Undemocratic Democrats
Jay Bryant (archive)
December 2, 2003 | Print | Send
What is it about democracy that Democrats don't like?
Most of the Democratic Presidential candidates, along with most Democratic Senators, voted in favor of the Iraqi War resolution of October 2002. But now that the war is over, they say they were duped by the administration's lies about weapons of mass destruction and connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. They want out, and pronto.
The democratization of Iraq doesn't count a whit with them.
We should not be surprised by this, since they don't seem to care much for democracy in the U.S. either.
In Florida in 2000, they tried to undo the vote count as certified by mostly their own election night counters because ballots approved by Democratic local officials were (they decided after the fact) defective. In 2001 and 2002, they tried to hold the Senate hostage until, they supposed, the 2002 elections would give them a working majority. When the elections went the other way, they redoubled their wrench-in-the-gears strategy, with filibusters, threats of filibusters and other tactics designed to prevent the Republican majority from accomplishing anything that might reflect credit on the Administration or Congress.
And don't forget that the 2002 elections would almost certainly have given the Republicans yet another US Senator if the Democrats hadn't managed to contravene New Jersey election laws and allow their dead loser of a candidate, Robert Torricelli to be replaced on the ballot long after the time for such changes had expired.
This year, when the duly elected legislators of Texas attempted to exercise their prerogative to draw Congressional district maps, the Democrats bolted to a Holiday Inn in Oklahoma rather than let the legislature vote on a map that would fairly respect the true partisan split in the state (as opposed to the gerrymandered one drawn up by a bunch of Democrat judges in 2001). Texas State Senators later pulled a reprise of the Where's Waldo act by absconding to New Mexico.
Democratic hatred for democracy has been further exhibited in recent weeks by a furious demand that the President renounce and pull from the airwaves an innocuous commercial which makes the startling claim that Democrats object to his Iraqi policy. They said he was impugning their patriotism. Of course, they can run ads accusing Bush of lying about Iraq, deliberately poisoning the environment, starving schoolchildren and being the Boston Strangler, but the minute he criticizes them, you'd think he'd set the burglars loose at the Watergate.
The criticism of the first little Bush advertising message is a harbinger of things to come, by the way. Look for the paranoia to get more and more intense as the campaign rolls on. The Democrats remember how, by screaming the words "Willie Horton" in 1992, they intimidated Bush the Elder's campaign into avoiding any serious negative messages, a prime cause of his loss that year.
But I digress. The latest example of Democratic antipathy toward democracy comes from that bastion of clean and fair elections, the state of Illinois. There, where the legislature is completely controlled by the Democrats, the destruction of democracy has reached Orwellian proportions.
In Illinois, in 2004, the name of George W. Bush will not, as of now, be allowed on the ballot.
State law specifies that the ballot must be certified in August; but the GOP National Convention isn't until September. So, a minor change in the law was required. But instead of simply making the change, the Democratic legislative leadership tacked a provision onto the bill that would allow the State Board of Elections to waive a bunch of election law fines, including a whopping $797,600 judgment against Secretary of State Jesse White, and others against no less than 14 Democratic Senators, none of whom bothered to recuse himself from the vote. Senate Republicans rightly refused to support such a blatantly corrupt measure, so the bill failed, and unless it is revised, Bush's name will not be on the ballot in Illinois; to win the state's electoral votes he will have to run a write-in campaign.
The bill could be brought up again in the spring, but according to Chicago Sun- Times columnist Thomas Roeser, the Democratic leadership is promising "that the same conditions will be applied next year."
Remember how Saddam Hussein got 100% of the votes in the October 2002 Iraqi "election?" The Democrats must have been poll watching in Baghdad that day; noting that no other candidates were allowed on the ballot, they came up with a winning strategy for 2004. If it works on the shores of the Tigris, why not on the shores of Lake Michigan?
What a bunch of spoiled brats the Democrats are. Give them majority power and they will abuse it. Deprive them of majority status and they become unconscionable obstructionists, the political equivalent of tree-nailers. The corrupt spirit of Tammany Hall is alive and well in the Democratic Party of the 21st Century.
Veteran GOP media consultant Jay Bryant’s regular columns are available at www.theoptimate.com, and his commentaries may be heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
©2003 Jay Bryant
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