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Politics : Right Wing Extremist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (30095)	11/14/2002 12:25:04 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 59480

Ben Shapiro November 14, 2002 URL:http://www.townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/ The revolt against democrat snobbery If the 2002 midterm election made one point exceedingly clear, it is that a growing majority of Americans hate having the Democrats patronize them. The Democratic Party platform is built on the idea that people are too stupid to take care of themselves or solve their own problems -- therefore, it promulgates Social Security, welfare, a massive and unwieldy public education system, minimum wage, gun control and so on. In 2002, Americans struck back against the snobbish Democrats. The Democrats thought voting Americans too foolish to see their bald-faced obstruction in the Senate, where they blocked qualified judges from the federal bench for purely ideological reasons. The Democrats thought Americans were too dumb to see through their ridiculous scare tactics like demonizing President Bush as a murderer of the elderly or insinuating that Republican policies were responsible for the Washington, D.C., sniper shootings. The Democrats believed the American people would ignore their weakness on national security. The Democrats were wrong. Americans can take care of themselves, and in this election, they voted in favor of personal responsibility over government baby-sitting. But rather than seeing this election as a referendum on their antics, the Democrats chalk up the 2002 Republican election victory not to public agreement with right-wing policies but to the stupidity of the populace. Terry McAuliffe, soon-to-be-terminated chairman of the Democratic National Committee, expressed his thought that people were blinded by the popular appeal of President George W. Bush. "If the Republicans had an edge over us yesterday, it was tactical rather than ideological," McAuliffe sniffed. "They had a wartime president with the highest sustained approval ratings in history, who made these elections his No. 1 domestic priority. He spent the year raising record amounts of money and the final three weeks stumping relentlessly for Republican candidates." Funny, the Democrats said the same thing about Ronald Reagan's victories over Democrats. Deep down, the people really believed in the policy recommendations of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, the Democrats felt. But President Dummy Reagan was too popular. His landslide victories in 1980 and 1984 were a referendum on his friendly persona, not right-wing policies. The Democrats believe strongly in the theory that Americans are too dumb to vote for what's good for them -- they just vote for nice guys. So the solution isn't to revamp the Democratic message, it's to reinvigorate it with left-wing radicalism represented by a friendly face. The Democrats believe that if some genial liberal can make the distinction between right and left clearer, people will finally be able to put aside their warm feelings toward that dunderhead Bush. Hence, Nancy Pelosi. If there's anyone who distinguishes left from right, it is Pelosi, a San Francisco radical who supports all anti-gun legislation, opposes war on Iraq, backs all abortion all the time and so on. "We must draw clear distinctions between our vision of the future and the extreme policies put forward by the Republicans," says Pelosi. The Democrats think she's likeable, and if you combine liberal policies with a friendly female face, you're automatically guaranteed success. It's fine with me if the Democrats want to move to the left. Public opinion shows that they will fall even further from American electoral favor. Fifty-seven percent of those polled in a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll over the Nov. 9 weekend said they think the Democrats are too soft on terrorism. Fifty percent of those polled said the Republicans have a clear plan for curing the country's ills, while only 30 percent said the Democrats did. Most telling, 54 percent of Democrats said the party should moderate its liberal message. But the Democrats won't. They refuse to moderate their message because they feel Americans support leftist policies but are too stupid to vote for them. Democrats think Americans can't be relied upon to act responsibly regarding their money, sexual behavior or children. Similarly, they believe that Americans are fickle and irresponsible voters, blinded by likeable but dimwitted Republicans. The only way to win back the dumb voters is to draw stark and distinctive lines between the parties and paste on a pleasant facade. I say let the Democrats try it. Americans are looking for more than radicalism with a friendly face. ©2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

To: calgal who wrote (30095)	11/14/2002 12:27:34 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 59480

Thomas Sowell URL:http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ November 14, 2002 A San Francisco liberal Now that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is becoming the Democrats' House minority leader, she is being celebrated as the first woman to hold such a high post. But she is also being described as a "San Francisco liberal" -- which she definitely is. What do San Francisco liberals do? They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so just look at the picture on page 58 of the October 28 issue of Fortune magazine. It shows a small, nondescript wooden house, wedged in between two other houses on a street in San Francisco. The caption reads: "Is this house worth $1.2 million?" San Francisco liberals, like liberals across the country, spend a lot of time talking and wringing their hands about the need for "affordable housing." Yet, wherever liberals have been politically dominant housing prices are most unaffordable. Liberals proclaim their concern and compassion for minorities and people with low incomes. Yet these are precisely the people who are being forced out of places like San Francisco, which has the highest rents of any city in the country. The black population of San Francisco went down 15 percent between the 1990 census and the 2000 census. The number of children in San Francisco has also gone down, since people young enough to have children can seldom afford San Francisco housing. Despite liberals' professed concern for the poor, San Francisco is increasingly dominated by the affluent. It has the highest average income of any city in the country. That is not necessarily because San Francisco employers are more generous. People who work in San Francisco, but are not paid high salaries, are likely to be living outside the city -- sometimes far outside -- and commuting to work. All these things might be considered to be just unfortunate coincidences, if the same patterns did not appear time and time again, in other places where liberals have ruled the roost for years on end, whether in San Francisco or elsewhere. You can see the same thing in elite college towns like Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as in Berkeley across the bay from San Francisco or in Palo Alto, adjacent to Stanford University. How do liberals manage to leave so much economic and social havoc in their wake, all the while feeling good about themselves and proclaiming their compassion for the poor, minorities, children and others? Economic illiteracy helps, but liberals are also tied in with environmental zealots who promote sweeping bans on the building of housing, using lovely phrases like "open space" and "protecting the environment." Since housing is subject to supply and demand, like everything else, stifling the supply is enough to cause home prices and apartment rents to shoot up out of sight. History shows clearly that it was not demand which caused the explosive increase in California housing prices that began in the 1970s. During the decade of the 1970s, when home prices quadrupled in Palo Alto, for example, the population of that city actually declined slightly. The number of children declined so much that several schools in Palo Alto had to be closed. It wasn't demand that drove the prices up because the average increase in income in California was less than in the rest of the country during the decade when the state pulled way ahead of the rest of the country in the prices of its homes and apartments. Why did housing prices go up then? Because this was the decade when severe land use restrictions spread through those places in California where liberals were politically dominant. Only in the remaining parts of California could you still find the "affordable housing" that liberals talked so much about. In recent years, the closing down of military bases has left great expanses of prime land, with magnificent views, available in and around San Francisco. If all this land could be auctioned off on the open market for the building of housing, it could enrich the city, wipe out the housing shortage and bring down rents and home prices. But congressional liberals and San Francisco liberals have made that impossible. So long as Nancy Pelosi remains in the congressional minority, the rest of the country may escape the effects of San Francisco liberalism. But if such people are ever in the majority, look out! ©2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.