Democrats’ selective moral outrage
Forget all of that Trump-Putin collusion stuff.
That’s out of date, the old party line.
Now there’s a new party line: Trump’s a white supremacist. Not a mere racist, mind you. A full-on white supremacist. And if you doubt it, then so are you!
Go on, let your imagination run red-ass-baboon wild.
Picture Trump stuffing his cheek with a wad of tobacco chaw as he cruises about in a pickup truck with a Confederate flag decal just above the gun rack.
Picture him spitting out the window as he drives through minority neighborhoods shouting racial epithets.
Let your imagination have at it!
Picture it: Instead of kiddies flooding the White House lawn for the traditional Easter egg hunt, the place under Trump becomes overrun with Skinheads and Neo-Nazis.
The Democratic Party has hit upon one heck of a new narrative here. Has it ever (hee hee)!
Just imagine: Trump clad in white sheet, pointy-headed hood with eye slits, pirouetting around a burning cross.
Trump organizing lynch mobs.
Trump snipping the ceremonial ribbon to open new concentration camps for Islamics, Hispanics and other disfavored groups.
Go ahead, indulge your nuttiest reveries.
The only decent folks left in this God-forsaken, Indian-cheatin’, slave-holdin’ hell-hole of a country are us high-minded liberals.
And don’t be bashful about saying so.
Maybe you’ll get some air time on CNN and MSNBC.
Maybe the New York Times will publish your op-ed piece on the menace posed by America’s “Basket of Deplorables.”
Maybe The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” will run an item heralding your haute monde sophistication.
That vast expanse of flyover land out there used to be called the Bible Belt. Now you can call it the Deplorables Belt.
Little surprise the Hollywood limousine liberal jet-set has produced a movie dramatizing a new sport among Progressive Elites: tracking down and eliminating this very target group, the (ugh) Deplorables.
“The Hunt,” the movie is titled.
According to the promotional trailer, the movie depicts Progressive Elites hunting down Deplorables they’ve kidnapped and set loose on a remote estate, as in the famous short story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” Questions abound. Where is the estate? Is it one of those sprawling, county-size properties nouveau riche Democrats now own out in Montana?
Do the Elites track down the Deplorables by detecting their Wall-Mart scent?
And what weapon do the Elites use to bag their game?
Surely not yucky firearms. Maybe bow and arrow.
For answers it looks like we’ll just have to wait. The release of the movie is reported to have been put on hold.
Meanwhile, however, the Elite evidently feel no obligation to put on hold their sanctimonious sermons against rhetoric they say encourages violence. The sermonizing goes on, unimpeded.
By describing illegal immigration as a “flood” — the very term Barack Obama himself used — Trump is said to be giving lunatics the signal to lock ‘n’ load and start firing away at Guatemalans and El Salvadorans.
It’s part and parcel of Trump’s white supremacy, it’s said. Actually, make that his “nationalistic white supremacy.”
So this is the new party narrative. Trump is not aligned with the Kremlin after all, he’s aligned with the KKK. “Jim Crow’s sneakin’ back in,” says Joe Biden.
The new narrative does seem at a glance to be devilishly clever. There is, though, a possible political downside to it.
Is sneering at a major segment of the electorate really much of way to drum up votes for your candidate or cause?
Can you win over the hearts and minds of people by snottily ridiculing them as slack-jawed cretins in bib overalls right off the movie set of “Deliverance”?
A coterie of PhD academic snoots, media snipes, hedge fund plutocrats, entertainment industry moguls and stars, plus public-employee union blocs, now constitute the vanguard of the Democratic Party.
But who does that leave to fall into line behind them?
Largely, the reviled Deplorables in their despised MAGA caps.
And “Vote for our ticket, you stupid racist, knuckleheads,” doesn’t quite have a rousing ring of victory to it, now does it?
The futility of hurling charges of racism, racism, racism, racism may be demonstrated by the low, low, low, low ratings at CNN.
Thanks to overuse, the term “racism” has become as devalued as Argentina’s bolivar, Zimbabwe’s dollar or the Weimar Republic’s mark.
The party vanguard now feels behooved, therefore, to up the ante by retiring “racism” in favor of “white supremacy.”
Two other handy generalizations also have gained currency: “white privilege” and “toxic masculinity.”
How likely are such snide labels to trigger a Democratic landslide?
Are white male heterosexuals some tiny, outlier cohort whose support is no more significant than that of, say, ganja-puffing Rastafarian vegan Trotskyite greens?
Apart from such considerations, the Democratic Party with its bigotry narrative seems to be playing with fire in a warehouse packed with gun powder.
Highlighting alleged bigotry among your opposition is a roll of the dice when there’s no shortage of it within your own shaky coalition.
Here the “civil rights” horn-swoggler, Al Sharpton, comes huffing and puffing into view.
Over the years he has left in his messy wake the flotsam of anti-Semitic and homophobic wisecracks. And unapologetically so. Not to mention a whitey-tweaking scam or two. (See, e.g.,” Tawana Brawley Hoax.”)
Yet all of the leading personages of the party continue to grovel shamelessly for the blessing of this apostle of divisiveness.
Indeed, they do not dare to do otherwise. If you hope to rise or at least hold your position in the party, better kiss Al’s ring (or his whatever). He’s a kingmaker who must be paid his due, and is.
For Al Sharpton’s nod, no amount of fawning or flattery is excessive — and never mind the “faggots” and “diamond merchants” adorning the colorful rhetoric of his past.
African Americans, Jews and gays are said to be three mainstay constituencies of the Democratic Party.
But this volatile coalition has more the look of a thunderhead about it than a rainbow.
Consider Pete Buttigieg, the boy wonder mayor of South Bend, Ind. He posits his sexual orientation as the distinguishing presidential selling point setting him apart from 20-odd other candidates.
He brims over with sanctimony. He singles out in his fireand-brimstone virtue-signaling the supposed homophobic bigotry of conservative Christians — evolution-lagging anthropoids such as Vice President Mike Pence, to cite one of his favorite examples.
Buttigieg thus seeks to spotlight one supposed source of intolerance while hoping — having raised the subject himself — that nobody will notice another major source of intolerance close to home: well-documented resistance in the black community to the gay agenda.
If we’re going to rail with huffy self-righteousness against fundamentalist Protestants and Catholic clerics over their putative hostility regarding gays, can we then overlook similar pockets of hostility elsewhere?
An analysis published in Public Opinion Quarterly, based on 31 polls, found blacks to be “more disapproving of homosexuality than whites.” Many other studies have come to similar conclusions.
A 2008 California referendum opposing gay marriage won 52.3 percent public support, led by a surge in the black turnout and a black vote in favor, by a 2-1 margin.
The proposition also won a majority of Latino support.
(The California Supreme Court swiftly decreed the public’s vote unacceptable.)
No less an authority than President Barrack Obama himself has lamented the lack of enthusiasm for the gay agenda among African Americans. “We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them,” he once remarked.
On another intolerance front, that of anti-Semitism, the unapologetic Rev. Sharpton has hardly been an isolated case vocalizing Jew-baiting stereotypes.
The Anti-Defamation League’s surveys have found, year in year out, a tenaciously strong streak of anti-Semitism among blacks — in 2016, for example, 23 percent vs.10 among whites.
That survey, incidentally, found an even deeper reservoir of anti-Semitism among another Democratic constituency: foreign-born
Hispanics. They’re 31 percent anti-Semitic, according to the ADL’s survey. (U.S.-born Hispanics also evince higher-than-average anti-Semitism, 19 percent, the ADL survey says.)
Meanwhile, the odious Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan packs auditoriums with his anti-Jewish tirades, rants the likes of which haven’t been heard since the rise of the Fuhrer.
Nevertheless, Democrats have latched onto their partisan intolerance narrative with a vengeance — the intolerance of others, that is.
With the ferocious piety of an Enid Strict, the “Church Lady” character in the old Saturday Night Live shows, the Democratic presidential candidates purse their lips in severe disapproval and wag their fingers accusingly.
They hope, apparently, that the selectivity of their self-righteous moral outrage will slip by unnoticed. Mostly it has. So far.