Tag Archives: ethics

The Progressive-Democratic Party

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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

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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.

EU Version of Brexit

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EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker says that the risk of a no-deal Brexit is very real.  He also says he told British Prime Minister Boris Johnson

…I have no emotional attachment to the backstop.  But I made clear that I do have an intimate connection to its commitments. I have asked the prime minister to make, in writing, alternatives.

The commitment of the backstop, the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which violates a central premise of the vote to leave the EU—British control of British borders—still amounts to a backdoor to partitioning Great Britain. Keep in mind that one of the EU’s early offers on this backstop was that Great Britain could put its hard border on the Irish Sea coast—an offer quickly deleted when its purpose was recognized as too obviously presented.

On top of that, Juncker has shown his unseriousness in these “negotiations” with his demand that Great Britain offer all the alternatives. Juncker has no need, apparently, to stoop so low as to offer his own.

Indeed, led by chief negotiator Michel Barnier,

EU negotiators say that he [Johnson] is yet to offer a viable replacement solution.

Because if they offered their own solution, and Great Britain accepted it, then Juncker and his court would have actually to say, “Yes,” finally.

It’s hard to see how negotiations can get more bad faith than this.  Juncker is like an emperor on the throne awaiting the pleas of his supplicant.

Judgment, Again

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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.

Continued Intransigence

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European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker makes it clear.

Britain has still not proposed any workable alternatives to the Northern Ireland “backstop” within the Brexit withdrawal agreement, the EU said on Monday.

And

President Juncker underlined the commission’s continued willingness and openness to examine whether such proposals meet the objectives of the backstop. Such proposals have not yet been made[.]

Juncker knows full well that the “backstop” is not just a deal-breaker, it’s a non-starter for the British. It demands that a core feature of the Brexit vote three years ago was so that Great Britain gets control of its own borders back, yet the “backstop” requires Great Britain to surrender its Irish border to the EU.  That can only be taken as a first step to dismantling Great Britain.

What demonstrates the cynicism of the EU and of Juncker is that they, and he, have steadfastly refused even to offer their own “workable alternatives.”  It’s the EU’s backstop.  Full stop.

In place of counter-offers, Juncker is offering only vapid, uselessly rhetorical pretense and empty willingness to “discuss the next steps.”

He plainly wants Great Britain to drop its Brexit plans and meekly beg for forgiveness for its effrontery. Despicably, so do Labour and too many so-called Tories.