Don’t be fooled: The Democrats don’t have any meaningfully moderate candidates.
The Democrats, now a cult of assiduous navel-gazers—obsessed with gender, anxious about white privilege and tortured about the role of race in American history—are offering their voters a choice between a 78-year-old-socialist-white-man and a 77-year-old-white-man who will employ any ideological device in the pursuit of power. One has been ideologically consistent, while the other has been consistently changing ideologies.
One has been ideologically consistent, while the other has been consistently changing ideologies.
The two duked it out last week during the Democratic presidential debate. Out of concern for their charges, the Democratic National Committee even allowed the elder statesmen to sit during the audience-free discussion. I was wondering when the nap break would occur.
The “debate” provided an opportunity for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to lead former Vice President Joe Biden by the hand, further into the netherworld of leftist politics. Sanders pushed and prodded Biden as he repudiated fracking, claimed he’d always been against the Hyde Amendment (that prohibits federal funding for abortion), and that he had spent his political career fighting the mad dogs of corporate capitalism. He was two wheezes shy of praising collective farming. After castigating capitalism, the conversation meandered towards social(ist) policies and outrageous accusations about the United States.
In other words, last week’s debate sounded like every Democratic debate we’ve seen this election cycle: a cross between a Trotskyite plenary session and a university microaggression conference. As the 2020 presidential election approaches, the Democrats have revealed themselves not as the party of diversity, not even a party of choice, but a party of socialism that is prepared to advance any crackpot theory of whim if it sounds sufficiently radical chic.
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Joe Biden.[/caption]
PROGRESSIVES STAND BEHIND THEIR (OLD, WHITE) MAN
Despite all the moaning about Sen. Elizabeth Warren being forced out of the contest because of conscious or unconscious sexism, the mainstream media has chronically neglected Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s (D-Hawaii) presence in the race. She was always just too normal, too centrist, too willing to appear on Fox News and too traditionally Democratic to validate. Gabbard called out the Democrats for their “hypocrisy” on sexism: always claiming other people are misogynistic when they are the worst violators.
“Joe Biden will run on the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in history, and Bernie Sanders and the movement he inspired are a big reason why.”
Last Thursday, Gabbard, too, had to throw in the towel.
Now, Democrats are left with the two last men standing for the presidential nomination—what a shocking reification of white male privilege! And it’s not just any two men; the Democratic Party is offering two men of virtually identical politics—even if one came by his policies honestly and the other has embraced the New Left in a desperate act of political expediency.
After pounding Sanders in the primaries on Tuesday night, Biden expressed what might have been the most succinct moment of his campaign, saying that he and Sanders “share a common vision.” The following morning, Barack Obama’s speechwriter, Jon Favreau, tweeted, “Joe Biden will run on the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in history, and Bernie Sanders and the movement he inspired are a big reason why.”
Biden was a radically different politician when he entered politics as a senator from Delaware. He was a good old boy from the South in the early 1970s, and he stayed that way for much of his time in the Senate. But his ideas, like those of any lifetime politicians, have proven to be entirely flexible, and he’s jettisoned any policy even vaguely conservative and embraced the ideology of the Democratic left. He’s even prepared to confront the imaginary crisis of climate change by putting oil executives in jail. Biden wants to increase the growth of the federal government—so it can confiscate more firearms—and he wants to abrogate national sovereignty by eliminating or just ignoring borders so more illegal immigrants can enter the country and demand taxpayer-paid health care.
Sure, Biden appears so confused and detached at times that it is doubtful he even knows what policies he is espousing. But that begs the question as to whether Biden will be the puppet of the hard left if he were ever to become president because there he has no ideological firewalls.
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President John F. Kennedy.[/caption]
A ONCE GREAT (ALBEIT NOT GRAND) PARTY
It was interesting to note how, after getting shellacked again by Biden in the latest primaries, Sanders has sounded like a man almost happy to lose. It’s almost as though he realizes that he’s succeeded in moving the party to his political orientation. And the transformation the Democratic Party has undergone in the last half-century is a remarkable one. What we see today is certainly not the party of Jimmy Carter, let alone John Kennedy.
If Kennedy was the victim of a massive conspiracy, it was not one that led to his assassination, but the one that nurtured the myth that he was a hallowed liberal who insouciantly but fearlessly pursued a progressive agenda.
It’s interesting to compare the candidacies of Kennedy and Richard Nixon during the 1960 election with what we see with today. Today, Sanders-the-socialist has become indiscernible from Bolshevik-Biden. Then, the similarities and cross-pollination of ideas was happening between parties.
Back in 1960, about the only thing separating the two men running for office was Kennedy’s good looks and womanizing. Politically, however, the pair were virtually identical. As president, Kennedy ran an administration that cut taxes and spent money on defense. If Kennedy was the victim of a massive conspiracy, it was not one that led to his assassination, but the one that nurtured the myth that he was a hallowed liberal who insouciantly but fearlessly pursued a progressive agenda.
Kennedy and Nixon became friends when they both arrived in Congress in 1947. When Nixon ran for the Senate against Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, whom Nixon branded as “pink, right down to her underwear,” Kennedy gave the Republican $1,000 for his campaign, saying of former actress Douglas that he wouldn’t be heartbroken if the Senate’s loss was Hollywood’s gain. Neither John nor Robert Kennedy supported two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson because they thought he was weak and too liberal.
Kennedy governed as a conservative with style. We should always remember that he was not murdered by a white supremacist or right-wing zealot—but by a malcontent Marxist.
The Democrats were once the party of President Harry Truman—a man who successfully contained Soviet communism in Eastern Europe and established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to demonstrate his resolve. It was a party where a Senate Majority Leader like Lyndon Johnson could work with Republican President Dwight Eisenhower on both foreign and domestic policy so that the nation could project unity and not partisan politics for their own sake. A Democratic president like Kennedy could proclaim “Ich bin ein Berliner” because he believed there was such a thing as a capitalist-free world and communist enslavement.
But you don’t have to go back that far to prove the point that the Democrats have lost touch with reality and the voting public. Today, that once-great-party only really wants to talk about identity politics, which that usually translates into sex. Whether it is celebrating drag queens or welcoming biological males into women’s bathrooms or waxing salons, the Democrats are committed to appeasing the woke brigade while alienating much of their traditional base.
And that traditional base is going to vote for President Donald Trump this November. Because it won’t matter whether the “establishment” candidate Biden wins or the mad socialist Sanders takes the nomination: the Democratic Party has become a madhouse where the inmates are not so much in control but where they have convinced the management that insanity is preferable to a sound mind.
