Paglia on the Decline of the Democratic Party

Camille Paglia ruminates on the decline of the Democratic Party from the 1960s version she once knew.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

Paglia’s critique explains the anger that many Americans, including some long-time Democrats, feel toward the current government.

Customer Service 101

Adam Graham takes a fresh look at the Congressional leadership’s dismissive attitude toward the raucous town hall crowds. What we are witnessing, he says, is a fundamental ignorance of the first rule in customer service: “The Customer is always right.”

Those of us who have worked customer service know well that many Americans get quite nasty when things go wrong. Those who are getting out of hand at town halls have likely gotten out of hand over not getting tomatoes on their salad. But it never occurred to me to tell a customer irate about his computer warranty that he was being un-American.

Most customers kept it under control and often said: “I’m not mad at you. You didn’t create this problem.”

At town hall meetings, however, voters are talking to some of the people who helped create the problem. Yet our members of Congress think they are the public’s masters, not their servants. Customer service representatives from every industry in this country may have to field the wrath of people dissatisfied with the product, the service, or the company policies, but members of Congress apparently should be immune from such wrath by virtue of them being members of Congress.

In 2010, the customers just might take their business elsewhere.

“A Feeling of Rebellion”

Peggy Noonan accurately captures the angry mood of America this summer, and the “let ’em eat cake” attitude of the Democratic Party machine in response.

What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack.

Read the whole article. As Noonan goes on to explain, if  Obama and his Democratic allies would back off, listen more and accuse less, they might have a better chance of getting somewhere. But like King George so long ago, this government is showing contempt for its subjects, and the subjects are responding in the only way left to them.

This could get ugly.

Pelosi’s Made-Up Numbers

Wow, the recession is worse than I thought. Did you know that 500 million Americans lose their jobs every month?

Millions, billions, gadzillions — what’s a few numbers among friends, eh?

Okay for Thee, But Not for Me

If the Democratic health plan is so great for the nation, why have its authors exempted Congress from it?

The irony here is that under the health reform he is sponsoring, it is unlikely that Sen. Ted Kennedy would have gotten the treatment he needed for his brain tumor if his case had to be reviewed by some cost-effectiveness board.

The likelihood is that if Ted Kennedy were British and subject to the tender mercies of that nation’s National Health System, he’d be dead by now.

The Dems’ Health Plan

And this is supposed to be an improvement??!!

Barney Wants a Villain

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) (the D stands for Democrat, in case you’re wondering) is seeking prosecutions against those responsible for the financial crisis. Good call, Barney. An IBD editorial suggests that he start by looking in a mirror.

His conflicts are obvious and outrageous, and his refusal to countenance reforms of Fannie and Freddie contributed mightily to today’s meltdown.

The Financial Crisis (Children’s Version)

Doug Ross has put together a compendium of links consisting of mostly pictures and very brief text that explains how we got in the current financial mess. The presentation reads like a children’s book (a la Dick and Jane), so anybody with a third-grade education can understand it. Which is probably necessary these days, given the electorate’s inability to grasp even the most basic principles of economic and political reality.

(via Instapundit)

A Bailout for Detroit?

Cal Thomas, on why a federal bailout for the big three automakers is a bad idea:

The argument made by those favoring a bailout of Detroit is that it will save more than 100,000 jobs in the auto and related industries. But what good does that do if people are not buying cars in sufficient numbers to allow the Big Three to make a profit? This becomes the kind of corporate welfare Democrats decry when it comes to Wall Street. But, then, Wall Street isn’t unionized and Democrats want and need the union vote.

A free market is a powerful shaper of ingenuity — if the government will get out of the way and let it operate.

A Dem Defends Palin

Camille Paglia excoriates her fellow Democrats who treated Sarah Palin with such shameless brutality.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology — contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

Barney’s Got Some ‘Splainin’ To Do

Sam Dealey, US News & World Report, on Rep. Barney Frank’s ridiculous charge that racism is driving Republican criticism of Democratic involvement in the housing crisis:

Fannie-Freddie criticism is hardly the special provenance of Republicans. Feckless lawmakers of both parties have a lot to answer for in failing to rein in the siblings. But chief among those lawmakers is Barney Frank, who kicked hardest against prescient reform efforts and pushed hardest in expanding Fannie and Freddie’s risk-taking. (See here for more.)

But, suddenly, to criticize his poor judgment amounts to racism?

Frank’s argument is as tacky as it gets, and it’s yet another measure of what a political buffoon he is. But if Frank insists on finding a racist angle to the catastrophe, he might reflect that it was his own actions that drove poor, black homeowners to financial ruin. And it is the lawmaker’s critics who now vow not to let it happen again.

Who’s to Blame?

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), chairman of the House Financial Services committee, is loath to accept any responsibility for the credit crisis, preferring to heap all the blame on “racist Republicans.”

But Barney should listen to one of his fellow House Dems on this. Here is what Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) said about the crisis:

Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. I defended their efforts to encourage affordable homeownership when in retrospect I should have heeded the concerns raised by their regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong.

Davis is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Congress Dodging the Meltdown

When the lights come on, the cockroaches scatter. That’s why Congress will adjourn this year without addressing the financial crisis that has hit Wall Street.

As more details emerge about who was in bed with who, it’s becoming increasingly obvious who bears significant, if not primary, responsibility for this mess.

President Bush in 2003 tried desperately to stop Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from metastasizing into the problem they have since become.

Here’s the lead of a New York Times story on Sept. 11, 2003: “The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.”

Bush tried to act. Who stopped him? Congress, especially Democrats with their deep financial and patronage ties to the two government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie and Freddie.

And Bush was not the only one who tried to warn the country of what was coming.

Just two years after Bush’s plan, McCain also called for badly needed reforms to prevent a crisis like the one we’re now in.

“If Congress does not act,” McCain said in 2005, “American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole.”

Sounds like McCain was spot on.

But his warnings, too, were ignored by Congress.

Of course, with the media now a bona fide adjunct to the Democratic Party, the public likely will not hear much of these details until after the election — or maybe never.

UPDATE: Okay, Congress is not entirely passive. Barney Frank’s House Financial Services Committee just voted to overturn a ban on seller-financed down payments for some government-backed loans. According to Nicole Gelinas, this move perpetuates the very high-risk atmosphere that got us in the mess we’re in now.

It seems that Frank and his colleagues remain keen on coddling the tenacious bad-lending lobby (including the National Association of Homebuilders and what’s left of the banking industry), which desperately needs suckers to buy newly built homes at inflated prices so that builders can pay back at least some of their construction debt to the banks and investors. Frank is certainly not looking out for average-Joe home buyers and sellers with this action.

Dems Are Bailing

Joe Lieberman has new company. A key Hillary supporter and fund-raiser has publicly renounced the Obama ticket and supports McCain-Palin. And she argues her case eloquently.

Democrats: The New Fundamentalists

Camille Paglia (feminist, Democrat, Obama supporter), writing in Salon:

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? . . .

The one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.

Republicans’ wildly enthusiastic support for Sarah Palin runs the risk of turning into a cult. But I applaud her candidacy if for no other reason than it exposes the ugly intolerance of the Left for what it is.

Dems and the Flag

Or rather 12,000 flags. That’s how many flags were reportedly discarded by the DNC following their convention last week. They were headed for a landfill, before an Invesco Field worker spotted them and retrieved them.  McCain and Palin are in Colorado Springs today on a campaign stop, and may use the flags tossed by the Dems.

If this story holds up, there are two obvious conclusions that can be noted:

First, whatever the Democrats say about patriotism, it’s obvious that in their private moments, they have little regard for it.

Second, all their condescending talk about doing their part to save the planet by conducting a “green” convention was just that — talk to flatter the masses. When they think no one is looking, they can be just as wasteful as any Republican.

Tossing the flag in the trash. What incredibly poor taste.