Secession

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.townhall.com/columnists/tonyblankley/printtb20041110.shtml>

Townhall.com

Secession
Tony Blankley (back to web version) | Send

November 10, 2004

 I assume the Republican National Committee is busy recording and archiving
the idiotic statements coming out of national Democratic Party leaders and
commentators. There is no doubt that the election has not only yielded a
victory for the Republicans, but also a bumper crop of self-destructive
vitriol and bitterness from the Democrats.

  The opinion pages of the New York Times (that would be pages A-1- D 37
inclusive) have been running articles by prime cut liberals, the general
themes of which have been that conservative Christians are the equivalent
of Islamic terrorists and that the benighted provincials who voted for
President Bush are simply hate-filled bigots who have no place in America.

  The apotheosis of this political dementia was put forward in my very
presence on last week's "McLaughlin Group" by my friend and colleague
Lawrence O'Donnell. Lawrence, in cool blood and in apparent full control of
his senses, asserted that this election will give rise to a serious
consideration of secession from the Union by the blue states.

   I should point out that though Lawrence has been barking more than usual
in this election season's TV commentary, he is a brilliant political
analyst and a serious Democratic Party player. He was the late Sen.
Moynihan's top Senate staffer. He comes from one of the great Democratic
Party families. I believe it was his uncle who was President John Kennedy's
White House chief of staff. He is also the most gifted writer/producer on
the NBC show, "West Wing." He is not one of those no name nitwits who the
cable shows pull from obscurity to recite Democratic Party talking points.

  I elaborate on his enviable pedigree and qualities of mind and experience
because if he says such a thing to a television audience of six million
viewers, it must surely reflect some measurable body of senior Democratic
Party sentiment. And although it is inconceivable that any senior elected
Democratic Party officials would ever repeat or act on such a deranged
notion, it is a measure of how deep is the Democratic Party elite's
contempt of and estrangement from the American public.

  In this regard, I couldn't help thinking of the founding election of the
modern Democratic Party -- the election of 1828, when General Andrew
Jackson of Tennessee defeated John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts by 139,000
votes out of 1.1 million cast.

  That election, which defined the Democratic Party that we have known for
almost two centuries, has been called the first triumph of the common man
in American politics. It pitted the moneyed interests of the Northeast
against the farmers and working free laborers of the South and West. It was
the first election in which almost all of the states (22 of 24) used direct
popular election rather than state legislatures to elect the presidential
electors.

  It was capped with a raucous inaugural celebration during which "rustic"
common people shocked Washington society as they wandered through the White
House celebrating, drinking and shaking President Andy Jackson's hand. And
so started a bond between the Democratic Party and the typical working
American that lasted 176 years -- until last Tuesday.

  It's not that the Democrats lost an election; obviously both parties have
lost numerous elections. But never before in my memory -- which goes back
faintly to 1956 -- has either party in its loss reacted with such venomous
contempt for the American people.

  When we conservatives got shellacked in 1964 -- with Goldwater losing 61
percent-39 percent to Lyndon Johnson -- we knew we had a lot of work ahead
if we were going to educate the public to our views. But I can honestly say
that although I remember thinking that the public was misguided in its
judgment, I never hated or felt contemptuous of the majority electorate --
of my fellow countrymen.

  This dominant sentiment of the Democratic Party elite -- that scores of
millions of Americans are categorically unacceptable as fellow countrymen
-- is evidence of a cancer in the soul of that party. These Democrats,
quite expressly, are asserting that "christers," people who believe in the
teachings of Jesus as described in the inerrant words of the Bible, are
un-American, almost subhuman. Some of these Democrats would rather secede
than stay in the same country with such people. If they were in the
majority with no need to secede, what would they do? Their bigoted and
absolutist view of religious people is at least a second cousin to the Nazi
view of the Jews.

  In Europe, the few remaining people of faith have recently taken to
calling the increasingly more adamant European secularist majority "secular
fundamentalists." While that phrase is unfair to the perfectly respectable
fundamentalist religious sentiment -- it shows how much more harsh and
filled with fear the religious/secular divide is becoming.

  Fortunately, most rank-and-file Democrats are not infected with such
secular bigotry. Democrats don't need to secede. They just need to purge
their party of such of their leaders and intellectual vanguard as spew
forth such rubbish.

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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'