That’s the LA Times. Here’s Eileen McNamara: “Democrats lose because they are unwilling to embrace the principles of their own party. Poverty is a moral issue, too. So is the right to basically medical care, a job, decent housing, safe streets, and a clean environment.” The sentiment, the thoughts, the theory is identical. The words only slightly similar but they still are. “If Kerry had projected half the passion about those issues that Bush did about abortion and homosexuality, this race might have been about big ideas instead of a protracted series of skirmishes and a culture war that Democrats cannot win.”
Well, in the first place, this campaign was not full of passion about abortion. This campaign was not full of passion about homosexuality. It barely came up — and when did it, both candidates said the same thing. Both said they were against gay marriage. Kerry supporters probably thought, “Well, he didn’t really mean it. He just has to say this.” But they were not big issues. That’s why on Friday I urged you to reject this claim that this election is about gay marriage or morals singularly. This is simply the way the Democrats cast the results so that they can continue to proclaim themselves as superior people, as elitists, and they don’t even want any part of these moral issues because by claiming this election was about abortion and homosexuality, particularly gay marriage, they are allowed to say, “Yes, we lost,” but they can martyr themselves.
“We lost but we are morally superior. We are more enlightened. We are less judgmental, and we are more tolerant. These hayseed hicks with their pickups and gun racks in the back? Those people are dangerous because they’re closed-minded racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes.” So even in their loss the libs try to spin this in a way that makes themselves morally superior. But that’s not what happened. This was a pure triumph of pure conservatism. The liberals lost because they are liberals! We won because we unabashedly proclaimed a conservative agenda. We didn’t get squishy. We didn’t get moderate. We didn’t moderate our tone.
We didn’t try to pick off some liberal voters here and over there by promising a little bit of what they want. We were just flat out pedal-to-the-metal, full-fledged conservative, and it wins every time it’s tried, and it didn’t hurt that the Democrats again nominated the most-liberal senator from Massachusetts, as they nominated the most-liberal governor from Massachusetts and the most liberal senator from Minnesota, Mondull, and Dukakis and John Kerry. Now, let’s get to these two paragraphs of these two pieces, LA Times editorial and Eileen McNamara. In The Boston Globe, “Democrats lose because they’re unwilling to embrace the principles of their own party. Poverty is a moral issue, too.”
Well, let me tell you something, Eileen. If you want to say that poverty is a moral issue, then we must also examine your way of fighting it because you guys have had your day on this one. We lived through 40 years and $5 trillion of wealth transfers through your “war on
What is moral about assuming that people in poverty don’t have what it takes to themselves get out of poverty? What is moral about not wanting them to escape poverty when you get right down to it? People who escape poverty are not going to need liberals anymore. The dirty little secret is the left doesn’t want people to escape poverty. They want credit for “caring” about people who have dire economic circumstances. The liberals never judge their results, my friends. We’re not supposed to do that. Remember, I’ve always told you: Liberals want to be judged on their intentions. (sniveling liberal voice) “Well, we tried to help. What have you done? Nothing!”
Oh, no. We define compassion by counting the number of people who no longer need poverty assistance, Ms. Eileen McNamara. You continue to count compassion by how many more people you are ‘helping’! You revel when the news was bad in America! What’s moral about that? You were praying for bad economic news. You were singing to your heart’s delight when the stock market was plunging and you had congressmen talking about every hundred-point drop gave you another seat in the House. What’s moral about hoping people stay unemployed? What’s moral about demanding another thirteen weeks of unemployment? There’s nothing moral about that. All there is in that is you and your good intentions and wanting credit for ‘caring,’ but you’re not solving anybody’s problem by giving them thirteen weeks of unemployment benefits. What needs to happen is people unemployed need to find jobs, and you need a growing economy for that, and the morality of a growing economy is rooted in tax cuts.
Oooooh! I know how they hate that!
You want to really frame these liberal issues as moral issues, Ms. McNamara? Because if you do that, you are going to continue to sink even further into an abyss. It’s going to get so deep, nobody’s going to be able to find you in there. The ‘right to basic medical care’? The right? Where is such a right to basic medical care. You may think it is a responsibility of a wealthy society, but to claim it’s a right? How are you going to enforce this right? You’re going to have to do what you’ve always done, Ms. McNamara. You’re going to have to go take from people and give to somebody else, and we have been trying one version or another of national health care ever since Medicare was invented, and what have we done?
We’ve only priced individuals out of the market of being able to take care of their basic health-care needs themselves. What is moral about making a Q-Tip cost $5? What’s moral about anything in the health care system that’s gotten so expensive that people cannot afford just to go get a the checkup or refuse to now because they think somebody else should pay for it? Where is the morality, Ms. McNamara, in convincing more and more Americans that somebody else ought to pay for their basic rights? I may have a whole bunch of rights, but why should I also expect somebody else has to pay for them?
If you want to go down the morality road on that, we welcome you to do so, because you’re only going to be recycling your old, losing issues. The problem, Ms. McNamara, is that
Well, yeah. I mean what if we all said, ‘Somebody else ought to get me my job and somebody else ought to provide me my health care and somebody else ought to give me my food’? What if we all said that? Where would we be? Some people accept the responsibilities of life, and others need to be taught to, and liberalism doesn’t teach people to accept the responsibilities of life. Liberalism tells people that they are victims, and that it’s everybody else’s responsibility to take care of them because they victimize them. What’s moral about that, Ms. McNamara? Do you really want to turn this into moral issues? I welcome you. Safe streets? A moral issue?
You mean to tell me that conservatives are responsible for a crime rate that’s plummeting? What is the problem here with safe streets? This seems to me to be a criminal problem — and where is the morality in excusing criminal behavior, Ms. McNamara, which you have done for all these decades? Where is the morality in assuming that criminals wouldn’t be criminals if, say, Reagan weren’t in the White House or Bush weren’t in the White House or if there were better socioeconomic circumstances? Where is the morality in, once again, assuming that decent people are responsible for all this? Where’s the morality? Because that’s what you always do, Ms. McNamara — and a clean environment? (rubbing hands together)
A clean environment. This seems to be, boy, the liberals are going nuts. There are all kinds of stories here about how global warming is speeding up. Have you noticed this since after the election, global warming. It’s worse than ever. It’s getting faster than ever. There won’t be any polar bears by 2100. That’s the latest story. This is from Reuters: no polar bears by 2100. What an absolute crock! But if that’s the case we’ll go rescue ’em and we’ll put ’em and we’ll let ’em sleep on ice bags because we are compassionate people. We are not going to lose polar bears! But this is so asinine. And once again you want to turn global warming into a moral issue? What are you going to say, Ms. McNamara? That the technologically advanced peoples and countries of the world, they’re immoral?
You want to keep going down this road of attacking progress? This is the cleanest country in the world; this country does more to clean up its own messes and others’ around the world than any country ever has. What it boils down to is that as the left continues to cry in their beer here and now trying to turn their issues into moral issues, what we find that they must do in order to do this is to continue what they’ve always done, and what’s that? Blame America and Americans first, and if you want to try to make those issues and that pretext, Ms. McNamara, a moral issue, that America is always wrong, then you go right ahead, and you’ll find yourself to continue to be on the losing side of more and more elections. So you’re welcome to it. Have at it.
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