"The Problem with Democrats? - They are not Liberal"
Sydney M. Williams
Most Democrats in this country, like their Socialist brethren in Europe, profess themselves liberals; they claim to represent the interests of the poor and disenfranchised. The truth is more complicated. Despite the fact that the partners of Goldman Sachs provided twice as much money to Barack Obama’s campaign as they did to John McCain’s in 2008, Republicans are skewered by Democrats and the press as lackeys of the monied classes. Democrats represent the leadership of large unions, who themselves are increasingly distanced from the people they supposedly represent. Too many Democrats are not small “d” democrats. President Obama’s decision to side with the teachers unions in Washington, D.C., in the issue of vouchers, against the wishes of poor black families is one instance. The decision by the Administration to support the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in their bid to prevent Boeing from opening a second assembly line for the 787 Dreamliner is another. Not only was the move highhanded, it reflected arrogance and a contemptuous disregard for the non-union workers in South Carolina.
In his speech on the Middle East on May 19 at the State Department, there was a whiff of Saul Alinsky in President Obama’s speech when he said, “…after decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be.” As it should be? In whose opinion?
Last December Charles Rangel was censured by the House for misconduct, including failure to pay taxes on income he had not reported. At the time, he was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which writes tax legislation. Mr. Rangel was questioned by a Washington Times reporter, following the censure vote; the reporter asked if the average American citizen had committed a similar felony would he be treated more harshly? Mr. Rangel’s response was: “I don’t deal in average American citizens.” Too bad. If he did, he would never have engaged in such nefarious activities.
Elizabeth Warren, who hopes to be confirmed as the White House’s latest Czarina as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, stated last week that “we will build a strong enforcement arm.” Banks, under her guidelines, would be subject to twenty new reporting mandates, with inner city activists (community organizers?) having a say on credit grants, thereby raising the risks for banks. Borrowers – and perhaps taxpayers – will have to pay for the likelihood of increased write-offs. A thousand banks, according to estimates, are expected to fail, as the cost of compliance will impair their margins. The consequence will be more limited access to credit for smaller and mid-size businesses and higher interest costs for those that can find the funds. Banks too big to fail will become even bigger; they risk reaching a size of being too big to save. (Of course by then Ms. Warren will have vacated her office, leaving any problems to a future administration.)
Katherine Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services immodestly and immoderately claimed that Representative Paul Ryan’s proposal to address the looming Medicare crisis, while not proposing one of her own, as being a plan that would “cause some seniors to die sooner.” She, of course, said nothing regarding the clause in Affordable Care Act that removes $500 billion from Medicare, in order to make Obamacare “affordable.”
While on the subject of Mr. Ryan, the ad that Democrats have been running showing a Paul Ryan look-alike wheeling an elderly grandmother off a cliff is the most distasteful (and dishonest) political ad since the one run during the Lyndon Johnson campaign in 1964, which showed a young girl sitting in a field amid beautiful flowers. The scene ends in a mushroom cloud with a warning of the risks of electing Barry Goldwater.
President Obama, in his “teleprompted” speeches, has a tendency to use “my” and “I” more than any recent President. He is quick to assign blame and, to the best of my knowledge, has never uttered a mea culpa. He alienated America’s longest standing ally when he returned the bust of Churchill on February 13, 2009 and last week he upset the one real democracy in the Middle East – Israel. High gas prices are blamed on “evil” oil companies and have nothing to do with the domestic supply he has constrained. He wants to tax them more, failing to acknowledge that corporate tax increases are always passed on to consumers.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has killed an estimated 1000 demonstrators since calls for reform began in March, and then another twenty at a funeral last week for some of the victims. Nevertheless, President Obama, in a speech last Thursday, said that Mr. Assad still had a choice: “He can lead that transition, or get out of the way.” A thousand protestors killed, and Assad still has a choice? Without giving him credit, Mr. Obama parroted Mr. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” Instead, he credited himself: “And that’s why two years ago in Cairo, I began to broaden our engagement…” But unless he starts leading from the front, “Arab Springs” are destined to become long, hot summers. As George Friedman of Stratfor has written: “All demonstrations are not revolutions. All revolutions are not democratic revolutions. All democratic revolutions do not lead to constitutional democracy.”
European liberals are far less liberal than their counterparts in America. The reaction in Europe to Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged run-in with an immigrant African maid in New York demonstrates a supercilious hubris that treats the maid as a non person. Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur was quoted by Mark Steyn over the weekend: “We and the Americans do not belong to the same civilization.” The police, M. Daniel wrote, should have known that M. Strauss-Kahn was “not like other men.” Jean Daniel could not understand why “this chambermaid was regarded as worthy and beyond any suspicion.” M. Daniel must be right. We cannot belong to the same civilization. I am not sure that the Marquis de Lafayette would admit to being a Frenchman today.
The French liberal intellectual, Bernard-Henri Levy, in defending Dominique, speaks of everything M. Strauss-Kahn has done at the IMF to help the world “avoid the worst.” He says that the IMF has worked to help “the most fragile and proletarian nations.” However, the IMF last year spent a third of their funds helping to salvage French and German banks who own a large portion of PIIGS’s debt. That sounds self-serving, which is okay with me, but why not say so?
It is the hypocrisy that is so obnoxious. Ninety percent of all politicians are bloviating blowhards; they are masters of saying what they believe their listeners want to hear – think of Mr. Obama’s attempt at redemption in his speech last weekend to AIPAC. While I have problems with the social conservative element of the Republican Party, there is nothing quite as off-putting as the arrogant “liberal” who is disdainful of the very people he or she purports to represent. It is little wonder that politicians rank below used car salesmen in terms of respect.
Thought of the Day
“The Problem with Democrats? – They are not Liberal”
May 24, 2011Most Democrats in this country, like their Socialist brethren in Europe, profess themselves liberals; they claim to represent the interests of the poor and disenfranchised. The truth is more complicated. Despite the fact that the partners of Goldman Sachs provided twice as much money to Barack Obama’s campaign as they did to John McCain’s in 2008, Republicans are skewered by Democrats and the press as lackeys of the monied classes. Democrats represent the leadership of large unions, who themselves are increasingly distanced from the people they supposedly represent. Too many Democrats are not small “d” democrats. President Obama’s decision to side with the teachers unions in Washington, D.C., in the issue of vouchers, against the wishes of poor black families is one instance. The decision by the Administration to support the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in their bid to prevent Boeing from opening a second assembly line for the 787 Dreamliner is another. Not only was the move highhanded, it reflected arrogance and a contemptuous disregard for the non-union workers in South Carolina.
In his speech on the Middle East on May 19 at the State Department, there was a whiff of Saul Alinsky in President Obama’s speech when he said, “…after decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be.” As it should be? In whose opinion?
Last December Charles Rangel was censured by the House for misconduct, including failure to pay taxes on income he had not reported. At the time, he was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which writes tax legislation. Mr. Rangel was questioned by a Washington Times reporter, following the censure vote; the reporter asked if the average American citizen had committed a similar felony would he be treated more harshly? Mr. Rangel’s response was: “I don’t deal in average American citizens.” Too bad. If he did, he would never have engaged in such nefarious activities.
Elizabeth Warren, who hopes to be confirmed as the White House’s latest Czarina as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, stated last week that “we will build a strong enforcement arm.” Banks, under her guidelines, would be subject to twenty new reporting mandates, with inner city activists (community organizers?) having a say on credit grants, thereby raising the risks for banks. Borrowers – and perhaps taxpayers – will have to pay for the likelihood of increased write-offs. A thousand banks, according to estimates, are expected to fail, as the cost of compliance will impair their margins. The consequence will be more limited access to credit for smaller and mid-size businesses and higher interest costs for those that can find the funds. Banks too big to fail will become even bigger; they risk reaching a size of being too big to save. (Of course by then Ms. Warren will have vacated her office, leaving any problems to a future administration.)
Katherine Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services immodestly and immoderately claimed that Representative Paul Ryan’s proposal to address the looming Medicare crisis, while not proposing one of her own, as being a plan that would “cause some seniors to die sooner.” She, of course, said nothing regarding the clause in Affordable Care Act that removes $500 billion from Medicare, in order to make Obamacare “affordable.”
While on the subject of Mr. Ryan, the ad that Democrats have been running showing a Paul Ryan look-alike wheeling an elderly grandmother off a cliff is the most distasteful (and dishonest) political ad since the one run during the Lyndon Johnson campaign in 1964, which showed a young girl sitting in a field amid beautiful flowers. The scene ends in a mushroom cloud with a warning of the risks of electing Barry Goldwater.
President Obama, in his “teleprompted” speeches, has a tendency to use “my” and “I” more than any recent President. He is quick to assign blame and, to the best of my knowledge, has never uttered a mea culpa. He alienated America’s longest standing ally when he returned the bust of Churchill on February 13, 2009 and last week he upset the one real democracy in the Middle East – Israel. High gas prices are blamed on “evil” oil companies and have nothing to do with the domestic supply he has constrained. He wants to tax them more, failing to acknowledge that corporate tax increases are always passed on to consumers.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has killed an estimated 1000 demonstrators since calls for reform began in March, and then another twenty at a funeral last week for some of the victims. Nevertheless, President Obama, in a speech last Thursday, said that Mr. Assad still had a choice: “He can lead that transition, or get out of the way.” A thousand protestors killed, and Assad still has a choice? Without giving him credit, Mr. Obama parroted Mr. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” Instead, he credited himself: “And that’s why two years ago in Cairo, I began to broaden our engagement…” But unless he starts leading from the front, “Arab Springs” are destined to become long, hot summers. As George Friedman of Stratfor has written: “All demonstrations are not revolutions. All revolutions are not democratic revolutions. All democratic revolutions do not lead to constitutional democracy.”
European liberals are far less liberal than their counterparts in America. The reaction in Europe to Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged run-in with an immigrant African maid in New York demonstrates a supercilious hubris that treats the maid as a non person. Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur was quoted by Mark Steyn over the weekend: “We and the Americans do not belong to the same civilization.” The police, M. Daniel wrote, should have known that M. Strauss-Kahn was “not like other men.” Jean Daniel could not understand why “this chambermaid was regarded as worthy and beyond any suspicion.” M. Daniel must be right. We cannot belong to the same civilization. I am not sure that the Marquis de Lafayette would admit to being a Frenchman today.
The French liberal intellectual, Bernard-Henri Levy, in defending Dominique, speaks of everything M. Strauss-Kahn has done at the IMF to help the world “avoid the worst.” He says that the IMF has worked to help “the most fragile and proletarian nations.” However, the IMF last year spent a third of their funds helping to salvage French and German banks who own a large portion of PIIGS’s debt. That sounds self-serving, which is okay with me, but why not say so?
It is the hypocrisy that is so obnoxious. Ninety percent of all politicians are bloviating blowhards; they are masters of saying what they believe their listeners want to hear – think of Mr. Obama’s attempt at redemption in his speech last weekend to AIPAC. While I have problems with the social conservative element of the Republican Party, there is nothing quite as off-putting as the arrogant “liberal” who is disdainful of the very people he or she purports to represent. It is little wonder that politicians rank below used car salesmen in terms of respect.
Labels: TOTD
posted by Thought of the Day @ 5:35 AM
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