Diane Alden
Monday, Oct. 21, 2002

Call me irresponsible
Call me unreliable
Throw in undependable too.

Call me unpredictable
Tell me I'm impractical
Rainbows I'm inclined to pursue.

"Call Me Irresponsible" was an old Frank Sinatra/Rosemary Clooney tune. That song pretty well describes the modern Democratic Party.

Fluctuating between promoting the latest goofball expansion of government services paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, the Democrats also function as the "I'm agin' it" party. Time and time again they prove themselves to be irresponsible.

For instance, Sen. Patrick Leahy and the Democrats on his judicial committee playing spoiler. By turning down decent men and women for judicial appointments simply because they are conservative, they give the Democrats a well-deserved black eye. It would appear that the "party of the people" is now the party of a bunch of obstructionist feudal barons.

It boggles the mind that after decades of failed Democratic policies, from the environment to education, Democrats go out and create more bad policy. To add insult to injury, they create the bureaucracies that go along with them.

From outrageous environmental policies to dumb and dumber education nostrums, count on the Democrats.

From the ruination of the civil rights movement to disastrous forest health and rural community policy, count on the Democrats.

From the failure to promote the two-parent family and responsible attitude toward the on-demand abortion debacle, count on the Democrats.

From idiotic military to even more idiotic foreign policy practices such as bombing aspirin factories, count on the Democrats.

Democrats are now about the self-destruction of what is best and most important with regard to America.

Today's Democrats are not from the same ethic that gave us Harry Truman or even John F. Kennedy. The Democrats of today are the party of elites. This elite speaks out of both sides of their mouths. The new Democratic elite ethic is simply about more power for the state and an expansion or domination of the leftist elite. Much of the elite are un-elected bureaucracies and approved interest groups of one sort or another.

Democrats call themselves "progressives" and maintain that they are the party of the oppressed, of approved groups of victims, which, of course, they define. Meantime, their elite consists of a coterie of big-money corporate and legal entities, along with groups who live and die in identity political subsets. Throw in the favored collectivist Democrat laws, rules and regulations, and the return of feudalism is nigh.

Through federal grants and loans, the Democrats fund a regiment of NGOs outside the government itself. They are un-elected, self-selected know-it-alls who think America as a nation-state is a dead duck and they ARE the alternative. It includes many in academe, of course, and organizations which cater to identity and grievance politics, national and international.

Democrats promote ignorance and fads and follies by being the political arm of the National Education Association and the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood. Democrats, for their own gain, promote group-think by using class warfare, pitting one group against another. They are past masters at selectively employing the Bill of Rights and Constitution while denying the rights to those with whom they disagree.

Democrats, by and large, are gun control fanatics. By and large, they don't care a hoot in hell that God and Christianity were booted from the public forum. All too many of them turn a blind eye to Christian concerns and the intolerance of the radical left toward Christianity. They use Christianity when it suits them.

Certainly, Democrats could care less about the U.S. Constitution except to manipulate it to suit the goals of their worst control freaks. They hardly pay lip service to the concepts in that document any longer. It becomes more obvious that their supporters on the left harbor a spirit of totalitarianism. A spirit that lies deep and implacable in their rigid and pinched collectivist souls.

Democrats are obsessed with clinging to failed policies. Their obsession with those policies, and their denial of the failures, impede any practical solutions. They cling to the present form of Social Security and demonize those who are trying to tell them it is a system which is going bankrupt.

As the last few months have shown, Democrats will not accept solutions to real problems, because those solutions come from Republicans. Democrats refuse to fill vacant judicial positions because they don't like the conservative views of the candidates for those vacancies. Democratic senator Patrick Leahy would prefer to swallow his tongue than allow a conservative appointment to the bench.

That is both foolish and intolerant and an indication of how big a failure the ideas of the radicalized Democratic Party are.

After nearly four decades, the solutions of the Democratic Party don't work. Yet they keep trying to impose more of those solutions on all of us. They offer no apologies for having created the heartless, mindless bureaucratic super state, which they will hand off to their grandchildren, and yours and mine.

A super state which includes oppressive taxes and tax system on a national and global scale. A tax system which the former Soviet Union views as repressive and autocratic. The Democrats don't want to hear that the former Communist State has adopted a low flat tax and dumped the graduated income tax.

Thanks to the Democrats, America is forced to keep a tax system which penalizes not the really rich, like Bill Gates, but those with a little bit more than most. The guy or gal with slightly above average wages, or the self-employed person. Bill Gates and Ted Turner don't worry about taxes. But the guy who owns a small machine shop or a successful outlet store does. The family doctor and the airline pilot flying you to Atlanta have a lot to worry about with taxes.

Nonetheless, the Democrats barely give a second thought to raising or imposing higher taxes. The ultimate radical Democrat, Bill Clinton, gave us the biggest tax increase of all times and then made it retroactive. King George and Prince John would be proud.

In addition, it is Democrats who created a crushing burden of regulations and rules for absolutely every human activity. They seem to stay up nights thinking of more ways to control or regulate people.

That control freak aspect makes the Democrats the party of NO: no smoking, no hunting, no nothing – except for sex. Irresponsible sex outside marriage with as many people or creatures as possible passes muster. That is because it suits their purpose to deconstruct and destabilize the nuclear family, religious institutions, and prohibitions and standards based on the Ten Commandments. Yet with sex as well, they would willingly tax it, license it and impose a fee if they thought they could get away with it.

The biggest control freaks are not the Christian Right but rather the radical left and the Democratic Party. They impose their politically correct views on everyone, and if you don't go along you are racist, homophobic, sexist or "mean spirited." Their Orwellian imposition of the deathly gray silence of political correctness speaks louder than a preacher at a tent revival meeting.

The progressive left continually puts that tendency into the laws and regulations of the United States. Their mindset serves to make our problems worse even while they destroy individuals, families and communities. That control freak thought pattern adds crushing burdens to our everyday lives. The Democratic Party is the home of the control freaks of our era.

Meanwhile, their clients, special interests, identity groups, take the crumbs they are thrown and call it wonderful. Any minority, especially blacks, who think they are better off because of the Democrats don't have a clue about their own history and their own best interests.

The Road to Hell Is Paved

Progressive or Socialist Democratic policy is pushing us down a dark path to a hellish place, and it is all being accomplished with the best of intentions.

While Democrats supported civil rights, they failed in the aftermath. For over three decades, Democrats' own good intentions and blindness damaged this nation. But they meant well; I am sure Lyndon Baines Johnson meant well.

LBJ's miserable War on Poverty and his expansion of the Vietnam War helped create the disconnected society in which we live. The War on Poverty, in particular, betrayed the civil rights movement. Out of the Democrats' good intentions came an intractable underclass. A class which has lost hope, lives in ignorance and decadence, a class that needs a miracle to change the mindset that controls it.

Democrats, devoted to the War on Poverty, destroyed the black family and black communities in the U.S. Before the War on Poverty, a majority of African-American children were born into two-parent families. These days, nearly 70 percent are born to young, poor, single women.

Before the War on Poverty, black communities, despite Jim Crow laws, were doing well in such diverse places as Detroit and New York. Black dads were finding their way into the middle class. In many areas, black children were doing better in school than were their white counterparts. That was true in Harlem and that was true in many major American cities.

Black culture and society might have thrived except for the selfishness of Democrats, who saw a client group they could keep on the government plantation by offering more and more federal programs and handouts.

Before the Democrats' War on Poverty, blacks could point to a proud history of survival and triumph over the odds, in spite of racism and bigotry. Yet Democrats continue to promote victim status of blacks and the less important aspects of black history.

In a comprehensive article in a recent City Journal, African-American historian James McWhorter reminds us:

"... but a history only of horrors cannot inspire. What could be more demoralizing than 'Mba Mbulu's Ten Lessons: An Introduction to Black History,' for example, a chronicle mostly of slavery and segregation, with 'White People's Attacks on Other People' and 'Back in Our Place' as typical chapter titles? Except for a little dollop of blacks' contributions to what is called 'White History,' the overall message is a grim saga of victimization. This kind of history is deeply damaging to blacks. When 'Learn your history' means 'Don't get fooled by superficial changes,' today's New York City Street Crimes Unit can't be distinguished from yesterday's Bull Connor, and our aggrieved despair over our sense of alienation from the national fabric remains as sharp as ever. Could any people find inner peace when taught to think of their own society as their enemy?"

McWhorter mentions Chicago's "Bronzeville" as an example of pre-LBJ War on Poverty. He relates:

"As the city industrialized after 1875, blacks occupied a three-by-15-block enclave on the South Side, and the Great Migration from the South swelled the black population to 109,548 by 1920. … Bronzeville was a leading center of innovation in jazz, nurturing Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Earl 'Fatha' Hines. Oscar Micheaux's film company, producing a pioneering oeuvre of 'race movies.' … This was a thriving civic community, supporting branches of various civic organizations, including a YMCA settlement house that ran job-training programs. Bronzeville's churches, all 92 of them, stressed 'community uplift'; they ran lodging facilities for new arrivals from the South and employment agencies to shunt them into the workforce. Olivet alone had 53 departments devoted to community programs. Bronzeville produced several political leaders, including the first black congressman since Reconstruction, Oscar DePriest."

Bronzeville's Provident Hospital was "one of the top black hospitals in the country, employing many of black Chicago's [by 1929] 176 doctors and running a nursing school. One of Provident's founders was the extraordinary Daniel Hale Williams, who was the first doctor in America to operate upon the human heart and the only black doctor among the 100 charter members of the American College of Surgeons." Odd, these blacks managed all this without the help of Democrats or well-intentioned liberals or leftists of either race.

In American public schools these days, American black history is presented as a mythical narrative of abuse and separateness with very few successes. Black intellectuals and politicians eulogize the grievance collectors or the black radicals. They do not promote the history of black heroes and heroines such as Crispus Atticus, the Buffalo Soldiers, black cowboys, black women who pioneered in the West, or the Civil War warriors who fought on both sides of the conflict.

How few relate the tales of Black Jack Pershing and his contingent of Rough Riders. Few young black males find inspiration in the stories of the Tuskegee Airmen or the soldiers and sailors of Vietnam and the Gulf War. They read the latest misery index of Toni Morrison or Cornell West and think that is what blacks are about.

It is inconvenient for Democrats and their friends on the left to give credit to modern great black businessmen and scholars like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Ward Connerly, Condi Rice and Colin Powell. But these individuals succeeded in spite of whatever racism or bigotry existed in their lives.

Democrats should be ashamed. They have betrayed progress for blacks – for all Americans, for that matter. They won't free them OR the rest of us from the pigeonholes and stereotypes they have plugged us into. Examples of this abound: the recent TV appearance of singer Harry Belafonte and a bug-eyed, ranting Phil Donahue demonizing and crying "Uncle Tom" as they castigated successful conservative blacks like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.

It was terrible to watch because I lost any respect I had for Belafonte. Forget Donahue; a bigger demagogue would be difficult to find and everyone knows that. But when I was growing up in the '50s, Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Sammy Cook and Johnny Mathis trumped Elvis in my book any day of the week. I will never hear Belafonte speak or sing again without regretting that I spent my hard-earned babysitting money on his albums and records.

Belafonte is just another example of how the Democratic left can be malicious when a member of a minority group wanders off the collectivist Democrat plantation. They save their worst invective for a Ward Connerly, Colin Powell or Walter Williams, who find that life is good and people are friendly, on the other side of the ideological fence.

Democrats will not allow any of us to move on and really "progress." They will never allow us to live outside their collectivist fantasies. They prefer the political chains they have forged for certain groups of people; chains which are not merely political but spiritual and mental as well.

One of the saddest commentaries in the history of America's political parties took place in the last 35 years. The fact is that the Democratic Party has evolved into something Harry Truman or JFK would not recognize. Those Democrats were about hope and freedom and opportunity. They were not about keeping people down by making them dependent and demonizing those who disagree with them.

If their policies and ideals actually worked, that would be one thing, but they don't work. We are a dumber nation than we were in 1965. We are in the depths of spiritual, moral and ethical poverty that has no comparison in American history. Our economy is more skewed and less free because of oppressive taxes and regulations, and the terrible cohabitation between corporate America and government and the kind of group politics which Democrats promote.

It is a horror that the radicalized Democrats took the civil rights movement and destroyed it. With good and not-so-good intentions they used it to acquire political power. In the process they created dependent classes, including African-Americans. By a huge majority, blacks vote against their own best interests each and every time they vote for a Democrat.

As it is, Democrats have been eminently successful in convincing blacks that Republicans had nothing to do with the improvement in their lot over the years. They have also succeeded, with the help of revisionist history and the media, to tell the big lie over and over again.

The Democrats won't tell you that more Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act than did Democrats. Without Republicans that Act would have failed, because Southern Democrats like Fritz Hollings and Al Gore Sr. would have held all the cards and voted against it.

Wildfires and the Election of 2002

I don't doubt that the Western wildfires of the last few years and especially this last summer are being forgotten. I don't doubt that some few thoughtless people, in the states which have experienced those fires, will vote for Democrats. It is tragic, but Democratic senator Max Baucus of Montana, the same Baucus who never saw an environmental law he didn't vote for, will return to the Senate.

That will be the case unless Montana can come up with a quickie write-in candidate to replace Republican Mike Taylor. Taylor bailed when the going got tough. Democrats implied that he was gay and a business cheat. Neither of those implications was true, but the damage had been done.

I caution fence sitters who live in the West, if you want your state to become one of the add-ons to the rural impoverished, vote for a Democrat.

When 6 million acres went up in smoke out West this past summer, even old leftie radical Democrat George Miller of California decided to rethink his knee-jerk and lock-step collectivist environmental stance. The former war protester, who is proudly a "democratic socialist," agreed to a commonsense forest management policy bill. Along with Democrat Peter De Fazio of Oregon, they were about to do something smart and vote for common sense. Democrat lefties, however, die hard.

These people are in the back pocket of the environmental movement, a movement which has been co-opted by dried-up Marxism in order to accomplish a collectivist agenda.

In any event, Miller and De Fazio renounced their promise and did not join four Democrats and 19 Republicans on the House Resources Committee to expedite forest management by allowing streamlining of environmental reviews. Because of their change of mind, the outlook for a reform bill in the Senate is bleaker than bleak. That is, unless the Republicans can take the Senate back by a LARGE majority.

The nation is in desperate need of new environmental policy and reforms. But the "progressive" left, i.e. the Democratic Party, won't allow it. It should be apparent to all but the most ideological that they are regressive not progressive. It should be apparent that they represent nothing more than graying and decayed '60s radicalism.

Democrats have no vision for the future except to divide and conquer, dumb down and burn up. Then turn the lumpen proletariat and the nation over to some super state uber alles, like the U.N.

As former President Bill Clinton stated to the British Labour Party a few weeks ago: "The great challenge of the first decade of the 21st century, therefore, is to move from interdependence to integration with a real global consciousness." Clinton also stated this could be brought about by the creation of a global security strategy and increased international cooperation, such as aid contributions. (Read: money from US to THEM.) "The United Nations will serve an indispensable role in this endeavor."

Thanks, Bill. Thanks, Democrats. We know where your hearts are, and they are not with the best interests of the United States.

Meanwhile, our lands and public places are in terrible shape, our borders are sieves, and we fail miserably to educate our native-born children, forget about adequately educating immigrant children. Thanks to the feel-good policies of Democrats, we cannot expect the same kinds of outcomes as we did for immigrants who entered in 1910. At that time immigrants were expected to pledge and owe allegiance to one country and one country only. Of course, that country was the United States of America. Immigrants were required to speak English and know American history. Not any more, thank you Democrats.

Thanks to Democrats and Democratic groupthink, we are facing residents from other countries, not citizens, who have all the perks and none of the responsibilities, and little knowledge or understanding of the American system and what it means to be a citizen. It is enough for Democrats that immigrants vote by huge margins for the party that promises them everything by supplying them with more "stuff." More stuff through transfer payments taken from one group to give to another.

(*Hispanics vote for Democrats, even after two or more generations, by a 3-to-1 margin. Even among Cuban-Americans, the tendency to vote for Democrats grows each election cycle. Blacks vote for Democrats by an 85 percent to 90 percent margin. Immigration has kept down the wages of America's poor, according to the leftist Rand Institute, by 5 percent. It is a myth that immigrants take jobs Americans don't want, a convenient political myth.)

Thanks to the active deconstruction of our society, primarily rendered by radicalized '60s Democrats, America is facing a loss of identity. It is also facing division, apathy, decadence and dishonor, not to mention a less than prosperous or secure future.

We must hold Democrats responsible for their failures. Call them irresponsible, call them Democrats, or call them unreliable utopian opportunists of the modern era. Call them anything you want to call them, just don't vote for them.

To comment, write alden@newsmax.com or visit my website at www.aldenchronicles.com.

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