Posted on 11/08/2002 3:06:20 PM PST by Jean S
It was a stunning, record-breaking night. George Bush is the first President in 68 years to gain seats in his first midterm election. Historically, the party in the White House loses seats in the midterm election. This is true even in wartime: Franklin D. Roosevelt lost 50 House seats and eight Senate seats 10 months after Pearl Harbor.
Though Democrats gleefully cite the midterm election of 1998 when the Democrats picked up six House seats—and no Senate seats—that was Clinton’s second midterm election. Republicans had already realized all their midterm gains in Clinton’s first midterm election. In the very first election after people got a look at Clinton in 1994, Republicans picked up 52 seats in the House, eight seats in the Senate, 11 governorships and 12 state legislative chambers. Not a single Republican incumbent lost.
Thanks to Clinton, the ’94 Republican sweep marked the first time in half a century that Republicans had a majority in the House. (It was one of many historic moments in the Clinton Administration—another being "First President accused of rape within weeks of being impeached.") That sweep meant voters in about 50 congressional districts had done something they had never done before in their entire lives: Vote Republican in a congressional election. There was no reason to expect lifelong Democrats in those districts to keep voting Republican in every successive election.
To the contrary, Democrats should have won back a lot of the seats they lost in 1994. By the standard of historical averages, in the 1998 midterm election, the Democrats should have won back 22 House seats. Instead they won only six seats. The average midterm loss this past century is 30 seats in the House. Clinton’s average was 46.
The media billed the Democrats’ paltry gain in 1998 as a victory for Clinton and revulsion with impeachment for the same reason they say Bush "stole" the presidential election. Liberals love to lie. (Someone should write a book about that.)
By contrast, in Bush’s first midterm election last week, Republicans made spectacular gains all over the country. It was such a blowout that over on CBS, Dan Rather had to keep retelling viewers about Sen. Lautenberg’s victory in New Jersey. (Good thing Election Day finally came without another Democrat realizing the voters were on to him, or the Democrats might have had to unwrap Tutankhamen.)
All night, victories rolled in for Republicans, even shocking victories no one had expected. They picked up seats in the House and Senate. Republicans won a double whammy with Democrat-target Jeb Bush winning in Florida and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend losing in Maryland. Democratic bête noire Katherine Harris won her congressional election. In stunning upsets, Republicans won the governorships in Hawaii and Georgia. The Republican juggernaut could not be stopped.
Democrats may be forced to shut down operations as a party and re-enter politics under a different name. The party formerly known as "the Democratic Party" will henceforth be doing business under the name "the Abortion Party."
That would have the virtue of honesty. Love of abortion is the one irreducible minimum of the Democratic Party. Liberals don’t want to go to war with Saddam Hussein, but they do want to go to war to protect Roe v. Wade.
Inasmuch as George Bush rather than Barbra Streisand will be picking our federal judges, even now liberals are sharpening their character assassination techniques. People for the American Way—representing Americans up and down the Malibu beachfront—are already lining up lying Anita Hills to accuse Bush’s judicial nominees of lynching blacks and burning crosses.
This is precisely the sort of Clintonian viciousness that Americans indicated they were sick of on election night. The Democrats’ motorcycle rally-cum-funeral in Minnesota for Paul Wellstone exposed the party’s character in a pellucid, dramatic way. It was so revolting, people couldn’t avert their eyes from the spectacle. The only moral compass liberals have is their own will to power. Even the deaths of three members of a family could not slow them down.
If the party formerly known as "the Democrats" doesn’t like the factually correct "Abortion Party," how about "the Adultery Party"? Noticeably, the only incumbent Republican senator to lose was Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas, who left his wife for a staffer a few years ago. I’m proud to be a member of a party that still frowns on that sort of thing.
The end result of a Democratic President’s being caught in an adulterous affair with an intern was: Two Republicans resigned from Congress. Meanwhile, the felon in the White House was revered as a latter-day George Washington by the Adultery Party. And consider that Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston were mere congressmen. Bill Clinton, Teddy Kennedy, Jesse Jackson and Gary Hart are deemed presidential material by the Adultery Party.
What a miserable party. I’m glad to see their power end, and I’m sure they’ll all be perfectly comfortable in their cells in Guantanamo. As Jesse Helms said on Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980: God has given America one more chance.
Eaker
Thanks, Billy and Hilly!!
Now that we agree, let's sum it all up:
ABORTION a bad word even to abortionists.
As a woman, I am heartily sick of the litmus test being whether or not I "approve" of abortion. I imagine many minorities are also feeling sick of being judged by the color of their skin, and lumped into some imaginary grouping based solely on that criteria.
As a woman who has experienced more than my fair share of "spontaneous abortions", I would never knowingly "choose" to inflict upon myself, or anyone else, that particular grief.
Ann Coulter is correct in this article.The Democrats are indeed the Abortion party.Abortion "right" is the only issue they have to keep uneducated women on their plantation.I want this issue gone.I do not believe anyone should be able to "choose" to terminate a second or third trimester pregnacy, based solely on personal convenience.There are valid reasons a woman must undergo a medically induced abortion.I dont think the majority of women view abortion as a viable birth controll method.
I think the abortion "issue" is one manufactured by controlling socialist elements of the Democrat party.The fear factor.The controll factor.The Taliban Democrat factor.
Roe v Wade only provided legallity for individual patient/doctor choice of treatment options. Nothing in that ruling mandated abortion on demand.
I truly want politicians to get out of my womb.I think minority races also want everyone to get out of their skin color.How can we ever achieve true equality, when a powerfull pollitical party (Democrat) bases their power on lies and fear?
That's no reason to resort to hyperbole to oppose abortion. (In fact, hyperbole should be even less necessary.) Moreover, suppose that a woman who finds out her husband is committing adultery becomes despondent and kills herself. Would you have the law treat her husband as a murderer?
If I believe that abortion is a taking of human life, then it shouldn't make any difference whether that life happens to be my own child or yours.
If anti-abortion people could prove that abortion is the taking of a "human" life, then they would have no need to resort to hyperbole. (Moreover, I could make a strong case that there is nothing wrong with valuing the lives of your own children more than those of anyone else.)
In the same vein, a southern before the Civil War would argue that he (or she) is simply pro-choice. Stephen Douglas certainly made that argument to Lincoln in the Lincoln/Douglas debates. How much respect would such a position get today when slavery is universally viewed as an evil?
I certainly respect Antebellum Southerners who thought slavery was wrong but should be legal more than I respect those who held slaves and claimed that it was part of God's plan for negroes. Lincoln, for example, was not an abolitionist when he first became President but rather thought that slavery should be ended by (a) appealing to what he thought were the Jeffersonian instincts of most Southerners and (b) compensating slaveholders for giving up slavery. It was only when he realized that slaveholders would fight to the death to preserve slavery that he became an abolitionist.
Of course, a legal choice to enslave is the opposite of a legal choice to abort. The modern slaveholders are the anti-abortion zealots who want to maintain pregnant women in bondage until they deliver a baby.
Calling it "pro-choice" is not a philosophical decision, but a marketing decision...
On the contrary, the "pro-choice" label is accurate for people who do not want the state to prohibit abortion and that's why it infuriates the anti-abortion zealots. On the other hand, the "pro-life" label anti-abortion zealots use is false advertising (unless the "pro-lifers" are in favor of women having as many babies as possible even if that means they have to be raped and held in bondage throughout their fertile years).
Notice that politicians will invariably say "I want to preserve a woman's right to choose", but they never explicitly say choose what.
Do you really think anyone doesn't know what choice they are talking about? If I asked a conservative office seeker "Do you believe that the state should permit people to choose to smoke so many cigarettes that they die of lung cancer or emphysema", you would expect him to say "Yes, I think the state should permit people to choose to smoke so many cigarettes that they die of lung cancer or emphysema"? There is a huge difference between false advertising and effective true advertising.
I don't think that and I didn't say that, but as in this column, Coulter harps way too much on the adultery and thereby hurts the Republican/conservative cause.
Even if you could prove that, it wouldn't justify the hyperbole of Ann Coulter and the other anti-abortion zealots. I fact, as I have stated, if you could prove that you would have no need for hyperbole.
You've got to be kidding. Here's a proof for you. Examine the DNA of an aborted baby and the DNA of a baby the same age born prematurely.
Then examine your own DNA. You will be surprised to find that all three of you belong to the species homo sapiens, the definition of human.
Not really. I believe in a soul but also believe that there is pretty strong evidence suggesting that the soul does not enter the fetus until shortly before birth.
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