With the 2006 elections ten months away Karl Rove pulled back
the curtain on some key GOP campaign themes recently. Hidden
amongst the themes of the Democrats’ “pre-9/11 worldview” and tax
cuts was his statement that Democrat Senators looked “mean spirited
and small minded” during the Senate Judiciary Committee
confirmation hearings of Judge Sam Alito. After decades of allowing
themselves to be branded the bullies of American politics, might
Republicans now have an opportunity to turn the tables on their
liberal adversaries, both in the other party and in the media?
It seems as though no matter how crazy the Democrats become,
Republicans always wear the black hats. Even after countless “Bush
is Hitler” parades in Washington, almost $300 million in liberal
527 negative advertising, and a phony memo scandal that almost
brought down a whole network, the big story out of the 2004
election remains those nasty Swift Boat Veterans who “slandered”
poor John Kerry, who simply was merely “reporting for duty.”
Of course, being mean and nasty isn’t necessarily a negative
trait for a politician to have, given that lunatic Islamist
terrorists are trying to kill us. But that point notwithstanding, I
do believe it is time the Democrats start wearing the black hats in
the popular caricature of our nation’s political drama.
That Ted Kennedy, Pat Leahy, Chuck Schumer, and the rest of the
Democrats on the Judiciary Committee made fools of themselves
regarding the Alito nomination is axiomatic. Their race-baiting
berating of Judge Alito brought his wife to tears and caused her to
walk away from the committee room in dismay and disgust.
Left-wing “activists” have launched an organized campaign to
“graffiti-ize the covers” of popular new conservative books such as Kate O’Beirne’s Women
Who Make the World Worse and Fred Barnes’s
Rebel-in-Chief. For example, one subversive Photoshop
expert replaced the title of Barnes’s book with “Felon-in-Chief.” Hardy-Har-har.
Even worse were some of the online “reviews.” Here’s one:
American hero? Fearless leader? Naaaah. More like:
Torturer. Liar. War Criminal. Dry Drunk. Immoral Christian.
English-language Incompetent. Loser Businessman. Mediocre Human.
Apocolypse Pox on American Politics. Bad book about a worse person.
May both disappear from the face of the earth.
Bravo. It would be easy to blow this fringe lunacy off if it
wasn’t, more or less, the official Democrat Party line about our
president.
And don’t forget Washington Post ombudsman Deborah
Howell’s
reaction to left-wing reader “feedback” to her columns about
Jack Abramoff:
Nothing in my 50-year career prepared me for the
thousands of flaming e-mails I got last week over my last column,
e-mails so abusive and many so obscene that part of The Post’s Web
site was shut down.
Yes, we are dealing with a very nasty group here. But the Alito
smears and the tasteless web chatter are small chips when we hold
them up against liberal public policies. It is there that the
liberals demonstrate just how mean and callous they really are.
CONSIDER THE SUBJECT OF EMBRYONIC stem cell research. In recent
years, America’s insurgents have assailed President Bush and
Republicans for being “against science” because the
administration’s official policy holds that the United States
should not use taxpayer dollars to finance the cloning and killing
of human embryos for the purposes of conducting scientific
experiments. It really shouldn’t be that controversial a public
policy. Just replace “embryos” with “people” and I imagine you’d
approach something near unanimous consent in favor of discontinuing
any such program.
But the radicals have been filling the hearts of the aged and
infirm with false hope about “the promise” of embryonic stem cell
research. As 2004 Democratic Vice Presidential nominee John Edwards
argued at a campaign stop:
We will do stem cell research. We will stop juvenile
diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases.
America just lost a great champion for this cause in Christopher
Reeve. People like Chris Reeve will get out of their wheelchairs
and walk again with stem cell research.
Elsewhere, 58 U.S. Senators — Republicans and Democrats alike
— urged President Bush in a letter to reverse his position on federal funding for
clone-to-kill programs in part because the United States was in
danger of falling behind South Korea in realizing the miracles of
embryonic stem cell research. Didn’t he know that this research
“might hold the key” to curing 100 million Americans, including
former President Ronald Reagan (if Bush hadn’t already killed him,
that is)?!
Alas, it was all a lie. The appropriately named South Korean
scientist Hwang Woo-suk, upon whose shoulders all this “promise”
rested, turned out to be as fraudulent as Mary Mapes’s documents.
He faked his cloned stem cell lines. And the enthusiasm for his
work expressed by the “scientific community” has made a joke out of
the concept of peer review.
Lest you think this is just some isolated hoax with no
implications on the larger field of embryonic stem cell research,
consider the words of one of Dr. Hwang’s peers, Joseph
Itskovitz: “The bottom line is that it’s a major disaster to our
whole field because the expectations were so high and now we are
back to square one.”
This is Jonas Salk faking the vaccination for polio. The hopes
of 100 million Americans have been shattered because of the
callousness of liberal promises.
AND LET’S NOT DISREGARD the looming (and increasingly inevitable)
financial disaster that will strike when swarms of baby boomers
storm the pay window to collect what they’ve been promised. The
politicians in Washington and American interest groups spent the
first half of 2005 debating the creeping crisis as it relates to
Social Security and whether we can or should do anything about it.
President Bush and some Republicans wanted to introduce personal
retirement accounts. Democrats (sadly with the help of more than a
few RINO’s) demonized the plan. But what is most notable about the
debate is that the Democrats’ official position was that we had
nothing to worry about. Don’t be fooled by Republican tricks, they
told Americans. Everything is going to be just fine.
This false sense of, ahem, security, over the years has resulted
in millions of soon-to-be-on-the-dole Boomers making the disastrous
decision to not put money away for themselves. And so now we have
the most prosperous generation in human history prepared to retire
without a penny to their names, fully convinced that the government
checks are on their way; “guaranteed” in a “lock box,” as the
liberal parlance goes.
But what happens when the bill comes due? Ask the city fathers
in Duluth, Minnesota. Since 1983, that city has promised lifetime
health care for all retired municipal workers, their spouses and
their children up to age 26. The result? Well, according to the New York Times:
No one really knew how much it would cost. Three years
ago, the city decided to find out….The total came to about $178
million, or more than double the city’s operating budget. And the
bill was growing….For years, governments have been promising
generous medical benefits to millions of schoolteachers,
firefighters and other employees when they retire, yet experts say
that virtually none of these governments have kept track of the
mounting price tag.
Now, replace “Duluth, Minnesota” with “the United States” and
“retired municipal employees” with “everyone” and you begin to see
the sheer heartlessness of the liberals’ empty promises. Many
retiring Boomers will be turned away at the pay window. Still
others will receive something much smaller than they were promised.
And the rest of us are going to have to pay more in taxes.
There’s liberal compassion for you.
If Karl Rove and the Republicans pursue this mean meme
throughout 2006, I hope they extend it past trite anecdotes about
liberal tomfoolery. They ought to make the point finally and
convincingly that liberal policies break hearts and destroy
lives.
