I see little difference with today’s Democrats. Just as many southern yellow-dog RATs were much more conservative than their party as a whole, yet still blindly voted for FDR, today there’s many blue-collar suburban families who are pro-life, pro-family, pro-gun, anti-illegal alien, etc., yet loyally support Obama. I live in a community like that so I know. I don’t see how heaping praise on yesterday’s demagogue socialists and falsely claiming they were “decent, honorable, patriotic” people is going to get these people to switch sides. Obama heaps praise on Abraham Lincoln, that doesn’t make today’s Republicans go “gee whiz, if Obama’s praising one of our past leaders, Obama must be for our side!”
>> Democrat patriots filled the ranks of the "Greatest Generation," Korean, and Viet Nam war troops as much as Republicans. <<
And this is different from today how? I can find boatloads of Democrats who “served honorably” in the first and second Gulf War and have unblemished military credentials. So can Rahm Emanuel, in fact he recruited many of them to run for Congress. I personally know someone from my H.S. class who became a top marine corp. intelligence officer during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He’s also an Obamabot and hates Palin with a passion. >>
They even served as Reagan Democrats. <<
Here’s the funny thing about “Reagan Democrats” and the freepers hailing the JFK era as a great conservative role model: Ronald Reagan was the ORIGINAL “Reagan Democrat” and in 1960 he was STILL a registered Democrat Party member. Guess who he supported that November? It wasn’t the “decent, honorable, patriotic” nominee of the RAT party. Reagan was a Democrat for Nixon. Reagan certainly disagreed that the pre-hippie RATs were great patriotic leaders, that’s why he switched to the GOP in 1964. Too bad “today’s Republicans” who swoon over JFK don’t follow Reagan’s beliefs about yesterday’s Democrats.
>> They do not yet fully recognize, it seems to me, that their grandfathers and fathers Democratic Party ain't no more. <<
They’re not alone. Many of us refuse to recognize the mainstream media fairy tale about how JFK’s presidency was Camelot and FDR saved America from the depression, etc. We don’t see these people as great patriots and role models. My father and grandfather’s party was Republican. If the Democrats had been the “honorable, patriotic” party back then, my family would have supported them. We didn’t support socialists then and we don’t support them now.
>> Why alienate them as they begin to "wake up?"
No need to alienate them at all. If any of TODAY’S Democrat’s are upset with what Obama’s doing and want to switch to the Republican Party for ideological reasons, I welcome them. Come on in. I just won’t repeat media fairy tales about how a bunch of crooked leftist scumbags from decades ago were “decent, honorable, patriotic” leaders. Since these guys are long dead I don’t think we have to worry about losing any votes over the matter.
Zell Miller and others are just plain wrong when they claim “I didn’t leave the Democrat Party, it left me”. The opposite is true. The RAT party didn’t change their views at all – Zell changed his. The RAT party was all for abortion on demand, gun control, envirowackoism, big spending, higher taxes, sucking up to dictators, gutting the military, being weak on crime, loose on illegal immigration, federal control of education, etc., etc., and Zell was more than happy to go along with it at the time. Zell had no problem standing with the likes of Carter and Clinton when they were popular. Yet now he’s supposedly pro-life, pro-family, limited government, and anti-Kerry and anti-Obama? Zell if you want to know who’s “changed”, look in the mirror. It certainly ain’t the RAT party platform over the last 40 years.
>> The Dems may have been "demagogue socialists since at least the 1890s" but they were our demagogue socialists. <<
Oh please. That’s like saying “Al Capone may have been a racketeering mobster, but he was OUR racketeering mobster. Today’s mafia just don’t make decent honorable people like Capone anymore. Gotta remind today’s mafia figures of how the mafia lost its greatness and they might leave and join our side” FACT: The Democrat Party is a criminal enterprise and has been on the WRONG side of history on every major issue for at least a century. I have no interest in helping the lamestream media attempts to rehabilitate their past failed leaders.
>> except for the most radical I do not believe that the Dems were 'Blame American First' until the Sixties Marxist-Alinsky hippie street rabble took over the Party. <<
I disagree. Pre-hippie era, one of the biggest strengths of the Republican Party was pointing out the Democrat Party of the 30s, 40s, and 50s was crawling with communist sympathizers and anti-American types. Ike won in ’52 by bashing the Dems as the party of “Communism, Corruption, and Korea” Nixon frequently took swipes at “Red Dean Dean Acheson’s state department”. One of the most unhinged, venomous and outright pro-third world dictator in “today’s Democrat Party” is Ramsey Clark, who was openly working to acquit Saddam and try America for war crimes in 2003. He’s so far left he makes Howard Dean look sane. Far from being an “anti-establishment” street hippie in the 60s, this guy was the ULTIMATE Democrat Party insider at the time – Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, son of Truman Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark. Another infamous outright communist sympathizer was Henry Wallace, who under FDR was Secretary of Agriculture (1933–1940),Secretary of Commerce (1945–1946) AND Vice President of the United States (1941–1945). There’s a long list of anti-American slime who reached the highest levels of power in yesterday’s “honorable” Democrat Party – Congressmen, Senators, Cabinet members, Supreme Court Judges, and so on. They weren’t “the most radical street rabblers” glaring away at the outside, they were the ones who ran the Democrat Party at the federal level.
If were we to believe that the pre-hippie era Democrat Party was mostly a “decent honorable, patriotic Party” with only a few “rabble rousers” outside of the power structure, then we accept the mainstream media talking points that all the Alger Hiss stuff of that era was simply a “witch hunt” brought on by a “red scare” of mean nasty paranoid Republicans. Most conservatives today will tell you that while Joe McCarthy was a nasty alcoholic and egomaniac, he WAS right about some communist infiltration in government.
Simply put, there’s a clear reason why the media wants you to accept their talking about how great all these dead Democrat politicians were, and wants you to believe that all the Democrat opposition to civil rights can be explained away by the fact the two parties “switched sides” and the Republicans for civil rights back then were supposedly “liberal” and the Democrats against civil rights of that era were supposedly “conservative”. Trust me, when the media promotes this stuff it’s not to “welcome today’s Democrats into becoming Republican because their party has changed”. The media has an agenda to whitewash the RAT party’s decades of criminal actions so voters will see them in a better light. It’s unfortunate so many of “today Republicans” are happy to go along with the media’s history revision of past events.
I leave you with author Don Capron’s information about yesterday’s so-called “honorable, decent, patriotic, pro-American Democrats” of his father’s era:
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From the earliest years of the New Deal until the late 1940's the government was deeply infiltrated with Communists and their supporters. There was no shortage of either messages to the President or evidence to support such infiltration. Yet, Roosevelt then Truman chose to ignore such evidence.
Adolph Berle, Undersecretary of State for internal security at State, went to Roosevelt in 1940 with a list of Communists in government provided by Whittaker Chambers, a party member who'd defected. Roosevelt, according to all accounts laughed it off and refused to deal with it.
J. Edgar Hoover, in 1943, informed Roosevelt of Soviet spying both within the government and at the Russian Embassy. On this occasion Roosevelt not only disregarded the evidence, he sent Harry Hopkins, his Domestic Affairs advisor, to warn the Soviet embassy that their phones were tapped.
In 1946 Hoover again went to the White House, this time providing Harry Truman with a list of known Communists and sympathizers still in the government. Truman's response was: "What am I going to do? Give those @#%&* Republicans up on the Hill something to bash me with?"
Alger Hiss who had been the number three man at State behind Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk, and who, most assuredly, at some point, would have eventually been Secretary of State. Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who purposely withheld allocated funding for the Chinese Nationalists, during their Civil War, that destroyed their currency and, thus, their efforts against Mao's Communists.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been conduits for even more damaging information than the atom bomb, for which they were executed. Lauchlin Currie, Special Assistant to F.D.R. Samuel Dickstein, member of the House of Representatives from Brooklyn.
William and Martha Dodd, son and daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Germany in the 1930's. Lawrence Duggan, State Department Director of Latin American Affairs. Harold Ickes, Sr., father of Clinton's impeachment flack, who was Secretary of the Interior. Finally, William Weisband, U.S. Army Signal Security Agency. This is just a very few, the most prominent or household names one might say.
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Indeed.
As a kid I went to the Chicago Historical Society one time, I think I told DJ about this once. Some guide was talking about Republican Lincoln and Democrat Douglas and how one was against slavery expanding and how the other thought it should be voted on and either the guide or someone from the peanut gallery added something like "of course that would the opposite today". (referring to the parties).
That does not mar the people of whom I speak: the rank and file. They were the Democratic Party and they were overwhelmingly traditionalists and patriotic. Over the recent decades the rank and file are seeing more and more how their Democratic Party ain't no more.
There was talk of Communists in the Democratic Party back then but the overwhelming MSM disparaged it.
I am not going to debate Parties. I truly do loathe both Parties beginning with the reason I stated above -- and the latest reason: those of both Parties who are trying to destroy Sarah Palin.
The MSM? disgusted with them too. I wrote letters to the networks in the '60s -- to which they replied "we're professionals and you're not."
Communists? I was a supporter of Joe McCarthy. I remember Murrow's signal (1953 I believe) that it was time to attack and destroy him.
I valued the American Opinion book stores (1960s) as one of the few sources for the rest of the news.
Democrat/Communist Henry Wallace you say?
Wallace, a Communist it was known at the time, ran as the "Progressive" Party candidate in '48. The rank and file Democrats would never have accepted him as their candidate. He was too much even for socialist leader Norman Thomas who left the Progressive Party because of communist influence over Wallace. Thomas would not have been accepted by the rank and file Democrats either.
The Democratic Party has long been acknowledged as harboring extremists, that's why it was so easy for the 1960s Marxist-Alinsky hippie street rabble to take over the Party -- and Democrat stalwarts, et al did in fact leave the Party.
Now it looks to me that many of the apolitical, rank and file Democrats finally are about to prove that America is more important than any damn political party. We can -- I hope soon! -- replace both Parties but there's only one America.