Bankrupt
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 26, 2006
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is David Limbaugh, a lawyer, nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate, political commentator, and author of the New York Times bestsellers Absolute Power and Persecution. He is the author of the new book Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party.
FP: David Limbaugh, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Limbaugh: Thank you. There is no place I’d rather be.
FP: What motivated you to write this book?
Limbaugh: In my syndicated column shortly after the 2000 presidential election I predicted the Democrats, so embittered by the election results and militant to the core, would conduct a four-year war throughout President Bush’s first term. My only mistake was underestimating the number of years. The Democrats have been particularly venal, particularly partisan and outright hostile to President Bush at every turn. While characterizing him as a liar on the things that matter most, they have been the ones guilty of lying. While characterizing him as partisan, they have been the ones far more guilty of partisanship.
This once great party has so allowed itself to become paralyzed by its singular hatred for President Bush to the point that it is no longer a responsible opposition party. As I witnessed the party continuing to debase itself as the president’s first term unfolded I decided it would be useful to write a book to chronicle its myriad misdeeds so that skeptics and believers alike could see the evidence gathered and organized in one place. If you are only a casual observer of politics you will be shocked at the cumulative weight of this evidence and hopefully convinced of the party’s bankruptcy of values and ideas. If you are more engaged in matters political, this book will serve as an unpleasant reminder of the character of today’s Democratic Party.
FP: Tell us some of the ways that the Democrat Party is morally and intellectually bankrupt.
Limbaugh: The party is systemically corrupt. By that I do not mean financial corruption, but a corruption of values and ideas. It has become so obsessed with hating President Bush that it no longer offers – or even attempts to offer – a legitimate alternative policy agenda. Most of its leaders also deny their liberalism. Thus, it is intellectually bankrupt.
Its moral bankruptcy can be seen in its pathological lying about President Bush, from false allegations that he lied about Iraqi WMD, to malicious charges that he presided over an inept, callous federal response to Hurricane Katrina because it was believed that a disproportionate percentage of its victims were minorities and he and other conservatives and Republicans are allegedly racists. They have mischaracterized President Bush as a unilateralist in foreign policy, hoping to augment their false picture of him as a neoconservative imperialist. Through his “go-it-alone” policies, they say, he has alienated our traditional allies in Europe and by attacking Iraq “unilaterally” he has alienated the Muslim world and spawned more Islamic terrorism. Of course the truth is that he did organize a broad coalition of some 32 nations to join us in attacking Iraq and he pleaded with Germany, France, Russia and others also to do the right thing. A unilateralist wouldn’t have bothered – and Democrats know it.
When these nations wrongly refused, Democrats castigated President Bush instead of these recalcitrant nations, who despite believing with us that Saddam had WMD and was dangerous, refused to join us. It is interesting to note that Senator John Kerry constantly maintained that if he had been in charge he would have built a broader coalition. This is absurd on its face, since he simultaneously proclaimed that Iraq was the wrong war, wrong place, wrong time. How Mr. Kerry could have convinced resistant nations to join a cause he professes not to have believed in himself is beyond mystifying – but an incurious, complicit liberal media never raised such questions of Kerry. Why would they? They are the megaphone for this once great institution.
FP: Why has the Democratic Party fallen so low?
Limbaugh: I believe the party sold its soul during the Clinton years when, instead of repudiating President Clinton as responsible Republicans did Richard Nixon in the seventies, they circled the wagons around him and adopted his misconduct as their own. They made a Faustian bargain to keep their wagons hitched to Clinton and his cult of personality as their best bet to retain power regardless of the consequences on their collective character. They further degenerated during the 2000 election debacle. Al Gore, seeing the writing on the wall that he had lost Florida, dispatched 72 of his operatives to Florida to manufacture bogus, but apparently plausible challenges to the election results. His team, for example, hired a telemarketing firm, which made some 5,000 phone calls in 45 minutes to stir voters into a frenzy over the possibility that they had miscast their ballots.
The pre-meditated result was that it appeared there was a spontaneous eruption of disgruntled voters who thought they had been confused or deceived out of properly casting their ballots for Gore. Gore’s legal team, while professing that every vote should count, demanded recounts in only those counties most likely to favor Gore. Similarly, they circulated sophisticated memos designed to disenfranchise military ballots. Though they lost at every turn, they portrayed themselves as the victims of Republican chicanery, including unconscionable allegations that Republicans intimidated and suppressed African American voters. When the United States Supreme Court finally slapped down the highly political and activist Florida Supreme Court for having changed its own states laws and constitution in the middle of an election contest, Democrats accused the “Republican Court” of having stolen the election for Bush – with the aid of President Bush’s brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his viciously maligned Secretary of State Katherine Harris.
In the process of all of this they greatly undermined the public’s confidence in the democratic process. And through their relentless propaganda they convinced significant numbers of African Americans that Republicans had deliberately disenfranchised them and rank and file Democrats they had been robbed of the presidency – neither of which was remotely true. The party was simply unwilling to accept its legitimate defeat and its loss of power. It was difficult enough for it to digest its loss of Congress in 1994 after enjoying a monopoly on the legislative branch for a near half century. But the loss of the presidency following their glory years of the nineties was apparently too much to swallow. I believe they focused all their fury from rejection on President Bush, who became emblematic of their loss of power.
Instead of trying to regain power during the next two, then four years through honest opposition, they resorted to the sordid politics of personal destruction and lost all touch with their better angels. But since they had won a majority of the popular vote in 2000 and believed they had built on that majority during the next four years by slandering and discrediting President Bush, they believed they would slide back into power in 2004. When they were defeated – this time by some 3.5 million votes, they went in droves to psychiatric counseling. New syndromes were developed to describe their lost and aimless condition, such as Post Election Selection Trauma. Since 2004 the party has devoted itself to destroying President Bush and in the process, have greatly damaged the national interest.
FP: Why do you think the Democrats are so weak when it comes to confronting Islamism?
Limbaugh: There are a number of reasons. Liberals are typically appeasement oriented, especially when Republicans are in control and so their instinct is not to be tough against this enemy. We have seen it from their opposition to President Bush’s various tools to fight the war, to their sympathy for European critics of the war, to their sympathy for enemy combatants in our prisons. Moreover, they tend to underestimate the nature and scope of the global terrorist threat, denying Iraq is part of the war and essentially saying that if we would only capture or kill Osama this war would end.
As a result of under-appreciating the threat, they also view the war as a law enforcement matter and want to give our enemy constitutional criminal rights as if they are entitled to the same degree of protection as a criminal defendant in the United States. They seem to think – amazingly enough – that we can negotiate with terrorists and that we have done something to provoke the terrorists into waging war against us. They were mortified when President Bush designated Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the “Axis of Evil,” and actually believe this designation has caused the antipathy of these regimes against the United States. Only unsophisticated people can possibly be so simplistic as to subscribe to moral absolutes, to see certain problems in terms of black and white and good and evil.
More nuance is required. Some of them believe we are too aligned with Israel and have thus given Muslim terrorists grounds for resenting, opposing, perhaps even making war against us. Their knee-jerk reaction to world conflict today is often to blame America first. America consumes too much of the world’s resources, America is a stingy nation, America is an imperialistic nation, America under President Bush conducts a unilateral foreign policies. America otherwise destroys the environment and selfishly refuses to sign on to the Kyoto climate treaty. America – especially its right wing – refuses to accept the enlightened ideas of the “progressive” European states, who have a thing or two to tell us about cultural and environmental issues. America has too many nukes, so how can it fairly prevent other nations from acquiring them. Finally, confronting the enemy involves joining with the President in the War on Terror and Democrats can’t bring themselves to be on his side about anything – even the war.
FP: Why do the Democrats hate the Republicans and Bush so much?
Limbaugh: I believe, in a nutshell, it is because they believe he symbolizes their loss of power. Beyond that, they hate this very likable guy because he is resolute, decisive, a Christian, and a person who makes black and white moral distinctions. He will not cater their every policy whim, which they interpret as him being stubborn. If they agreed with his policies they would admire his perseverance, but since they abhor them, they cannot abide his steadfast unwillingness to admit his mistakes. Indeed, they can’t believe he presumed to govern as if he had a mandate in 2000 when he didn’t win a majority of the popular vote and in 2004 when he won by three and a half million votes. He should have employed a bipartisan approach, meaning he should have adopted their agenda.
Chuck Schumer said he'd govern in a way to please both sides. They forget that although Clinton failed to win a majority of the popular vote in either of his presidential elections, the mainstream media were quite clear in declaring that Clinton had a mandate. They are entirely oblivious to their own double standard as they persist in demanding that Bush voluntarily dilute his agenda because he didn’t win by enough of a margin to pursue his own. Their attitude is: We’ll do it our way if we win and if you win, you’ll do it our way. When he hasn’t, they have grown to hate him more. Oh yes, and don’t forget the cowboy swagger and his use of nicknames. These folksy southern traits are repulsive to their blue-state elitist instincts.
FP: Tell us a bit on the Democrats’ use of race and class warfare.
Limbaugh: Democrats have shamelessly employed divisive racial and class politics. On race, they promote the malicious notion that conservatives and Republicans are insensitive to minorities and perhaps even racists. But when one examines the record on civil rights he might find the Republicans, historically, fare better than Democrats. Democrats have deliberately and repeatedly issued the false allegation that Republicans try to suppress black voter turnout, not just in Florida, but Ohio and other states. The charge is outrageously false, but their failure to substantiate it does not deter them from continuing with the destructive charge. But they outdid themselves on racial politics with Hurricane Katrina when they charged that President Bush presided over a delayed federal response to New Orleans because a disproportionate number of its victims were perceived to be black. No reasonable people could believe such poisonous bile, but Democrats pushed it far and wide, which inevitably fomented much racial distrust and resentment.
It seems that very little is off limits for Democrats if it can yield partisan gain, from their lies about the president on the war to their lies about his approach to Hurricane Katrina. The class warfare tactics are along the very same lines. They continually say that Bush’s tax cuts were skewed in favor of the rich. In fact, the tax cuts made the tax code more progressive. After the cuts were implemented, the wealthy paid a higher percentage of federal revenues than before. Under our current tax structure, the bottom fifty percent of income earners pay less than four percent of federal revenues, and Democrats have the audacity to charge the code favors the wealthy. In fact, during the Reagan and Bush tax cuts the lot of all income groups improved, not just the wealthy. Most of the lower twenty percent of earners moved up in earnings, showing that a rising tide certainly lifts the bottom boats too. Further, Democrats have perpetuated the myth that the Reagan and Bush tax cuts caused hikes in the deficit and the national debt, when the empirical evidence – as cited in detail in my book – show otherwise. Excess spending is the culprit.
But with the tax cuts, we were growing out of the deficit during the end of the Reagan years and it appears we are beginning to do so again under the Bush cuts. Democrats have also employed class warfare in connection with their demagogic opposition to Social Security reform. They were so adamant that Social Security was in crisis in 1998 through 2000 that Clinton and Gore both insisted it be placed in a “lock box.” But as usual, they were all talk. When George Bush actually had the courage to take on the “third rail of politics,” they changed their tune, saying it was not in crisis and that any crisis was of Bush’s own making. Bush, they said, wanted to destroy Social Security. Bush, they said, wanted to partially privatize it as a sop to his buddies on Wall Street. Like with the war, racial relations, the judiciary and other issues, they have placed their perceived partisan interests above the national interest and their performance has been consistently regrettable.
FP: David Limbaugh, thank you for joining us.
Limbaugh: Thank you very much. I have been a big fan of Frontpagemag.com for years and it is my honor to have participated in this interview. |
