Practical Treason
I have pointed out before that Republicans lost for decades pursuing the “minority vote.” Their rationale was that over forty percent of blacks voted for Ike in his 1952 and 1956 landslides, and over forty percent of Hispanics voted for Bush in his landslide reelection as governor of Texas. The key word here is “landslide.”
As a practical politico, I have seen the slips that black “leaders” pass out to tell their blacks how to vote. These slips are not passed out in obvious landslides. Only if the outcome is in doubt are the slips passed out, and then the black vote goes back to over 90% Democratic, as ordered.
One funny example of this was the Democratic senatorial primary in SC in 1966. Hollings wanted the black vote, but he wanted to be on record as NOT getting the black vote to beat the Republicans in the General Election. In SC the black vote was always measured by the percentage a candidate got in all-black Ward 9 in Columbia and the all-black ward also called Ward 9 in Charleston.
So the black leadership was instructed by Hollings to hand out slips to get their blacks to vote for his opponent in the two Ward 9s and to vote for Hollings in the rest of the state. They handed out the slips accordingly and the obedient blacks voted 9-1 against Hollings in the two Ward 9s and 9-1 for him elsewhere.
The old SLAVES should have been so obedient!
So Republicans used the old landslide figures and lost and lost and lost in their hopeless pursuit of the black vote.
The key word, as I said, is “landslide.”
McCain always votes with Republicans when an issue is decided. In cases like campaign finance reform or gun control, he takes the lead with Kennedy. He is far more important to the other side than one more standard liberal Democrat. McCain votes against all impossible gun control measures, but he joins with Kennedy in demanding outrageously expensive “smart” guns to keep working people from being armed.
McCain took the lead in the last drive for amnesty for illegal aliens, though he is publicly hard on border patrolling.
Respectable conservatives shout about abortion and stuff that is already decided. But William Buckley is the only national columnist who has publicly endorsed Europe’s Though Crime laws. Conservatives lead the lynch mob when liberals want it.
This is PRACTICAL treason, the kind that shouts how loyal it is and stabs you in the back.
#1 by Simmons on 12/22/2007 - 11:39 am
It pays well treason does. PC or liberalism or whatever this psychological dementia is called is nothing, ask of it or its cult members the right questions and it goes away. Take for instance Huck’s “Merry Christmas” ad, a desperate pol took a stab at PC and now “respectable” conservatives are torn between trying to salvage the chimera or wishing people a Merry Xmas. Hucks was an ignorant stab, once a new breed of Mantra trained people take to assaulting PC liberalism will be as rare as a May Day parade.
#2 by Dave on 12/22/2007 - 2:35 pm
McCain and Kennedy are very old men to be emblematic of the world circa 2008 and their careers since 1981 could not be more ironic.
1981 was a banner year for reasons the “body politic” of today is entirely blind. No one today even remembers or knows how deeply America was mired in the quicksand’s of urban unemployment all throughout the rural to urban migrations that ran in earnest from the 1920s through the mid-1960s.
That is what makes 1981 a banner year. There was 16-year lag between 1981 and the mid-1960s but the end of 1981 finally adjusted things. It was a dividing line between societies in which jobs became chronically plentiful and one where jobs were chronically scarce.
But today this fact is entirely ignored. Lightweights such as McCain and Kennedy (and the Bushes) never could have persisted in their prominence were it not for a prosperity that they bear no responsibility for. Their reign is only fortuitous. They themselves are completely ignorant of what lightweights they really are.
Oddly, I don’t think the Clinton’s are ignorant of it. Maybe it is their Arkansas background.
But I think that the whole thing is changing again. 2008 will be a banner year like 1981. It is not that I think that we are headed back into the quicksands of high unemployment. It is almost more onerous.
State and local governments have nowhere to go for their financing except to higher taxes. They have played the booms for all they are worth, and now this is over. State and local governments are no different than private corporations. Their bond capacity is limited, unlike the Feds.
But all of America cannot sustain NYC or Nassau County tax levels. The white populations will rebel and this has already started. At heart, this is racial conflict because state and local taxes heavily grab white savings to redistribute to nonwhite populations in devious ways.
The state and local police and judges are not up to suppressing this rebellion. Without Federal backup, they will chicken out, if it starts in earnest. I predict Federal backup will not be forthcoming. This is not the 1960s.
Both Kennedy and McCain are in their dotage. They don’t have a clue, and they certainly are not up to navigating this. This is way too “South American” for them.