Posted on 07/05/2004 5:22:00 AM PDT by ZeitgeistSurfer
In exactly three weeks, like a swarm of locusts, the national Democratic Party will descend on Boston.
As a long-time resident of the Commonwealth, I say: What better place than Massachusetts for the party of plunder, perversion and patriot-bashing to hold its 2004 nominating convention, and not just because our junior Senator – John Fraud Kerry – is its putative nominee.
High taxes, gargantuan government, extravagant spending, an imperial judiciary and weird social experiments are the Democrats’ weapons of Mass destruction. All were field-tested in the Bay State.
During the Reagan years, then-Secretary of State James Baker was preparing for a trip to China. A reporter asked if he’d ever been to a communist country. Baker innocently replied that he once spent time in The People’s Republic of Massachusetts.
That’s funny, unless -- like me -- you’re a prisoner of this gulag.
Massachusetts is liberalism’s hometown – the only state carried by George McGovern in his 1972 presidential campaign.
In the 1984, Republicans took to describing their opponents as the San Francisco Democrats (after the site of the convention that nominated Walter Mondale), to emphasize the party’s steady leftward drift.
But the Bay State is a much better symbol for the party of socialism, secularism and bimbo eruptions, than the City by the Bay.
Kerry is only the latest lame-brained liberal Massachusetts has inflicted on the nation. We also gave America the Democrats’ 1988 nominee, Michael Dukakis – a man so out of touch with reality that he actually thought his membership in the ACLU recommended him for the highest office in the land.
The late Tip O’Neill – prince of pork, appropriations-junkie and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (1976 to 1987) – was another product of Massachusetts’ hothouse political environment. When O’Neill retired, instead of a federal building in Boston, they should have named the national debt after him, in recognition of his peerless contribution to augmentation of same.
Our current Congressional menagerie includes Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy, Barney Frank, James (I heart Fidel) McGovern, Ed Markey, who misses the Sandinistas, and Rep. Marty Meehan, who accused Bush of “grandstanding” as he rallied the nation after 9/11.
According to the National Taxpayer Union, on average, the Mass. congressional delegation is more dedicated to taxes and spending than is Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders – the only avowed socialist in Congress.
Massachusetts is as much a one-party state as North Korea. The Democrats have had a 50-year stranglehold on the state legislature. The GOP, which caucuses in a broom closet, can’t even muster enough votes to force roll calls or sustain a veto.
Not that it matters much. The average Bay State Republican would be considered a Democrat almost anywhere else in the country.
Ex-governors William Weld and Paul Cellucci, and current Governor Mitt Romney – who claim a vague connection to the GOP -- have more in common with Tom Daschle than Tom DeLay. Weld (of the Thurston Howell III wing of Republican Party) was nominated US ambassador to Mexico by Bill Clinton -- a move torpedoed by real Republican Jesse Helms.
Like our politicians, our colleges and universities come from another galaxy.
There’s more anti-Americanism on Massachusetts’ campuses than in the streets of Tehran or Ramallah. MIT linguist Noam Chomsky thinks Hamas are the Minutemen of the Middle East and Israel is Nazi Germany in a prayer shawl.
Howard (Ho Chi) Zinn, retired from the political science department of Boston University (and author of “A People’s History of the United States” – which blames America for every act of aggression since the Peloponnesian War) thinks Chomsky is a moderate.
If it was up to the Harvard faculty, America would have a marginal tax rate of 100% for annual incomes over $80,000, the Pentagon’s budget would be transferred to Health and Human Services, George Bush (take your pick) would be tried for war crimes, and we’d be paying reparations to African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans and Hispanics. Michael Moore would be head of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Even our cities and towns aren’t immune to this lunacy. Cambridge and Amherst have their own foreign policy. (Each has disavowed “Bush’s war” in Iraq.) Boston has its own immigration policy. (Several years ago, the city announced that its employees would no longer cooperate with the feds in their search for illegal aliens.)
Above all, Massachusetts is a monument to grande government – a cold-climate Cuba. We have the fourth highest per-capita state and local tax burden in the nation.
There’s a state income tax (5.3%), a sales tax, a meals tax and an auto excise tax. The Massachusetts’ legislature is working on a way to tax air.
That section of the Mass Turnpike between Framingham and Boston (roughly 20 miles) is the most expensive stretch of toll road in the nation.
Not all of the state’s boondoggles are locally financed. Boston’s Big Dig, two miles of roadway running under the city (on which construction was completed this year), cost a staggering $14.6 billion – up from an initial estimate of $4 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. This platinum-plated project was more than double the cost of the Panama Canal, in today’s dollars.
And while Massachusetts’ politicians dreamed it up (it was a parting present to Tip from his congressional colleagues), almost 60% of the total cost will be paid for with federal tax dollars.
The lethal combination of real estate taxes and regulations on new construction has driven the cost of housing through the roof. In a survey conducted by Mass Inc magazine, Massachusetts’ residents rated affordable housing their number one concern. In the same poll, 40% said their financial situation was fair or poor.
The publication projected that over the past dozen years, the Commonwealth experienced a net loss of 213,000 workers – mostly young and in the middle class.
Jenny Armini of Mass. Inc. says Massachusetts is “becoming a highly stratified society – the high-octane people who can afford to live here, the poor who can’t afford to leave and the middle-class” which is disappearing.
The state’s economic refugees are the very “working families” Democrats claim to care about so very much. Massachusetts is coming to resemble an old Eastern bloc state – with an elite at the top, huddled masses on the bottom, and no one in between.
In the cradle of the American Revolution, the nanny state reigns supreme. Romney recently signed into law a statewide ban on smoking in public places. But every year, 20,000 potheads congregate on the Boston Common for a so-called Freedom Festival, where they toke up in full view of the city’s police.
The state where the shot heard ‘round the world was fired has the most draconian gun laws in the land. In 1998, there were 1.5 million licensed firearms owners in the Commonwealth. Today, there are less than 300,000. Illegal possession of a shell casing (forget the gun) is punishable by up to two years in prison.
In its vigilant efforts to keep citizens from defending themselves, Massachusetts even requires a license to possess a can of pepper spray.
There’s one more Democratic ideal fully realized in Massachusetts – a judiciary detached from both constitutional restraints and reality. In May, the Supreme Judicial Court (the highest court in the Commonwealth) mandated homosexual marriage. A few years earlier, the SJC told organizers of Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade that they had to accept a gay contingent. That was too much even for the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously reversed the decision.
The edicts of our state’s high court read like the National Lawyers Guild on speed. In one of its more other-worldly decisions, the court held that nude dancing was protected speech. A dissenting justice speculated on the content of the message conveyed by the gyrations of strip-club performers. While he’s attending the Democratic nominating convention, Bill Clinton may wish to conduct a fact-finding mission to The Golden Banana.
Gone is the Massachusetts of Pilgrims and Puritans, of Minutemen and Tea Parties, of John Adams and Calvin Coolidge. If the militias of Lexington and Concord showed up at the Fleet Center for the Democratic bash, they’d be branded a bunch of right-wing, racist gun nuts and forced to undergo sensitivity training.
The Kerry Democrats have big plans for America. Massachusetts is a sneak preview. A decade ago, the Commonwealth unveiled a new license with the slogan: “The Spirit of Massachusetts Is The Spirit of America.” God forbid!
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant.
I just hope that the Mega Millions tax windfall will fall on one of your adjacent states, where the winner hopefully resides.
It's the only activity we have where the people still demonstrate the spirit of American independence.
snicker
bump
Ah, home sweet home.
Of course his book was required reading in his class and he did the usual scam to get you to buy the most recent copy. Proceeds went to enrich Zinn and further left wing causes.
Zinn, Chomsky and Said. The Marxist trifecta. One down, two to go.
Massachusetts - a Canada in America. If you love every left-wing hare-brained scheme under the sun, the Bay State's your place. It has virtually almost no conservatives to speak of. I pity Don Feder for the singular misfortune of living in one of the most Democratic AND liberal states in the entire country.
"If all this insane liberalism isn't enough, Boston drivers are without a doubt the worst in the nation."
A person's ability to drive a car is indicative of his/her intelligence.
"Swarm of Locusts" is right.
And about the traffic--didn't Tip'$ & Ted'$ Excellent Adventure (knows a$ the Big Dig) fix all the traffic problems as promi$ed, or did they just keep billion$ of FEDERAL money for them$elves? I was of the understanding it was to have been completed years ago.
Sorry, did I sound bitter just then? Maybe the rest of the dems, all together in lovely Bo$ton to see it firsthand, will ask them about it......Nah
When is President Bush going to start campaigning?
He is going to run against Kerry, isn't he?
Up here in New Hampshire (which is going to be close) we haven't heard a peep, other than feelgood ads which remind committed Bush voters like me why it's a good idea to vote for him.
If Kerry (who is very wise to keep silent) is not methodically demolished, Lee Atwater style, he could actually win.
And there's so much to demolish!
I'm in MA too. But I think it was tax-free liquor purchases that had the State police parked just on this side of the NH/MA border. It didn't work. (But I've always wondered if they struck a deal -- NH liquor stores stopped advertising on WRKO at the same time!)
That would make sense. I am sure they did strike a deal. Massachusetts is very territorial about it's taxes and probably cannot stand the fact the NH is so close to our border.
Grew up in New York, going to college in Massachusetts--escaping to New Hampshire!
Is there any question why the 9-11 terrorists picked Boston's Logan Airport as the jumping off point for their attack on America?
And now MA is outlawing smoking in bars and restaurants all over the state! What next? The food police? Fatties not allowed to overeat? We already have the environmental police. But hey, that windmill farm off Cape Cod was scuttled because Fat Teddy, Cronkite and their rich pals didn't want the view spoiled. Some laws are for the rich and rest are for the poor.
At least one part of the deal was allowing Mass. liquor stores within 8 miles of the border to stay open on Sundays. Also remember that NH liquor is sold through state stores, so it's less handy to buy than it Mass.
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