. The staff told me that no more chairs were available. The students and I were lined up against the outer wall, disappointed that we wouldn’t be
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able to see the speaker. But then suddenly Dole himself appeared and approached the young people, offering his left hand and warmly greeting each one. (His right arm was largely paralyzed due to terrible wounds he suffered heroically rescuing a fellow soldier during WWII.) When he came to me, he told me that he wasn’t going to enter the meeting room until my students could too. In a matter of minutes, hotel workers came scrambling on to the scene with chairs from other rooms, which they crammed into the ballroom, and the students quickly filed into them. Then Bob Dole, with his radiant smile, took the podium. Dole was considered a possible Presidential can-
didate at that time, and typical of the sardonic wit that for both good and ill became his trademark, he commented that some of his critics were saying that because he was the Republican National Chairman at the time of the Watergate burglary, he should be disqualified from running. Dole denied anything to do with Watergate, adding that, “I was doing another job up in Chicago that night.” There are countless examples of his wry humor, but one that particularly stands out in my memory was when the earnest Jimmy Carter promised to the American people with his customary toothy smile, “I will never lie to you,” Dole wryly commented, “Gee, I thought every time he told a lie he
grew another tooth.” His first choice for the Republican nomination in 2016, was Jeb Bush, but loyal soldier that he was, he supported Trump in the general election that year. I was sorry to see him continue to support his party right or wrong in 2020. To his everlasting credit, however, Dole refused to buy Trump’s perpetual fraudulent lie that the election was stolen, and congratulated Biden on his victory. In one of the last official acts of his long life, Dole returned to his native Kansas, and visited the common people in every one of the 105 mostly rural counties in the state, thanking them personally for the opportunity they had given him to serve.
We need a coordinated global response to the pandemic T
here is a board-game called Pandemic that has been around for years before Covid 19 circled the globe. In Pandemic, you and your fellow players are members of a disease control team. You must work together to develop cures and prevent disease outbreaks, for Pandemic is a cooperative game. The players all win or lose together. We need to learn the lessons of this game and apply them to 10 - December 29, 2021
the real world. In controlling a global pandemic, we must come to the realization that no one is safe until everyone is safe. Global cooperation is the key to success. The developed Jerry Tetalman nations have received most of the vaccinations, but have been plagued by new variants such as Delta, which started in India, or the new Omicron, first reported in Southern Africa. These variants are created in areas of low vaccination,
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where high rates of transmission increase the odds of a new mutation that is more contagious, more deadly or able to break through the existing vaccines. Such variants, unfortunately, can circle the globe quite quickly, as we have seen. Consequently, we must develop a coordinated global response to this pandemic, if we truly want to defeat Covid 19. But how do we develop this coordinated global response? At present, we have the World Health Organization, which Valley Journal
unfortunately lacks the authority and resources to truly be effective. There is also Covax, an international organization whose purpose is to create equitable global access to the covid vaccine, but has yet to fulfill its mission. These organizations are part of the United Nations, and as such, all actions are voluntary on the part of individual nations. Due to our state of relative anarchy at the international level and our lack of strong and effective see page 11
A Republican to the end, Bob Dole was no demagogue and no danger to democracy. He will be remembered well, I think, in the annals of time. Bob Brown of Whitefish is a former MT Secretary of State and State Senate President
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