WHY I LEFT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY I used to be a Democrat. I was raised in a family of Democrats. We were staunch Yellow Dog Democrats way down there on the Gulf Coast of Texas. I was raised on real liberal principles, not leftist princples. Back then there were liberals that really loved their country, and wanted the best for it, and didn't spend all their time trying to undermine it by focusing everybodies attention on the countries past mistakes, like slavery, racism, not letting women vote, things that were already either fixed or changing for the better as I was growing up. Back then 'conservative Democrat' was not a misnomer. Today they talk about 'moderate Democrats' and you hardly ever hear the term 'conservative Democrat' anymore. Did you know the Democratic party used to be full of people like Zell Miller? He was right at the last convention when he said he didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him. Radicals took that party over in 1968 and it took awhile for their extremism on things like abortion, gun rights and crime to work it's way down to the state level. By 1979 when I entered high school, that change began to take effect. We were Democrats and we watched Jimmy Carter totally make the wrong choice, surrounded by people like Andrew Young, who would go to meetings with dictators and actually apologize for America trying to hold them to treaties they had signed. The whole Iran fiasco played out over more than a year. The Shah got the run-around from Carter, and at first the Carter Administration thought they could 'work with' the Ayatollah Khomeini because he was a 'religious leader'. But I was still a staunch Democrat. I knew Carter hadn't done a good job, but I was still suspicious of Reagan, hearing all the stories about how 'religious' he was. (I was an agnostic at the time and very much against religion) Reagan's first term occured mostly during my high school years, 1979-1983. I kept hearing about all the bad things he was doing, bank-rupting the country with outrageous tax cuts, looking to start a war with the USSR; it was unending and the media coverage of him was negative - the man literally could do nothing right. After 4 years of that, to my surprise, the man was re-elected in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history. I know he was running against Walter Mondale. Still................... Something happened in 1984. I became a Christian, at age 20, having never attended church in my life, and having never even set foot in a house of worship except for a handful of weddings and one funeral. 1985-1989 I spent in a small Bible College in Minnesota. Still a Democrat, mind you. But a conservative one. I soon discovered that Minnesota is full of very, very liberal Democrats who don't even consider a conservative Democrat to be a Democrat; instead they are considered stealth Republicans. Well in 1986 the mid-terms came up, and I got together with a handful of other conservative Democrats (most of whom were Christians) and we attended a meeting of the local chapter of the Democrats in preparation for the primaries, where resolutions are adopted and people volunteer for various work in the up-coming elections. There were about 40 people there, the group I was with was about 6 people. 30 minutes go by and we hear various people get up and propose different resolutions. They're all insane. One calls for Reagan to be censured for not doing enough to stop AIDS. Another demanded that the government immediately begin funding abortions again. Another called for all aid to resistance groups in Afghanistan and in Central America countering communist dictators to be stopped. (The Boland Amendment that passed later succeeded in doing this for the Contras) Another called for the military budget to be slashed in half. You get the idea. (All the Democrats I knew were staunch anti-communists.) Well our group had a resolution to present, so the lady who was our organizer got up and read it. It was a resolution that called for the limitation of abortion to only in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. Not only was the resolution voted down, it was SHOUTED DOWN. And from that moment on the walls went up. Once the 30 some-odd people there figured out our group was made up of CONSERVATIVE Democrats, we were viewed as a cancer that had to be expelled from the body. That, my friends, was the moment I realized that the Democrats don't have a big tent anymore. Are you pro-gun rights? Pro-life? Tough on crime? Anti-communist? Against using the government to promote the gay lifestyle, or censoring criticism of that life-style? There's not a whole lot of room for you in the Dem's tent then. We were frozen out for the rest of the night. I heard people get up and blame Reagan for homelessness, the crack epidemic, people getting shot by criminals (which they blamed on the guns, of course), teen pregnancy (since he wanted to promote abstinence and not just handing out condoms in public schools), and of course, claiming that Reagan WANTED young women to die in back alley abortions. Shortly after that I got arrested for blocking access to a women' health care facility. Twice. For those of you that don't know: Women's Health Care Facility is a euphimism for an abortion clinic, which doesn't really improve a woman's health that much at all if you think about it. I was sentenced to several hundred hours of community service for my crime in defense of humanity, and I elected to spend those hours at a homeless shelter in Minneapolis. For around 6 months, me and three other people from my Bible College sentenced to the same fate, spent 6-10 hours on weekends working at this homeless shelter. At this time the entire "Homelessness is Ronald Reagan's Fault...We Are All Just One Missing Paycheck Away From Being Homeless!" meme was in full scream in the national media. And I was still influencable by the MSM at that point, so I bought it. Yeah, Reagan cut taxes, social services dissappeared, and this caused homelessness. Well actually working with the homeless was the first time I realized that the MSM is full of $hit. The vast majority of the homeless were not there on the streets because they missed a paycheck. Nope. Neither are they there because Reagan cut taxes. Whatever else Reagan did, he didn't tell the local states to turn out all their mental patients on to the streets, and he didn't introduce crack cocaine to the inner cities, or sell cheap booze. As a matter of fact, Reagan launched the War on Drugs as a response to the crack epidemic to try to stop the flow of drugs into the country so more homeless people wouldn't be created. What thanks did he get for that? He got attacked for wasting millions of dollars spent on writing and enforcing new drug laws. As Ann Coulter pointed out in her new book, by the 1980's the liberals had been in control of the judicial system for almost 30 years. Their soft on crime approach perfectly prepared the ground for the drug epidemics that hit America in the late 1960's through the early 1990's. With the liberals running things, the drugs quickly got out of hand and Reagan spent most of his first term trying to right the ship and get the drug enforcement laws off the ground. Drugs are a perfect issue for liberals because in their mind the enforcement of drug laws is never the solution; they view a person taking a drug as a 'victimless crime' so instead it becomes a societal problem/indictment that they can use to create and fund un-ending rehabilitation/facilitation programs that are bottomless pits. And I saw this at the homeless shelter I was working at. The constant refrain from the staff that they needed more 'money for treatment' while I was watching guys doing drug deals just down the street from the shelter. Many homeless guys wouldn't even come into the shelter because they didn't want to give up their drugs. I broached the idea once of "Hey, how about the cops arrest all the guys that are dealing drugs and send them to prison? Wouldn't that be a big incentive for most of these homeless guys to go into treatment if they knew the drugs weren't out there to be found?" But of course the liberals would proceed to chant the mantra 'But you can't stop drugs from being sold' - to broach the idea that cops should crack down on drug dealing was to 'take the wrong approach'. The fact is, in most conservative states Crack Houses have a hard time flourishing because communities of conservatives have no problem getting orders of condemnation for run down crackhouses and then bulldozing them to the ground. Dealers who dare to deal in public are quickly arrested and put away for a long time, so it's just not worth the hassle to stay in the business. There are some towns where they just have a policeman stand around outside all day, or a black and white out front, where they know drug dealing is going on. Hard for a dealer to move his product and hence make a profit if all his potential customers have to stroll by a cop. Those are pro-active conservative communities dealing with the drug problem. How do liberal communities deal with it? Well first off they just tell themselves right off the bat they can't stop the dealing, so they don't even try to get the guys off the street that are dealing openly. Next they pretty much admit the drug-dealing areas are cop-free zones, so nobody ever sees the cops around, so all the drug business is done briskly and openly. Any dealers that are arrested quickly go through a revolving door and are right out there on the street corner back in business in just a few hours. What made Rudy Guliani turning New York around so amazing to liberals is that they kept telling themselves over and over again the 'broken window', pro-active police enforcement method doesn't work, that when it did they were shocked. All Guliani did was put the cops where they could be seen. They enforced the loitering laws, they cleaned up the drug dealing areas, they made the dealers move indoors, and they they put freakin' black and whites out front. fascism, fascism! The left cried. Only it worked and now they don't dare critcize it. Well when I suggested doing that back in 1986-87 to a bunch of liberals working in a homeless shelter, they looked at me like I was a Nazi with a dead baby hanging from my mouth. Go after the drug dealers? That's too much work and it wouldn't work anyway! Right. I guess spending millions on law enforcement and doing your best to make drug dealing a most unprofitable enterprise in your city is a waste of time, but pumping millions into rehab programs that merely deal with the dealer's victims while you leave him alone to operate free and clear makes tons of sense. Enforce the law, put the dealers out of business, no new drug addicts, you only have the present ones to deal with. Pump millions into rehab, leave the dealers alone, and you get successive generations of clientele for your rehab clinics, all courtesy of the same dealers. About this time I began to realize that most leftists don't adopt their positions based on facts and a reasoned analysis of the issues. It's mostly emotional. And they don't really want to solve problems as much as they want to perpetuate them. Drug dealers are creating drug addicted homeless people: arrest the dealers, make their life a living hell, the problem goes away. Soon not that many homeless people to take care of. Only the shelters like the one I was working at were mostly subsidized by government money based on......how many homeless people they helped. Aha. You see, it began to dawn on me that the liberals I was working with at this homeless shelter didn't see homelessness as a problem to be solved; they weren't interested in really helping these people kick their addictions, get jobs and move out of the shelters, off the streets and into stable homes. They weren't interested in seeing the mentally ill get sent back into the sanitariums and mental hospitals where they could receive adequate care. Where would the fun (or the money, or the self aggrandizing moral self-righteousness) be in that? Homelessness proves that American capitalism is evil!! It proves that Republican tax cuts harm the poor! It improves the case for socialism and welfare if everyone is just one missing paycheck away from destitution! By 1988, when Bush I went up against Dukakis, it had become apparent to me that the Democratic party leadership had drifted so far left they decided to run a midget for President who ran on his record of handling the judicial system of Massachussetts, where he apparently thought it would be a swell idea to give furloughs to first-degree murderers serving life without parole. Yes my friends, despite everything the Dem's could do as they shrieked RACISM!!!!! whenever the case of Willie Horton came up, I latched immediatley onto the cogent train of thought that they were so desperate to keep most Americans from having: This guy Dukakis is PROUD of the idea that he instituted a progam that lets violent first-degree murders sentenced to life without parole walk out of prison regularly to mingle with society, and he wants to be PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES? Dukakis wasn't just soft on crime............HE WAS INSANE ON CRIME. I had to face it during the runup to the 1988 elections. The Dems were soft on crime. I was hard on it. They were all-out for abortion. I was against it. They were against gun rights. I was for them. They didn't have a problem with Communism expanding and wanted to keep Reagan from halting it's expansion in Afghanistan and Central America. I was for supporting people who didn't want to live under communist dictators. While all this was going on in my head, the prevalence of speech codes and PC burst on the scene, and I now realized that many Democrats didn't even really believe in Free Speech anymore. I voted for George H.W. Bush in 1988 and never looked back. Nowadays I remember the ways the MSM was warning people about the 'hard right' back in the 1980's with all their caterwauling over the 'Moral Majority' and the "Christian Right", groups that were seeking to end abortion, promote home-schooling, and alternatives to evolution in public schools! Oh the horror! In the meantime, where was all the warnings from the MSM about the 'hard left'? You know, the ones who tried to hand Hollywood to the Communists back in the '50's, became spies for the Communists in our own government, and sought to tie America's hands when it came to checking the expansion of Socialism in Vietnam, Central America, Afghansistan and Africa? Who did Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed ever kill? But the Rosenbergs fixed it so Americans had to live under the spectre of nuclear war for over 40 years, and the guy running Truman's China policy turned out to be a Communist spy that practically handed the country to Mao, who proceeded to slaughter people on a scale that even Hitler and Stalin couldn't have imagined. Let me end with a story about..........Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton has the leftist vision of America: A bad country that did bad things for which it should still be apoligizing today. In fact, Blowjob Bill has taken it upon himself when he travels the world to let his audiences know just how sorry America is for all the racism, slavery, Indian Genocide, and McDonalds restaurants. Do the Japanese expect their diplomats and former leaders to tour China and Korea and the Philliphines while making it a big part of their work to apologize endlessly for the depridations of Japanese troops in WWII? How many Russians tour Afghanistan these days on "Sorry for the Invasion" speaking engagements? Is it too late for the Spanish and Portuguese to send their former leaders to South America to apologize for the 4 or 5 centuries worth of slavery, genocide and exploitation? What kind of people think this way? Bull Connor died years ago. The last slave-owning white guy was dead and buried over 50 years before Bill Clinton was born. The US Army hasn't shot any Indians for over 4 generations. But hey, it makes Bill feel better to apologize. It feeds his sense of self-righteousness. People stand around and share their feelings, like something of consequence has just been accomplished. On behalf of America, I'd like to apologize for Bill Clinton. He thinks America still has plenty of things to 'atone' for and so he needs to run around the globe apologizing to people and making himself feel better about being an American. I say this country paid for it's sins in a river of blood and it has forsaken and repented of the crimes of it's past and it's only liberals still stuck in the past that keep bringing these ghosts back up into the light. America is not a bad or negative influence in the world, it is a positive one, and any shortcomings or crimes during it's birth stage such as slavery and mistreatment of the Indians certainly isn't unique to America alone, and indeed America led the way in the Western world's divesting itself of these things. For a liberal Democrat, America must always be on the defensive and apologizing for stuff. Oh, and deferring to the international community at the UN when it comes to setting it's foriegn policy goals. Mustn't forget that. That's why I'm proud to have voted for George W. Bush twice. What the world needs from America now isn't apologies or a deference to corrupt international bodies like the UN. It needs leadership. Clinton never understood that, and today as he travels the globe playing the role of Apologizer In Chief I'm more glad than ever I left the Democratic Party. Sincerely, manofaiki
Good lord, giddy. Give me a break. Not that I give a damn, but can you at least provide a link?? With all due respect, of course. Keep D&D Civil.
it's from some brave keyboard screamer on a right wing blog. I wouldn't be surprised if portions of it were fake as to the personal details, aside from the obvious factual errors and inconsistencies.
I'm a good liberal and all, but, philosophically speaking, thank goodness this kind of thinking wasn't around during the passage of the Civil Rights Bill, or on the Court during Roe v. Wade. I think a statesperson actually best votes, and acts, on the behalf of his or her constituencies' interests: which are some gooey mismash of consience, liberty, security and pocketbook (try paying down your mortgage with freedom). Probably worth noting that Lieberman is apparently willing to still align with the Democratic caucus if re-elected, Zell Miller Burr this guy ain't. Televangelists who want to convert all of Israel to Christianity, and Red-Staters who think the Northeast is New Gomorra, both vote in large enough Republican numbers to keep this Connecticut Hebrew in the DNC and giving the right speeches in Bridgeport and Groton during Olympic years. Policy matters, but sometimes the ****'s just personal.
