Have They No Conscience?
By Charles Cole (09/01/04)
The Democrats seem to have decided to get on the “values” bandwagon. Speaker after speaker at their July convention tried to disguise their leftwing views in an effort at convincing the American people that these delegates and speakers share the “values” of Middle America. At a recent campaign stop, Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry, speaking of “values”, mentioned the following as the values he espouses: “Family. Responsibility. Service. Opportunity. Inclusion. Fairness. Faith”.
Wow! My mind immediately did a flashback to 1972 when I was in the city of Riga, Latvia during the Soviet era when it was still a “Soviet Socialist Republic”. I was there with a U.S. Information Agency cultural exchange exhibit and we were spending a night in Riga on our way to our next exhibit city. At a bus stop, I looked up and began reading aloud (in Russian) the slogans which stood atop a nearby building in huge letters: “Happiness. Freedom. Unity. Brotherhood. Equality.” An old Latvian fellow heard me and looked up at the top of the building (likely for the first time in 25 years), read the words aloud, then looked at us and said, “Yeah. Everything we don’t have here!”
The gap between the Democrats’ rhetoric and the reality of what they really believe is staggering. On issue after issue, they consistently act in ways contrary to the real values of a vast majority of Americans. Their voting records in Congress are replete with examples of this phenomenon – from opposing bans on partial birth abortions, to voting against tax relief for the American people, to paying lip service to the importance of families and defending marriage while preventing the Federal Marriage Amendment to even be voted upon, to stymieing efforts at reforming an out of control tort law system so as to protect the narrow interests of their trial lawyer friends, to opposing school choice while giving more and more federal funds to the teachers’ unions. The list is endless.
Perhaps the most egregious example of their hypocrisy and deceit is their treatment of President Bush’s judicial nominees. A host of imminently qualified judges have been proposed for positions on the federal circuit appellate benches, only to have these honorable men and women besmirched, defamed and prevented from having what the Democrats insisted was the right of every nominee just a few years ago – an up or down vote in the Senate. Edward M. Kennedy, that paragon of virtue from “traditional value” Massachusetts, railed against blocking “women and minority” appointees during the Clinton Administration. Now he is one of the leaders of a left wing cabal in the U.S. Senate engaging in filibustering Mr. Bush’s nominees. Kennedy has even gone so far as to call them “Neanderthal judges”. Neanderthals? Janice Rogers Brown, a Justice on the California Supreme Court (and an African-American female to boot) was re-elected by 76% of the vote in that bastion of conservatism – the Socialist Republic of California – only to be lumped in with all the other Bush circuit court nominees as “out of the mainstream” and “Neanderthal”. And the “mainstream media” slumbers on!
One wonders why the extreme left wing Democrats in the Senate have become so emboldened as to defy societal values on the record! What makes them willing to participate in the duplicitous and arguably unconstitutional practice of requiring 60 votes to allow a nominee to come up for a vote? Simply put, the Democrats know that, despite their crowing about being supporters of “traditional American values”, they cannot pass their far left agenda in the Congress or in very many statehouses. Thus, they must rely on an activist federal judiciary to prop up activities opposed by large majorities of the American people (such as gay marriages and partial birth abortions) and to promulgate and agenda of social engineering and forced compliance with leftwing causes.
A cursory examination of the recent record reveals instance after instance of this phenomenon at work in our society. Federal judges in California, New York and even Missouri have held that federal and state laws banning the barbaric “procedure” known as partial birth abortion are unconstitutional. What Democrats couldn’t stop at the state and federal levels has been blocked by three liberal judges. In the California and New York cases, it was done by Clinton appointees. In the Missouri case, they had to resort to hauling out an 81-year-old judge whom Jimmy Carter had appointed in 1979 and who had taken “senior status” in 1991. And the Democrats would have us believe that their party stands for “traditional values”?
Let’s examine another case. If Democrats are such value-laden folks, they would certainly support a law requiring girls under 18 to obtain their parents’ consent before getting an abortion, right? Wrong! A three-judge federal circuit court panel in Idaho recently jammed a procedural broomstick into the spokes of an Idaho law requiring such notification. They found the definition of medical emergency to be “unconstitutionally narrow”, thus invalidating the parental consent law. Coincidentally, all three of these federal judges were appointed by the Democrats’ sterling supporter of family values – William Jefferson Clinton.
As President John Adams noted some 200 years ago, “Facts are stubborn things”. Little wonder why the Democrats are pulling out all the stops to camouflage their public record and to make yet another of their pillars – John Kerry – appear as a giant of a patriot and a staunch defender of traditional American values. They can do no other. Without the dissemblance and masquerading, Kerry would be exposed as just another in a long line of leftwing extremists, bent on tearing apart the infrastructure of our democratic republic and replacing it with a miniature replica of France. Hopefully the American voter will pull aside the curtain this year and expose this latest version of the Wizard of Oz.
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