The difference

Why Schultz would have to run as an independent

Investors Business Daily exxplains here why candidates like Howard Schultz who are socially liberal but fiscally conservative have no chance of winning the nomination of the Democratic Party.

"He wants to get to yes. They want to stay at no!"

"Collusion:" "between the American media and the open borders Democratic Party!"

"Yet again, the party of Jim Crow has sought to stymie the freedom of a black man to express his own political opinion."

Brandon J. Weichert writes in American Greatness,

The Democratic Party is a group of tricksters. Consider this: the party of Jim Crow managed to recast themselves as the paragon of racial equality during the tumultuous 1960s, while still supporting the economic programs that impoverished minorities. They then convinced a majority of African-Americans that Republicans were their true oppressors! It is no wonder, then, that Michael Walsh has determined that Democrats today are aligned with the “Satanic Left.”

Lies, deceit, manipulation, these are the ways of Satan—and the Democratic Party.

...Yet again, the party of Jim Crow has sought to stymie the freedom of a black man to express his own political opinion. In this case, Kanye’s declaration of support for Trump has prompted the self-styled “guardians” of race in America (the most vanilla group of people imaginable) to brand Kanye’s actions as those of a mentally unstable person. Interestingly, the Soviets used to claim political dissidents were mentally ill, too.

...Republicans are finally competing for the hearts-and-minds of black Americans in a meaningful way. Seen that way, the Trump-Kanye meeting is only strange if one is a racist left-winger, who views black Americans as a class to be kept pacified with dreary government handouts in heavily policed inner cities.

Read more here.

An explanation of why the Democratic Party has gone far Left

Posing as tough and decisive, but then when questioned, as anyone should be questioned who wishes to have power over you, Hillary whips around and accuses you of bias! Democratic centrists were represented by the kleptocratic Clintons for a long time. Now the party has gone far Left because the Clintons have discredited by their sleaziness centrist politics.

"Clean house, or go full antifa".

Regarding the Donna Brazile book creating a furor this week, Mark Steyn writes,

she has confirmed what some of us charged at the time - that the Democrat establishment succeeded in doing to Bernie what the GOP establishment tried but failed to do to Trump: steal the nomination away from the insurgent.

...As long as "centrism" is cornered by the Clintocracy, the Democrats will continue to drift left and lefter. Clean house, or go full antifa.

Who pays the price for the smug idealism of the Left?

How Obama and Hillary destroyed the Democratic Party.

We learn more each day

Here is one more little piece of evidence that Stephen Paddock was a lefty. He made two small donations to a Democrat PAC.

hat tip Chateau Heartise

The Democratic Party - "a cultural movement fueled by coastal elites, academics, celebrities, and the media"

Victor Davis Hanson notes that the Democratic Party

is no longer a liberal (a word now replaced by progressive) political alternative to conservatism as much as a cultural movement fueled by coastal elites, academics, celebrities — and the media. Its interests are not so much political as cultural. True to its new media identity, the Democratic party is against anything Trump rather than being for something. It seeks to shock and entertain in the fashion of a red-carpet celebrity or MSNBC talking head rather than to legislate or formulate policy as a political party.

...The Democratic party is now in the hands of Obama progressives, who in turn follow the lead of the hip, cool, and outraged media that have no responsibility other than to appear hip and cool and outraged. Trump apparently understands that and so focuses most of his invective not against a tired Nancy Pelosi or the shrill Chuck Schumer but at the major networks, mainstream newspapers, and Hollywood celebrities — the heart now of the progressive fusion party.

...Operationally, the celebrity world and the media have institutionalized political obscenity and street theater. On Inauguration Day, Madonna dreamed out loud of blowing up the White House; Ashley Judd went on a crude, incoherent rant about Trump. Since then, media fixtures such as Steven Colbert and Bill Maher have melted down, the one suggesting on the air that Trump had committed a sex act on Vladimir Putin, the other that he commits incest with his daughter. Yet both were simply amplifying the prior gross slur from Politico reporter Julia Joffe: “Either Trump is f***ing his daughter, or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?”

Read more here.

The world's most successful hate group

Robert Stacy McCain writes,

The Democrat Party is the world’s most successful hate group.

It attracts poor people who hate rich people, black people
who hate white people, gay people who hate straight people,
feminists who hate men, environmentalists who hate
the internal combustion engine, and a lot of
bratty college kids who hate their parents.
However, the real secret of the party’s success
is that it attracts the support of
journalists who hate Republicans,
and who therefore work tirelessly to convince
the rest of us that we should vote for Democrats. . . .

No matter who the Republicans nominate for president,
the Organized Forces of Liberal Journalism will paint him
as a greedy, cold-hearted, woman-hating racist.
If the GOP nominated a Buddhist monk or a Latina lesbian,
still the New York Times and NBC News would find
a way to convince themselves that the Republican candidate
represented everything liberals hate about America —
the military, the police, Christianity, capitalism,
the internal combustion engine and
heterosexual white men who work for a living.

"The Democratic party for now is reduced to a loud racist/sexist/homophobe broken record that fewer and fewer are listening to — including many of the Democratic elites who continue to play it."

Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review,

The Podesta archive, when coupled with the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation, summed up the liberal ideology: progressive platitudes as cover for an elite’s pursuit of power and influence.

...Self-righteous outrage is a Democratic selling point and a wise career move for journalists, academics, bureaucrats, and politicians.

Without an ideology that even remotely matched the life she led, Hillary Clinton could only run a campaign without consistent positions.She flipped on the Keystone pipeline and trade agreements. She refuted the entire 1990s Clinton economic and social agenda. Indeed, her positions of 2008 — anti–gay marriage, border enforcement, and rural populism — were the very positions that she smeared others for embracing in 2016. In 2008, Clinton damned Obama for his “clingers” speech; in 2016, she trumped him with her deplorables and irredeemables.

She both derided Wall Street and was enriched by it. Her 2008 brief flirtation with the white working classes as a modern Annie Oakley came full circle in 2016, with exultant promises to put coal miners out of work. In the end, Hillary had no ideology other than getting even richer by leveraging the office of secretary of state and pandering to identity politics in hopes that record numbers of women and minorities would vote for a 68-year-old white multimillionaire, much as they had voted for Barack Obama. The more she talked of the LGBT or Latino communities, apparently the more we were to think that the Clintons had subverted their offices and reputations to grift a $150 million personal fortune for the underprivileged.

One of the reasons Trump won without commensurate money, organization, ground game, big-name endorsements, establishment unity, conservative media encouragement, and despite a campaign of gaffes and opposition-planted IEDS, was that half the country felt it would not have survived four more years of the cynicism of left-wing politics. In other words, voters got tired of being accused of thought crimes from a party led by wealthy people who made them poorer while adding insult to injury.

...It was hard to know who was more cynical: the moralist DNC heads Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile, who conspired to rob Bernie Sanders of the nomination, or Bernie Sanders himself, who (after WikiLeaks confirmed his suspicions that Hillary Clinton was a shill for Wall Street, that the Democratic establishment had tried to rig the primaries, and that even the debate questions were compromised) ended up singing Hillary’s praises as he retreated to his new lakeside estate.

...Progressive outrage should not be taken too seriously because it is not intended to be serious. When Barack Obama invites rapper Kendrick Lamar into the White House and announces that his “To Pimp a Butterfly” is the president’s favorite song of the year — whose album cover shows the corpse of a murdered white judge, with Xs in place of eyes, on the White House lawn, as African-American youth toast his demise with drinks and cash — do we really assume that progressives like Obama believe in stopping hate speech and imagery, or perhaps even believe in anything at all?

...The Democratic party leadership is no longer an alternative to corporate wealthy America, but is corporate wealthy America, albeit in a new garb of jeans and flip-flops, Silicon Valley–style. The small-business person, assembly-line worker, and non-government wage earner mostly now vote Republican. Progressivism is a pyramidal capstone of wealthy elites who have the influence and money to embrace boutique positions and the cunning to profess egalitarianism, all while they lead private lives that would otherwise be condemned as illiberal and apartheid-like. So affirmative action ends up providing high-cheekboned Elizabeth Warren entry into Harvard Law School, the same way that progressive investigative journalism is reduced to Politico’s “hack” Glenn Thrush (who asked the Clinton campaign to fact-check and approve his article), and in the manner that philanthropy is reduced to the Clintons’ piling up of millions by selling influence. We are a long way from Harry Truman’s working classes.

The Democratic party for now is reduced to a loud racist/sexist/homophobe broken record that fewer and fewer are listening to — including many of the Democratic elites who continue to play it.

Read more here.

What used to be the party of the working man

Rufus asks,

Where did all the kitchen table Democrats go—the Democrats as they were understood by past generations. You remember, they fought for the common man, championed the working family, gave unto Caesar but overturned the counting tables.

These were the Depression-era Democrats who assisted destitute families who migrated from harvest to harvest and lived in tents. The Democrats who sponsored mega-projects to employ the jobless and who sided with unions to give wage earners leverage against exploitation. Then, during the world war, they protected us with rationing and price caps and home visit nurses, and after the war, they sponsored government-backed loans to finance homes for returning GIs. It's a great story.

...How did Everyman, the struggling and perpetually wronged object of their doting attention, become a deplorable xenophobic, homophobic, racist, misogynist drooling lunatic, unfit to look through the window at all that is good and decent? How did "f--k whiteness" become a thing with them? Is the party determined to make enemies of every last white working class person in America? Are white folks now one of their despised "special interests" and a "plague to the planet" ?

What must former John Q. Public do to exonerate himself in the eyes of the party? Would murdering a few cops suffice? How about punching out some elderly Trump supporters? Loot and burn a CVS or two?

Predictably enough, after demanding normies demonstrate their Civic Responsibility by embracing an election result thought to be a certainty, then losing in an epic pratfall, they're sponsoring riots, shutting down major highways, and committing serial vandalism and assault in public places. Their strategists wave it off as "recapturing the narrative" but fantasize about overturning the election "by any means necessary", including assassination and armed insurrection .

...The party specifies the target of this blood frenzy in the starkest of terms: middle America, particularly white middle America. A resurrected JFK himself wouldn't be safe from them. So. Where did all the kitchen table Democrats go we still wonder, as the unhinged slander and threats blow inland, and as the assaults increase daily . But paralleling that increase, so does fear and loathing for the former working man's party.

A line has been crossed. What happens from here can't be known. It can, however, be imagined with a high degree of confidence.

Read more here.

"The most dangerous, destructive force ever unleashed upon our nation since its inception"

Donald Trump and Mike Pence are our candidates. Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine are the enemy. The word “enemy” is not hyperbole; the most dangerous, destructive force ever unleashed upon our nation since its inception has been the Democrat Party. Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine are now at the sharp end of the spear. Revolting as what was revealed on Friday about Trump, let me state this categorically, emphatically and unwaveringly:

There is no way that Trump’s comments will change my mind in supporting and actively pulling the lever for him. To allow Hillary Clinton to win the election is to actively participate in and approve of the destruction of this nation. Period. Full stop.

Lest we forget, the media is a willing appendage of the Democrat-Leftist-Big Government regime. They obviously had this footage of Trump for months if not years; they could have released it during the primaries yet waited until a Friday, two days before a crucial debate. Plus, this footage was surreptitiously recorded without Mr. Trump’s knowledge. Compare and contrast with the Planned Parenthood body parts exposé, all but ignored by the media except to damn the reporters for their work and who now face prosecution; Billy Bush is, of course, an intrepid hero.

More importantly, for over 30 years, the media have obfuscated or ignored the rape, sexual assaults and abuse inflicted by Bill Clinton upon at least a dozen (that we know of) of women – one a twenty-year old intern in the Oval Office which led to his impeachment and disbarring – and the threats and character assassination inflicted upon all of them by Hillary Clinton, the putative champion of women’s rights and dignity. And that doesn’t even include the massive thievery, corruption, influence peddling, incompetence, virtually treasonous behavior and an abject, naked lust for power that defines this woman and her sham husband’s existence.

Read more here.

The Left’s wholesale domination of much of the knowledge industry, a growing uninformed and disengaged electorate, and a failing two-party system.

Scott Powell writes at The American Thinker,

If people today could somehow be transported back to the time of Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy, they would swear those standard bearers were Republicans with little in common with today’s Democratic Party.

...The progressive philosophy that the Democratic Party has come to embrace now has its roots less in the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of individual happiness and more in the tenets of race and class identity, equal outcomes, and an expanding welfare state. Since individuals vary in talent, ability, and motivation and the free market system produces unequal outcomes of success, a core principle of the Democratic Party is now redressing this disparity through the redistribution of wealth.

...Marx’s political and economic revolution was first staged in the largely agrarian nation of Russia, carried out by Marxist revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin made major contributions to Marx’s theories, so much so that Marxism-Leninism became the dominant theoretical paradigm for advancing national liberation movements, communism, and socialism wherever in the world radical revolutionary movements arose.

Among Lenin’s contributions was the theory of the vanguard. Since it was apparent that the proletariat masses were unlikely to rise up, Lenin argued that it was necessary for a relatively small number of vanguard leaders -- professional revolutionaries -- to advance the revolutionary cause by working themselves into positions of influence. By taking over the commanding heights of labor unions, the press, the universities, and professional and religious organizations, a relatively small number of revolutionaries could multiply their influence and exercise political leverage over their unwitting constituents and society at large.

...The New Left did not simply fade away when the troops came home from Southeast Asia. It went mainstream, with many of the 60s radicals deciding to follow Alinsky’s counsel to clean up their image, put on suits and infiltrate the system. They would become professional revolutionaries who landed jobs in the knowledge industry: the universities, foundations, and the media and special interest activist groups.

...By winning “cultural hegemony,” the acolytes of Gramsci, Alinsky, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School believed that the wellsprings of human thought could be largely controlled by mass psychology and propaganda. One of Alinsky’s unique contributions, explained as the seventh Rule for Radicals, was the tactic to avoid debate on the issues by systematically silencing, ridiculing and marginalizing people of opposing views. At the same time, allies in the media provided cover and a framework of acceptance for radical issues and leaders. Traditional values of morality, family, the work ethic and free market institutions were made to appear outdated -- even reactionary, unnecessary, and culturally unfashionable. Ultimately this evolved into what has become known as political correctness, which now envelops the culture.

...By 1980, the counter-cultural alliances would include radical feminist groups, civil rights and ethnic minority advocates, extremist environmental organizations, and advocates of liberation theology, anti-military peace groups, union leaders, radical legal activist organizations like the ACLU, human rights watch-dog organizations, community organizers of the Alinsky model, national and world church council bureaucracies, anti-corporate activists, and various internationalist-minded groups. Working separately and together, these groups could count on a sympathetic media and favorable coverage, which facilitated building bridges to the Democratic Party and becoming vocal constituencies deserving attention and legislative action.

....Fast forward to 2008, and we find the long march through the institutions resulting in the New Left being embedded in constituencies that provided a base of support and policy positions for the Obama presidential campaign. And while Barack Obama had a very unconventional background of lengthy associations with Marxists and anti-American radicals throughout his formative years and early adulthood, a nearly twenty-year membership in Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “hate America” church, and an extreme left-wing voting record, the major media–now enveloped with the blinders of political correctness–made little effort to report on his background or examine his substantive qualifications. Barack Obama was both the culturally cool and articulate black candidate who provided a means for national redemption for a racist past, while also being the one candidate who provided a blank slate upon which people could project their own desires for hope and change.

...The problem today is threefold: the Left’s wholesale domination of much of the knowledge industry, a growing uninformed and disengaged electorate, and a failing two-party system. The normal process of checks and balances, which is made possible when compromise can be accomplished between the parties, simply no longer works. With the long march through the institutions having resulted in one of those parties no longer sharing much in the way of common ground -- in terms of a philosophical heritage and values of liberty, private property, and limited government -- compromise has become nearly impossible. The radicalization of the Democratic Party has so affected Congress and the current president as to render bipartisan solutions and reconciliation all but impossible.

...In the end, what is important for Americans to realize is that the experiment with a left-wing president, like Barack Obama, is less an aberration than the logical outcome of the transformation of both the Democratic Party and the American culture. And the election of Hillary Clinton, a student of Alinsky and well-schooled and practiced in his teachings of deceit and camouflage would take the United States further along its trajectory of decline. Hillary’s election would effectively constitute an Obama third term.

...Edward Gibbon, the renowned historian, published his first of six-volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in 1776, the year Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence. Gibbon described six attributes that Rome embodied at its end: first, an overwhelming love of show and luxury; second, a widening gap between the rich and the poor; third, an obsession with sports and a freakishness in the arts, masquerading as creativity and originality; fourth, a decline in morals, increase in divorce and decline in the institution of the family; fifth, economic deterioration resulting from debasement of the currency, inflation, excessive taxation, and overregulation; and sixth, an increased desire by the citizenry to live off the state.

One might hope that awareness of factors associated with Rome’s fall would prompt an awakening in America. But so many are now disengaged and relatively few people read books, let alone possess the capacity to reflect deeply about causality and historical parallels. Many feel atomized and helpless.

Read more here.

"You didn't build that" and "leading from behind"

At Instapundit Elizabeth Price Foley links to an op ed written by Peter Alberice at Breitbart:

...With the election of John Kennedy, one could argue that the Democratic Party believed that the United States was a great nation and a beacon of hope for the entire world. Under JFK, the economy grew to the benefit of all through across-the-board tax cuts. We as a nation took an unambiguous stance in understanding the threat of Communism and supported our allies in resisting that threat. We embarked on the space program which has yielded immense benefit to all of us with advances in manufacturing, computer science and medical technology.

Lyndon Johnson began the transformation of the Democratic Party of Harry Truman and John Kennedy. With the advent of the Great Society, LBJ created the dependency plantation that has undoubtedly created a multi-generational underclass. The result of this effort is the perpetual poverty that plagues many inner city neighborhoods and rural areas in our country. Jimmy Carter continued the decline by his lack of fortitude in understanding the ongoing threat of the Soviet Union and the rise of Islamic Fascism.

Bill Clinton was a successful president in many ways because he had to pivot after his first term and work with Congress in order to pass welfare reform and other pieces of legislation. He also benefited greatly from the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the window of relative peace the world experienced through most of the 1990s. Clinton, however, pushed for greater home ownership for under-qualified buyers, which ultimately led to the 2008 financial crisis. The rise of single-issue politics as opposed to the broader world view of Truman and Kennedy began to redefine the Democratic Party.

...Under Obama, divisiveness and the politics of envy overrode the unity and a sense of purpose under JFK that the party once stood for. “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” has been replaced by “You didn’t build that.”

“My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man” has become “leading from behind.”

The Democratic Party will continue to champion divisiveness through single-issue political infighting, a failed progressive economic agenda, and an almost nonexistent foreign policy. The party that once stood with our allies abroad and supported robust economic growth has been replaced by whiny radical feminism and an overwrought sense of entitlement.

Mattress Girl and Pajama Boy are the new Democratic Party; Truman and Kennedy would be embarrassed.

Read more here.