Posted on 11/27/2012 4:48:01 AM PST by Kaslin
Post-election season is a time for healing, for putting aside the rancor of a long campaign and rediscovering what unites us. It has not been that way this year.
Prudence, one would think, if not generosity of spirit, should impel Democrats to be magnanimous in victory. Romney did receive about 48 percent of the vote. A little modesty among the winners would seem to be in order.
Instead, the gloating has been extravagant. Worse, liberals have gorged themselves on the same junk food they enjoyed during the campaign and cannot seem to resist under any circumstances -- slandering their opponents. The smears are so casual and commonplace that we become weary of responding. But we must protest, or someone new to politics may assume that we concede the point.
Appearing on "Meet the Press", documentary filmmaker Ken Burns attributed conservative unhappiness with the election to racism. "Race is always there in America," Burns opined. "It's always something we don't want to talk about. Do you think we'd have a secession movement -- a faddish movement -- if this president wasn't [sic] African-American? Do you think the vitriol that came out of some elements of the Tea Party?"
Ken Burns is a fine filmmaker. I met him once, and I found him to be engaging and amiable. It's painful to see him descend to this kind of defamation. Some disappointed Republicans are talking secession in Texas and elsewhere. This is proof of racism? Is this the standard of evidence Burns employs for his films?
Secession talk is the overheated emotional venting of the disappointed. It is not the exclusive province of Republicans. In 2004, Jonathan Gurwitz of the Houston Chronicle reminds us, Democratic talking head Lawrence O'Donnell suggested that George W. Bush's reelection would provoke "a serious discussion of secession over the next 20 years." When a fellow panelist on the TV show in question asked, "Are you calling for civil war?" O'Donnell replied, "You can secede without firing a shot." Bob Beckel was for kicking the southern United States out of the union that year. "Really, I think they ought to have their own confederacy." Alec Baldwin, among others, had threatened to leave the country if Bush were reelected.
Burns' flippant reference to the "vitriol" emanating from "some elements" in the Tea Party is nothing but an oft-repeated slur. The late Andrew Breitbart famously offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could produce audio or video proof that the "n" word was hurled at black members of congress as they moved through a Tea Party protest on Capitol Hill. The accusation of racism was broadcast far and wide. The lack of proof -- though hundreds of people had video cameras recording every moment -- is the untold story. Someone as sophisticated as Ken Burns should know that the Tea Party protests were multiracial, multiethnic affairs, featuring speakers of every background. What united them was concern that the government should stop spending money it does not collect.
False accusations of racism are an attempt to delegitimize those who disagree with you. Promiscuous use of the word also defangs it for actual instances of racial bias. Honest liberals should further consider that flinging the charge protects them from having to defend their ideas. It's simultaneously ugly and lazy.
Kathleen Geier of the Washington Monthly writes that conservatives use abstractions because they are attempting to conceal positions that "a hefty chunk of the population" finds "icky." That's the reason, she explains, that they talk of "small government, right to life, states' rights, free markets, right to work, judicial restraint, family values."
I can't recall the last time a mainstream American politician referred to "state's rights," but I'm pretty sure that whoever it was, he was a Democrat. It was the code term southern Democrats used to defend Jim Crow laws. Three quarters of the nay votes on the 1964 Civil Rights Act came from Democrats. Conservatives, as Ms. Geier would know if she actually read them rather than relying on cartoon depictions, do talk of federalism. If Geier thinks the constitutional order providing for state and federal governments is "icky," she should say so.
As for the "right to life," isn't that a great deal more honest than the liberals' habit of disguising a policy of unrestricted abortion up to and including birth as "women's reproductive health"?
Geier further confuses her readers by explaining that "judicial restraint" means "no rights for women, gays, or nonwhites."
On reflection, I take it back. What liberals like Geier need is not humility or magnanimity. It's basic information.
11/13/2012 9:13:00 AM
What now, conservatives? Relax, we’re winning the war
Richard Moore
Investigative Reporter
Not too long ago I wrote a column about how dynamic and vigorous the conservative movement in this country was and how quickly it was morphing into the most potent American political force of the young century.
The conservative wave of the future, I called it.
At first blush, looking at last Tuesdays election results, it looks as if my prognosis was just a hair off, having missed the mark by about a century. On Wednesday, the conservative movement lay seemingly battered on the shore, looking less like a tidal wave than a wrecked ship run aground by a tsunami.
Thats exactly what the mainstream media called it in the wake of President Obamas re-election. The presidents expansive electoral army of 2008, they intoned, was not a one-time deal after all but a durable coalition capable of dominating American politics for a generation or more.
To hear the tale, the Republican Party has lost everyone in the country except old, white men. Minorities, women, the young, environmentalists, urban liberals this is the alliance of victory and of the future.
I beg to differ. The election results notwithstanding, this analysis is deeply blinkered. Indeed, a close look at the returns indicates big trouble looming for the Democratic Party, not for the GOP.
No, I am not out in Colorado smoking newly legal weed. Consider this: Mr. Obamas durable coalition was considerably weaker this time around. As of Nov. 8, for example, the president had received about nine-million fewer votes than he did in 2008. Not all the ballots had been counted, and that number will shrink, but he clearly will receive substantially fewer votes than his remarkable 2008 total.
On the other side of the coin, the Democrats have their own growing racial problem their inability to attract white voters. Winning only 39 percent of 72 percent of the electorate gives the opposition 42 percent of the total vote from the get-go. That should give Democratic Party leaders pause because, given population trend lines, the proportion of white voters is likely to remain above 60 percent for at least the next 20 years.
None of this is to say the GOP doesnt have a minority conundrum. Any time you get less than 25 percent of the nonwhite vote, its a problem, and a growing one if the GOP cant make inroads into those constituencies.
So both parties have voting-bloc impediments beyond their respective foundations, but this begs the question, which is more likely to hold and enlarge its base?
That quite clearly would be the Republican Party. Lets take a look at why the mainstream media consensus is biased.
First, the voting blocs are mischaracterized. The Republican base is defined as a mass of old, white voters, while the Democratic Party is depicted as a broad and sweeping coalition. On Election night, for example, after exit polls were reviewed, ABC News blared out: Obamas winning coalition of women and nonwhites.
Look again, though, and there is no and in the mix. Mr. Obamas base is nonwhite voters and, as a practical matter, nonwhite voters only. Sure, radical white feminists, white urban liberals, young white college students and white environmentalists are there, but those activist pods represent a miniscule share of the voting population.
http://lakelandtimes.com/main.asp?SectionID=10&SubSectionID=68&ArticleID=16315&TM=35274.06
That is what happens when way too many Republicans, esp ones in congress,+Romney enthusiasts live in a fantasy world where most voters see things exactly the way they do. In that world all the polls are wrong, "they must be rigged because everyone agrees with me, I know it"
After all Rs in congress won 2010 didnt they? Wasnt that proof they would win 2012 without a fight? without convincing others (who are not Rush 24/7 members or loyal FNC watchers) needed to vote? Why figure out how to beat O when you know the voters agree with YOU already?
If Dems were so clueless and got beat in all those swing states after being sure they would win, like they did in 2004, we would certainly be gloating. Sadly some are still living in that imaginary world.
The question now is do they turn it around like Pelosi and CO did in GWB second term and make voters sorry they re-elected O? Or do Republicans show that that they are incapable of learning anything?
Yeah I remember how the left all agreed to work with Bush after he won in 2000 and 04. / sarc.
They play politics as a blood sport. With 48 % of the vote AND a majority in the House, there is NO reason to roll over and play dead. Our opponents sure would not if they had lost by similar margins. He’ll they would be fighting it out in the courts and trying roll back the election results ala Scott Walker in Wisconsin. WARNING TO THE GOP LEADERSHIP, DO NOT ROLL OVER AND TRY TO “ GET ALONG” . Fight for every inch of ground.
It doesn’t matter if they win or lose - the Left will never let up and until we get the same type rabid unity, they will continue to take us to the depths of ruin.
“Or do Republicans show that that they are incapable of learning anything?”
We have a “B I N G O”!
I have been thinking about this theme myself...mostly late at night when things seem more clearly in focus. It won't end well.
On a local Reno TV show this weekend, a man who I think is the head of the Democrat party in Washoe county said that Planned Parenthood does NOT do abortions and DOES do mammograms.
The woman who is the head of the Republican party in Washoe county tried to tell him the facts and all he did was snort at her. She finally laughed at him.
With that level of refusal to find out or know the facts is the level of Democrat leadership we have here in Nevada. That bleeds on down to the Democrat voters.
I cannot fix stupid—even on the level of County party chairman.
It’s going to be funny to watch. The folks in the cities are going to demand that the folks in the country keep paying for their lifestyle, their benefits, their social programs, etc.
This will breakdown to economics, ultimately.
However, the way it will deconstruct and decay will be along racial lines almost certainly. The system will fail, and it will fall to families to rely upon their own resources rather than the government’s.
The white and hispanic families in flyover country will have prepared themselves. Asian families too.
Broken families in the cities, of every color, will just dissolve into something very ugly indeed.
Races in the cities will start sticking together, and you’ll have race on race violence almost certainly.
All the resources are in flyover country. All the weapons and bases of any real merit are in flyover country (Fort Lewis being an exception).
The liberals will have a navy, and the rest will have the bases and the missile silos.
There is a reason why Quebec decided not to secede: they couldn’t afford to live outside of a country almost completely supported by Alberta.
Like a lot of people I've enjoyed Burns's docs knowing that he was a liberal. But even during his doc about the national park system some historians he quoted balked at the idea that national parks is America's best idea. My wife and I love the nat. parks, and we've visited many of them in the last ten years. But any person, like Burns, who thinks the park system is America's best idea thoroughly delineates the difference between a soft-headed lib like Burns and conservatives.
All libs should be in a mental prison...ALL.
Not bad from the likes of Mona Charen, who is an idiot when it comes to immigration.
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