The Divine Right of Democrats

Edwin: I’m not bound by a word given by an out­law, honor is between gentlemen.

Robin Hood: And some­thing to be worn like a con­ve­nient coat, when it becomes uncom­fort­ably warm you just take it off.

The Adven­tures of Robin Hood: The Youth­ful Men­ace 1958

As you may have noticed for a Con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can, I quote Biogra­phies of Lyn­don John­son and the Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Tip O’Neill an awful lot while I can’t remem­ber the last time I quoted Buckley.

I was for the first nearly 40 years of my life a demo­c­rat, but slowly the party moved away from me until I finally as a believ­ing and prac­tic­ing Catholic decided to offi­cially join the side I was already on.

In polit­i­cal terms both O’Neill and John­son were giants, they under­stood peo­ple and part of their suc­cess came from their ori­gins. O’Neill came from mod­est begin­nings and achieved power never for­get­ting where he came from. John­son came from an even hum­bler start and those roots com­pelled him for­ward. Unlike O’Neill he was not restrained by ethics but that lack of eth­i­cal restraint didn’t keep him from under­stand­ing peo­ple par­tic­u­lar the vot­ers from the Hill Coun­try that he sprang from or the peo­ple like them all over the country.

It was that con­nec­tion with the great masses that made the Democ­rats and what they stood for the party of my fam­ily and the immi­grants like them as Joseph Fein notes in an excel­lent post:

The Tip O’Neill Democ­rats (unlike today’s [Howard] Dean Democ­rats) stood up for Free Speech and were unafraid of the poor and the unwashed. Who­ever has time to bring camp­ing gear in the mid­dle of a city?

The con­trast is amaz­ing, when Tip O’Neill wanted to flip Mass­a­chu­setts he used hard work to recruit can­di­dates and turn things around. Today’s democ­rats take a dif­fer­ent view:

When Democ­rats lose, that’s not a coup, that just means you lost this years elec­tions. Don’t blame it on the Koch broth­ers, Hal­libur­ton or any­one else, some­times the vot­ers don’t like you. The Repub­li­cans spent 40 years in the wilder­ness until Elec­tion 1994 (Con­gres­sional elec­tions not Pres­i­den­tial ones) — not one Repub­li­can thought of chang­ing the rules or the constitution.

It has been ever so, when the GOP took the con­gress in 1994 Peter Jen­nings called it a tem­per tantrum, for eight years the left insisted that George Bush was not legit and when in 2010 the vot­ers threw out the democ­rats Amer­ica is dumb.

I’ve been writ­ing about the elites and Feu­dal­ism since 2009. Because they see them selves as our bet­ters their actions are no surprise.

That’s why they can go from talk­ing about the sanc­tity of the court to attack­ing them when they dare defy them

That’s why they can go from deplor­ing ques­tion­ing Romney’s reli­gion to push­ing the meme.

That’s why they can go from a war on women and deplor­ing Rush Lim­baugh to attack­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive women in office and out.

And lets not even start with going after a seri­ously ill female friend of mine in an attempt to ruin her rep­u­ta­tion over an online con­test.

You see as we haven’t achieved their level of enlight­en­ment, we cer­tainly can’t expect to be treated as peo­ple, let alone equals.

I’m pleased to say there are excep­tions, would that there were more.