Scanning the net today I read a series of posts that seem unconnected but actually scream the same thing.
I started with this post at The Other McCain which caught my eye this morning:
Past the advertising slogans like the one Al Gore spouted for his little pack of robots in Northern Virginia comes the question: does the man subscribe to that tripe? When not in front of the ‘bots, but rather chillin’ with the beautiful people in Davos, does he really sound like that?
It linked to the incomparable Victor Davis Hanson who within his weekly screed had this to say:
How could Barack Obama, community organizer par excellence, send his kids to Sidwell Friends? How does Bill Gates, Sr. tour the country, hectoring to re-impose inheritance taxes? Did Al Gore need the extra Montecito home or John Kerry the $7 million yacht (cf. “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money”)? Why did the Clintons shake down corporations for gifts to their DC home and Bill’s library?
Stranger still is this new Democratic emperor/bread-and-circus alliance. The very wealthy promise largess to the poorer on the premise that both despise the culture of the aspiring, the one in condescending disdain, the other in bitter envy. Jimmy Carter laments, near life’s end, the unfairness of it all, as the ignorant never appreciated his godhead. John Kerry wails about how a slogan or two misled us from his message. Obama re-channels the poor clueless clingers trope from the Ground Zero mosque to the upcoming election. “What’s the matter with Kansas?” is the gnashing of the well-off who cannot understand why the less well-off don’t join them in redistributing their far smaller incomes.
Then there is this post at Legal Insurrection:
The other interesting aspect, quite apart from politics, is Allred’s willingness to expose her client to legal harm even though the client does not have any meaningful legal claim. This is not a case where Allred’s client is a crime victim who comes forward to the police. There does not appear to be a violation of any law by Whitman, but there does appear to be both immigration and possibly criminal violations by Allred’s client, who filed false documents with the government. By going public as she has, Allred has exposed her client to significant legal jeopardy in order to score publicity and political points for Allred.
That got an instalanche that said in part:
Yeah, but she’s doing it in the service of electing a Democrat, so it’s okay. Kind of like outing gays, engaging in racist rhetoric, or whatever. It’s irretrievably evil — unless the cause is right.
Which led me back to my own Examiner article that went up around midnight
Hundreds of thousands of dollars of union dues will be spent not on pensions but to achieve that one day photo op to convince the media that their numbers are real and through them convince voters.
What is the thread that connects all these stories? The fiction of the modern democratic party.
About a month ago I sat with two friends in their late 50’s were sitting with a second friend. One expressed astonishment that I and my pal were Republicans. She is a strong faithful Catholic, against abortion, against gay marriage, an immigrant herself she is opposed to illegal immigration.
Yet she insists that the democrats are the party of the common man and that the republicans are the party of the rich and can’t understand why I left the party or consider it an unwelcome place for Catholics.
I couldn’t wrap my head around it until I talked to a third friend weeks later on a similar topic, when discussing her and a second faithful acquaintance of ours with similar views he said the magic words.
They still think that John Kennedy is president
That is the key, that is the reason for the preservation of the myth of Camelot. It is to connect Democrats to a time when they actually stood for the average person, for a shared set of American Values and with the military that so many of their father and grandfathers fought for back in WW 2.
Today the democratic party is increasing a party of elites. When Jay Nordlinger goes to Davos what does he find? It isn’t support for the values of the working class, it is support for the values of limousine liberalism. Their leaders are confused when the voter rejects their promises to continue to redistribute everyone’s wealth (but their own of course), they cry gun control as the inner cities bleed while in gated communities far removed they employ armed guards. They protect failing public schools while sending their own children to elite private institutions.
Every two years they run away from themselves to get elected, and whenever necessary throw a piece of their coalition under the bus only to dust them off and find them a seat when they are again needed. They promised a war on poverty but instead delivered an unending cycle of dependence and while pension funds are in trouble spend millions for political campaigns in the hope of sustaining themselves by the largess of the American Taxpayer.
They get away with all of this because a fair amount of the population and almost all of the media sees not the democratic party as it is, but sees it as what it once was, the party of give em hell Harry, FDR & JFK.
Much like a restaurant heavily in debt and living off glories well past the democratic party still pushes plans that have not only failed but made worse the very problems they were meant to solve while still trumpeting to those not paying attention the glories of their youth.
It remains to be seen if the Tea Party and the electoral upheaval it produces this cycle will produce the awakening that so desperately required.
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