Thus Spake Russ

Posted By Russ Emerson on October 30, 2004 at 5:29 pm

One might be tempted, in this campaign season, to think that honest Democrats were few and far between*, if they exist at all. The shrillness and vitriol of their talking points are far more extreme than ever before. Their mouthpieces in the press make virtually no pretense of being fair-minded deliverers of news.
You need only to look at any “talking heads” news program to see the spinners of the Left interrupting, shouting down and talking over their political opponents, manners be damned. Lawrence O’Donnell’s shameful (and shameless) performance on the air with John O’Neill just a week ago is an extreme and noteworthy example.
It would be one thing if they were using actual truth as the weapon against their opponents, but frankly, the Left would neither know nor care about the truth if it stood in front of them with a flaming sword, threatening cauterization (with the attendant need for such) if they were not to mend their ways.
It is not merely in debate that their extremism is evident. Theft and vandalism have been reported nearly every day for the last month. GOP offices have been burgled, ransacked, and even shot at. If sanity does not pull the extremists’ choke-chains, eventually someone is going to get hurt, perhaps even killed. The left-wing extremists had better think twice — or even just once — before they go down that road; it leads through dangers from which they will not emerge victorious… if they emerge at all.
The hard-core Left are losing their minds. I’m already convinced they’ve lost any love of country they ever had. Scoop Jackson, oh, how we miss you. Zell Miller, where can we get more Democrats like you?

Fortunately, there are outposts of sanity remaining on the left side of the aisle. Some who wear the label “Democrat” retain the intellectual honesty and love of country that used to characterize their party, but they seem like scattered rowboats on an ocean of sulphuric acid. One might be excused for feeling like Diogenes, looking for an honest Democrat in the public arena.
Orson Scott Card, whom I have cited before, is one such honest man. He examines the current state of mind of the Democrat party — the scamming, the lying, the pseudo-intellectualism, the mockery of faith in God, and the unswerving notion that they are entitled to rule — in The Death of Shame. A brief excerpt:

The falsehoods are thick on the ground, and contrary to the impression some might try to give you, they are not conducted equally by both sides.
When they trumpet examples of Republican “lies,” they usually turn out to be in the following categories:
1. Statements that turn out to be wrong, though they were believed to be right at the time they were spoken. (In the rational world, we call these “mistakes.”)
2. Statements that interpret legitimate data in ways that support the Republican view. (In the rational world, we call these “differences of opinion.”)
3. Statements that point out obvious contradictions between what the Democratic candidates say and what they have said and done in the past. These are called “negative campaigning” and “mudslinging” and “distortions” and, of course, “lies,” but these countercharges are offered instead of coherent explanations.

^{[Italics and parenthetical comments in the original.]}
I don’t need to tell you to read the whole thing, do I?
* I refer, of course, to the leadership and public face of the Democrat party, not to the millions of decent folk who remain members thereof. Those folks should, however, be dismayed that their party has been taken over by the extreme Left. Maybe after a thorough trouncing, they’ll do something about it.

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