Are the Socialist Democrats Already Admitting Defeat for 2004?
By Mary Mostert on 09/23/03
There is an old Chinese saying, that was in a collection proverbs I had as a teenager, that came to my mind in the past few days as a flurry of hate mail bounced into my stacks of e-mail: “The first to become angry admits losing the argument.” I’m beginning to think the socialist wing of the Democratic Party is already conceding defeat in next year’s elections.
There appears to be a standard operating procedure in these days of deceit and spin, for those attempting to get free advertising for their particular political view. People like me who write commentary, and have many readers, are prime targets for the deceit and spin. It usually starts with flattery and an apparent appeal to reason. Increasingly, commentators who fail to bash Bush are targets. It starts like this:
Dear Mary,
You are so smart and so well informed I was surprised to see that you support George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. Don’t you know that: (pick a statement to fill in the blank)
1. The Bush family made their money supporting Hitler.
2. This is all about oil and the Bush family will make a lot of money by invading Iraq (or defending Kuwait, whatever.)
3. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction because he just wanted to invade Iraq.
This phase doesn’t usually last too long, since I deal with facts, not opinions and emotion. The next phase is the fear stage. Bill Clinton used this very effectively in getting re-elected in 1996. He and the Democrats, aiming directly at those near or older than 65, a group that usually go to the polls and vote, warned that if Bob Dole was elected, with a Republican majority in the Congress the senior citizens would lose their Medicare and Social Security. At the time, shortly after Clinton’s attempt to socialize the medical, the political tactic used by the Democrats was dubbed “Medi-scare” – scaring senior citizens.
And, it worked pretty well. I knew retired people who actually changed their vote for fear somehow Bob Dole, all by himself, would snatch their social security checks and Medicare.
It appears that most political analysts believe that the major issue for the 2004 election, which is still more than a year away, will be either national security or the economy. Consequently, we have a campaign already underway that is trying to blame Bush for whatever happens in either of those categories. However, since there hasn’t BEEN another terrorist attack on American soil as deadly as the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the stock market has climbed back to about what it was on September 10, 2001, it is possible that neither issue will be sufficiently scary to bring voters to the Democrats.
What I am seeing, and in fact, what I am experiencing, as things begin to improve is an increase in hate mail and name-calling mail, none of which I care to repeat.
The problem the left is experiencing appears to be a bit of over-blown hysteria. For example, in January 2003, in an effort to frighten people into joining a movement to prevent President Bush from taking action to end Saddam Hussein’s regime, Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general, spearheaded a movement to “impeach President Bush, Vice-President Richard B. Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft. According to Clark, impeaching four top leaders of the United States would “save our Constitution, the United Nations, the rule of law, and the lives of countless people and leave open the possibility of peace on earth.”
Well, here we are, nine months later, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft are still at their desks, the Constitution still is intact, the United Nations is still talking and doing nothing in New York and, with Saddam Hussein gone we are counting deaths on one hand instead of in the hundreds or thousands. For the first time in almost 4 decades, Iraq is safe enough for an American Secretary of State to fly in and give a speech in a city where thousands of Iraqis died from some of that poison gas that the left-wingers keep telling us Saddam Hussein didn’t have.
The American people, bless them, appear now to feel so safe that they show signs of becoming bored with terrorism and national security and, as a result, it is getting harder and harder to get them riled up and frightened, especially now that we’ve had a rise in the stock market from 7,517.76 in mid-March 2003 to 9,567.34 on September 16. That’s a 25% rise in six months. This does not really look like impending disaster.
This has led to the next step –name-calling and threats to create anger and possible violence. The better the news out there, the angrier the left wing seems to get, and the more absurd and vicious their language. There is a well-organized plan for 2004 to seize control of the courts, where they don’t NEED a majority vote to implement their socialist programs. Often, out of 281 million people, all that is required to thwart the majority of 141 million people, it seems, is one vote on the U.S. Supreme Court.
The name-calling and threats are designed as a cover-up so the person attacked will spend time and money defending themselves. To his credit, President Bush and the others in the Bush Administration who are targeted by the extremists (some calling themselves conservative, some calling themselves “moderates” and some calling themselves “progressives”) are just doing their job and not wasting time to playing their divisive name-calling game.
The fact that we are more than a year away from the 2004 election and the language has already gotten so extreme indicates to me that a lot of Bush opponents already realize they have lost the argument. They are going to have to figure out a way to destroy Bush somewhere other than in the voting booth. They almost seem to be admitting defeat in the battle for the hearts and minds of the people. |
