By DEXTER DUGGAN
An inapplicable roadmap won’t get you to the correct destination. You can’t cross the Everglades with a diagram of the Rocky Mountains or see how wide one of the Great Lakes is by using a chart of the Pacific Ocean.
If your tour guide says he likes mountain goats better than alligators, that’s still no excuse for looking at pictures of Pike’s Peak when you’re trying to find the way from Tampa to Miami.
However, much of the advice being offered to Democrats about how to arrive at Victory City on Election Day doesn’t acknowledge actual political road conditions.
Anyone knows, or should, that the national Democratic Party’s militant embrace of repellent permissive abortion has cost it millions of voters. Yet so uniform is the voice of pro-abortion in dominant media that it apparently precludes consideration of any other direction, no matter how necessary to reset the compass for success.
An August 2017 news release from Democrats for Life of America (democratsforlife.org) observed: “In 1978, Democrats held a 292-seat majority in the U.S. House, with 125 pro-life Democrats. Notice: As pro-life Democrats disappeared from Congress, so, too, did the Democratic Party’s majority.”
Yet as some pundits suggest how Democrats could reposition themselves, the culture of death seems to be — to use another transportation metaphor — their untouchable third rail.
Goes one analysis: Dems should focus more on opportunity and less on socialism, more on moderation and less on the hard left.
Another asks: Whatever happened to what used to be Midwestern bastions of “progressivism”?
A third recalls that Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for decades in the twentieth century, except for a few terms, and won congressional districts they routinely lose now.
However, these analyses and many others say nothing, either generally or specifically, about standing up for pro-life or rejecting the priorities that reduced Catholic Dem leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Tim Kaine to lackeys for Planned Parenthood.
Conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on July 24:
“While most politicians have a reputation for shifting positions just to win, there are certain core beliefs that politicians in each party actually hold and do not move on. In the GOP, for instance, the Second Amendment is largely non-negotiable, and it doesn’t really matter what the political climate calls for. In power or out of power, the GOP is going to defend the Second Amendment.
“For Democrats,” Querard added, “abortion is simply not negotiable, and in power or out of power, the ‘right’ of a mother to kill her baby is a core Democrat value.”
It might be added that pro-Second Amendment Republicans generally seem more successful winning elections than openly pro-permissive abortion Democrats. The abortion proponents try to cloak their stands in euphemism, although pro-gun Republicans plainly say they defend widespread firearms possession.
This is logical because the gun guarantee specifically is in the nation’s founding documents. Permissive abortion, however, isn’t mentioned or even implied anywhere — until nearly two entire centuries later, when some self-deluded Supreme Court justices declared they’d discerned mystical pro-abortion vibes previously unknown.
Interestingly, when there undoubtedly was moral as well as legal justification for an issue such as protecting the lives of the preborn, pro-abortionists would say “moral issues” were out of bounds for public consideration, and laws simply had to be changed to codify what progressives wanted.
To them, “moral issue” became a term of contempt or disqualification.
Then, down the road a bit, “moral issue” assumed a new application — it became something on the leftist agenda that they considered a good.
You can’t regulate abortion because it’s only a moral issue. However, if, say, unlimited millions of illegal aliens stampede into the United States, you’re not allowed to stop them because their alleged right to automatic entry is, um, a moral issue.
By the same token, kindergartners can be propagandized in favor of transgenderism because to oppose that would be to unacceptably impose a “moral issue” on public schooling. However, kicking Donald Trump out of the White House is a wonderful moral issue that all progressives must support.
Sen. Cory Booker, a pro-abortion leftist Democrat from New Jersey, gave a good impression of a Bible-thumping preacher inveighing against heathens and demon alcohol in a video posted at the Washington Examiner site on July 24. Wide-eyed and waving his arms, Booker warned against, ahem, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Catholic family man and Federal Judge Kavanaugh actually is, Booker said, an emblem of evil: “I’m here to call on folk to understand that in a moral moment, there is no neutral. In a moral moment there is no bystanders. You are either complicit in the evil, you are either contributing to the wrong, or you are fighting against it.”
Booker, who would recoil in horror or laugh out loud if anyone dared cite the Bible regarding, say, protecting preborn babies, was more than ready himself to call up the Bible as authority against the serious moral threat posed by Kavanaugh. This made the gesticulating Booker think of “walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.”
Examiner writer Philip Wegmann commented: “So thirsty for a 2020 berth, the wide-eyed New Jersey Democrat perfectly encapsulates the Left’s crazed and dizzying hysteria over the nomination of Kavanaugh.”
Even an opinion column posted July 23 at the left-wing UK Guardian by Henry Olsen remarked on the depth of media loathing against Trump: “It is impossible to overstate the degree of daily vituperation visited upon the president in the media….Trump supporters who follow news at all cannot escape the daily blast of negativity.”
One need only recall the blaring front-page headline and opinion cartoon at the New York Daily News as Trump was blasted for his news-conference performance with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on July 16.
“Open Treason,” the fallacious all-caps headline claimed, while the remarkable cartoon depicted Trump shooting Uncle Sam in the head as he held hands with Putin.
When the Daily News announced drastic staff reductions a few days later, conservatives didn’t seem very likely to collect an emergency fund to rescue a historic New York paper ailing today in more ways than the financial one.
At least one commentator suggested the paper’s plight was due to disrespect for the press. Do you think he meant what was stirred by Trump’s “fake-news” taunts? Or how about, instead, the Daily News’ own irresponsibility? Freedom of the press doesn’t mean an entitlement to have the public underwrite it.
The Daily News’ sports department reportedly was being cut from around 39 people to nine. Maybe those still getting paychecks can stay busy telling who’s on base instead of throwing bean balls at Trump.
With Cong. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) already having called for protesters to harass and hassle members of the Trump administration — harassment, for heaven’s sake, done in the name of God, like Bible-thumping Booker’s warnings against Kavanaugh — the Denver Post took the next step on July 21 by publishing a letter to the editor suggesting the execution of Trump and “many” associates.
“If it walks like a traitor, and talks like a traitor, and acts like a traitor…it is a traitor. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed on a basis of far less evidence than is had on Trump and many in his administration,” the letter-writer said.
Think of it, Trump and his crew as Soviet spies, even without a Soviet Union to spy for. Maybe Putin will have to do as the stand-in.
Relentlessly Hostile
The toxic national atmosphere undeniably has been affected by dominant media trying to impose their own narrative to override any other.
The conservative Media Research Center’s NewsBusters posted on July 24 that broadcast network news shows chose to make “immigration,” framed just as they saw it, a leading topic in the Trump administration.
“During the 18 months of the Trump presidency, immigration has received more airtime on the three broadcast evening news shows than any other policy topic,” NewsBusters said.
“The networks’ coverage has been relentlessly hostile to the administration (92 percent negative, just 8 percent positive), largely because these newscasts have framed nearly all of their coverage around the plight of those adversely affected by the administration’s enforcement agenda, and have virtually ignored law enforcement or anyone harmed by illegal immigration.
“From January 20, 2017, through June 30, 2018, the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news programs spent a combined 995 minutes discussing various immigration topics, or roughly one-sixth of all coverage of the administration,” NewsBusters said.
“Since Inauguration Day, only the Russia investigation has received more airtime (1,680 minutes)” — Russia being, needless to say, another narrative priority of these media.
While victims of Trump policies received 478 minutes of sound bites, friends or family of crime victims had five minutes, NewsBusters said; and while protesters against Trump policies got 163 minutes, advocates of enhanced enforcement got four minutes.
Meanwhile, the cause of protecting preborn babies gets as little attention as crime victims — or Democrats who feel shut out by their pro-abortion party.
Where will this all lead? An editorial cartoon at The American Spectator site depicts a character like young New York Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez preparing to denounce the Border Patrol and ICE while Republicans rush to get her more microphones.
Will exposure of Trump’s mouthy opponents turn out to be equally as or more powerful than their denunciations of him?
November will tell.
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