The Democrats, a.k.a. the Decepticons

The Democrats are in a rage for socialism [note]. The degree of their frenzy seems to be owed in equal parts to (1) a level of self-righteousness that by comparison would make Christian fundamentalists look like libertines ready for the Playboy Mansion, and (2) simple and pure lust for power. Since the latter is a moral failing that Democrats like to charge their opponents with, part of their rage looks like a psychological defensiveness that probably reflects their sense of their own bad faith and dishonesty, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. Bad faith is evident, for instance, in the way they carefully avoid admitting that they are socialists. They know that people are aware of the meaning of socialism -- the ownership and control of everything by the government -- and that Americans especially have an immediate and visceral antipathy to that. Democrats think that if they talk about freedom (while promising free stuff) while in fact creating tyranny, they will be able to deceive enough people to get away with it. They have, indeed, been doing rather well with that strategy. And they have learned that it is possible to lie in the face of overwhelming evidence and still avoid exposure.

[financial analyst Maria] Bartiromo did not just accept whatever Barney Frank said. She said: "With all due respect, congressman, I saw videotapes of you saying in the past: 'Oh, let's open up the lending. The housing market is fine.'" His reply? "No, you didn't see any such tapes." "I did. I saw them on TV," she said. But Barney Frank did not budge. Thomas Sowell, "Is Barney frank? In a class by himself," 19 October 2010, boldface added

After outright transparent lies, we get the strategy of statements that are simply preposterous, but are presented in all seriousness and are apparently swallowed by loyalists and believers. A good example we see in the Wall Street Journal:

For a laugh-out-loud moment on all of this, we recommend yesterday's performance by New York Senator Chuck Schumer on NBC's "Meet the Press." Mr. Schumer declared that "Barack Obama and we Democrats -- this is counterintuitive but true -- are really trying to get a handle on balancing the budget and we're making real efforts to do it." Counterintuitive? He said this four days after Senate Democrats lost a vote to add $250 billion to the deficit for doctor payments without any compensating spending cuts. ["The Spending Rolls On," 10/26/2009]

The preposterous thing here is that any major Democrats, especially "Chucky" Schumer (reelected in 2010), worry in the least about balancing the budget. The only reason they ever complained about Republican spending or deficits is that they wanted to sucker people into putting them in power so they can have even greater spending and deficits. The Democrat explanation for all their failed programs is always that they didn't spend enough -- the programs were not "fully funded." Since their spending will never make their programs successful, they will, by necessity, always need greater spending. If they ever worry about paying for this, they only think about raising taxes. Indeed, when it was pointed out to Barack Obama by a reporter that revenue could be increased by cutting taxing, candidate Obama responded that "fairness" was more important than revenue. Thus, although the stock Democrat response is to deny that cutting taxes increases revenue (although one of the best examples of increased revenue is when Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, did it), Obama incautiously revealed, as he has done more than once, his real agenda -- attack wealth, attack capital, regardless of the damage it may do to all. Revenues may fall, unemployment may soar, the Nation may be impoverished; but the government, and the self-righteous Left, will prosper.

Of course, when the Soviet Union owned everything in the country, there was no private economy to tax, and the economy still didn't work, Stalin decided it was time to kill people -- "wreckers" -- because sabotoge was the only explanation he could come up with for continued failure. The Democrats are not at that point....yet.

A favorite rhetorical strategy of the Democrats, as with the mortgage bubble, is to introduce a policy or program and then, when it goes bad, act as though they had never done anything and/or that their program has nothing to do with what went wrong. This strategy goes back to the Depression, when the recession created by the collapse of the Stock Market, which was recovering by 1930 (unemployment was back down to 6%), was turned into a Depression by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill and then when the Federal Reserve allowed the banking system to collapse. This was actually the fault of Herbert Hoover and the directors of the Federal Reserve System. However, the Democrats wanted to blame it on "speculators" and on the banks themselves. Thus, when FDR came to power, what was wrong was misdiagnosed and policies were implemented, usually following in Hoover's footsteps (without any credit to Hoover, except privately), that prolonged the Depression through the rest of the decade. This failure is what the Democrats have never wanted to admit, and still will not admit. Roosevelt kept attacking business and finance until he wanted to put the country on a war footing and needed industry to manufacture war materiel. Then the anti-business rhetoric stopped and the crippling policies moderated.

In the 2008-2009 collapse of the housing mortgage bubble, we get the same attacks on "speculators," finance, and banks, with calls for greater regulation of the credit and banking markets. We even see a version of this in Playboy magazine, in the course of a smear of the "conservative underground":

Banks and mortgage lenders, left pretty much to their own devices after decades of deregulation, came to misbehave in a spectacular manner. They handed out mortgages to anyone. [Thomas Frank, December 2009, p.112]

What the Democrats (and Mr. Frank) leave out is that banks, far from being left "to their own devices" by deregulation, were threatened by regulators (and Democrats) that if they did not make loans to underqualified, largely minority, borrowers, they would be subject to regulatory and legal sanctions.

...the recession is virtually solely a result of the federal government which, through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Bank, the threatened criminal penalties of the Community Reinvestment Act, and other efforts to deny the market, have so distorted the marketplace that literally trillions of dollars have been malinvested... When Chris Dodd and Barney Frank aren't self- righteously berating the private sector for the mistakes those two gentlemen inflicted on them, the chief cheerleader is none other than our increasingly classless president, Barack Obama. Ed Crane, President, CATO Institute, May 3, 2010

Another area where Democrat responsibility has been deflected is in medical care. Medicare (for the old) and Medicaid (for the poor) were begun by Lyndon Johnson, with very unrealistic expectations about their cost. Of course, in Basic Economics, one learns that demand explodes for anything desirable that is offered for free. So now the programs are quickly headed for bankruptcy, even as they now only reimburse part of recipients' medical expenses (for which they need "medi-gap" insurance), while also limiting the compensation that physicians will receive for what they do -- with the result that some physicians will not treat Medicare or Medicaid patients. In Canada, where some provinces (Quebec) have simply capped the income of physicians, they often take the rest of the year off once they have hit the cap. Thus, for the most obvious economic reasons, Medicare and Medicaid can limit their costs only by price fixing -- an economic practice that then necessarily produces shortages (as, indeed, in Canada). But now enter the Modern Democrat, Barack Obama, whose argument for socialized, government run medicine is that it will reduce costs! Only in a country with a general ignorance of economics and history (the fruit of Democrat "education") could anyone actually get away with this. Indeed, I think most Americans already know that government ends up doing everything in the most wasteful and inefficient way, thanks to things like the dynamics of bureaucracies. People encounter this all too often in their own dealings with the government. The idea is simply preposterous, even if one was not aware of the dismal experience with Medicare.

A generalized use of this "deflect the blame" strategy may be seen in an interview with Playboy magazine by the Communist Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present) shortly before his death. With images of decaying Rust Belt factories, Zinn asserted that Capitalism cannot maintain employment. This is rich. Democrats and labor unions, with obvious hostility, drive industries out of whole cities and States and then lament that "Capitalism" has failed to provide employment. No. A good example is that the laissez faire Capitalism of 1906 delivered 1.7% unemployment, the very year that Upton Sinclair's The Jungle portrayed hopeless hordes of the unemployed waiting for jobs at the meatpackers in Chicago. The real hopeless hordes of the unemployed are now in France, or Michigan, where socialism has reigned for decades. In 2008, Texas created more jobs than the whole rest of the United States put together. With no personal income tax, Texas is not famous for economically restrictive government. Thus, Texas grows, while Michigan, New York, and California shrink. The simple abandonment of large parts of Michigan cities like Detroit has been in the news lately. As we should expect, Zinn was an (Communist) ideologue who was simply blind to any actual facts or falsifying evidence.

As the public has become alarmed about the Administration's intentions in the summer of 2009, and citizens have expressed outrage at "Town Meetings" called by Congressmen in their home districts, the response of Democrats has been curious. Their charge is that the angry citizens have been organized and planted by Republicans and Right Wing -- even Neo-Nazi -- groups. The irony and hypocrisy of this is stunning, although of a piece with the brazen arrogance of the Democrats. This is a President, after all, who is proud to have begun his career as a "Community Organizer," which means doing exactly what the Democrats are accusing the Ring Wing of doing now. Rush Limbaugh himself responded to these first accusations by saying that, even if the charges were true (which they weren't), "It's about damn time." The Democrats are the masters of the rent-a-mob, calling out often disruptive and violent protesters from organizations like the SEIU (the Service Employees International Union) and ACORN (the "Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now," which once asked to be exempt from minimum wage laws because, duh, they wanted to hire more people than they would be able to otherwise). The conceit of the Democrats is always that their protestors, whom Obama has now explicitly called to mobilize and attend these public meetings (when Democrat politicians will still actually hold them), show the spontaneous Uprising of the People, while their opponents can only be paid mercenaries (as with Barbara Boxer charging that the anti-socialism protestors were "too well dressed" -- obviously suits from the drug companies or insurance companies). Now we hear that Union members ("goons"? "thugs"?) have been threatening and strong-arming citizens who show up at the public fora. Democrats simply cannot believe, or don't care, that their promotion of socialism will evoke a genuine visceral and spontaneous reaction from Americans. They are also absurdly and hypocritically shocked and outraged that people should portray Obama or the Democrats as Nazis or Fascists ("We can't allow this incivil discourse!"), when we heard no such cautions for all the years that George W. Bush was portrayed as a Fascist, Nazi, or Adolf Hitler himself. The grotesque conceit seems be that, well, smearing Bush was true, while labeling Obama the same way is an intolerable misrepresentation, outside reasonable political speech! [note]

What has happened to the Democrats is that they have become the Party of Government, where all of their purposes are to promote the interests of Government, as opposed to the interests of citizens. You can spot this when Democrats say "We are the government," meaning that the interests of government and citizens cannot possibly diverge. But then we see the divergence in action when Democrat policy protects and expands the power and privileges of politicians, in the first place (hence their opposition to term limits, usually quite popular with voters), of public employees (hence the support of Public Employee and Teachers Unions for the Democrats), and of people dependent on the government -- hence Democrat support for welfare, protectionism, corporate welfare, and the other spawn of rent seeking (e.g. the Trial Lawyers). Democrats want us to think that only Republicans promote corporate welfare, but we have recently seen their participation in that form of corruption in the corporate bailouts of 2009 -- and they have all but institutionalized corporate welfare for the corn lobby in subsidies and mandates for ethanol (e.g. the Archer Daniels Midland Company). The logical goal of Democrat politics would be to put all business under the control of the government, a goal now achieved with General Motors, and to render all citizens into helpless peons who receive all goods and favors from politicians. Political enemies thus can be immediately deprived of jobs, housing, medical care, etc., as in the Soviet Union.

This danger was foreseen by John Locke:

But in Governments, where the Legislative is in one lasting Assembly always in being, or in one Man, as in Absolute Monarchies, there is danger still, that they will think themselves to have a distinct interest, from the rest of the Community; and so will be apt to increase their own Riches and Power, by taking, what they think fit, from the People. ["The Second Treatise, of Civil Government," in Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett, Cambridge University Press, 1960, 1988, §138, boldface added]

"A distinct interest" is now the whole story of Democrat politics. It is thus not surprising that one of the brainstorms of Democrat politicians is the "full time" legislature. This was accomplished in California under Democrat Party boss Jesse Unruh (d.1987). The idea was to create a "professional" body of law-makers, who would then, of course, be all the better and wiser for it. Now, of course, California is close to financial collapse, hemorrhaging jobs and businesses, while Texas, where the legislature only meets for five months every two years, has a budget surplus, with more jobs created there in 2008 than in the whole rest of the country put together. Texas, in short, is America, while California is a France wanna-be.

After the lessons of history and economics, it is now impossible to be a socialist except out of ignorance or dishonesty. Deception, dissimulation, and dishonesty have been the bedrock of leftist politics for decades. If Communists in the '40's and '50's had publicly admitted they were Communists, all the mythology of "red-baiting" and "witch hunts" would have evaporated. If Alger Hiss had admitted he was spying for the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, decades of anti-anti-Communist rhetoric never could have happened. If Barack Obama admitted that he wants a "single payer" government medical system, and that the "reform" of the Democrats is designed to drive insurance companies out of the medical insurance business, the debate over "reform" would be a lot clearer. Obama denies this is what he wants, but then, like Barney Frank, he is on audio and video telling audiences not along ago that this is exactly what he wants and intends to do. Thus, it is not enough for the Democrats to be dishonest. They must rely on the ignorance of the public to get away with it.

On the other hand, ignorance, unfortunately, is now the stock-in-trade of American education, at all levels -- as the Democrats and the leftist allies of the Democrats have seized the educational institutions -- from the worthless Schools of Education, to the accreditation agencies, to the professional societies (the Modern Language Association, the MLA, may be the worst), to the administrations and faculty of the schools themselves. The higher the education, the purer the Marxism and Leninism, although leftist anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism infuse all levels of education. One way this could happen is that most college students who go into education major in "education" rather than in any real disciplines. What they pick up otherwise is from the humanities, rather than the sciences, and they soon discover that courses, for instance, in English departments have little to do with literature and language and much to do, like Sociology and now History departments, with political propaganda.

It usually doesn't matter how good the Economics department in a college may be, students get their economics in the form of "English Department Marxism," from professors who have no real education in economics, and usually even no rigorous philosophical education in Marxism (but may be active in the MLA). They get it all secondhand from "Theory," a cheap pastiche of Marx, Nietzsche, deconstruction, and other nihilistic knock-offs. Marx and Nietzsche, although sharing few values in common, nevertheless make a heady combined brew where everything is analyzed and explained in terms of power. There is no truth, knowledge, goodness, etc., simply power -- as Lord Voldemort says, "There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it" [Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling, Scholastic Inc., 1999, p.291]. The goal of leftist and Democrat politics then is to gain power by any means necessary.

As "tenured radicals" have come to dominate academia, the press, and the intelligentsia, a major conceit of leftist and Democrat politics is how smart they all are. In turn, the common theme of trendy humor and opinion is how stupid Republicans are, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. After the Democrats took Congress in 2006, however, the American public has had a good chance to see a lot of Democrat politicians in action. What seems obvious about the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, or Barney Frank, then, is that they are just idiots. They make George W. Bush look like Albert Einstein. They will say anything just because they want it to be true, however absurd or incoherent it may be. The Democrats do believe that there are some smart Republicans, and their reaction makes it easy to detect such belief. Since the Democrats don't believe that Presidents like Ronald Reagan or the Bushes are smart, they suspect that there is some demonic and Svengali-like figure in the background pulling the strings. We learn of this from the vitriol of Democrat attacks. Actually, the people that the Democrats identify and attack often are Republican strategists who have hard-ball political skills that may be the equal of the Democrats. Of course, this is what makes them particularly threatening and motivates the Democrats, not just to identify and attack them, but to hope to eliminate them through smear campaigns or association with some kind of wrong doing. A good example of their approach began with Lee Atwater (d.1991), an advisor to Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In fact, Atwater's premature and sudden death from cancer may have removed Bush the Elder's anchor to political reality. Compromising with the Democrats and breaking his "no new taxes" pledge cost Bush his reelection, despite the great spike in his popularity over the successul liberation of Kuwait. It is inconceivable that Atwater would not have warned Bush away from his follies. George W. Bush, the Younger, then consistently benefited from the advice of Karl Rove. Guiding Bush through election and successful re-election, Rove earned an unprecedently level of spite and hatred from the Democrats. They also had reason to hope that they could entangle him in the bogus Valerie Plame affair. Although the Special Prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, determined quite early that no laws had been broken, he continued his investigation anyway. Since in this case, as in others, the investigation itself can generate offenses, if the testimony of anyone can be construed to involve lies (it is an offense to lie to Federal agents, whether one is under oath or not), one suspects that Fitzgerald maliciously continued on in the hope of bagging someone with such a complaint. Hopes were high among Democrats that Fitzgerald could snag Rove, and Rove worried about that himself. However, Fitzgerald could only make a case against another Bush adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Libby was actually tried and convicted over conflicting testimony about conversations that no one at the time would have had any reason to remember. Bush then commuted his sentence but didn't pardon him, leaving Libby with a felony conviction. This was no tribute to Bush's courage. Rove meanwhile had moved over to Fox News, making him a public figure the way he had not been previously. As it happened, neither the Democrats nor the public noticed any sensible political adviser behind John McCain's clumsy campaign of 2008. On January 5th, 2010, we got a good example of shamelessly obvious falsehoods, again, from the Democrats. CSPAN had taken the unusual step of asking that the conference committee negotiations over the House and the Senate "Health Care" bills be broadcast. Something of the sort had actually been an Obama campaign promise. At a press conference, in the act of refusing to broadcast the negotiations, Nancy Pelosi said that "There has never been a more open process for any legislation." For a "process" that involved committee votes on bills that had not even been printed or offered yet, 2000 and 2700 page bills that were published only a couple of days before floor votes were scheduled, obviously with the intention of making it difficult for people to discover what was in the bills before the votes (and there were some remarkable bits of tyranny and corruption included), and with back room deals to buy votes with special exemptions from taxes (especially for Louisiana and Nebraska), it took remarkable gall for Pelosi to call the business an "open process." But the Democrats have at hand unlimited gall. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "If once they ['our people'] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves." But the Democrats often count on the public being "inattentive to the public affairs." It is impossible that Pelosi could expect people to believe her statement without relying on them to not know what had been going on [note]. Meanwhile, most academic leftists are unable to write intelligible sentences. They load them with a specialized jargon, in the tradition of Hegel and Marx, in a way that provides a substitute for any real thought, and they expect people to regard this as profound. Usually the public never hears examples of it, which is fine, since academics only need to impress other academics. But if one reads this stuff with the understanding that it is all about the promotion of naked power, its mysteries usually become obvious enough.

My first political memory is of my aunt telling my mother that someone had vandalized her "I Like Ike" bumper sticker while she was parked at the beach. That must have been in 1956. Unfortunately, this sort of thing has turned out to be all too characteristic of the shameless conduct of Democrats and the Left. Schools for such acts are, indeed, American universities, where theft, vandalism, disruptions, and even assaults are generally tolerated by administrators, as long as the targets are conservatives or libertarians. Far more outrage is expressed over outrages by the Right, which not uncommonly turn out to have been faked by Leftist radicals, just so that La Raza, etc., can have something to scream "racism" about. Τηλεπατητικός (Telepateticus)

And when it comes to power, the Democrats know their hardball. This is where, to be sure, they make the Republicans (except the occasional Atwater and Rove) look stupid. Everyone knows about Democrat political machines, whether historically in New York or Kansas City, or with a long tradition in Chicago; and many people know about the Democrats stealing elections, including the 1960 election, where Illinois and Texas went for John Kennedy just because Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, and Duval County, Texas, cooked up enough votes to swing the States. (Richard M. Daley, J's son, has been Mayor of Chicago since 1989.) What is different now is the open and shameless way in which the Democrats have learned to do it. As with Barney Frank on the mortgage collapse, they've discovered that the more open and outrageous the lie, the better the chance they may have of brazening it out. It is an infantile attitude, but they have discovered its usefulness. This may have started in 2000. The election was close, and the outcome would be determined by Florida, where the vote itself was very close. The strategy was adopted of successive recounts. With each recount more Republican votes could be disqualified and more Democratic votes "discovered." This was done so openly that in one news report, the vote counter held up a ballot that had no vote for President and said it would be counted as a Democrat vote because the other votes were for Democrats. There was a furor that the computer card punch ballots were unfair because people didn't check whether the "chad," the small piece punched out, had actually come out and detached. The implication seemed to be that the Democrat voters, being stupider (the opposite of the usual conceit), were more strongly affected by this. The result, however, was that vote counters could make subjective judgments about votes that, obviously, the vote counting machines would not have done.

As the Florida Supreme Court was going to allow endless recounting in the whole State, contrary to all State and Federal law, the United States Supreme Court stepped in and stopped the farce. The Democrats, having brazened out their own attempt to steal the election, then began screaming that the Republicans had stolen the election. This went on for years -- even until today. Meanwhile, the Democrats have perfected their strategy and have now stolen two major elections. In 2004 the Republican Dino Rossi won the Governor's race in Washington State by a small margin. The Democrats then began endless recounts, especially in urban districts with Democrat officials, until the Democrat, Christine Gregoire, moved ahead and could be proclaimed the winner.

The next case would be of greater national significance. In 2008, Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman won his race by 725 votes. After eight months of recounts and challenges, Democrat comedian Al Franken ("Stuart Smalley") was credited with a victory by 312 votes. Perhaps an all too typical Republican (i.e. a chump), Coleman, instead of appealing to Federal Courts, conceded defeat, as Richard Nixon had in 1960. The result was firm Democrat control of the United States Senate, enabling them to pass national socialist medicine, or whatever else they want, and override all opposition -- until Ted Kennedy died and Republican Scott Brown won the Senate race for a replacement, to the astonishment of the Nation, in January 2010. Massa-clue-less voters had suddenly wised up.

It is remarkable to me that people in a democracy would want to steal elections, but I have no doubt that the Democrats are willing to do this, as historically they often have. Indeed, since 2000, they have learned that it is possible to openly steal an election, while accusing the Republicans of doing it. This is no less brazen than Barney Frank denying that he made statements that he has been shown making on video. Well, he got reelected in 2010, so not all of Massachusetts has turned over a new leaf. Sometimes self-righteousness and lust for power may not be enough to explain this sort of thing. Or, since the most radical Democrats and their supporters are clearly Communists, it is obvious that they have no respect for elections, majorities, legality, democracy, free speech, or anything else that would stand in their way. But I am also perfectly willing to consider the possibility that Supernatural Evil is involved, as in the N.I.C.E. ("National Institute for Coordinated Experiments") institution of C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength [1945]. Much of what the Democrats do looks like N.I.C.E., in both its rhetoric and its police state reality [note]. If I were a Christian, and if I thought that abortion or homosexuality were morally wrong, I think it would be hard not be believe that Satan, as in Lewis' novel, was personally behind Democrat politics. The mix of lies, seduction, death, sterility, and corruption seems Satanic in its combination of fair face and vicious substance, hedonism and rot, glowing rhetoric and iron fist. As it is, self-righteousness and lust for power will have to suffice, and Thomas Jefferson understood the dynamic well enough: Mankind soon learn to make interested uses of every right and power which they possess, or may assume. The public money and public liberty, intended to have been deposited with three branches of magistracy, but found inadvertently to be in the hands of one only [as in administrative law], will soon be discovered to be sources of wealth and dominion to those who hold them; distinguished, too, by this tempting circumstance, that they are the instrument, as well as the object of acquisition. With money we will get men, said Caesar, and with men we will get money. Nor should our assembly be deluded by the integrity of their own purposes, and conclude that these unlimited powers will never be abused, because themselves are not disposed to abuse them. They should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when a corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and claws after he shall have entered. [Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1784, boldface added]. Unfortunately, there is no modern politician with the wisdom of Jefferson, the wolves are among us, and the teeth and claws are in us. These are the Democrats, supposedly the heirs of Jefferson's own Party. It is all their project. The worst that can be said about the Republicans is that they have largely gone along with it and (since Reagan) have grossly failed to articulate the danger. The worst that can be said about the Libertarians is that they are off in a utopian Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, muttering about gold and the Confederacy, while Democrats and most Republicans urinate on the Constitution every day. The result is that I don't know where the American people can turn. The Democrats are liable to get their way just because they are the most ruthless and shameless in the mix. Even if they drag down the economy into another Depression, they may still get away with it. FDR did, and we know that Obama is expected to provide a New New Deal. So we may be entering a very long night of decline, corruption, decay, and tyranny in American history. We will really know it when the Democrats commission a monument to Fidel Castro in Washington. I am sure, after the Congressional (Democrat) Black Caucus went to Cuba to praise and adore Castro early in 2009, and Representative Diane Watson recently made the statements below, that they already want to do it. It was just mentioned to me by our esteemed speaker, "Did anyone say anything about the Cuban health system?" And lemme tell ya, before you say "Oh, it’s a commu-," you need to go down there and see what Fidel Castro put in place. And I want you to know, now, you can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met. And you know, the Cuban revolution that kicked out the wealthy, Che Guevara did that, and then, after they took over, they went out among the population to find someone who could lead this new nation, and they found... well, just leave it there [laughs], an attorney by the name of Fidel Castro... [Democrat Member of Congress Diane Watson, 27 August 2009] Since what Castro "put in place" in Cuba is a totalitarian police state, one properly wonders about the nature of Watson's political values. Also, by the way, Castro was not some lawyer minding his own business who was then "found" by the "Cuban revolution" to lead it. He was the leader already.

Democrat Developments in 2012; the Pinocchio Scale Most of the comment here on the 2012 election and the behavior of the Democrats is in regard to the Republicans and their own behavior. However, there was one incident that all by itself may be taken as characteristic of the Democratic Party, its mentality, and its conduct. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz [ ἀνάξιος ] was and is the Chair of the Democratic National Committee. At a "training session at the Democratic National Convention to instruct Jewish Democrats" in 2012, she said that she had been told by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren that "what the Republicans are doing is dangerous for Israel" and very troubling to the Israeli government. When this became public, Oren released a statment saying, "I categorically deny that I ever characterized Republican policies as harmful to Israel." Wasserman Schultz then responded that she had said nothing of the sort and was "deliberately" misquoted by a "Republican newspaper." Unfortuately for Wasserman Schultz, the reporter of the story, Washington Examiner columnist Philip Klein, had her statements on audio tape. He had not misquoted her, and she had said exactly what she had been reported as saying. Thus, Wasseman Schultz was exposed in a double lie, first to misrepresent the Israeli Ambassador, and then to falsely deny that she had perpetrated that misrepresentation.

The Pinocchio Scale a Lie, Psychobabble a Damn Lie, Mendacity, Bureaucratese Statistics, Sophistry, Edubabble, Network News

Legalese, Pure Sophistry, Political Rhetoric, Supreme Court Decisions

Marxism , deconstruction , "Critical Theory," other "post-modern" "scholarship"

The lesson here is what happened next. Nothing. Wasserman Schultz did not resign in disgrace. She did not apologize. No Democrat complained. She is still the DNC Chair. Being caught in a barefaced double lie evidently meant nothing, and the accepted Democrat response for all involved was to shamelessly and brazenly ignore the whole business. The Democrats, both professionals and constituents, are simply not embarrassed by such lies. One wonders if Democrat voters (the "low information" voters) even pay enough attention to events to know about it all.

This may not be as absurd as Barney Frank denying he said things that he had just been shown saying on video. But it is all of a piece. It does not matter what the truth is. Democrats can just say anything, however mendacious, outrageous, or demonstrably false, and they can and do expect to get away with it. One wonders if they derive confidence from the "post-modern" epistemology that there is no truth, only power. The more brazen the lie, and the more trival the consequences, the more effectively is Democrat political power demonstrated -- as Wasserman Schultz now says that, despite Obama's famous "you can keep your plan" lie, nothing Obama ever said was a lie. The proper "truth" is simply whatever will discredit and defeat the Republicans. Not surprisingly, it is a totalitarian and Orwellian mentality. The continuation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the Chair of the Democratic National Committee means that the Party and all its leadership are comfortable with the exemplary leadership of a shameless, pathological liar, a person evidently without honor or conscience, honesty or sincerity. Again anyone might be forgiven if the thought crossed their mind that this would be most pleasing to the Father of Lies, as a demonstration that the work of evil at some point does not even need to conceal the effective use of open lies as a means of conquest. The Democrats are well past that point, and their Lord Satan would be proud.

Stranger, in a way, are the lies of Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid [ ἀνάξιος ] , since Reid is supposed to be a Mormon, elected from a heavily Mormon State, Nevada. But, during the 2012 election, Reid said, from the floor of the Senate, that, according to his sources, Mitt Romney (who is himself a Mormon), the Republican Presidential candidate, had not paid any taxes for some years. This turned out to be untrue, and it was noted that Reid only made the accusation in the Senate, where whatever he said could not be the basis of a libel lawsuit. So he probably knew that the accusation was untrue. After announcing his forthcoming retirement, in April 2015, Reid was asked about this accusation in an interview. He refused to "back down" from the accusation, despite its fraudulent nature, refused to apologize, and justified the claim by saying, "Romney didn’t win, did he?" Simililarly, he said, "I have no repentance, because the issue was important." In other words, this man is claiming that lies are fine if the issue is "important" and if the lie is politically effective in defeating an opponent. This is now the stuff of our political culture, not just that politicians lie, but that they unrepentantly boast of their lies and celebrate their effectiveness. Who taught this creep his morality? Is this acceptable behavior for Mormons? It has not been at all unusual for Reid to say vicious or absurd things in the Senate, but this really takes the cake. Even Debbie Wasserman Schulz never actually said it was acceptable to lie just in order to defeat Republicans, however much she has done it.