Democrats’ Fundamental Unseriousness By Jon Roth

by John Hawkins | October 22, 2007 2:59 am

I’m used to the Democrats being just plain wrong on key economic and national security issues, the issues that, at the end of the day, matter most to our country. Since John F. Kennedy’s advocacy for supply-side tax cuts in 1962, Democrats seem to have become totally oblivious to the empirical data proving the economic bounty to be enjoyed from lower tax rates. Lessons from JFK himself, or Reagan, or Bush, or Thatcher or the Republic of Ireland, or the Baltic nations, etc. do not move liberals who cling to high taxes with religious conviction that defies all logic. But I’m used to that.

Likewise, Democrats ignore history when it comes to national security. While counterfactuals are impossible to prove, history tends to show that tyranical regimes and their proxies respond only when there is a credible use of force against them. Leaving aside Neville Chamberlain’s disastrous delusions about Hitler, recent decades have witnessed free and decent nations stand on the sidelines while millions of innocents were slaughered by rulers of Cambodia, Vietnam, Darfur, Cuba, Lebanon, Burma, Tibet, North Korea, etc. And history has also shown that efforts at compromise, concession and conversation are interpreted by despots as nothing but weakness. Only when faced with either force or a credible threat of it, which political division renders impossible, have dictators proven to be malleable (mostly the pro-American type such as in Chile, South Korea and Taiwan, while the anti-American dictators tend to live forever). But, also post-JFK, I’m used to Democrats favoring weakness and appeasement.

Now, however, we encounter a Democratic party that is defined by manifest unseriousness as much as by anything else. How else to explain the galactically stupid timnig of the Armenian genocide resolution Congressional Democrats were cooking up? Whether it is Harry Reid declaring the war in Iraq lost before the “surge” even began or Barack Obama claiming the only thing American serviceman do is bomb civilians or Dick Durban equating American soliders with SS concentration camp guards or Pete Stark accusing the Commander-in-Chief of persisting in our war against al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed terrorists in Iraq for pure personal amusement or Charlie Rangel proposing a reinstatement of the draft so that he could vote against it or the contemptible Jack Murtha slandering U.S. Marines as murderers, this is a party whose leaders so unserious that it must be chalked up to ignorance. And when the federal Treasury is overflowing with a tsunami of tax revenue after the Bush tax cut that the Congressional prognosticators failed to foresee, Democrats who blame the deficit on those tax cuts are equally ignorant of simple statistics. And when Democrats claim that the 1930’s-era Ponzi scheme of Social Security (and, structurally, that’s all it is – a Ponzi scheme) is sustainable despite a demographic shift of enormous magnitude, they are similarly unserious. And while Brits are pulling their own teeth and sharing unwashed hospital bedding, Canadians entering lotteries to be able to see a doctor, and French seniors dying by the thousands during a heat wave, nationalized health care is still being exalted (also with religious fervor that belies all statistical evidence) as the panacea to our health care problems. When a party, along with some clearly moronic Republican remora, claim that a veto against expanding a health care program for poor children to middle-class kids as well as millions of adults is taking health care away from poor children, it is also unserious.

Why can’t Democrats just say that they want to put middle-class kids and adults on the federal dole for government health care? Why can’t they just say that they want to stick a finger in Turkey’s eye to hamstring the U.S. armed forces? Why can’t they just say that they believe rationing by government agencies, instead of by individual consumers, is the key to reining in health care spending? Why can’t they say that they want to play up any hint of American failure in Iraq in order to end the war? And why can’t they say that, while lower taxes have historically unleashed stupendous economic growth in America and around the world, they prefer a system that has more income equality even if it means less overall prosperity? Why? Because they are fundamentally unserious about the leading issues of the day and not willing to engage in an adult debate about income distribution, economic opportunity, governmental paternalism and the nature of the Islamic fundamentalist threat against America. By all means let them advocate all the policies that most Republicans oppose, but at least have the confidence to do it openly.

This content was used with the permission of GOP Bloggers[1].

Endnotes:
  1. GOP Bloggers: http://www.gopbloggers.org/

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