More On Nelson

[For the first part of this story, go here] 

I know some readers are going to think I am am picking on Bill Nelson far in excess of what he himself deserves.  He's a good guy, he's a family man, he rode on the Space Shuttle, he's personable.  He's the man every guy strives to be and every woman wants to marry.  A leader, a lawyer, a legislator.  From his campaign website:

From time to time, Bill gets asked where he gets the energy and determination to stand up and keep fighting. He says it comes from being an optimist and believing things will get better for all people. It's an optimism that comes from faith, from family and from his belief in individual responsibility. It's why Bill Nelson is optimistic for the future of Florida and our nation.

That's just so beautiful!  It's so hopeful, so positive.  It belies anything a person who observes him and thinks clearly and for himself would deduce from Nelson's conduct in office; but Geez, don't you just wish it were true!

See, this has always been my problem with the Donkeys; and it's their secret weapon; one of their most powerful.  Individually, the Donks can sometimes come off as salt-of-the-Earth, fairly conservative people in their personal outlook, demeanor and lifestyle.  They go to Church, they may hunt or fish, they read to the vision-impaired and they show up at Habitat for Humanity.  They never miss a State Fair, and make sure the press knows what soup kitchen they'll be working in next Thanksgiving.  They fit into their communities, they have to to get elected.  The problems start when they get to Washington.

Get lost, bitch, I'm on the phone.

For most of my life, the Donks have been moving farther and farther to the left.  Self-important Senator from New York, Charles Schumer  (The Tumor), is a leading strategist behind many of the DNC's policy and publicity initiatives [not to mention my personal choice for Biggest Momma's Boy in Congress] and regularly trots out the "extreme right-wing" label, no matter how mildly centrist the object of his vituperation, more so even than Van Jones uses "racist."   Neither label has any particular meaning except to rouse somnolent Donks who wait to hear the right boogey words which impell them into action.  Think of them as Manchurian Constituents, ready to board buses and shout slogans and carry signs thrust into their hands when they hear certain phrases that have been programmed into their small brains.

So you vote for the mainstream guy, but you get the rabid Equine.  He's the beard the Party wears to gain a majority.  You vote for Bill Nelson, you get Schumer the Tumor.  You vote for Bill Nelson, you get Harry Reid.  You vote Nelson, you get Barbara Mikulski.  You get Dick Durbin. You get Barbara Boxer.  When he gains enough seniority, you'll get Al Franken, too.

This is the Howard Dean Donkey Party.  It isn't going to change.  Well, it will, but the days of the more centrist Democratic Leadership Council are long gone.  It's getting more and more left-wing. For those of us who watched the Democratic Primaries in 2008, there were tell-tale clues.  The Eastern hard left Donks were chafing under the more Centrist Clintons and their pet DNC chairman, Terry McAuliffe.  But the Clintons brought in the donations as no one else in the party at the time could, so the Clintons called the tune and the rest of the party capered about obediantly.  That doesn't mean they liked it.

Dean is another story.  Dean can, through a TV screen, palpably radiate  his insane hatred for Republicans and by extension, for the American traditionalism and values they represent. You could cook a Cornish game hen in the radiance of Dean's venomous tirades when he unleashes them.

Weiner goes on the attack.

[And speaking of  politicians that go rabid from time to time, every Pubbie's favorite Democrat-to HATE-Anthony Weiner.  Would it surprise you to learn that Weiner learned from the Master, the aforementioned Chuck Schumer?  Weiner was an aide to Schumer when The Tumor was in the House, trying to have gun dealers in Wyoming regulated as though they were selling to recently-escaped convicts in Rego Park or drug merchants along Woodhaven Boulevard. After serving on the City Council in New York, Weiner ran for Schumer's House seat in 1999 as The Tumor was trading up to bring his own special brand of poison into the World's Greatest Deliberative Body.  Weiner has never gotten less than 59% of  the vote in 5 elections, so that's why the little putz is always so smug.  I come from Queens, Jackson Heights specifically; I know the area Weiner represents.  Gilbert Gottfried could get elected there, bad taste jokes and all.]

"Ja think I'm a cowboy!"

When Mr Obama came along, and showed he had a talent for putting money together and for putting a highly-effective grassroots coalition in play and using the Internet as well, out went the centrists.  I knew Mrs Clinton's was done in January 2008, when Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama. Ted's signature issue throughout his career had been health care, which is also strongly associated with Hillary and wasn't with Obama at that time.  Maybe Ted never forgave her for screwing it up so badly during the Clinton years, which she undoubtedly did, leaving the Republicans in charge of both the Senate and the House during most of the final years of his life.  Kerry-the-Sailor-Man had already endorsed Mr Obama.  Others followed suit.  Maybe the entire caucus resented her for Bill Clinton's turn to "Triangulation" as an act of self-preservation, saving his own Presidency by essentially abandoning the Congressional Democrats.  The Donks had won big in the 2006 mid-term elections, a sign that the country  was turning away from the political center.  Hillary was toast, and the Donkeys were in full gallop Leftward for the general election.  The Donks had had their fill after sixteen years of Clintons.

The leftward lurch of the US continued through the 2008 elections, helped along by the economic downturn,  mortgage banking implosion, TAPR and Detroit bailouts and calls for subsidies for many industries as long as the subject was on the table.  When Republicans start tossing around collectivist cures to economic and societal woes, they are going to lose out to the party that always prefers socialist solutions.

The Donkeys do have a critical weakness that victory in politics brings out. The Party leadership and their camp followers in the media, in academia, in the blogosphere and in the left-leaning nonprofits are horrifyingly, excruciatingly, condescendingly elitist. Not in the Old Money sense of the word, but a self-appointed elitism based on acceptance of the model and forms of Progressivism. They are just smarter than anyone else. University trained, good grades in all the "right" subjects, a solid career in public service or it's close private analog. Aware of the tragedies and foibles of their unenlightened fellow humans, they hear a call the unworthy are deaf to, a sublime summons to organize mankind for the sake of mankind.  Even if it's against the will of mankind.  So for the greater good of mankind it is necessary to hoodwink mankind.  They know they are worthy, they are special, they are better because they hear that call and others do not.

So generally speaking, the Donks begin to steamroller their visions.  Whether the Bill Nelson's of the party are truly with them ideologically or not doesn't matter.  They had better toe the line, to vote as the party demands.  Having a political party at the national level at all means you are going to have to accept compromise as a fact of life and vote en masse when your leadership makes a case for it; that's life in politics.  But when the Leftist Donkeys take the bit in their teeth that dynamic changes, and the more moderate Democrats become true party "backbenchers,"  with radicalized, redistributionist reformers out to remake this "zero-sum" world.  And the Republicans become, well "What Republicans?"

The rank and file Donks and the rest of the public would probably rebel if the full extent of the corrective surgery were revealed.  So they obfuscate, they generalize, they retreat behind carefully crafted phrases that seem to fall from the lips of every Donk caught out where a reporter can question them, simulatenously and verbatim; bromides that reveal nothing except the inner goodness of the speaker and his Party.

They went too far post 2008.  No jobs materialized from that orgy of pork and debt known as The Stimulus Package.  Businesses surprisingly (to anyone who did not study the 1930s and New Deal), un-patriotically, did not expand and hire more employees in the wake of new taxes and new regulations being tweeted and emailed from Speaker Pelosi high above Planet Earth in her US Government Gulfstream.

And then The Horror began.   A self-organizing group of people aghast at the extent of government growth being promulgated started to show up at what the Donks thought were going to be routine dog-and-pony Town Hall meetings about the health care proposals and ask unplanted questions.

Moreover, they demanded answers and just would not be shut-up, put off or put down.  And the more the elitists tried to dismiss them, the more they came back and with greater intensity.  The elites made the mistake of writing it off to racism, or fear of the unknown, or religious intoxication, anything but what it really was.  A spontaneous, grassroots rebellion against everything the Progressives hold dear, everything the leadership of the Democrat Party has become in the last several decades.

And anyone who kicks Arlen (Scottish Law) McSpecter  around earns a warm spot in my heart.

More to come . . . .