I'm With Stupid: The Democrats Have A Hill Of A Time Cracking Heads In Philly
I loved being a liberal back in the day. Loved the speeches. Loved the passion. Loved the Hollywood A-listers working above their intellectual pay grade. Then, as Irving Kristol said, I got mugged by reality. Talk is cheap. Symbols don’t create prosperity. Hollywood isn’t reality. You only had to look at Philadelphia this week to see why.
Michelle Obama’s tour de force was a soaring Democratic Party speech, full of lofty ideals, calls for unity and a requisite references to slavery. The kind that used to make the hair on my neck bristle with excitement. It was also a throwback to Obama Mania of 2008. Except this time it was Michelle, the First Lady, who warmed over the optimistic porridge her husband had extolled almost eight years ago.
It was hard to find fault in the composed, engaging manner of the woman (who’d declared she wasn’t proud of America till it elected her husband). But it didn’t take long to recall that her Barack, who’d ridden to two terms as president on these sentiments, had failed to translate this same dream of a united America into action. Polls this week show America feels more culturally divided than ever— from 22 percent in Obama’s inaugural year 2009 to 69 percent in a recent New York Times poll..
“While its adherents call it a movement, the Obama/ Clinton/ Sanders party is actually a racket. A racket to protect its hold on the public purse. A racket to keep the public unions in control of the bureaucracy. A racket to keep the media buying into their narrative. A racket to soak private enterprise. It’s been successful at all of these lately.”
Playing favourites while talking equity is the hallmark of the two Obama terms. Michelle Obama’s words, like her husband’s, were gilded frames around empty pictures. But then, consistency is never the strong suit of progressive Democrats. Hillary’s lost emails are innocuous bits of fluff about yoga and wedding dresses. Until, in the next breath, the nuggets she hid from Americans became the vital secrets of the America state.
While its adherents call it a movement, the Obama/ Clinton/ Sanders party is actually a racket. A racket to protect its hold on the public purse. A racket to keep the public unions in control of the bureaucracy. A racket to keep the media buying into their narrative. A racket to soak private enterprise. It’s been successful at all of these lately.
This racket came complete this week with entertainers. Elizabeth Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Angela Bassett. Ted Danson and Al Franken showed up in Philly to distract the patrons. These progressive Mouseketeers had nice hats. They had a nice song (even if Paul Simon can’t sing it anymore). They had big smiles. They have a speech code to follow (“Guns, Gays and God” in Nancy Pelosi’s pithy phrase).
The racket also had to suppress dissent. In their bid to homogenize the world, progressives like Dunham and Silverman want you to know that any non-adherence to the rules of their party game is punishable by a furious social media onslaught and many lashings of indignation. Silverman’s smug diss of her former Sanders comrades ( “You’re being ridiculous”) gives you a brief whiff of their condescension cordite. It gets much worse, as any black Republican can tell you.
If you’re a loyal Mouseketeer, however, you’re in the fold forever. So while DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz had to resign when it was seen that she was putting her thumb on the scale in favour of Clinton, Hillary the Munificent immediately made her an honourary co-chair of her election campaign.
And my, they have such interesting notions.
Did you know that America is on the verge of becoming Nazi Germany? The helpful folks at the DNC— from senators and governors down to guerrilla street mimes— dropped “fascist this” and “totalitarian that” on Herr Trump all week. (It's cool in Dem circles to make light of the Holocaust dead, but you must get incensed over the Russians stealing your internal part emails.)
If you didn’t know who Joseph Goebbels was, noted Holocaust scholar Lena Dunham was on hand to connect the dots. Then tell you that the Republicans are the party of fear. (Airheads like Dunham throw around this guff moistly because they don’t know anyone who’s not in on the Dem racket. It’s always a guess about who lives beyond the security fence. So they use their imaginations.)
The Philly fanatics claim war never achieves anything (don’t mention WWII, the Cold War, the U.S. Civil War). So liberals hurl verbal, not actual, bombs at their enemies. To silence the wicked, the Vassar vigilantes employ an escalating scale of shrieking to bring you to heel. Depending on how vile you have been, the ad hominems go something like this:
1, Sexist
2. Racist.
3. Islamaphobic
4. KKK
4. Nazis
5. Hitler
Hitler being the gold-standard insult, you were hearing the Fuhrer and the Donald linked often by Bernie Sanders (faux Democrat) and Elizabeth Warren (Fauxcahontas). Because they’re immune to irony, the smug busters think this Poli Sci 101 fancy talk makes them sound clever. Because they’re out of touch with reality, they think they are all terribly brave delivering the middle finger to Middle America.
And in their huddled mass, they must act brave. Frankly, Donald Trump petrifies liberals. Watching Barack Obama push all the chips from his two terms into the pot on Hillary was stunning. That’s Trump shock. You only had to see Bill Clinton— who knows exactly what’s to come in the next WikiLeaks dump— unflinchingly extoll his wife’s virtues even as her luck is about to get much worse.
Remember, it takes a village to raise a child. But it takes the Democratic Party racketeers to raise a woman who doesn’t know how the internet works. God, I miss the good old days,
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy
Bruce's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience with successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also the best-selling author of seven books. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013).