Category Archives: culture

The Progressive-Democratic Party

Posted on by
Reply

Today’s Party, the evolution of the Democratic Party, is little distinguishable from the modern Progressive movement as devised by that movement’s founders, Herb Croly, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.

Brief for instances:

Roosevelt and Wilson both wanted to nationalize broad swaths of the American private economy, and Wilson did so, until the Supreme Court struck his move and released his seizure.

Today’s Progressive-Democrats take pride in their Progressivism, including seeking to nationalize broad swaths of today’s economy: Barack Obama seized our health care and health care coverage industries, and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden wants to expand on that.  Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates and Senators Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) want to go further and replace our health industries with Medicare-for-All and to eliminate altogether all vestiges of privately obtained health insurance.

Both want to seize our wealth property in the form of much higher taxes—in Warren’s case, an explicit tax on the mere possession of wealth.  Ex-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio (D) is even clearer, if that’s possible: he says there’s plenty of money, it’s just in the wrong hands.  And we need to seize it and put it where we say it belongs.

Beyond that, today’s Progressive-Democrats are proud of their Progressivism: Hillary Clinton is a proud Progressive, Biden says he’s the most Progressive of the current Party candidates.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) have averred their pride in their Progressive policies.  Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) are so far Progressive, they’re openly Socialist.

Today’s Party shares, also, the movement founders’ contempt for ordinary Americans.  Croly said the average American was inadequate to his duties as a democrat, and Wilson wrote that Americans generally could not handle a republican form of government and that blacks in particular were so incapable that they should be grateful for the protection of segregation.

This is echoed with ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) dismissal of Americans as nothing more than bitter Bible-clingers and gun-toters, Hillary Clinton’s slur that tens of millions of us are irredeemably deplorable, racist, and homophobic.  Others in Party dismiss Republicans as Trump-cultists and say that anyone who supports Trump is necessarily racist.

The list goes on for a long distance.

Censorship

Posted on by
Reply

Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D, AZ) seems to have failed her Progressive-Democratic Party’s purity test.  She votes for what she views as right rather than knee-jerkishly IAW Party diktat.  As a result, she

may face a censure vote by Arizona’s Democratic Party because she votes too often in favor of President Trump’s agenda
…
Since joining the Senate in January, Sinema has opposed Trump 81% of the time, The Arizona Republic reported, citing data from the FiveThirtyEight Trump Tracker.
That’s apparently not often enough to satisfy many of her fellow Democrats in the Grand Canyon State.

Here’s Dan O’Neal, Progressive Democrats of America (a Progressive-Democrat PAC) National Field Team Director and Arizona State Coordinator:

[T]he way she is voting is really disappointing. We want Democrats to vote like Democrats and not Republicans.

Think about that.

Sinema was elected to the Senate by her constituents, the good citizens of her Arizona district, not by the Progressive-Democratic Party.  She, like all elected politicians in an ideal world, was elected to do her best to carry out her constituents’ instructions, and where those instructions are unclear—where there is no consensus among her constituents—to carry out her best judgment.  The quality of that performance, and the consequences of unsatisfactory performance, are up to her constituents to decide.  They’re not up to Party.

This is what bipartisanship looks like for the Progressive-Democratic Party.  This is what free speech looks like for the Progressive-Democratic Party.  Remember this in the fall of 2020.

Judgment, Again

Posted on by
Reply

Recall the New York Times‘ publication of an article slandering Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with an unfounded accusation of sexual misbehavior toward a young woman decades ago at a college party.  Recall further that the NYT later “corrected” its claim with an “Editor’s Note” buried in the original smear piece instead of placing its Note prominently.

There’s more to this story.  The smear piece, excerpted from a forthcoming book as part of a marketing effort for that book, was written by the authors of the book.  They excerpted their own book.

They omitted the key information themselves.

Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, the authors of the book and the authors of the excerpted smear, claim they had the substance of the Note in the draft of their article, and that “editors” cut it out.

This, of course, is, to put it politely, utter nonsense. It’s entirely plausible that editors cut the critical information (and what does that say about the underlying integrity of the NYT?), but Pogrebin and Kelly did not have to agree to the censoring.  They chose to accept it; they chose to publish a blatant, dishonest smear.

But wait—mightn’t the editors have made the cut and gone to press without a faretheewell to Pogrebin and Kelly?  Maybe.  In that case, though, the two would have been all over the media hours after publication squawking to high Heaven about the cut and how the cut utterly changed the meaning of what they wrote. If they disapproved of the cut.  But they weren’t, because they approved the cut. Whether they did the cut or the editors did it, Pogrebin and Kelly fully approved of the cut and the smear that resulted from the cut.

When asked about that bit of editing and the Note during an interview on MSNBC, Pogrebin offered this:

We discussed it. We felt like there was so much heat, there’s so much– everyone has been has been [sic] seizing on various aspects of this that we certainly didn’t want it to be an issue anymore and we certainly never intended to mislead in any way. We wanted to give as full of a story as possible.

As full a story as possible.

Right. I might know of some beachfront property for sale north of Santa Fe, too.

Judgment

Posted on by
Reply

Recall that the New York Times, just a very few days ago, reprinted an excerpt from a Clinton lawyer’s book that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had inflicted an obscene act on a young woman while he was a college student at a “drunken dorm party.”

Immediately on publication, Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates and sitting Senators Kamala Harris (CA), Elizabeth Warren (MA), Bernie Sanders (VT), Cory Booker (NJ), along with fellow candidates ex-Congressman Robert Francis O’Rourke, and ex-HUD Secretary Julian Castro all demanded Kavanaugh’s immediate impeachment.

Then the NYT, having been caught in its lie, had to print a “correction” in the form of an…Editor’s Note…buried in the article:

An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.

Nor, apparently, did the NYT bother to ask the person in question to be interviewed for its article containing the excerpt. The NYT also has offered not even a single syllable of apology to Kavanaugh for its smear.

We expect that out of tabloids.  What’s particularly disgusting, though, is that not a single one of those Presidential candidates have offered a smidgeon of apology to Kavanaugh for their role in expanding the smear. Instead, with their silence they stand by their claims.  That’s a lack of integrity, an absence of morality, that’s wholly unacceptable.

Impeach on the basis of a newspaper article, rather than actual evidence.  That’s not the quality of judgment we need in the White House.  Nor is it the level of integrity needed there.

Strength of Consent

Posted on by
Reply

The people of Hong Kong are in their 15th straight week of protest against the People’s Republic of China’s moves to intervene in Hong Kong’s internal affairs, to impose yet more PRC controls over a nominally free, “two systems” city.

People of all ages, many unmasked and some carrying children, walked more than 2 miles from a shopping district, where usually busy stores were shuttered, to downtown Hong Kong. Many chanted, “Five demands! Not one less!,” “Fight for freedom!” and “Revolution of our times!”

Those five demands, which do not add up to freedom, but are a necessary early step on the path to freedom, are these:

  • independent inquiry into allegations of police brutality
  • amnesty for arrested protesters
  • electoral reforms to allow Hong Kongers to vote for their own leaders
  • formal withdrawal of the extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kong citizens (and anyone else arrested) to be sent to the PRC for trial and jail
  • Hong Kong Executive Carrie Lam’s resignation

Lam has “promised” to formally withdraw the extradition bill, but she has not honored her promise, and she has categorically rejected the others. Lam’s “promise” was a cynical effort to divide and weaken the protest movement.

However, as The Wall Street Journal put it in the article at the link,

The scale of the crowds Sunday evoked mass marches earlier this summer, suggesting efforts by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam to weaken and divide the opposition movement are having little effect, and the crisis remains a challenge for the Chinese leadership in Beijing.

This protestor illustrates the matter.

The PRC’s President Xi Jinping has a golden opportunity, here, to demonstrate the strength of consenting to the citizens’ demands, but he’s overtly eschewing it. He, and his Chinese Communist Party cronies, are simply too insecure to take the step.  And not just politically: they’re personally and emotionally too insecure.