The Audacity of the Democrats

The Audacity of the Democrats
By Rocco DiPippo
There was a pre-Lewinsky time, before moral relativism blurred
America's vision, when associating with people like Jeremiah Wright
and William Ayers would have automatically excluded someone from
attaining the highest office in the land. Back then, anyone with well
known connections to such America-averse personalities would have been
rejected by a super-majority of the electorate during primary season
and almost certainly blocked by the Democratic Party before they could
have gotten to within a mile of the White House. But those days --
when patriotic, true liberals like Joe Lieberman were considered
typical Democratic Party politicians -- are gone. Now politicians like
Lieberman are banished to the Party's periphery and leftists, not
liberals, like Denis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, Jim McDermott, John
Kerry, (who served in Vietnam), Jim McGovern, Patrick Leahy, Richard
Durbin, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have replaced them.


Until recently in our history, a President Barack Obama would have
been an impossibility. But given the political and ideological climate
that exists today in America, the ascension of a leftist like Barack
Obama into presidential politics makes perfect sense. Beliefs like
domestic terrorist William Ayers's and racist, anti-US preacher
Jeremiah Wright's are no longer met with utter scorn or a trip to
behind the woodshed, but are embraced, promoted and defended by many
Americans. Think MoveOn, International ANSWER, think hordes of young
neo-communists and their indoctrinating, puppet-master Marx-spouting
professors. Think Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Noam Chomsky, Ward
Churchill and his acolytes. Think NYU, Columbia, The New School and
Harvard. Most importantly, ponder the makeup and direction of the
Democratic Party leadership. Like Barack Obama and his radical
friends, it is appallingly far Left.


Ideological descendants of Marx and Rousseau now lead the Democratic
Party and they have turned it into a disloyal opposition to an
increasingly accommodating GOP. They have molded the Party into a
force working stridently and unashamedly against a Commander in Chief
during wartime. They have made it a den of treachery devoted to
American defeat in Iraq. They preside over an institution advised and
influenced by moneyed, non-governmental groups and individuals with
unquestionably anti-US agendas who help make the Party a pseudo-
intellectual sinkhole filled with perverse, tried-and-failed ideas
repulsive to the majority of Americans. Those ideas are shaped into
agendas which are then forced on the public by an activist leftwing
judiciary and by a major media and arts consortium shot through with
utter disrespect, indeed contempt, for traditional American values,
religions and institutions.


The Democratic Party has devolved into a club for the illegitimately
aggrieved, the self-absorbed, the self-hating and the perpetually
pissed-off. It is a sanctuary where solipsistic malcontents and their
disjointed causes find refuge and support. It has long ceased being an
earnest gathering of broad minds where man's timeless problems are
examined against the backdrop of the Constitution and solutions to
them proposed based on the actual realities of the human condition. It
is now the political province of the intellectually deceased, where
frightened, lock-step ideologues and other small men and women concoct
and promote divisive, destructive, weird and cowardly policies
developed within a not-so-quaint, quasi-Marxist stricture of gender,
class and race.


So what does all of that have to do with the propulsion of Barack
Obama to within a whisker of the Presidency? Everything. It could not
have happened without the existence of a substantial, organized,
internal anti-US Left and the approval and guidance of the Democratic
leadership I describe. Obama is in step with that radical element and
with that leadership. His views reflect their views, and he is now a
central figure in the deceptive, destructive strategy to restore the
Democrats to power, a strategy that has been in play since the US
Supreme Court declared Albert Gore the loser of the 2000 presidential
contest. "Don't call me a liberal," says Obama. In a precise, lawyerly
sort of way he is being honest - he truly isn't a liberal, but he is a
leftist.


At a glance, Obama's quick rise in the world of presidential politics
is puzzling. His background, including his personal and political
associations, is antithetical to the historical stature of the
American presidency. It could also be said that given his non-
traditional upbringing, his schooling in radical politics and his
seeming preference for friends and mentors who view America
disdainfully, he is antithetical to the traditional American
Experience itself. Obama is young and he has less than one Senate term
under his belt. Neither quality is particularly presidential.
Questions of patriotism dog him, as do questions about his religious
and ethnic heritage. Many of the people who tutored and supported him
through his personal and political journeys from the backwaters of
Indonesia to the main stage of US presidential politics are
contemptuous of the US. Some of them publicly express outright hatred
of the country Obama now seeks to lead.


So why is so controversial a candidate even in the running to be
president?


Because he reflects his Party's leftist agenda, has unique, prodigious
manipulative talents and equally impressive Hollywood attributes.
These are indispensable in closing out the dangerous, deliberate game
the Democrats have been playing with America's security and its
perceived stature in the world. It is a game that has been going on
beneath our noses since the election of 2000. Its object is simple:
the acquisition of power regardless of cost to the Nation. It is
something the American people must be reminded of, made aware of,
before they enter the voting booth in November.


A strategy of contention vs. the risk of irrelevance


The opening event setting the stage for Obama's ascension was the
contentious 2000 election. When Bush was declared its winner,
Democrats fumed that the election had been stolen by the Republicans.
The promotion of that canard within leftwing and media circles and the
personal quality of the resentment of Bush it provoked within the
Democratic Party is important to mention, since a similar canard that
morphed from it and became popularized -- "Bush Stole the Election,"
-- became the base justification for the future blizzard of untruths
used to disparage the President. It also provided justification for
the widespread disrespect and abuse President Bush endures to this
day, disrespect that would be far more deserved if he had indeed
illegally assumed power.


Less than a year after the 2000 election was finalized, September 11,
2001 arrived. In the baleful blink of a jihadist's eye, most of the
issues that normally occupy the American polity in peaceful times were
swept off the table. Issues that normally help Americans differentiate
between the two major political parties and define those party's
respective agendas -- health care, taxes, the environment, social
programs and civil rights -- took a far-distant back seat to two far
more pressing matters: Exacting justice for the 911 atrocities and
protecting the homeland from additional attacks.


Since the American electorate historically views Republicans as being
more competent and trustworthy than Democrats in matters of war and
security, and since all other issues that Democrats could normally use
to make political hay with had been blasted off the table by 911, the
Party was facing the threat of irrelevance. There was another factor
that did not bode well for the future political fortunes of the
Democratic Party in the wake of the 911 attacks: George W. Bush had
become an extraordinarily popular president.


Whatever patriotism was stoked within the hearts of Democratic Party
leaders by that September Day of Infamy was likely tempered by an
unsettling reality: If America stayed united behind George W. Bush and
the Republicans during the coming military response to 911, the
Democratic Party would be out of power for a long time.


As the wreckage of the Towers was being scoured for the remains of the
murdered, the Democratic Party faced an extended stay in the political
wilderness. It must have been an extraordinarily bitter pill to
swallow, especially on the heels of its having lost the presidency by
a tattered handful of contested votes. As things stood, Democrat
prospects for winning it back anytime soon looked grim. Americans did
not switch horses in the middle of a war -- unless they perceived a
war to be headed towards defeat. This was especially true after the
911 attacks. The Democratic Party, with its conflict-averse, Vietnam-
era mentality would be naturally unattractive to a war-time electorate
seeking vengeance for the mass murder of its brothers and sisters.
Pragmatically speaking, the only hope the Party had then, in terms of
making inroads with post-911 American voters, rested on a single
option: overlaying the US military response to 911 with a template --
the rhetoric, look and feel of the Vietnam debacle of years earlier,
portraying those directing and supporting the war and those fighting
it on the ground, as corrupt, inept and malevolent.


As the Democrats weighed their narrow, post-911 political options and
saw a grim future, at least a few of them might have considered Jimmy
Carter's triumph on the heels of Vietnam and Watergate, and felt a
flicker of hope.


A Vietnam strategy develops


Soon after 911, as America shifted into a wartime footing, leftists in
academia and in the Legal Left began testing the waters of dissent by
deconstructing Bush and the Republicans and blaming American foreign
policy for the 911 attacks. Several professors at major Universities
openly proclaimed their wishes to see America defeated and disgraced.
One of them, Professor Nicholas DeGenova of Columbia University,
announced to those attending a ‘peace' conference at the school
shortly after the 911 attacks that he "wished for a million
Mogadishus," a reference to the loss of 18 US serviceman during a
mission to capture a warlord in Somalia in 1997. DeGenova also said,
"the only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the
U.S. military," and referred to patriotism as a form of white
supremacism adding that "My rejection of U.S. nationalism is an appeal
to liberate our own political imaginations such that we might usher in
a radically different world in which we will not remain the prisoners
of U.S. global domination." Since DeGenova is an American collecting
an excellent salary at a prestigious American university, it is
puzzling who he meant by "we."


When the Democratic Party joined the academic Left's undermining of
the Administration's military response to 911, a lethargic Republican
public relations machine and inarticulate President were no match for
the polish and reach of the influential leftwing media assisting the
Democrats. Within months of 911 the Party and its media assistants
began manufacturing anti-Bush, antiwar propaganda with impunity.
Prominent leftwing intellectuals spoke openly of America's culpability
in the 911 disaster even as the Towers still smoldered and the Nation
wept, sowing seeds of doubt and divisiveness amongst a population that
had been traumatized and then unified by the terrorist attacks. The
press began chipping, then hammering away at the Administration's war
policies and its domestic policies regarding security. When the debate
on whether or not to invade Iraq came, there was no doubt which side
of the discussion the press -- and most of the Democrats -- would be
on.


Predictably, the historically anti-US, European socialist Left closed
ranks with the Democrats and the academic Left. It also fell in line
with the neo-communist-organized antiwar movement in America that was
taking shape. With the first wave of antiwar street protests, the
Democratic Party's mission to reacquire power lurched into high gear.
That mission would be accomplished at the risk of weakening America's
security and at the expense of her standing in the world.


Shortly after the US invaded Iraq, Party leaders and their friends in
the media started kidney-punching America, pounding away at the
wartime president, deriding his administrators and his policies,
harping on and grossly magnifying each setback in Iraq.


On the home front, every Bush policy designed to protect America from
further attacks was framed and presented by Democratic Party leaders
and leftwing 527 groups as direct assaults on the US Constitution and
as being destructive to the Bill of Rights. The press followed the
Party's antagonistic lead, flooding the news with disproportionate
coverage of subjects like Abu Ghraib, Haditha, US so-called torture
and rendition; so-called domestic spying; the so-called rights of
terrorists in Guantanamo; the so-called evils of the Patriot Act; the
so-called lies of George W. Bush; the so-called warmongering of ***
Cheney and the so-called greed and evil of defense-related
corporations like Halliburton.


The effect was to frame isolated incidents of US atrocities and other
malfeasances that occur in any war as emblematic of the entire Iraq
enterprise. A narrative of an administration hell-bent on
imperialistic conquest, spying on Americans and shredding the
Constitution concretized within most American and international
newsrooms. And who can forget the endemic, Left-generated conflation
of the Bush Administration with the Nazis and the invention and
promotion of theories that Bush and Cheney planned and directed the
attacks of 911 to advance a secret desire of turning America into a
fascist state. Those theories were boosted by prominent leftists,
including respected author Gore Vidal, who wrote a book promoting such
a theory. The collective message of the anti-Bush noise machine was
clear and diabolical: The President of the United States was a bigger
threat to world peace than men like Osama Bin Laden were. Bush was
more evil than Adolf Hitler.


The withering attacks on the Bush Administration took their toll. Bush
was slowly becoming a pariah, even within his own political party. His
approval ratings, burdened by the vicious attacks on his character and
constant attacks on his war policies, sank like a stone.


By the 2004 election, the Democrats' strategy of throwing everything
but the kitchen sink at Bush was poised to render results. But a
lackluster campaign by a wooden candidate, John Kerry, and serious
attacks on Kerry's credibility and patriotism by 250 decorated war
veterans caused the Party's presidential effort to fail, but just
barely.


In spite of that loss, or perhaps buoyed by the closeness of it, the
Democrat assault on America's President and on America's war-time
morale intensified as the 2006 congressional elections approached.
Efforts to stabilize a post-Saddam Iraq were sputtering and support
for Bush and Republican politicians sagged in direct proportion to
every real, over-reported and media invented setback there.


It is common knowledge, supported by history, that war is fraught with
uncertainties and surprises that cannot always be planned in advance
for. It is the side in a conflict that best adapts and adjusts in
response to those vagaries that usually wins. The slaughter of 5,000
US soldiers at Omaha beach in a single day during WWII was not
trumpeted by the US media to America and to the world as evidence of
imminent US defeat against the Nazis, nor did US politicians of that
era cry for withdrawal from the larger battle when disasters like
Omaha Beach and Corregidor happened. They did not publicize enemy
successes during the vicious battles of Guadalcanal nor did they
pronounce defeat whenever Americans suffered setbacks while fighting
the fanatical Japanese. But throughout every phase of the Iraq and
Afghanistan conflicts nearly every negative event, every disaster or
perceived disaster, exploded across the front pages of the major US
papers and was broadcast by Democrats from the halls of Congress as
evidence of Bush's malevolence, stupidity or incompetence and as
evidence of impending American defeat. Michael Yon, the Iraq
conflict's Ernie Pyle, best sums up the result of that grinding media
assault on the Iraq War and its American leaders:


"Enemy dominance of the media battle space translated quite directly
into military setbacks. Terrorists from many countries swarmed into
Iraq to be part of the victory they saw happening on the TV screens."


Deliberately or not, the Democratic Party and the leftwing media, with
their endless criticisms of the Iraq conflict, and their endless
public comparisons of that war to Vietnam, sent a direct message to
the rag-tag army of ultra-violent terrorists in Iraq who were
detonating car bombs in crowded marketplaces, beheading and mutilating
civilians and killing American and Coalition soldiers: "Keep the
violence up just a bit longer. We'll take care of wearing down
America's will to win from within, just like during Vietnam."


Even violent, under-equipped sociopaths facing the most powerful
military on earth know a gift horse when they see one, and react
accordingly.


On the other hand, nearly every bit of positive war news was whispered
in quiet sentences or totally ignored. Today, with the Iraq venture
steadily closing in on success, the amount of news about Iraq has
slowed to barely a drip. That is quite telling.


Under the deliberate, massive media barrage of negative news about the
war and hampered by a lack of coherent strategy with which to counter
it, Republican prospects for the retention of Congressional majorities
in 2006 looked shaky at best. Then the Congressman Larry Craig sex
scandal broke and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate
were lost.


In less than five years, the Democratic Party had gone from being an
increasingly irrelevant political minority to controlling both houses
of Congress.


A Strategy Emboldened


Buoyed by the 2006 election success of their Vietnam-era strategy,
Democrat leaders and other leftists began openly calling Iraq an
‘unjust' war, an "unwinnable" war and relying on the short memories of
most Americans to hide the fact that many prominent Democrats had
actually voted to authorize it. Jesse Macbeth, Jimmy Massey, Scott
Beauchamp and other antiwar frauds who admitted faking tales of
atrocities committed by US soldiers were praised by the press and the
Democrats as heroic dissenters against the evil Bush war machine,
their false tales of butchery and bloodlust spread far and wide.
Widespread, positive coverage was given to antiwar, anti-American, pro-
terrorist activists like Cindy Sheehan, who was sanctimoniously
christened America's "Peace Mom" by leading Democrats and the leftwing
media, while true American heroes, patriots like Paul R. Smith and
Jason L. Dunham, both Medal of Honor winners, both killed in the act
of protecting America from her enemies, received virtual media silence
for their heroism and sacrifice and little public acknowledgment from
Democrat politicians.


The press and the Democrats did however publicly acknowledge American
soldiers when they were killed, when they spun tales of atrocities,
when they groused or when they returned home and fell through the
cracks. They wanted Americans to be ashamed of their soldiers, to be
ashamed of the Commander-in-Chief, to be ashamed of America itself.
They needed America on its knees -- disillusioned, angry at its
leaders and their policies -- hopeless, sick of hearing about the war
and demoralized because then, out of desperation, they would naturally
look to Democratic politicians for relief.


The technique of creating discontent and "talking all things Bush
down" paid big dividends for the Democrats in 2006. Devoid of credible
ideas and solutions, they had nevertheless worked a strategy leading
to the re-acquisition of at least some of the political power they had
lost during their wilderness years after the Reagan Revolution. The
2006 election confirmed the effectiveness of their "destroy Bush"
election strategy. And so the Democratic Party's attacks on Bush and
the Republicans increased to a ferocious level, even as Iraq turned a
corner towards security and political stability.


When to the Party's dismay the Bush troop surge took hold and the
situation in Iraq began improving, the Democrats' defeatist rhetoric
reached a desperate, farcical crescendo: "The war is lost," (even
though objective measurements indicated that it was being won) crowed
many Democrats, including prominent ones like Harry Reid, Nancy
Pelosi, John Murtha, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry and Barack Obama.
Prominent Democrat John Murtha publicly tried and convicted US Marines
involved in the Haditha incident before those Marines even went to
trial. "Bush lied us into war" became the catch-phrase of almost the
entire Democratic Party leadership, even though before the war had
commenced many of those same Democrats had access to the same
information that the Bush Administration used to justify it.


Power at any cost indeed, even at the defeat and humiliation of one's
own country.



***


Now the 2008 election is upon us. Whether it is Iraq or Afghanistan,
the economy or the overblown dangers of anthropogenic global warming,
the Democratic Party and its media shills continue crafting and
pounding home messages telling us that our national problems, real and
imagined, are caused by Bush and the Republicans, They tell us that
due to Bush and his policies, our nation is an evil one, our nation is
hated by the world, our nation is fractured into pieces, our nation is
murdering innocents, our nation is the world's biggest polluter, our
nation is a den of racism, our nation is stingy, our citizens are
impoverished, our economy has been destroyed. Collectively, this
endless stream of buckshot propaganda adds up to a single, powerful
and demoralizing statement: America has come apart at the seams - and
George W. Bush and the Republicans are to blame for it.


Though the Democrats and their media shills are responsible for
creating that illusion, Bush and the Republicans are to blame for
generally ignoring or responding weakly to the Left's relentless
assault on America's war-time morale. Instead of using the power of
the White House pulpit to broadcast a steady, convincing message on
the importance of presenting a unified national front in the face of
totalitarian Islam, America is instead often treated to incongruous
platitudes like, "Islam is a religion of peace." Instead of a
forceful, direct calling-out of the Democratic Party, the State
Department and CIA on their numerous subversions of Bush policies,
those subversions are usually referred to by the White House as
"disagreements."


Because of the Administration's seeming refusal to conduct
investigations leading to the indictment of those leaking classified
security information to the press, and thereby to the enemy, the
Democrat-leftwing press consortium has been given implied consent to
inundate America with torrents of articles and highly publicized tell-
all books from former government officials, some revealing sensitive
war-time information, most of them highly critical of America's
Commander-in-Chief -- all published while American soldiers and
civilians were, (and are), on the ground in combat areas, directly in
harm's way.


With the exception of the Vietnam War, never before in America's
history have such things happened while hostilities were ongoing. And
what happened during Vietnam was tame in comparison. Worst of all, due
to the subversive Democrat-media barrage, and crippled by its public
relations ineptness, Bush and the Republicans could never quite
convince the American people of a simple reality: that they are all in
the fight of their lives against an implacable, dedicated,
totalitarian death cult, one seeking nothing less than America's utter
destruction, and that the fight demands focus and sacrifice from all
Americans. Instead of rousing, convincing, patriotic speeches, the
public was usually treated to lame utterances from Bush like, "Its
hard work . . . we're working hard . . . we're making progress."


The end result of the inability of Bush and his PR team to own and
promote the Big Ideas necessary to have focused America on the prize
of victory in Iraq and on a greater victory over the worldwide forces
of totalitarian Islam, is best summed up by three, short sentences
written on a whiteboard in a US Marines barracks:


America is
not at war.


The Marine Corp
is at war.


America is at
the mall.




***



It is no wonder the American electorate has slipped into a foul mood
-- little wonder why it seems that its heart is not in the fight
against the totalitarian theocrats who threaten it. For seven years
Americans have been pounded with messages that their country and its
leaders are unjust, warmongering, and evil and hated by all -- it
deserves whatever evil it gets.


America now has serious doubts about itself. Its citizens have been
pummeled with those terrible messages for so long now, that many of
them believe them to be true. They are vulnerable to the Democratic
Party's sudden mantra of Hope and Change and Progress. In a nutshell,
here are the mechanics of the crude, hate-based initiative the
Democratic Party and its media wing have forced on America since 2001:


1) Invent, inflate, and over-report bad war news. Tie all bad news to
Bush and/or Republicans. At the same time, ignore or downplay good
news as it relates to Bush, the Republicans or the war(s).


2) Create the illusion of widespread, honest dissent to Bush policies
by giving plenty of airtime to leftwing groups and individuals
historically antagonistic toward the projection of US, and only US,
power. Fail to report the true agendas of those groups -- when
covering antiwar, anti-Bush protests and events, make sure to
meticulously portray antiwar marches as spontaneous gatherings of
mainstream, mom and pop Americans.


3) Downplay, ignore and disparage American success wherever you find
it.


4) Exalt in, sympathize with and mythologize America's enemies, vilify
and deconstruct its protectors.


5) Downplay America's generosity and righteousness. Recast a mission
that includes saving a nation from a murdering brute and his rapist,
sociopath sons as a brutal occupation in the pursuit of American
Empire.


6) Fill the Nation's airwaves, from sea to shining sea, with
questionable and sometimes outright false tales of Bush-related
misery, butchery, fraud and waste.


7) Foment as much national anxiety and hatred of the Republican leader
as money and can buy. George Soros and other moneyed leftists will
fund you. Give airtime and print coverage to leftist radicals and
Democrats who call Bush a war criminal. Present those radicals and
their crazy plans to try President Bush and Vice President Cheney for
"war crimes" as worthy of consideration.


8) Provide coverage to leftwing intellectuals and scientists making
anti-Bush statements. Present them as legitimate, non-partisan experts
in their fields. Publicize their specious, politicized findings,
present those findings as non-partisan, accurate and objective.


9) Present major news coverage of every antiwar protest you can find,
whether it draws 100 people or 10,000 people, ignore all pro-US, pro-
Iraq War, pro-troop rallies completely or portray their attendees as
violence-prone, fringe-lunatic jingoists.


10) Blame a hurricane's aftermath on Bush. Give news coverage to
racists and Democrat crackpots who say Bush and Cheney actually caused
the hurricane and blew up levees to kill African Americans. Keep that
Bush-hate buzz alive at all costs.


11) Give airtime and print coverage to groups and individuals accusing
George W. Bush of having engineered and directed the 911 attacks.
Remember, it is not the credibility of accusations that count in
shaping public opinion now, but the seriousness and sheer volume of
accusations that do.


12) To sow further strife, anxiety and confusion, continue stoking the
fires of racial tension and class warfare.


13) Once the onslaught of lies, moral relativisms and crazy notions
have created a self-sustaining, luciferous, widespread unhappiness and
confusion, dangle a fat bait of silence and tranquility -- of Hope,
Change and Progress -- crowning your deceptive achievement by hooking
the same fish you made hungry.


That is the immoral, destructive strategy used by the Democratic
Party, even as our soldier sons and daughters have been fighting and
sometimes dying to protect us, in the years since 911 to recapture
power it unjustly covets as its Divine right.


Now, a master psychological fisherman, Barack Obama, dangles a bait of
salvation. As a highly experienced practitioner of Saul Alinsky's
radical arts, he is perfect for the job. Those who know Obama well,
like Mike Kruglik, who helped train him in Alinsky's methods would
agree:


"He [Obama] was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation. . . As
with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With
probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of
pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before
dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better."


It is truly audacious of the Democrats to entice us with their slick-
tongued messiah, one who appears out of nowhere and graciously offers
to scrape clean and sanitize the same plate of defeat he, his party
and their assistants in the media served to America for nearly eight
years in the middle of a war. Soon we will see if a majority of the
American electorate accepts that offer, or if it rejects it, sending
the Democratic Party back to confront the same irrelevance it risked
the safety and security of our nation to avoid.


Rocco DiPippo, an American Thinker contributor, spent time in Iraq as
a civilian contractor. He currently lives throughout the Middle East.
Email him here.
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