Mid-Week Rants and Election Woes

"Give us what we want & we'll go away!"

I don't know when it was that my country went from a nation where most people believed  in working hard and doing for themselves, in supporting their nation against all foreign threats and  believing in the basic decency of one's fellow citizens to a nation where that is considered a sign of unhealthy extremism.  "Extremism" itself is an interesting expression.   It implies that there is some undefined benefit in being balanced equally between two polar opposites.  Conceivably, it is a modern expression of the ancient Greek axiom of "moderation in all things,"  truly I don't know. 

But it's modern use has been to pull the country steadily to the Left during my lifetime.  And it was going on before I was born, too.   Listening to my favorite cabal leader, Schumer the Tumor, in a verbal ping-pong match with Matt Lauer, you begin to worry whether the great mass of Americans will fall for this cynical spinning or not.   For The Tumor to claim that a $33 billion cut in spending is a reasonable compromise from the $100 billion figure that the Republicans initially wanted is pathetic.  Even the $100 billion number was a token gesture measured against total spending, but a behemoth such as our government doesn't turn on a dime; it was enough to get it started in the right direction.  $33 billion will be treated as a rounding error by the Democrats  in our government's inexorable spending climb.

What has happened in America is that with each small victory of the Progressives, the baseline for normal has been pulled steadier and steadier to the left.  But the Progressives never stop.  Take Schumer's favorite hatred, private ownership of firearms.  In the course of my life, whenever legal firearm ownership has been restricted a little further, someone like Chuck pops up after the smoke clears and expresses the opinion that "it's a good first start."  No matter how far we've already come, "It's a good first start,"  relentlessly tugging that baseline to the left, redefining what the center is by shifting the mean.  Ronald Reagan famously remarked that "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The party left me."

Schumer's eyes glow with satisfaction and malice and hate at the thought of the shutdown being blamed on the Republicans and that segment of the electorate he despises most of all:  The Tea Party.  They are anathema to Schumer, a real grass-roots movement not afraid to challenge the growth of the Progressive state Schumer wants for all of us.  THAT to Chuckie is the most un-American of things, to rebel against your duly-elected (from NYC) civil masters, to question their guidance and thwart their will.  He and the toady media have done their best to gin up hatred for this movement of average Americans practicing simple adversarial politics in a supposedly democratic system.  And they've been helped by the union bosses, angered at having their banquet of taxpayer-funded dues disturbed and threatened.  

"If you won't contribute . . . ."

Schumer, as I have said before, is a major mover and shaker within the policy-making side of the Donkey party.   Inside it, he is considered a shrewd calculator and strategist and a true believer in the Progressive vision.   In public view, he has limited utility and he knows it.  His face and voice and expressions are so marked by the twisted hatred in his soul for what we all think of as traditional America that they only bring him out in the light of day when they are desperate, and the Donks are.   All you need to know about what Schumer thinks of middle-America you get from his ideological offspring, Anthony Wiener, who is Chuck Schumer without an inner monologue.  But now, he's in his element.   If the Donks feel the average American has blamed the shut-down on the Pubbies, he will smile and sink back down into the swampy waters he is most at home in, his eyes and nostrils above the surface, waiting in ambush like the crocodile he is.

Mr Obama, of course, has tried to keep his skirts as far away from the mud of actually governing as possible.  Incredibly, while the country teeters back and forth, he junkets around the globe.  I hope GE appreciates all the business he is getting for them that they won't pay taxes on (OK, but I HAD to get that in).  Seriously, that's what you have a VP for, although given Biden's verbal gaffes, sending him on a diplomatic trip might end with the European Union declaring war on us.  But Mr Obama apparently enjoys all the trappings of holding the most powerful executive office in the world.  Except for that messy, annoying bit about actually governing.

All clear, Captain Obama!

I shouldn't be surprised at the depth of ignorance, intolerance and sheer irrational hatred coming from the Left, but I am sometimes taken aback by it.  Spend any time in the Twittershpere and you will see some of the most hateful messages being posted.  I'm not dismissing the occasional ignorant remark on the part of the right-wing crowd, but the Left is an order of magnitude worse in sheer vitriol and emotionally-laden fantasy.  America is on a downward slide into bankruptcy and there is no one big enough to bail US out.  No, not China; China has 1.3 billion people and a billion of them still live in near poverty and increasingly resent it.  China needs every resource it can muster to fund it's own development.  Don't look to the IMF, we're their principal contributor.  And yet for the first time in a generation a political movement seeks to turn the ship away from the iceberg and half the passengers have joined with the crew to keep us bow on to destruction.

Albert Shanker

It isn't even possible to discuss political differences with most on the other side.  Public education has been in the hands of the Left since the mid-Twentieth century, and the top levels of the teachers unions are utterly controlled by Progressive true believers.  It filters down, not always in a doctrinaire way, but in a subtle manner, what subjects you emphasize, which get short shrift.  And many of the damn teachers are products of that educations system, so we have a second, third and fourth generation of people teaching our children about our Republic who don't have the slightest idea what they are talking about.  They don't teach limited government.  They don't tell students the differences between a direct democracy and a federal republic, because I don't think they know.  They are certainly not inclined.  When you are teaching history from Howard Zinn's bloody book there is no reason to wonder why.

So you get slogans in return for arguments.  Political discourse has become one long barrage of imprecations against corporations and wealth, tirades against Judeo-Christian religious principles, vague and not-so-vague suggestions of corruption.  A great consuming terror that if a government program disappears or changes, chaos and destruction will follow.  People shout about rights being denied who have no conception of what the word even connotes.  Self-evident inconsistencies go unreported by a largely compliant media.  No, by an advocacy media.

Most of all, they don't understand that one of the most precious principles we have is the rule of law.  But the rule of law is only as good as the men who uphold  it.  To the Donks, there is no other consideration except winning elections.  There just isn't, and anything done to win that election is justified in the name of  . . . righteousness.   Absentee ballots that magically appear that somehow carry votes for only the major contested election, ignoring all other contests.  The sneering contempt in the act shocking in it's smug confidence.  A parade of last minute voter registrations.   The rank-and-file Donkeys bray and catcall and cheer, like it's got no more significance than a baseball game.

But it does.  For if the Donks prevail with Kloppenburg and the recall of Republican state senators in Wisconsin, reverse everything that Governor Walker has tried to do to stop the downward spiral of his state, the booby prize they will get will be layoffs and bankruptcy, and that will happen whether there's a Pubbie, a Donk or a Martian in the Governor's mansion.    

And ya know, I don't think the Koch brothers will be one bit worse off.