Category: Politics

HoDean, always good for a quote:

“You know, the Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people. They’re a pretty monolithic party. Pretty much, they all behave the same, and they all look the same… It’s pretty much a white Christian party,” the former Vermont Governor [Howard Dean] told a San Francisco roundtable in reaction to a question about the lack of outreach to minority communities by political parties….
The comments are another example of why the former Vermont governor, who remains popular with the party’s grassroots, has been a lightning rod for criticism since being elected to head the Democratic National Committee last February. His comments last week that Republicans “never made an honest living in their lives,” which he later clarified to say Republican “leaders,” were disavowed by leading Democrats including Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

Pretty funny coming from a former governor of a 97% white state. One could say that, at least demographically, the Democrats are a “Christian” party, given that over 90% of Americans identify themselves as Christians, over twice the number that say they’re Democrats.
Unless “Christian” is a code word for “Evangelical” or “fundamentalist,” Dean probably means that the Republican party is the home for people who place their faith first in their lives. This nutty little man will drive off religiously serious voters, who tend to be morally conservative but are probably persuadable when it comes to, say, education or tax cuts.
And that’s bad for the country. Both major political parties ought to be friendly toward religious voters — they used to be. 1984 was the first year that (to my knowledge) a pro-abortion Democrat ran for national office. Evangelicals used to split their votes between the parties, and Catholics used to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.
Now, one major political party forces believing, orthodox Christians to betray or ignore their faith, if they vote for its candidates. You cannot be in favor of medical experiments on tiny human beings, gay marriage, easy divorce, condoms for schoolkids, abortion, and pornography, and reconcile that with Christianity. In the long run, you either cast your lot with the ways of the world, or the ways of God. It isn’t that the GOP is the party of God and the Democrats aren’t; that is far too simplistic. Rather, the Democratic platform contains elements that go against the plain meaning of Scripture and 2,000 years of Christian tradition. On top of that, a large number of Democrats hate — the word is not too strong — people of faith and disdain them with words normally reserved for people who commit mass murder or high treason.
Democrats will either abandon their quixotic quest to build their free-love, quasi-socialistic, pacifist utopia because the American people have rejected it, or they will convince Americans that the post-Christian society is the way to go. The only way they’ve been able to keep their party going is through racial demagoguery and promises to sustain middle-class welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare. Most Americans don’t think that 13-year-old girls should have sex, much less get abortions without their parents’ permission, and they don’t think two men can make a marriage. If the party would drop its advocacy of those two issues alone, it would cause serious damage by stealing away weakly committed Republicans. But then a lot of hard-core Democrats would have to abandon deeply-held religious beliefs of their own, whether or not they label those beliefs as such.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Gerhard Schroeder were losing his grip as the Eurofederalist constitution melts down, but no, he’s just having a bad photo-op. Since he’s got an election coming up in a few months and is likely to lose, I guess you could call it a John Kerry moment.

When I saw the headline above in the New York Times, my heart lept with joy. At last, we are getting serious about the war on terror!
Then I realized that the lawyers were going to Guantánamo to serve as legal representatives for the detained thugs. They weren’t going as prisoners. My heart stopped leaping.
Ah, well. Maybe someday.

I would bet a bottle of gin that not one in five American adults could tell you what a “filibuster” is. Perhaps one in ten Americans think it’s important, and that ten percent is scattered across the political spectrum. This is after weeks of public discussion about the proper use of the filibuster and the “nuclear option” (i.e., voting when the majority decides to vote).
But the chattering classes care about the filibuster, because it is the method by which the Democrats’ dwindling minority gets to keep “religious extremists” and pro-lifers off the Federal bench. The Republicans could have given Senator “Ku Klux Klam” Byrd the smackdown he richly deserves, pleased the GOP’s most fervent supporters, and made the judiciary more friendly toward economic rights, less friendly toward judge-made law, and possibly made some progress toward stopping the secular sacrament of abortion. The cost? Some nasty editorials in liberal newspapers. But those editorialists hate Republicans anyway, and would find something else nasty to say about them.
Yet a small group of Republicans managed to sell out their party, not to mention the constitutional principle that the Senate has a duty to examine and confirm judicial nominees. Even though they’ve been in the majority for most of the last decade, the Republicans once again demonstrate that they play like amateurs, and the Democrats play for keeps.

I want to like Hillary better, I really do. The Democratic Party has pretty much reduced its political agenda to government giveaway programs, unrestricted abortion, and the acceptance of buggery. They need to get serious about being a national party again, and Senator Clinton (D-Standbyourman) is one of the few leaders who can stand up to the shrill, narrow constituencies of her party.
So when I see her get tough on North Korea and their nukes, my heart is gladdened. During her time in the Senate, and especially with her work on the Armed Services Committee, she has tried to be a serious voice, and by all accounts she works hard to understand the issues under their purview. States are primarily about enforcing worldly justice, by enforcing the law internally and by defending against external aggressors, and anyone who wants to be president must take that seriously.
Yet through it all, she is a Clinton, and being a Clinton means that you have to get in a nasty cheap shot while ostensibly doing something for the public good. When Admiral Jacoby, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, delivered the assessment that North Korea has the capability to put nuclear warheads on missiles that can reach the U.S., Clinton called it

…the first confirmation, publicly, by the administration that the North Koreans have the ability to arm a missile with a nuclear device that can reach the United States….Put simply, they couldn’t do that when George Bush became president, and now they can.

She apparently forgot that her husband was president when North Korea promised to stop its offensive nuclear program in 1994, in exchange for fuel and other goodies. Well, they took the fuel, continued the program, and that’s why we’re in this situation today: because her husband accepted the word of an insane tyrant. The problem didn’t start with President Bush (and, in fairness, it didn’t start under President Clinton, either), it was inherited by him.
Disagreeing about the best way to defend the nation is healthy and good, but using the subject primarily for political ammunition is a grave betrayal of public trust. Someday, there will be a nationally-known Democrat with some degree of intellectual honesty whose name is not Joe Lieberman. Maybe that person will be Senator Clinton. She’s got about three years to make it happen.