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Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Who's polarized?


Did you see all those guys at NASA celebrating the Martian landing?  They are cheering for their saved jobs for the next two years.  Then Obama has scheduled a big layoff in 2014. Tom Coburn has released his latest Worst Things the feds spend money on.  Most agravating was $120 million per year that the feds send to dead federal workers and never recover.  Most humorous is the $600,000 study of why chimpanzees throw their poop at other chimps.  Soooo--next time some Dem says something stupid, just say, "that's a bunch of chimp poop you're throwing".  There's always something fun that comes out of the Limp Picks.  Yesterday it was the British pole vaulter who, like so many others was having trouble completing a vault in the high wind.  She didn't medal, though favored, and broke down in tears.  Until her boyfriend came to her aid and asked her to marry him.  Now that changed the complexion of the day!  Wildest thing today was Glenn Beck interviewing some guy who graduated Columbia 1983 in the same Law/Politics cirriculum as Obama.  Didn't recall any Barry Soetoro and according to him neither did 400 other Columbia students Wall Street Journal asked.  No Barry to be found.  So his speculation is that Barry attended sporadically and as a foreign exchange student.  Grades or a scandal wouldn't be reason to keep the files locked at this point.  (No one would care if the President of the United States once flunked Esoteric Philosophy 101 or threw rocks at the dean's dog.) If he came from a humble background, how did Bare get Ivy League tuition money?  If he had scholarships, didn't he have to keep good grades?  But what if the mystery of finance was provided by untraceable foreign aid and his mother never bothered to get an American birth certificate so that he attended as a foreign student?  This would explain why he mysteriously went to Pakistan and Indonesia while in college and why his birth certificate looks quite faked. Oh, well, now the serious stuff...

There’s a big news media-induced moan going around about how we are such a Polarized Nation.  Fair enough.  Who is responsible?  It sounds like what "the public" longs for is life about 30 years ago.  I remember it well.  Tip O’Neill and RR jousting back and forth but at the end of the day having a beer together.  Or at least that is what people say nostalgically, although both O’Neill and Reagan said there was never a beer—a definitive statement from two amiable Irishmen.  And my memory is rancorous politics.

1980.  Republicans today say they long for the days of Reagan and principled constitutionalism which goes way back to the Founders.  Reagan was elected 32 years ago.  In Oklahoma, there were 3.5 registered Democrats for every Republican in those days. Recently I talked to the guy who had been Speaker of the House (D) during Gov. Larry Derryberry (R), and he avowed how bipartisan things were then.  Those 3.5:1 Democrats were old FDR Democrats who believed strongly in their principles.  Yet there wasn’t the polarization. At least that is what people choose to remember. 

Now follow the logic.  If R’s want Reagan and principled constitutionalism back, circa 1980, they surely aren’t looking to be polarizing, nor is there anything polarizing about such well-known traditionalism of American Values.  On the other hand, D’s here in Oklahoma have quit their party in droves.  The 3.5:1 registration ratio has become almost a dead heat at 1:1.  The Okies didn’t change, still the same people, so what did?  The national Democratic party has gone radically left.  “I didn’t quit the party; the party quit me,” as RR said.  And with the leftist shift it created huge polarization.  Moreover, this shift isn’t an Oklahoma phenom.  See the same thing happening in Texas, Missouri, Dakotas and other states.

And this leftist shift of the D's-- "corporate social democracy" NBC calls it-- is resoundingly like the social democracy or "national socialism' of Prime Minister Mussolini. Didn't we fight a war against this?  No wonder it is polarizing us.

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