Is it over yet? The race to see who the Democrats are going to nominate as their Presidential candidate, I mean. I only ask because the whole thing just bores me to tears and, frankly, either candidate would be a disaster. For the country, that is, as I think the Democratic Party as a whole is beyond redemption, and that's a shame.
People who know me also know what my reservations about Senator Obama are. Despite what he proclaims, he has no experience, particularly at national-level politics. More importantly, he has the judgement of a radish. I'm sorry, one does not sit in a church for twenty years, listen to the kinds of things said by Reverend Wright and be, as the Senator now claims, offended by it, and continue to park your butt in the same pew Sunday after Sunday.
To be very blunt, Senator Obama is lying about that. As the old saw goes, actions speak louder than words. Hearing those sermons, for twenty years, he either agreed with them or didn't find the statements to be that out of line. Given the anti-American and, frankly, racist nature of the Reverend's statements, there's a huge problem there in the Senator's complicity in seeming to endorse them.
Then again, dishonesty, intellectual and otherwise, don't seem to be a problem for the Senator. Remember, two days before he held a press conference in which he stated that he found Reverend Wright's statements to be offensive, Senator Obama flatly stated in another press conference that he had never heard Wright make any such statements. Which leaves me to wonder which of the Senator's statements on that issue we should believe.
Of course, there are also the Senator's deliberate misrepresentations of Senator McCain's statements about Iraq. Now, one could simply excuse those as just being politics, except for one thing. When Senator Obama first stated in a press conference that Senator McCain wanted to continue the war in Iraq for a hundred years, he was called on it by a reporter. If you remember, what McCain had actually said was that he saw no reason why, if it was mutually agreed to, that U.S. troops could not be stationed in Iraq under a SOFA, just as we presently do with Germany, Japan and the RoK. The reporter did, indeed, point that out to Senator Obama, and to his credit, the Senator did agree that that was what his notional Republican opponent had said. To his discredit, however, a day later he was back to saying that McCain wanted to continue fighting in Iraq for the next century.
Then there were Senator Obama's statements about troops in Afghanistan being so under-supported that they had to take weapons and supplies from the enemy just in order to be able to fight. The good Senator was even kind enough to cite both the news report and the Army officer he claimed to have spoken with that support that charge.
Problem is, that is neither what the report nor the Army officer actually said. Oops. Yet that didn't faze Senator Obama, and he continued to repeat those charges. It may just be me, but I can't help thinking about someone else who once propounded on the efficacy of the "big lie."
Now, don't think for a moment that I am in any way comparing the Senator to that individual. I am not. But I am questioning the Senator's character; you can not make contradictory statements, nor can you deliberately distort issues, and then claim that the nature of your character is beyond reproach.
Then there is Senator Clinton. Quite aside that I believe having a former President take up residence in the White House again is just a really terrible idea, and one that would make the Founding Fathers roll over in their graves, her character is even more suspect than Senator Obama's. Sniper fire, anyone? If she had told that tale only once, I might be able to buy into the explanation that she merely "misspoke." But she didn't tell it just once; she stated that story as fact on numerous occasions. I can only suppose that she somehow forgot about all the news cameras recording her arrival in Tuzla.
Then there is her dogged determination - which, at least, is in step with the majority of her fellow Democrats - to declare the fighting in Iraq a disastrous failure. Now, make no mistake, the campaign in Iraq has been seriously mishandled, from the very beginning. Yet, even with the mistakes, we are winning. She, along with others, predicted that the troop surge would be a failure, and she was wrong. And she is equally as wrong to, as we are succeeding in stabilizing Iraq, to insist on an "immediate" withdrawal.
I'm wondering what happened to the party of John F. Kennedy. It seems to have gone from "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" to "Ask me not to do anything that might inconvenience me." It would appear that we have indeed seen the torch passed to a new generation, one which firmly believes that if we just pretend nothing bad can happen to us, then nothing will.
Senator Obama proclaims that he would solve all the ills of the world by simply negotiating with those who are hostile to us. But how, I wonder, does one negotiate with people who are willing to fly aircraft into buildings because they believe God is telling them to do so? Senator Clinton, it seems, would rather base her national security decisions on what the liberal intellectual elites in Europe would have us do, rather than on what our nation's actual security needs are. Both would, it seems, rather base their economic policies on what the Democratically-aligned PACs want, rather than on what a healthy and vital economy requires in order to remain that way.
Not that the Republicans don't have their own problems with these issues, but those are subjects for another blog.
The GOP, at least, is not as beholden to its extreme elements as the Democratic Party is to theirs. There is, in fact, very little room for a "middle ground" in the contemporary Democratic Party. Someone like a Sam Nunn, for instance, could not exist in the party today. This is the same party that has given us Jimmy Carter, who now embraces organizations like Hamas, and condemns their victims. How is it, I wonder, that the priorities become so twisted that the terrorists are the victims, and the victims are the oppressors? And is this really the legacy that the Democratic Party desires for itself?
It seems that the Democrats have lost their way. Questions and debate are a good thing, a healthy thing, in the body politic. But, under the influence of it's more extreme fringes, the Democratic Party no longer seems interested in that. Rather, it tries to shout down those who disagree with them, as if by denying a voice to the other side of the argument somehow validates their own beliefs. The only thing that says, however, is that no opinion matters or is valid, except there own. They seem to forget that people of goodwill can disagree, and that it is a very dangerous assumption to make that your ideas are the only "correct" ones. More things have come to ruin from an excess of hubris than anything else.
There are some good ideas within the party, but those ideas have to be tempered with the realization that government is not the answer to everything, that there is such a concept as personal responsibility. When you remove that from the equation, then people will not be responsible, because no one is holding them accountable. That leads to anarchy and a welfare state, and would lead to a fundamental change in the nature of the United States that no one would find very palatable. It's called the law of unintended consequences.
What happened to the Democratic Party?
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