Things are not going well for the Democrats. They get nasty when backed into a corner. Well, nastier. A great deal of left-wing politics is motivation-based; you're supposed to support them because of their unimpeachable good intentions, not the actual results of their policies, which means their opponents must be subhuman monsters. It's much easier to win debates against monsters. You don't have to engage their arguments on an intellectual level - just point at them and scream.
So here we have Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) claiming that Republicans desire an ostensibly savage 1 percent cut in the $80 billion food stamp program to slake their genocidal bloodlust: "They just want people to starve, and it's disgusting."
Fortunately, this tireless Champion of the People appears to be in no imminent danger of starvation himself.
He also whined, "We're not extending unemployment insurance, and now we want to starve people?" Why does everyone need government-supplied food and unemployment checks in Barack Obama's roaring economy? I thought the new Democrat Party line was that millions of people only submit themselves to the slavery of work because they need health insurance, so all praise to the Peoples' Glorious Health Care Leap Forward to freeing them from "job lock." But now they need food and cash too? What kind of "recovery" is this? Since the Democrats just conceded, as a matter of official Party dogma, that incentives such as health care subsidies do discourage people from working, is it a good idea to give Obama's high-unemployment economy more work-suppressing incentives?
Also, I remember when Democrats said the slightest delay in ObamaCare was tantamount to attempted murder. Now President Obama delays parts of it on a whim, every time the polls look especially bad for his Party. Aren't people going to die because Obama is delaying the Affordable Care Act? What about the demonstrable health risks to all those cancer patients who can't see their doctors any more because of the Democrats' health care law?
Do you think Rep. Nadler would do anything other than mumble about how everybody who disagrees with him is a homicidal maniac, if these questions were posed to him? Of course not. Vicious politics is lazy politics.
Then you've got Rep. Alvin Holmes (D-AL), who brought back a golden oldie of Democrat intolerance by saying of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, "I don't like him at all because he's an Uncle Tom." He also said he doesn't like the fact that Thomas is "married to a white woman," although he clarified that he thinks other people think he doesn't like Thomas just because his wife is white, but really it's because he's an Uncle Tom.
Holmes also falsely accused Thomas of being a failed land surveyor before taking up law school as his Plan B career option - a charge he invented because that gave him the topical relevance necessary to get his Uncle Tom garbage into the congressional record, since the topic of debate was a land survey bill.
Naturally, the mainstream media threw itself atop Rep. Holmes' comments as if they were a live grenade, performing their customary service of protecting Democrats from the sort of foot-in-mouth outburst that would instantly annihilate any Republican. Those are the rules of engagement: Democrats can be as vicious, personal, over-the-top, racist, and sexist as they want to be. It's a huge advantage, because it lets Democrats communicate with their most excitable fringe voters without fear of getting busted by the language police, and it helps them dehumanize Republicans in a way that can never, ever be reciprocated. No Republican who said the sort of things Nadler and Holmes said would survive the week, probably not the day in Holmes' case. And everyone else in the GOP would be held responsible for their words; even the strongest and swiftest denunciation of these gasbags wouldn't be good enough.
A few weeks ago, the president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, Reverend William Barber II, described black Republican Senator Tim Scott as the witless puppet of extremists, specifically a group Democrat character assassins love to portray as racist: "A ventriloquist can always find a good dummy... the extreme right wing down here finds a black guy to be Senator and claims he's the first black senator since Reconstruction, and then he goes to Washington D.C. and articulates the agenda of the Tea Party."
That's standard procedure for the Democrat power structure when it comes to dealing with independent-minded conservatives of color. They're not really, truly, authentically black; they're Uncle Toms and ventriloquist dummies. Senator Scott is not some hapless naif picked up off the side of the road by Tea Party villains who wanted an appealing mouthpiece to hide their racism from the tireless detectives at MSNBC; he previously served in the U.S. House, on the Rules Committee no less, and before politics he was a highly successful entrepreneur. He was very classy, and pugnacious, in his response to Barber, as related by the Daily Caller:
???To reflect seriously on the comments a person, a pastor, that is filled with baseless and meaningless rhetoric would be to do a disservice to the very people who have sacrificed so much and paved a way,??? Scott told The Daily Caller in an emailed statement. ???Instead, I will honor the memory of Dr. King by being proactive in holding the door for others and serving my fellow man. And Rev. Barber will remind me and others of what not to do.???
[...] ???I did not meet [Barber] when I was failing out of high school. I did not see him on the streets of my neighborhoods where too many of my friends got off track and never recovered. I did not meet him when I was working 85 hour weeks to start my business, nor did I meet him when I was running for Congress against long odds. But who I did meet were people everywhere across this state who were willing to work hard and to help me succeed ??? and I them,??? Scott said.
If you imagine yourself delivering a more heated response to the insult leveled at Senator Scott, remember, Republicans aren't allowed to get any more heated than this. They don't get to question the humanity of Democrats, accuse them of racism, or portray their policies as killing sprees.
Update: Alvin Holmes is a state representative, not a member of the U.S. Congress, as incorrectly suggested above. Apologies for any confusion this may have caused.
