The Democratic Party is Destroying Itself

The Republican party is destroying itself. That's the message you'll see repeated in media outlet after media outlet. That is the liberal talking point that has been spread throughout 2008 and 2009 by the press over and over again. It's the one they're still repeating now, even as the Tea Party movement has gone from a populist movement that the media ignored and then smeared when they couldn't ignore it anymore, to a national force in politics. It's the mantra that they're still chanting even as so many Democratic congressmen are departing that it almost feels like a coup.

As the Soviet Union kept insisting in the 70's that world capitalism was on the brink of destruction-- the Greenwalds, the Krugmans and their meme spreading diggbats are insisting that the Republican party is about to be destroyed as a force in national politics. Just as the Republican party is due for a major comeback in the midterm elections. As Obama's ratings keep sinking faster than a wet Koran in a toilet and the Democratic congress finds itself chained to a wildly unpopular health care plan that would force everyone to buy insurance from their health insurance industry backers-- the old record keeps spinning. The Republican party is destroying itself.

But that is the price you pay for living in an echo chamber. The echoes may sound pretty, but only to someone who is deeply in love with the sound of his own voice. The USSR formed itself into one giant echo chamber in which everyone repeated the lies that the government wanted them to believe, until the government believed them too. And that is the real punishment of a liar, not that he will not be believed when he tells the truth, but that he will come to believe his own lies as the absolute truth. So when every level of government and media in the USSR repeated that last year's harvest was 96 percent successful, no one could logically reconcile that with the fact that there was no actual bread anywhere to be found. Forced to choose between believing in the propaganda of a successful harvest or the reality that there was no bread-- they went on believing in the propaganda, because lies had become their reality.

When in the aftermath of Scott Brown's Massachusetts victory, Howard Dean went on Hardball to explain that the actual vote had been in support of the Public Option, you could almost see the hammer and sickle waving over his head. His argument made absolutely no logical sense, even to famous leg-tingler Chris Matthews. But they were never meant to make any kind of logical sense. Howard Dean was proceeding from the absolute belief that the American people want the most extreme legislation that Democrats can possibly think of. Not the opinion, not the ideal... but the belief. This is an absolute belief that millions of liberals share. The fact that most Americans do not want their legislation is not a fact that they can process. When confronted with it, just ignore it. Because when your premise is that Americans want your legislation, then the fact that they don't want it, does not compute.

Ideology programs people to believe things in the same way that a computer is programmed to believe things. At that point reason and facts have absolutely nothing to do with it. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan went off to war fueled by faith that their own superiority would cause them to prevail. Setbacks and defeats could not be processed logically by their leadership-- because their ideology said that setbacks and defeats were impossible. Hitler ignored the pleading of his own generals to retreat. In the last days, his bunker became an echo chamber in which his followers remained convinced that Germany would prevail even as its armies had been destroyed, and children were being thrown into the battle. And when the facts couldn't be ignored any longer, Hitler killed himself. Just as Hideki Tojo tried to kill himself. Just as Stalin had contemplated killing himself when German troops had initially flooded across the border. Just as the Democratic party is now trying to kill itself.

The madness of the left is holding the Democratic party hostage, as the nutroots insist that the only reason the party is suffering setbacks, is because they aren't being extreme enough. Which is how rigid ideologies deal with setbacks. Which is why ideological revolutions quickly devolve into mass graves as the leadership and the cadres look for new targets to blame for "sabotaging" the revolution. Because the revolution itself can't be flawed. Its ideas are as perfect as the sky above and as pure as the driven snow. It is the unbelievers and the heretics, the "moderates", the "Conservative Democrats" who are the forces of reaction, who are responsible for the setbacks. The party must rededicate itself to its revolutionary purity of 2008 and remain in the vanguard of the struggle to destroy health care in America. Madness? No, this is what George Soros paid for. This is what imprisoning an entire party under a glass dome of ideology looks like. This is what Communism looks like.

Using Reconciliation to pass health care, Howard Dean's nutroots vectored proposal, that even Chris Matthews derided as insane, has gone mainstream now. Or as mainstream as anything that Obama backs, but won't actually say straight out, can possibly be. Nancy Pelosi is warning congressmen that they should be prepared to lose their jobs to pass health care legislation. But why would they be in danger of losing their jobs unless the voters didn't want them to pass it? The third most powerful figure in the Democratic party, is urging her fellow Democrats to ignore democracy. And this backhanded way is her only acknowledgment that she has dedicated itself to a plan that the public opposes. That she knows the public will punish at the ballot box.

But oh yes, after winning the governorships in Virginia and New Jersey, and taking Ted Kennedy's seat in the bargain, thereby terminating the Democratic party's Supermajority (an event that the polls showed the public strongly favoring)... the Republican party is destroying itself. All that's left for Obama is to take off his shoe at his next address to congress and bang it on the podium, screaming, "We Will Bury You All". Though perhaps with the current state of the White House, that job would most properly fall to Joe Biden.

In the halls of congress, there's still talk of reviving Cap and Trade-- a piece of legislation that should properly be called, "HR: 1917 We Will Bury You All". Because what America most needs right now to speed up its economic recovery, is to completely destroy what's left of its industrial and manufacturing base. Such is the mad logic of Los Angeles, where increasingly demented Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is preparing to saddle Angelinos with a Carbon Surcharge. Fresh from his appearance on All My Children, Villaraigosa has temporarily put his patented "One Million" proposals on hold long enough to come up with a new plan to bankrupt Los Angeles that doesn't involve building a subway system. This at a time when the California economy is already approaching a state of disaster.

There's no madness like ideological madness. That's the species of insanity that drives a Krugman to insist that we're not going into debt fast enough to fix the economy. That's the kind of madness that leads a victorious party to go down a blind alley in order to pass a health plan that only health unions and health insurance companies want. A few months after winning on a platform of "It's the Economy, Stupid", the Democrats switched to wearing "I'm with Stupid" t-shirts every time they posed with Obama.

And it won't be fixed by repeatedly referring to their plan as health care reform and promising to challenge all the big evil health insurance companies, by forcing the public to be their customers. Despite all of Obama's glib telepromptered rhetoric, it hasn't fooled the voters. And it won't, no matter how many times Obama channels the spirit of Castro in nationally televised addresses to be broadcast on every network.

Because if Congress passes a bill that forces every American to have his or her clothes dry cleaned once a week, no one in their right mind will buy it as a reform plan or be grateful to the politicians who forced it on them. If Congress passes a bill forcing everyone to buy Tofu, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the only people who benefit are Tofu manufacturers and distributors. The health care plan doesn't benefit American consumers, it benefits the Democratic party's base of dole voters who live off taxpayer funded freebies, the health insurance industry, their affiliated unions and everyone else who profits from entangling government and business into one big Gordian knot.

And so onward go the Socialist Soldiers of the Democratic party, marching as to war. And if they can ram through health care with 50 Senators, the only certainty is that this is how many they won't have next time around. Because the people may be slow to react, but they do watch and they do punish. And what goes around comes around. If the Democrats have failed to learn from Massachusetts, when their attempt to pass an unpopular health care plan helped cost them a Senate seat in one of the most liberal states in America, then they will get the chance to learn from numerous other races in 2010 and 2012-- particularly if they attempt to illegally ram through a piece of legislation that is now more unpopular than ever.

The Democratic congress can use reconciliation or just drive up tanks to Capitol Hill or station armed guards at the doors to keep Republicans out. But unless they suspend elections, there will still be a price to pay at the ballot box. And forgetting this is a true sign that the Democratic party is blindly and willfully destroying itself. The left wing takeover of the party has doomed it to act like Chavez, without having the kind of broad powers that a Latin American tyrant can wield. And so all that's left is the echo chamber, the propaganda memes echoing from wall to wall, as the faithful assure each other that victory will soon be theirs.

Meanwhile the New York Times and a number of other dead tree magazines are busy running stories warning that Rupert Murdoch's empire is about to fall apart. Even at a time when News Corp is one of the few media companies turning a profit, primarily thanks to FOX News-- while the New York Times is laying off workers and borrowing money from shady Mexican billionaires to stay afloat. But of course it's the New York Times that is going along swimmingly, while poor profitable News Corp is at the edge of the abyss.

As Iraq had fallen, the Iraqi Minister of Information, was still insisting that there were no American troops in Baghdad. Not even within a 100 miles of Baghdad. That they were shooting down hundreds of American cruise missiles. That most of the American forces were already dead. That the rest would perish soon. Today the Iraqi Minister of Information would have no trouble getting a job in the White House. Because every echo chamber needs a good echo before it plummets into the abyss.