The hapless liberals are scurrying around trying to make sense of the loss of Massachusetts to a conservative.  Some are clearly delusional.  Some are spinning the story so much they look like square dancers.  Some are obviously disheartened and morose.  Some are trying to make lemonade.  However, for all in the Democratic Party, that curious yellow liquid running down their legs is not lemonade.  No, it certainly is not.

Progressive Democrats’ religion is government.  They believe fervently that government is the be all and end all to their existence.  They live and breathe the power it confers.  They also believe they cannot be wrong.  The ever-loving narrative of a Marxian world of capitalist oppressors versus the beleagured proletariat colors every single event that transpires.  As a result, what most of us see does not appear the same to them.  It is absolutely impossible for the people to vote against their beknighted, holy candidates unless evil, vicious, manipulative capitalists are polluting their poor befuddled minds.  Hence, the strange world of progressives and socialists post-Brown.

The most blatant and obvious example of this bizarro world comes from an exchange between the collectivist Chris Matthews and socialist Howard Dean on Hardboiled.  They are discussing the Massachusetts election and Dean has posited the idea the people voted against Washington because the health care takeover wasn’t radical enought.  Therefore, he divines, Democrats should become more left wing in order to capture those votes. 

MATTHEWS: Oh! You rationally would not have voted for the conservative Republican because he’s against health care, but you say the voters are irrational. They somehow send smoke signals in their voting. They vote for a conservative Republican who’s totally against health care to tell the country they want a progressive health care program. That’s crazy!
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DEAN: We know what they did.
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MATTHEWS: Are voters crazy?
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DEAN: We actually know that they did.

Now, Matthews is a tried and true left wing wingnut, but even he cannot swallow the story Dean is trying to spin.  Bromance with Obama aside, Matthews points out the unreal nature of the results with the narrative.  Dean, however, is more than willing to sell this malarkey as Truth in spite of the facts and the impact of the election.  But, as bad as Dean appears in this exchange, the far left is hellbent to sell this storyline.  Obama himself is trying to make the same point.  In his interview with George Snuffalupagus on This Week, he made the ridiculous claim that the same anger that elected Brown had elected him.  That old nag will no longer carry any water.  But what he said later is quite telling.

“And if you ask the average person what was our stimulus package, they’ll tell you, ‘The bank bailout.”

And I can say, “Well, no — actually that started before I was sworn in, and we’ve managed it very well.” But it doesn’t negate that sense on peoples’ part that nobody is looking after them in an extremely tough situation.”

What Dean was trying to sell on Hardboiled is exactly what the president is trying to sell.  First, the ‘average’ person doesn’t know the difference between a bailout and a stimulus package.  He demeans the entire American populace.  Now, if he’s talking to the nitwits who were chanting and raging for him before his win in 2008, we know they may be that mind-numbingly stupid.  But, for the vast majority of the electorate, they know the difference and they have seen the abysmal results of his program. 

His second point is equally as offensive.  He presumes this fictionally stupid electorate is looking for someone to ”look after them” as though he was the Supernanny of the country instead of its president.  That isn’t the job of a president.  You can just hear the tape playing in his head that tells him these stupid people need babysitting and it is my job to tell them what to do and what not to do.

That is classic socialist and progressive thought.  They do not believe we are capable or entitled to live independant, free lives.  They must direct and regulate because the people are just too plain ignorant to do so.  Obama is merely expressing the contempt the left feels regarding the bulk of the country.  Of course, Stephanopolous doesn’t catch that, he feels exactly the same way.

This narrative of an angry and rudderless Massachusetts electorate rang throughout the political pale.  The Boston Globe had a headline that argued “Voter Anger Caught Fire in Final Days”.  Bill Clinton suggested, “….My experience is when people are frustrated and angry and they act on their frustration and anger, they’ve got about a 75 percent chance of making a bad decision — not just in politics, but in life.”  The Washington [Com]Post’s Dan Balz and Jon Cohen wrote a piece with the headline, “Frustration with D.C. Fuels GOP in Mass.”  While admitting the independent voters were furious with the current administration’s policies and congressional actions, they paint these voters as somewhat schizophrenic by first adopting Obama and now Brown. 

Throughout these examples, the Democratic Party paints the American populace as stupid, crazy, unreliable, rabid, and a mindless animal that races from one side to the other without much in the way of reason. 

The assault on the average American continues. 

Some in the Democratic Party are beginning to see the light, at least a little.  To borrow the old adage about GM, if the Democratic Party has a sniffle in Massachusetts, the national party gets pneumonia.  Evan Bayh, Jim Webb, and even Barney Frank are recognizing this turn of events for what it is, a full scale repudiation of the Washington takeover of everything and the massive spending without pause.  While they are not acknowledging all the parts, they are beginning to understand that without knowing they have a problem, they will not be able to fix it.  The Democratic Party is about ready to begin imploding.  The Dean versus Matthews disagreement is simply a taste of things to come.

Tammany Hall, now a metaphor for Democrat corruption, began as a real place.  It was a building, in fact, the headquarters of the New York Democratic Party.  During the 19th century and early 20th centuries, Tammany Hall was the foremost center of power and financing in the Democratic Party nationwide.

The origins of Tammany Hall date back to the 1790s as a fraternal organization, The Society of St. Tammany.  No, there was never a real Saint Tammany.  Anyway, along came one of the archvillians of American history, Aaron Burr.  Senator Burr took over the society and made it a political organization, which evolved over time into a pillar of the Democratic Party.

In the late 19th century, Tammany Hall, aka the New York City Democratic Party, stole staggering amounts of taxpayer funds – billions of dollars in today’s money.

The head honcho of Tammany Hall was William “Boss” Tweed, a former Democrat congressman.  In addition to larceny, Boss Tweed’s Democrat gangsters also excelled in vote fraud.

Tammany Hall faded in the 1930s as it lost its reason for existence.  With the New Deal, why should the Democrat leadership have a stand-alone organization devoted to shifting money from the government to their own coffers when the federal government could do it for them?  It was at this point that the Democratic Party became the Party of Government.

Now, seven decades later, the Democrat leadership, indeed all Democrats in Congress who vote for the stimulus package and socialized medicine and all the payoffs of Obama’s agenda do so knowing full well they are shovelling billions of dollars from taxpayers to their own coffers.  They’re all Boss Tweed now.

By the way, Boss Tweed died in prison.

Michael Zak is a popular speaker to Republican organizations around the nation, showing office-holders and candidates and activists how they would benefit tremendously from appreciating the heritage of our Grand Old Party.  Back to Basics for the Republican Party is his acclaimed history of the GOP cited by Clarence Thomas in a Supreme Court decision.  His Grand Old Partisan blog celebrates more than fifteen decades of Republican heroes and heroics.  See www.RepublicanBasics.com for more information.

Back in the day - which is to say, the days before reliable automatic weapons were present on the battlefield - armies relied pretty heavily on volley fire and rigid discipline to win battles.  There were two reasons for this: first, of course, the more missiles you have in the air at once, the harder it is to get out of their way.  The second reason was psychological: charging in the face of steady fire - even essentially unaimed fire - is extremely difficult.  Armies and their generals simply had to accept that there would be casualties, and that the proper response was to keep moving forward and return fire.  So it usually came down to determination versus determination.  Sometimes the one side broke and ran… and sometimes one side simply hesitated in the face of a sustained series of volleys.  It sounds counter-intuitive, but that can happen when your troops are braver than your generals.  Or when your generals simply don’t know what to do next, and don’t have the capacity to improvise.

Why am I bringing this up?

The White House privately anticipates health care talks to slip into February — past President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address — and then plans to make a “very hard pivot” to a new jobs bill, according to senior administration officials.

[snip]

Internally, White House aides are plunging into a 2010 plan calling for an early focus on creating jobs, especially in the energy sector, along with starting a conversation about deficit reduction measures, the administration officials said.

Ed Morrissey has more.  Bottom line: this will probably work out well enough for the President, but only because he has over two years before he has to start worrying about getting re-elected.  Democratic Members of Congress have eleven months, and they’ll need every second of it to handle the problem of their unpopular support of an unpopular health care rationing bill.  Put another way: either health care is an immediate crisis, or it is not.  If it is the crisis that we were told, then the President needs to get his fellow-Democrats in Congress to press on through and pass something with the urgency that they’ve been claiming all along was necessary.  If it is not the crisis that we were told, then the President needs to pull his fellow-Democrats out of this particular fight before retreat becomes impossible (but rout does not).  Letting Democrats in Congress take fire on health care rationing in the same way that they’ve been taking fire on cap-and-trade will simply get more of them fired in November for no good reason*.

But that assumes that the President is loyal enough to his party to take the personal hit to what’s left to his reputation for competence.

Moe Lane

*Which is fine with me, of course.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Has anyone heard from Colin Powell lately?  Since Barack Obama became president, there has been complete silence from Colin Powell about a man he described as having “great insight into the challenges we’re facing of a military and political and economic nature.”  When can we expect Powell to show the courage to admit his mistake, his blunder, his betrayal?

Just weeks before the 2008 presidential election, Powell went on television to attack John McCain and the Republican Party.  He then, in his wisdom, endorsed Barack Obama:

“I watched Mr. Obama during this seven-week period.  And he displayed a steadiness, an intellectual curiosity, a depth of knowledge and an approach to looking at problems like this and picking a vice president that, I think, is ready to be president on day one. And also, in not just jumping in and changing every day, but showing intellectual vigor.  I think that he has a definitive way of doing business that would serve us well.

Mr. Obama has given us a more inclusive, broader reach into the needs and aspirations of our people. He’s crossing lines–ethnic lines, racial lines, generational lines.  He’s thinking about all villages have values, all towns have values, not just small towns have values.

I come to the conclusion that because of his ability to inspire, because of the inclusive nature of his campaign, because he is reaching out all across America, because of who he is and his rhetorical abilities–and we have to take that into account–as well as his substance–he has both style and substance–he has met the standard of being a successful president, being an exceptional president.  I think he is a transformational figure.  He is a new generation coming into the world–onto the world stage, onto the American stage, and for that reason I’ll be voting for Senator Barack Obama.

And I have watched him over the last two years as he has educated himself, as he has become very familiar with these issues.  He speaks authoritatively.  He speaks with great insight into the challenges we’re facing of a military and political and economic nature.  And he is surrounding himself, I’m confident, with people who’ll be able to give him the expertise that he, at the moment, does not have.  And so I have watched an individual who has intellectual vigor and who dives deeply into issues and approaches issues with a very, very steady hand.  And so I’m confident that he will be ready to take on these challenges on January 21st.”

Are you still confident, General Powell?  If not, the nation deserves an apology from you.  General Powell, Douglas MacArthur’s words from 1962 speak to you today: ”the very obsession of your public service must be Duty, Honor, Country.”

Michael Zak is a popular speaker to Republican organizations around the nation, showing office-holders and candidates and activists how they would benefit tremendously from appreciating the heritage of our Grand Old Party.  Back to Basics for the Republican Party is his acclaimed history of the GOP cited by Clarence Thomas in a Supreme Court decision.  His Grand Old Partisan blog celebrates more than fifteen decades of Republican heroes and heroics.  See www.RepublicanBasics.com for more information.

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) says that people who oppose socialized medicine are comparable to those opposed freeing the slaves.  Another outrageous lie from the Democrats!

Just as outrageous is that, by ignoring their party’s heritage, the Republican Party has allowed Democrats and their lefty media allies to mislead millions of Americans about the true history of the Grand Old Party.

Every Republican, and I mean every Republican, should know that it was the Republican Party that freed the slaves and that it was the Democrats who wanted to keep African-Americans in chains.  Democrats denounced President Abraham Lincoln (R-IL) for his Emancipation Proclamation, and congressional Democrats voted unanimously against the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery.  In fact, so long as the GOP appreciated its heritage, the Democrats were known as the ‘Slaveocrat Party.’

To quote Back to Basics for the Republican Party: “The more we Republicans know about the history of our party, the more the Democrats will worry about the future of theirs.”

See www.RepublicanBasics.com and the Grand Old Partisan blog for more information.