BROOKS: WHY ARE DEMS SO OVERHEATED? ..Developing

Drudge ^ | 10/29/05 | David Brooks

[STARWISE]

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald did not find evidence to prove that there was a "broad conspiracy to out a covert agent for political gain. He did not find evidence of wide-ranging criminal behavior. He did not even indict the media's ordained villain, Karl Rove," writes David Brooks in Sunday's NY TIMES.

"Leading Democratic politicians filled the air with grand conspiracy theories that would be at home in the John Birch Society."

"Why are these people so compulsively overheated?.. Why do they have to slather on wild, unsupported charges that do little more than make them look unhinged?

(snip) Brooks quotes from an essay written 40 years ago by Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

Hofstadter argued that sometimes people who are dispossessed, who feel their country has been taken away from them and their kind, develop an angry, suspicious and conspiratorial frame of mind. It is never enough to believe their opponents have committed honest mistakes or have legitimate purposes; they insist on believing in malicious conspiracies.

"The paranoid spokesman," Hofstadter wrote, "sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms -- he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization." Because his opponents are so evil, the conspiracy monger is never content with anything but their total destruction."

Developing...

[Southack]

The Democrats and the news media are "unhinged" because liberalism can't win on its own merits.

Abortion didn't win. Nationalizing healthcare didn't win. Putting gays in the military didn't win. Gun Control didn't win. Raising taxes didn't win. Appeasing terrorists didn't win. Kyoto global warming nonsense didn't win. They couldn't even stop the deployment of our national missile defenses.

In the battle of ideas, liberals have lost every national battle (see above).

Which brings us to why they are unhinged. Unable to win on their own merits, liberals have placed all of their bets on winning via scandals.

They want to arrest Tom DeLay. They want to impeach VP Cheney. They want to jail Rush Limbaugh. We "rushed" to war; then we took too long...were in a "quagmire."

We had too few troops in Iraq, then later they said we needed to bring 20,000 troops home for Christmas (i.e. had too many). We put panties on the heads of terrorists in Afghanistan (e.g. Abu Ghraib), then the "scandal" turns out to be bi-sexual, rogue liberals in uniform (including one of the highest ranking women in our military)...so the story gets dropped.

They put more reporters chasing Schwarzenegger's alleged "gropings" than they put on the UN oil for food outrage. Governor Gray Davis' bribes...forgotten.

They wailed about Hurricane Katrina and screamed "racism" only to find that Blacks did just fine evacuating from the harder-hit East side of that storm (e.g. Mobile, Alabama) where the local leadership actually followed its own disaster planning.

At every turn, the liberals hype their faintest hopes of GOP scandals...

...Because they've got nothing else. Their ideas have been rejected. Go to a liberal cocktail party in San Francisco (I've done this) and they'll opine about how our evil Pledge of Allegiance should be banned...only to learn the hard way at the ballot box that 92% of the U.S. supports keeping the Pledge unchanged.

In private, they hate the Pledge...but their idea to ban or change is utterly rejected by our democratic republic.

Liberal idea after idea has been or is being rejected.

All that they've got Left (pun intended) is the hope of a GOP scandal. So they scan every news article, troll every GOP website, scan every public database looking for something...anything...that might "bring down the mighty right-wing Elephant."

They phoned in "tips" to the SEC that Senator Fritz's published, by-the-book stock sales were somehow shady...triggering a useless investigation that will only exonerate him, for instance.

They're grasping.

They haven't even figured out yet that prosecutor Fitzgerald just indicted a Democrat (Scooter Libby and his wife are life-long Democrats)...the liberals are so presently blinded by their desperation to find a scandal that they think that everyone in the White House is a Republican.

They need a scandal. They know, positively know that they can't win on the merit of their ideas alone...either they get a big scandal or else they'll lose again and again.

They just lost on raising the Minimum Wage. They just lost their battle to prevent our giving of immunity from lawsuits to our domestic firearms manufacturers. They just lost their battle to prevent bankruptcy reform.

Bolton is at the UN. The ICC is toothless. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty is dead. The ABM treaty is dead. Their precious UN treaty to ban firearms from the Public is dead.

Everywhere they look they see their ideas either dead or dying.

They're desperate. They're forging National Guard documents. They're forging Niger uranium documents. They're engaging in sting operations on-line such as what we saw here on Free Republic of NCPAC versus MD4Bush.

They're stealing and destroying classified documents (e.g. Sandy Berger). They're committing Identity Theft against GOP candidates (e.g. Senator Schumer's staff against Lt. Gov Steele). They're delaying approval on some new judges until their pet cases are ruled upon by the outgoing judges (e.g. Senator Rockefeller's Intel Committee memo).

...And everywhere you turn the Democratic leadership is claiming that they are being too soft on the GOP! The NY Times has apologized for being too pro-Bush!

Twice!

The LA Times has run wholly fabricated polls showing Bustamante ahead of Schwarzenegger. Exit polls for Presidential elections in 2000 and 2004 were both rigged...entirely inaccurate.

That's what the modern Left has devolved into. We're dealing with desperate people willing to go to great lengths...unethical lengths...against us.

Because they know that they can't win on the merits of their own ideas. Either they ram those ideas down our throats and call us all bent-kneed Monica's, or else they lose.

[Bush gal in LA]

I think they've already started attacking each other. The ''Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, anti war, hard left RATS ''are going after the ''WE need Hillary now'' semi left'' RATS '' crowd saying she is not anti war enough for them cause if she got in she won't bring the troops home on day 1. While the Hillary RATS are screaming back she's the best chance we've got for 2008 so STFU! I am so looking forward to the RATS eating each other alive!

[goonie4life9]

Very true. It is interesting, to say the least.

[Hank Rearden]

at the exact moment when the Republican Party is staggering under the weight of its own mistakes, the Democratic Party's loudest voices are in the grip of passions that render them untrustworthy.

Seems like the perfect opportunity to get rid of both Big Stupid Government parties, doesn't it?

[The Raven]

>>Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald did not find evidence

So why the indictment?

[Harrius Magnus]

Amen brother, amen. Thank you for that.

[sphinx]

Projection is part of it. So is the desperate need to assert moral equivalency; the democrats spent most of the 90's defending Clinton on an astonishing array of misdeeds and are desperate to pin something, anything on the Republicans. Hence the imbecile mewling about Cheney and Halliburton. Now we will hear that Libby is the greatest criminal in history, or at least since Hitler.

But one other important aspect is the democrats' utter bankruptcy on major policy issues. Social Security? They say we don't have a problem, at least not until 2045, and blast Bush for trying to do something. Health care? They're for single payer but don't want to acknowledge that single payer means rationing. Education? Whatever the NEA says, and shut up about the collapse of standards and writing off yet another generation of inner-city kids. War on terror? Appeasement and retreat.

I was well trained as a sprout to avoid psychological and motivational arguments except as a last resort because they are so easily used to avoid the need to engage an opponent's principled positions. But with the current dems, we are truly at the last resort. Their cupboard is bare. All they have left is ad hominem attack. Very sad. We need an honest, intellectually serious opposition party. The honest democrats very urgently need to stand up to the psychotics who have hijacked their party.

P.S. If Libby is the nefarious leaker, and he may be, I think he should be punished with the full severity that has been visited on every other leaker in the last 25 years. That would mean ... a tenured professorship? Testimonial dinners at the National Press Club? A bigger job in the next administration?

The fact that Libby's leak, if that's what it was, happened to discredit a Kerry campaign lie is not a reason to impose differential and disproportionate punishment.

[sphinx]

You beat me to it. But you're right.

[Morgan in Denver]

You might enjoy reading the book "The Death of Right and Wrong" by Tammy Bruce if you have not read it yet. If my memory is correct, she supports your opinion as to narcissistic personality disorder being alive and well with the left today.

[sphinx]

Seems like the perfect opportunity to get rid of both Big Stupid Government parties, doesn't it?

We need a Reagan to lead a conservative resurgence in Republican primaries. And it may be time for a Republican backbencher to update the 1980's Gingrich playbook for the new era. That may be happening now.

60 votes in the Senate would be huge. We have majorities right now for Social Security reform, much expanded choice in schooling, and probably for vouchering health care entitlements, which would allow us to move to universal coverage in a market context. We might even have a majority for serious tax reform. But all of the above face certain filibusters in the Senate. A lot of pubbies who would vote for them if they had a promise of passing prefer not to fall on their swords on a lost cause.

We have gotten to the mid-50's in the Senate a couple of times but have always fallen back an election or two later. If we can break through there, everything changes. Right now, 2006 looks like a fall back rather than a storm-the-heights election, but we have a year to change that. In any event, that's where we should be investing our energies.

[Alia]

Very fine post, Southack. Your analysis is comprehensive. Liberalism, on its own merits cannot win and because it is predicated upon a victimist platform and with the ultimate result of creating more victims.

In re the scandals: Pinole (CA) Pt. Steel. (And similar cases involving prisons around the US). Pinole Pt Steel was a company in Northern California. A group of people asserted that Pinole Pt Steel was "discriminatory" in its hiring practices. Although there was no hard instances of such, San Francisco Legal "Community" (Marilyn Hall Patel, etc.) launched a class-action lawsuit against Pinole Pt Steel. It appeared in all the newspapers. It went like this: Even if you never applied for work at Pinole Pt Steel and because YOU THOUGHT YOU MIGHT BE DISCRIMINATED AGAINST... join in on this class-action lawsuit. This was also done, again, at some prisons in re guards and those who "might" work at prisons.

Not a word about who wanted Pinole Pt Steel's business. Not a word about who wanted the land or the company operations or to purchase what "remained" of Pinole Pt Steel after this bogus lawsuit.

Obviously, someone wanted something very financially-related out of the Pinole Pt Steel company. However, the "race card/gender card" was used to extort from an American company.

This has been the STANDARD OPERATIONAL PROCEDURE OF THE LEFT. In my own books, this is "legal" looting via the courts.

Dittos other "legalisms" wrought by leftist lawyers and their activist judges. Someone files a suit against you. It's a he said/she said type of suit. Whether it is true or not, the accused HAS TO FORK OUT MONEY TO HIRE LAWYERS in their own defense against a "legal assault".

Enough time has passed, and the left has used this "methodology" overamped, that more and more people are awakened to the cheatiness of the left and their "laws".

Two different men I know have been caught alive inside the "legal" system and for defending their family against home-invasion instruders. They are broke, now, and because they did the right thing. But nonetheless, they had to fork out huge sums to defend themselves in a court which allowed that the intruders had "special rights".

At the root of the liberal psyche is this belief that they themselves are "special" and everyone else is just a useful blob of tissues.

My point in all this to underscore what you've written: The left creates a scandal whole cloth. It goes to court. The lefty lawyers in process tweak legal precedent in order to create newer, confiscatory, anti-civil legalisms. Once established as a "case" then these "cases" are used when more "dust-devil" whole-cloth fabrications are INDUCED by liberals.

What I find fascinating of late?

Liberals attempting to abscond with conservative or non-partisan institute names. "Gold Star Moms versus Gold Star Moms for Peace (Sheehan)". Just saw at wnd... Focus on the Family won against a group trying to name itself Focus on the Human Family.

Liberals are going back to their "change the meaning of words" game, hoping this might work. Frankly, I think it's too late in time for them to attempt this.

The odor of their lies and deceptions has reached every corner of the world by my estimates. And that's where the WOT comes in.

[Do not dub me shapka broham]

O Noes, it's Richard Hofstadter!

Using the academic left's favorite historian/political scientist against them; that's a BURN!

It'll be interesting to see the fray on the HNN after this column.

:)

[OldFriend]

The dems think that if they pretend to believe their own lies, we'll believe them too.

After all, they have the media on their side.

Now we have the pajama people on our side and can make a dent in the misrepresentations if we stick together to deny the dems their victories at the polls.

[marktwain]

Because they know that they can't win on the merits of their own ideas. Either they ram those ideas down our throats and call us all bent-kneed Monica's, or else they lose.

Well said! Your whole post sums up what is going on in the Democrat culture.

The real question is: How much damage will they be able to inflict as they go down?

[Patriot from Philly]

If you want an understanding that, despite the media hype on this story, the result is a clear disappointment for the left, do a search on the following:

"22 indictments"

Now it wasn't just the nutty left that was out of control. If you watched the coverage of this story,one that should have warranted no more than a few headlines on the news, you would have noticed the breaking news crawl:

"indictments expected imminently"

that's with an s

Several mainstream publication was talking of a "raft" of indictments against key officials right up until the documents were released.

This was a bust for the left. They are making lemonade out of the lemons they received.

[Morgan in Denver]

Nice list of the state of affairs today. Thanks!

[norwaypinesavage]

"Likely lawyers for those appearing before the grand jury. And it's perfectly legal for them to do so. Only the prosecutor and grand jurors are sworn to secrecy."

I don't think Rove's lawyers would be leaking a story that Rove was about to be indicted. Since only they, the Grand Jurors, and the Fitzgerald lawyers would know about any possible Rove indictment, that leaves only the Fitz lawyers, or the jurors.

[depenzz]

Very good post, great, you wrapped it all up in a short post and every bit is true. I am sure we could find more to add but why do it. It is the pattern of the left and they can't get out of the rut (because I don't think they know they are in a rut)

[SAWTEX]

What needs to be found out is who kept leaking all this information from the grand jury over the past two years to the liberal news media....

Catch them and put them in jail for life.

Who was the CYA CIA dip who referred this to justice knowing
all along that the woman was not covert. This is the kind of trash I want Porter Goss to take out.

[wny]

They are a sick and dying party. But sadly, the pubbies can't take advatage of it. Half the pubbies in Congress are spinleess cowards.