That Squeeze You're Feeling is the Noose Tightening Around your Neck

James G. Long has an article up today at the American Thinker that i worth reading and thinking about entitled The Rise of the Manifestoists: the End of the Democratic Party. I don't think he means that we won't have a party called Democrat in the future, whose mascot is the ass, but that it is not the same party as it once was.

Actually, in my opinion, the old Democrat party, the party of Jefferson and Jackson left years ago, routed by George McGovern and the New Left in 1972. The last adherent of the old regime in my mind was Zell Miller, not Liberman, who gave his farewell address at the Republican Convention in 2004. But the party of old had long disappeared, replaced by people willing to say anything, even make stuff up, to get and keep power.

We have a person at work who epitomizes this sort of say anything, do whatever it takes to win political debates, which he often as not starts himself. I no longer debate him. He starts out on one topic, gets you to comment, changes the subject, and is talking about something else when it become clear you have the facts on your side. Or he will start something, then throw out statistics that are completely wrong (and I often suspect made up on the spot.) He will cite obscure journals nobody has ever heard of, while you are citing mainstream journals. Of course, he believes anything coming out of Fox News Channel is absolutely evil.  My co-worker is absolutely harmless, except of course that he votes, but he betrays a mindset that too often is a characteristic of people in office.

Now, you may think the antics of my co-worker above is aberrational, and that most of these people are rational, if misguided. But I watched an episode of Lou Dobbs recently where Lou had two liberals, and one "conservative" on his A-Team. The liberals both displayed the same types of behaviour defending what were indefensible Obama positions. Of course, Lou called them on it, but it did not stop them from running out the clock without answering his actual question. Mr. Long writes:

Not to put too fine a point on it, Manifestoists win by lying, cheating, and stealing. There are exactly two current major philosophical systems that make a holy sacrament of dishonesty: Marxism and Islamism. Not coincidentally, these and similar traits are characteristic of psychopaths, as listed in Dr. Robert Hare's Psychopathic Check List - Revised...

It is bad enough that one side feels it is OK to steal, cheat, and to say anything to get elected, while the other does not. But it is made worse because each side projects its own beliefs on the other. So, for example, because Democrats are lying, cheating and stealing, they figure the other side is too. Because Republicans generally don't do these things, they look at the other side as simply misguided, and therefore don't vociferously counter their opponents attacks.

Mr. Long again:

My thesis is that all dictators and dictator wannabes are psychopaths, requiring power in order to conceal their own inadequacies from themselves. When Grandma no longer serves the dictator's needs, she goes under the bus, joining a long line of five million kulaks under Lenin, more millions of communist party apparatchiks and great chunks of the Soviet military officer corps under Stalin, thirty million peasant farmers starved to death under Mao, millions dead in North Korea, and one third of the Cambodian population dead under Pol Pot. Favored groups become quite expendable when the psychopathic leader's control is threatened. Obama's announced intentions to change the Constitution, control guns, and start a federal government-run domestic police force -- coupled as it all is with new advances in surveillance capabilities and the Gramscian media's relentless bias against the Constitution...bluntly put, this deadly cocktail presents a pointed risk to your freedoms.

The sooner the general public wakes up to the danger, the sooner we will begin getting our house in order again. But we have to be willing to kick these people out of power, and never let them near government again.  Take a look around you, America, that squeeze you are feeling is the noose tightening around your neck.