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Posted on 01/17/2003 1:44:16 AM PST by JohnHuang2
PONTEFICATIONS
"ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL," SAYS THE FAMOUS DICTATE in George Orwell?s 1945 novel of totalitarianism Animal Farm, "but some animals are more equal than others."
This statement, so true of our time that it has become a cliche, came to mind in mid-January as minority Democrats for several days turned the United States Senate into the "animal house" of Congress.
Despite the votes of the American people last November to take away their gimmicked one-vote majority, Democratic committee chairmen led by Tom Daschle (D.-S.D.) refused to relinquish their gavels or positions of power.
Defying the very democracy that is namesake to their party, these arrogant commissars blocked passage of the traditional "organizing resolution" that re-defines the members and chairmen of committees ? and that would have replaced Democratic chairmen with majority Republicans.
"This is a routine recognition of who won the election. It is being turned into a leveraging of trying to get their procedural agenda through to try to slow up the nomination process and potentially the legislative process," said a flabbergasted Senator Rick Santorum (R.-Pennsylvania).
"That is almost incredible," Senator Santorum said. "I mean, it?s tantamount to an attempted coup right here on the floor of the United States Senate!"
What Democrats were demanding by holding the Senate hostage was, among other things, money. The long-customary apportionment of funds allocates two-thirds of each committee?s funds to the majority party staff and one-third to the minority party staff. Democrats were demanding a 51-49 split of such budgets, reflecting the numbers of members siding with each party in the Senate.
Something like that, plus an additional 10 percent controlled by each committee chairman, had prevailed for the past two years by agreement between Democratic leader Tom Daschle and now-demoted Republican leader Trent Lott (R.-Mississippi).
But this had been an exceptional arrangement, the result of a Senate controlled by Democrats only because of the turncoat defection of just-reelected Republican Senator Jim Jeffords (I.-Vermont). It existed as tacit acknowledgement that Daschle?s control of the Senate was illegitimate ? that the American people had voted in 2000, as they would again in 2002, for a Republican majority of Senators.
Despite their undisputed majority in 2003, Republican Senate leaders struck a bargain that rewarded minority Democrats for their unethical, anti-democratic tactics. Instead of the traditional 33 percent allocation of committee funds, Democrats would be given control of roughly 40 percent of such funds. When extortion is profitable and results in no punishment, we should expect to see lots more of it from Democrats in the immediate future.
Those same Senate Democrats were quick to attack President George W. Bush for supporting equality and an end to racial preferences at the taxpayer-supported University of Michigan. This public university has operated a de facto racial quota system, gimmicking a point system to "reverse engineer" a desired outcome ? a student body that is 10 percent black, Hispanic and Native American.
Those applying to the University of Michigan and its Law School were awarded 20 out of a possible 150 points merely for being of one of these three favored minorities (but not of other historically-discriminated-against minorities such as Jewish-Americans or Asian-Americans). By comparison, a student who scored a perfect 1600 on his or her Scholastic Aptitude Test would be given only 12 points.
This racist tilting of the playing field has meant that an African-American applicant could be more than 900 times as likely to be admitted to the taxpayer-funded University of Michigan as would a Caucasian-, Jewish-, or Asian-American with identical grades and SAT scores.
In this racist system, some applicants definitely are more equal than others, just as was the case half a century earlier at Old Miss.
At Old Mich, such systematic discrimination has been rationalized as the only way to create racial diversity in the student body. The usual Leftist Democrat argument continues to be racist and patronizing ? claiming implicitly that African-Americans are so inferior that they cannot possibly get into the University of Michigan or other fine institutions of higher learning based on merit.
Minority rules ? different from those for the rest of Americans ? must be imposed, say these racist Leftists, as a kind of welfare redistribution so that those born with the politically correct skin colors can be given what they are too inferior to earn.
George Orwell, were he here today, would cut through this cant to expose the hidden agendas of Leftist Democrats. Among the little-discussed things he would notice are these:
In America we already have a plague of lawyers. The city of Los Angeles alone has four times more lawyers than does the entire nation of Japan, home to a population half as numerous as America?s. And a large share of these are trial lawyers, eager to sue, prey and enrich themselves upon the carcasses of doctors, engineers, manufacturers and others being driven from their productive professions by what trial lawyers have done to their insurance bills. This is why President Bush has been pressing for tort reform.
The Democratic Party in recent years has gotten 40 percent of all its campaign donation dollars from trial lawyers, and it has served them by creating ever more laws that open new opportunities for suing productive Americans. One leading Democratic Presidential contender for 2004 is John Edwards (D.-N.C.), who himself made millions as a trial lawyer and has gotten 95 percent of his campaign donations thusfar from that profession.
Is it a coincidence that law schools like that at the University of Michigan have discarded equality and put into place rules that give preference to African-American applicants? In 2002 in some states African-Americans voted 95 percent for Democratic candidates.
When Leftists tilt law school applications in favor of African-Americans, therefore, this is almost the same thing as tilting in favor of Democrat applicants over Republicans.
And by seeding law schools disproportionately with Democrats, a pattern is perpetuated of creating lawyers who will donate from their wealth disproportionately to the Democratic Party.
Think about this when you hear Democratic lawmakers attacking equality and praising the racist admissions process at the University of Michigan. What they are actually proclaiming is their own selfishness. Just like segregationist Democrats of 50 years ago, they are sowing the public square with racist seed from which they expect to reap a harvest of wealth and power for themselves, their political party, and their anti-capitalist ideology. Left to run amok, this growing plague of lawyers will eventually devour everything private in America, leaving only the government.
Prophetic as he was, Orwell is now being questioned by scientists such as Dr. Tim Roper at the University of Sussex in England. Various species of animals, according to Roper?s research, actually are "democratic," i.e., behave in accord with what a majority decides. In a herd of red deer, for example, when 62 percent stand up to move, the rest will rise to join them. A kind of "vote" has been taken, and majority opinion rules.
The real "animal farm" may in fact be far more "democratic" than today?s piggish Napoleons of the Democratic Party or other elitist Leftist-run institutions. In these authoritarian entities, ideals such as equality are trampled underfoot, people are judged not by the "content of their character" (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?s standard) but only by the color of their skins, and power is asserted arrogantly by minority rule.
This is good. He zinged Johnny Edwards as well. Thanks for the post, JH. (^:
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