(Editor's note: I wrote "Step Right Up" just after the owner of Civilization Calls invited me to share her website, a partnership that lasted until the middle of June and for which I will be forever grateful because it was profoundly helpful in resurrecting my journalism career. This essay was my first contribution to that site; it originally appeared on February 9, 2004. I reprint it here because John Kerry's recent goose-hunt ploy contains an implicit lie that demands immediate and detailed refutation.)
OBSERVING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION campaign for the past couple of weeks I’ve been struck repeatedly by how successful the Democrats are at downplaying their suicidal foreign-policy proposals and their authoritarian domestic agenda. This is the party that would revert to the Clinton Administration’s ruinous practice of regarding Islam’s 1300-year war against civilization as merely a crime problem: the very do-nothing strategy that invited the attacks of 9/11. These same Democrats would impose socialized medicine, would torpedo public-school reform merely to serve the (unspoken) purpose of fostering an ever-growing number of voters utterly ignorant of the ideals and history of the United States, and would further balkanize the nation by resuming the official encouragement of victim-identity cultism so characteristic of the Donna Shalala years. Yet thanks to the bias and superficiality of mass media – that and the fact the American electorate all too often has the attention-span of an earthworm – the vital issues to be decided by the outcome of the 2004 election are becoming ever more obscure, all but ignored in the distracting but ultimately meaningless epidemic of journalistic flatulence that results when politics is covered as a mere Superbowl of personalities and pork.
But it is not just the electorate that is duped. One of my favorite conservative columnists and libertarian bloggers – one of the very best in the business – is Andrew Sullivan. Indeed my only real criticism of Mr. Sullivan is that sometimes he squanders too much general-interest bandwidth on special-interest matters relevant only to gays and lesbians – though given his own avowed orientation, it is surely an excess he can readily be forgiven, especially considering the overall astuteness of his thinking. However just last week I caught him in one of his extremely rare errors – an error that illustrates how very effectively the Democrats and their media allies have hidden the electoral stakes of 2004. Writing about the Democratic Party and its campaign to retake the federal government, Mr. Sullivan asserted in his London Sunday Times column (1 Feb 04) that “Democrats have gone a long way to reverse their anti-gun mentality.” Which is, of course, precisely what the Democrats want the rest of us to believe – especially those of us who cherish the Second Amendment and take it at face value.
That the truth is something quite different will quickly become apparent to anyone who researches likely input for the Democrats’ 2004 platform proposals. Americans for Gun Safety, a group consistently aligned with Democratic Party strategists, commissioned a poll completed in October 2003 that detailed how to disguise gun control as a “gun safety” issue – the better to impose gun control on the public – and recommended the Democrats adopt just such camouflage. (The poll is available here. ) Another Democrat strategy group, the Emerging Democratic Majority, has already commented favorably upon the AGS proposal. Meanwhile the hysterically anti-gun New York Times noted with approval (7 Feb 04) that likely-presidential-candidate John Kerry consistently voted for “stiff” gun-control laws; in Timesspeak the only truly “stiff” gun-control laws are those that seek to ban the private ownership of firearms. Hence the probability Democrat partisans have it exactly right when they gleefully speculate that at the very least, a Kerry Presidency would impose Massachusetts’ draconian permit-and-registration scheme – the most vindictively restrictive gun-control regime in the country – on the entire United States. Most of all there is the fact that Democrat politics are still driven by fanatical anti-gunners – a loose coalition of pacifists, matrifascists and victim-identity cultists, the majority of whom despise not only the Second Amendment but the other nine amendments of the Bill of Rights too.
Though all politicians practice deception – the old joke that a politician is lying “anytime his lips are moving” surely has a basis in fact – I can’t recall any other circumstance in which either one of the nation’s two major parties has so methodically set out to bilk the voters. The fact today’s Democrats are even considering such a ploy tells us not only of their contempt for the electorate but the extent to which they are willing to embrace strategies that were formerly the identifying characteristics of fascists, Communists and Nazis. Hence whenever some Democrat promises Utopia and invites you to “step right up,” reflect on carnival-king P.T. Barnum and his infamous credo of a new sucker born every minute.
Posted by Loren at October 25, 2004 04:30 AM