Posted on 11/12/2003 1:59:47 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
NBC's The West Wing introduced many politically challenged Americans to a group of U.S. House members called "Blue Dog Democrats."
Their claims to fame, or infamy, are their fiscally conservative voting pattern, their toadying up to Republicans and their mission to drag what remains of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party kicking, punching and screaming back to the squishy center of U.S. politics.
Enough about Blue Dogs.
Over the years, when I have called myself a "Yellow Dog Democrat," I always am amazed that so many folks have never heard the term. Here is a simple definition of Yellow Dog Democrats: If the only candidate on the Democratic ticket is an old cur yellow dog running against a highly regarded Republican, we would vote for the yellow dog. Period. A handful of Yellow Dogs may actually like some Republicans, but hardly any of us trust Republicans to run government, especially the federal government. We are, according to Just Politics, "unswerving" party loyalists.
Political writer Taegan D. Goddard offers this derivation of Yellow Dog: "The term comes from the 1928 elections. During the election, Sen. Tom Heflin of Alabama refused to support fellow Democrat Al Smith. Instead, Heflin chose to support Republican Herbert Hoover, who would go on to become president. Many Alabamians disagreed with Heflin's choice and in retaliation popularized the line "I'd vote for a yellow dog if he ran on the Democratic ticket!' "
Besides being Southerners, the main characteristic of Yellow Dog Democrats is their liberalism, which knocks out the likes of Sen. Joe Lieberman, who supported many of George W. Bush's un-American policies, including his overthrow of a sovereign nation. Yellow Dogs still believe that liberalism is nature's greatest creation - after sex and the grapes from which red wine is made.
Devotion to liberty - as expressed in Ben Franklin's famous words - is always in the middle of the Yellow Dog's feeding dish: "They who would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Obviously, then, Yellow Dogs have nothing but contempt for the current administration in the White House, an administration whose attorney general's idea of liberty is the FBI's unfettered right to wiretap the homes of those with whom he disagrees.
Yellow Dogs, being liberal, believe that America has real classes of disenfranchised residents - African-Americans, homosexuals, farm workers - whose rights need protecting and honoring.
Which gets me to another point: Who are these Yellow Dog Democrats anyway? My own guesswork tells me that far fewer white males count themselves as Yellow Dogs than just 10 years ago. Jews, too, who used to be a stable bloc, are increasingly deserting the party. The same is true of Hispanics, and not just Castro-hating South Florida Cubans. Many Chicanos in California, Central Florida and elsewhere now vote Republican. A large number of Arabs, who once shunned the GOP, voted for Bush. Go figure.
As always, the most loyal Yellow Dog Democrats are African-Americans. Oh, sure, you hear big mouths, such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and NAACP leader Kweisi Mfume, go on about blacks not letting the Democratic Party take them for granted. But such talk is showboating nonsense. Blacks have hardly any reason to get in bed with Republicans. The modern Democratic Party (I am not talking about "Dixierats") expresses our values, our goals, our aspirations. The Democratic Party has done the most for us.
The Republicans' racist inner core repels blacks, many seeing the old beloved party of Lincoln as their contemporary enemy. Far from taking African-Americans for granted, the Democrats long ago made our quest for civil rights the bedrock of many policies. The Democratic Party is black America. You do not take for granted that which you are. You simply are. Blacks are Democrats. Yes, yes, J.C. Watts, Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, Colin Powell and others have cast their lot with the devil, but their action does not mean that the rest of us should lose our minds, too. We know who our real friends are. And they are not in the GOP.
Blacks did not become Yellow Dog Democrats accidentally. They found a home, a place where they knew that bleeding hearts would do the decent thing - even if the decent thing had unintended negative consequences. I cannot recall a single time that Democrats planned how to abuse blacks. Without trying, I can think of many ways that Republicans have been intentionally cruel to blacks and other groups.
No one should be surprised that most blacks are Yellow Dog Democrats.
Maxwell starts out on the money, then (as is his norm), he shoves his foot in his mouth.
He falls into the standard liberal trap of believing that the Democratic party has nothing but the best of intentions for blacks. He refuses to take the next step (probably because it is not an easy step to take - it involves looking deep within yourself as opposed to taking the emotional rabble as gospel)
He insists (as many blacks who are on the liberal plantation do) that everyone on the right is racist. Oh, sure we have our share of knuckle-draggers (even some here on FR fall in that category, sadly), but overall, the right is nowhere near the race-baiting, race-hating crowd that the left would paint us.
When confronted with example after example of blacks who have thrown off the shackles of liberalism, and who gladly attempt to reach back to help, Maxwell, like many others, find it more convenient to make personal attacks than to discuss issues rationally.
Pathetic. Simply pathetic.
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But yet the author does not list any examples. What a surprise! Not.
Just like many on FR... no thought process or intelligence behind the decision, just blind adherence to their own off-base assumptions about what party affiliation means about a candidate and/or a person.
All of the intelligence of Zero Tolerance policies, coupled with the effectiveness of Zero Parenting (never admonishing a child when they do wrong), all wrapped up in one voting strategy. How nice.
Interesting. Look what he wrote less than a year ago.
The blacker-than-thou paradox divides***I remember those days well, a heady time when African-Americans took education for granted as the sure route to self-improvement and the subsequent uplifting of the whole race.
On my tiny Texas campus of fewer than 1,000 students, only fools refused to read and study diligently. Only fools destroyed their brains with drugs. Only fools physically hurt their brethren. In fact, "being smart" was in. We called it being "heavy." We even expected jocks to be heavy. All musicians, especially the jazz types, were heavy.
Black power meant just that: being black and powerful, being armed with education and the drive to improve our lot in a hostile environment where the very concept of racial egalitarianism was still alien to most white Americans. Black power meant sharing the good and eliminating the bad.
In time, the concept of black power changed. Instead of being a sentiment that united us, it became a source of deep division. Those who followed Martin Luther King and his nonviolent movement, for example, were not as black as those who followed, say, Malcolm X's philosophy or that of the fearless Black Panthers.
No longer bringing us together, black power had become a negative litmus test for one's degree of "blackness." We had entered the "Blacker than Thou" era. On campuses nationwide, black students separated themselves into enclaves.
If you could quote from Frantz Fanon's book The Wretched of the Earth: The Handbook for the Black Revolution That Is Changing the Shape of the World, you were one black brother or sister.
And if you had an African name, wore a dashiki, sported a huge Afro, followed the Socialist Workers Party, talked like a Trotskyite, peppered your speech with Marxist aphorisms, majored in black studies and planned a trip to Africa, you were the essence of blackness.
The ultimate blacker-than-thou paradox occurred on traditionally black campuses. Nearly all of these campuses had parallel student government organizations. One was the legitimate body elected by the entire student population and was usually called the Student Government Association. It had the blessings of the administration and faculty.
The other was a self-appointed organization, usually called the Black Student Union. Assorted radicals belonged to it. In other words, the BSU was blacker than its duly elected counterpart, the SGA. I was president of the BSU at Bethune-Cookman College and founder and editor of the BSU newspaper. ***
Like Sen. Robert "Sheets" Byrd.
Maxwell can't tell black youth to excel and break the stereotypical mold while at the same time telling them to vote lock step for the Left. He's being a hypocrite.
It's hard to understand someone's politics holding reign over their mind, so much so, that they'll actively work to keep people tied to an anchor.
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