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March 03, 2005
Victor Davis Hanson on Why the Democratic Party is in Trouble...
This is from an interview with Victor Davis Hanson by a fellow blogger Chrenkoff ---
- Q: You are a life-long Democrat, a classicist and an old-style farmer skeptical of big business, yet after September 11 you’re finding yourself on the same side of the fence as Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice. Do you see a major political realignment taking place in American politics?
A: Yes, I do. Democrats are isolationists now.
In matters of the Middle East, a Mubarak or Saudi Royal family are the "other" and deserve the multi-cultural pass of not being judged, since they are just "different" rather than atrocious.
Those who worked in the trenches for George Bush were mostly volunteers and grass roots; those for Kerry paid, and often from monies from the likes of a George Soros.
When I see a Teresa Heinz Kerry or George Soros, or the Hollywood elite, or the pampered professoriate, I see out-of-touch utopians who lecture others to do what they never would. Sort of the Kerry SUV syndrome or the big mansions of a Barbra Streisand lecturing on conservation.
And in the media, by any fair historical measure, the blogs, call-in radio, and cable news, are far more the vox populi than Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and the CBS—the old reformers, who are now dull, timid, arrogant, huffing and puffing about "standards" and "being degreed" as they do some questionable things.
Look at Jason Blair, Rathergate, the Moyers PBS family octopus, the crazy CNN President's statements, and so on. The old reformers on four feet are the new entrenched on two inside the former farmer's house, to paraphrase Orwell who had seen the same thing in the socialist world of the 1930s.
If you wish to find a pompous, affluent, stuffy, condescending, bore then go to a university or big news room—and this was not always the case when Civil Rights, worries about pollution, and exploited labor needed support.
In response, these out of touch boutique liberals thought Michael Moore's scruffy looks meant he was a populist, even though he, not George Bush, would have been booed at a NASCAR rally. As far as Wolfowitz, go back and look who favored freeing the Shiia after the 1991 halt on Baghdad or who pressured Marcos to leave. And when I saw Rice stand up to Boxer and insist that her crazy tirade "It was the WMD, period" in reference to the 23 cases for war passed by her own Senate, I thought something is radically wrong.
Boxer was the entrenched bore who raced to her website to raise money from her embarrassing invective, Rice the calm and far better prepared newcomer. So yes, the Left has to go back and start over again, and quit thinking that just because you apply affirmative action to some redneck from your tenured perch or just because you would never be a friend of a Church of God worshipper that somehow makes you, in the words of Tom Sowell, "annoited." Such smug arrogance the elite left now shows. The Democratic Party reminds me of the Republicans circa 1965 or so—impotent, shrill, no ideas, conspiratorial, reactive, out-of-touch with most Americans, isolationist, and full of embarrassing spokesmen. I would listen to Lieberman, bring back Gebhardt, ignore Dean and Boxer, ostracize Sharpton and Moore, retire Ted Kennedy, and yes, let Bill behind the scenes triangulate Hillary to the middle-if they wish to win and resonate with Americans.
Mr. Hanson here makes a brilliant point that while the Democratic elite talk about making the world a better place it is mostly a matter of "do what I say not what I do". So they live in huge mansions, drive SUVs, fly private jets from coast to coast - all actions with serious environmental costs - then proceed to lecture everyone else about the need to "save the environment". What hypocracy!
Posted by rakhier at March 3, 2005 10:22 AM