One Destination

Why the Democrats Will Keep Losing
Opinion © 2005, by Guy L. Evans

August 22, 2005

Hugh Hewitt links his readers to an article in the Washington Post by Peter Baker (Monday, August 22, 2005) entitled Democrats Split over Position on Iraq War.

Of interest is the strategy the Democrats are employing to guarantee that they will lose more and more elections.

The wariness [in criticizing Bush’s handling of the war]...reflects a belief among some in the opposition that proposals to force troop drawdowns or otherwise limit Bush’s options would be perceived by many voters as defeatist.

The reality is that voters already perceive opposition to the war as defeatist.

The internal schism has become all the more evident in recent weeks even as Americans have soured on Bush and the war in poll after poll.

It should be noted here that Baker never sites any actual data. If there are any such polls, you would think that the Washington Post would want them repeated here verbatim. Baker makes an assertion that he fails to verify.

In delivering the Democrats’ weekly radio address yesterday, former senator Max Cleland (Ga.), a war hero who lost three limbs in Vietnam, declared that “it’s time for a strategy to win in Iraq or a strategy to get out.”

The omission is glaring: Max Cleland “lost three limbs” in a motor vehicle accident, not in combat.

The Democrats resort to a strategy of defining victory as defeat. In two years of combat operations, the U. S. has lost more than 1,800 troops. The U. S. lost more than 6,800 killed in 36 days of combat on Iwo Jima. From September 5 through September 10, 1914, over 500,000 troops from both sides were killed or wounded in the First Battle of the Marne River. The dictatorship of Iraq has been defeated, disbursed, and abolished. The people of Iraq elected a new government last year. If the war in Iraq is not a victory, then please define “victory”. According to the Democrats, victory in Iraq is simply not possible because nothing the Bush administration does will please them. However, being impossible to please is not a strategy for winning elections.

As for getting out, why? We’re still in Germany and Korea. We still have bases in Japan. We maintain forces in Cuba. Why get out of Iraq?

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, who rose to public prominence on an antiwar presidential campaign, said on television a week ago that it was the responsibility of the president, not the opposition, to come up with a plan for Iraq.

This is an admission by the Democrats that they aren’t going to take responsibility for the war in Iraq, and that they are going to hand over the entire operation, for better or for worse, to the Republicans. This makes the Republicans look like responsible adults, and the Democrats look like slackers. The “Hey! It’s not our problem” approach only guarantees that the voters will not look to the Democrats for leadership.

Steve Elmendorf, a senior party strategist whose former boss, then-House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.), voted in 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq [said,] “The difficulty of coming to a unified position is that for a lot of people who voted for it, they have to decide whether they can admit that they were misled.”

Again, Bush “misled” the Democrats into taking America to war in Iraq. The unspoken assertion here is that if Bush is such an idiot, what does it say about Democratic congressional leaders who were “misled” into committing the United States to war in Iraq? If Bush is a moron, and the Democrats are too stupid to outwit him, why vote for Democrats?

[Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.)] said, “We have to go on the offensive to show the American people that we’re not afraid to disagree.”

That’s about it, folks. The Democrats are going to “show the American people that we’re not afraid to disagree.” Be still my spleen. Added to being impossible to please, disagreeing with Bush doesn’t amount to a campaign strategy. If all the Democrats have to offer is reacting to initiatives by the Republicans, then the Democrats have no chance of capturing the voters’ confidence.

Unscientific Internet polls showed support rising [among liberal Internet bloggers] for a Feingold presidential run in 2008.

Oh, please! Oh, please! Oh, please! Oh, please! Oh, please! Oh, please! Oh, please! Oh, please!

In a Washington Post-ABC News poll in June, just 42 percent of Americans approved of congressional Democrats, a figure even lower than Bush’s.

This is interesting. Above, Baker asserted but did not verify that public approval for the war in Iraq is dropping. Here, however, he sites an actual poll (by his own pro-Democrat paper) showing that Democrats are less popular than Bush. Considering that Washington Post-ABC News polls tend to be slanted toward the Democrat position by several points, it could be that only 32 percent of Americans actually approved of congressional Democrats. Apparently, the fact that Americans don’t approve of congressional Democrats hasn’t been processed by anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-American-victory-in-any-war Democrats. Americans hate war, but they hate defeatist Democrats even more.

“Many of us are talking about the war, talking about the costs,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.)

When you want to publicly oppose something, always talk about the costs, never about he benefits. Yes, war carries a greater cost than we would choose to pay under normal circumstances. However, the cost of any war is accurately judged only by the cost of losing it.

“The American people are much farther ahead in their thinking about the war than the White House or the Republican Congress,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). “They understand we can’t continue down this same failed course in Iraq.”

Ted Kennedy, mind reader. The term “the American people” is indeterminate in number. We can’t know how many people Kennedy is talking about. If he means a handful of Americans, then he is right. However, his statement makes it clear that he is one of the congressional Democrats the Washington Post-ABC News poll is referring to.

The Democratic Party resembles little more than a group therapy for people with passive-aggressive, paranoid, oppositional, and negativistic tendencies. They have no idea how obnoxious they are. They cannot understand their negative and defeatist tone puts people off.

They are self-deluded. They are able to apprehend facts, but unable to interpret them. Their position is rigid. Any facts that do not fit their vision of themselves (such as the Washington Post-ABC News poll numbers showing their low approval ratings) are simply not apprehended. They don’t even go to the trouble of refuting the facts; they just don’t see them. Stop sign, officer? What stop sign?

They are self-destructive. They would rather quit than do the hard work of finishing the job. You can always ensure failure by quitting before the job is finished.

They are spoilers. Democrats are more committed to spoiling life for the Republicans than they are in winning elections for themselves, even if it means ruining their own chances for victory in the future.

Their behavior is maladaptive. They insist on doing things the same way over and over, choosing to relive what they think is their victory over Richard Nixon rather than face the facts in front of them.

They refuse to take responsibility for their own behavior. When their actions result in failure, they look for enemies to blame. It’s the perfect strategy for continued defeat. Try something that can’t work, and when it fails, look for scapegoats. Humility and self-examination be damned. Bush lied! Blaming others ensures that Democrats will be unable to learn from their mistakes. What is worse, they will be unable to learn from their successes, either.

Planning to thwart Bush’s expectations and being defeatist, negative, and obnoxious only guarantees that Democrats will keep losing elections. This is all bad news for the Democrats, but good news for America--we just can’t trust our nation’s future to a mob of self-deluded spoilers.

Guy L. Evans
Aurora, Colorado

Feeling Better about the Democratic Party
Opinion ©2005, by Guy L. Evans

August 16, 2005

Hugh Hewitt points his readers to an article by Dean Barnett. Barnett’s article quotes some subject matter from a leftwing blog that is XXX rated, so be forewarned. Barnett makes some sound observations about the recent election in Ohio:

“While [Paul] Hackett shared little with the liberal blogosphere in terms of substantive positions, they did have one thing in common--a mutual fondness for bilious and spiteful rhetoric.”

“In spite of being a moderate, bloggers fell in love with Hackett based on little more than a shared fondness for juvenile insults and a mutual loathing of George W. Bush.”

“The shift from the DCCC to the blogs may signal that the Democratic party will no longer even pretend to be a party of ideas, but will instead become a party of oppositionism somewhat akin to Great Britain’s current sad sack of Tories.”

Barnett notes that the lefty bloggers are passing around something they are calling a litmus test for Democrat candidates, but which on examination appears to be nothing more than the usual pointless babbling that is standard among leftist hate-mongers. Daily Kos has a copy of this litmus test, and says this about the matter:

“In reality, it’s about who controls the money. And that’s why the DLC is becoming irrelevant (hence the importance to them of the Hillary pact), and why it is doomed to irrelevance.”

Barnett notes what I have thought for some time, that the lefty filth-mongers are interested in nothing more than an unending verbal diarrhea of obscenities and hate--the more repulsive, the better. My conclusion is that the image of the Democratic Party is taking on the character of these immature, nauseating, self-indulgent twaddle-heads who are too self-deluded to comprehend that their own behavior is the cause of their political loses. Never mind their politics (if they even have any), such people are too self-destructive to be trusted with power.

No one wants a skunk in their living room. The more vile they become, the better I feel about the Democratic Party.

Guy L. Evans
Aurora, Colorado

Seeing Only Evil
Opinion © 2005, by Guy L. Evans

August 5, 2005

I just finished reading a great article by Barry Loberfeld at FrontPageMag.com,

Requiem for the Left
By Barry Loberfeld
FrontPageMagazine.com, August 5, 2005

The following excerpts appear on page 2 of the article:

On the face of it, the very concept of a “rape culture” is an absurdity. How does one logically contend that the crimes of sociopaths reflect the values of society? Are we similarly a pedophilia culture, a murder culture, etc.? What, then, do feminists gain from this demonization of everyone else?

The canonization of themselves. It is widely but erroneously believed that Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil” refers to the rejection of any notion of right and wrong. He was in fact comparing two warring archetypes of right and wrong: “good and evil” vs. “good and bad.” Among the differences, the man of “good and bad” wants an “enemy” in whom “there is nothing to despise and very much to honor,” he explains in On the Genealogy of Morals.

Picture, on the other hand, “the enemy” as the man of [“good and evil”] conceives him -- and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived “the evil enemy,” “the Evil One,” and this indeed is his basic conception from which he then evolves, as a corresponding and opposing figure, a “good one” -- himself!

It is the evil of the Other that determines the good of oneself. Consequently, the greater the former, the greater the latter. What moral distinction did self-professed “feminists” gain from opposing only rape? Not much: Who doesn’t oppose rape? In contrast, the anti-pornography campaign cast them in the role of crusaders -- against violence and for “equality” and “civil rights.” But even this placed them only in the company -- i.e., on the same moral plane -- as the Religious Right and many other Americans. But the “rape culture”! Now their moral distinction, their moral superiority, was unmistakable when contrasted to the great evil of the masses.

No matter what language a person uses, the Left reserves the right to condemn it for bias -- and to damn him as evil.

(And to exempt itself from any standard. ...)

The “moral” impulse of the Left is (to borrow the poet’s terms) the passionate intensity of the worst who think themselves the best.

Loberfeld concludes with:

Leftism constantly reveals itself for what so many have called it: a religious dogma. The religious aspects are innumerable, including the doctrine of a sinful humanity that needs the saving gospel of an elect that itself cannot fall from grace, an elect ordained to construct and control an earthly theocracy. The dogma is to be found in the attempts to juggle internal contradictions and insulate itself from empirical falsification. When the vision before one’s eyes is eclipsed by the vision behind one’s eyes, dogmas become outright delusions. And just as the sun itself is useless to a blind man, all the reality in the world will not liberate a mind enslaved by delusions, be they of grandeur or anything else.

There isn’t much to add, except that I have to eat some crow. I have never been a fan of Nietzsche, and I usually tell people to avoid him. However, in his statements quoted above, he hits the nail on the head. For some people, the only good is opposition to some self-defined evil. Define something as evil, then oppose it. Bingo! Instant moral superiority!

When a person convinces himself that he is able to define good and evil on his own terms, there is no end to the evil he can commit. And , as Loberfeld points out, the whole purpose of this exercise is to gain self-importance. The greater the evil you oppose, the greater your own good. Such people define themselves by the greatness of their enemies. This is narcissism with paranoid and passive aggressive aspects. This is nothing but self-determined self-importance.

And that pretty much sums up all radical, hostile ideologies: Self-aggrandizing, self-admiring, self-righteous, self-defining, self-entitled, and utterly unaccountable to any authority except their own. The Leftism that Loberfeld describes is basically the expression of arrogant brats who feel that they get to make up the rules by which everyone else will live.

In fact, Leftism is not an ideology at all. It is merely a convenient vehicle for immature minds to excuse themselves from any responsibility they may have for ruining their own lives and the lives of other people. No matter what damage they inflict on themselves and others, their remedy is to always assert that they are heroically opposing some greater evil.

Guy L. Evans
Aurora, Colorado