Demagoguery
It’s a story that has become all-too-familiar, and has its roots going all the way back to the 1964 Presidential Election, when incumbent Democrat Lyndon Johnson was running against Republican Barry Goldwater. Johnson, who had succeeded his predecessor when John F. Kennedy was assassinated the preceding November, really had this election “in the bag”. However, Johnson being Johnson would leave nothing to chance, and chose instead to paint Goldwater into a corner with an extremist brush. Those who are a certain age remember well the television advertisement of a little girl, picking daisies, chanting a familiar rhyme only to be interrupted by a juxtaposed video of a nuclear detonation- suggesting that Goldwater and the Republicans were war mongers who would bring about a nuclear apocalypse if elected, and so began the dubious tradition of Democratic candidates stooping to absolute lows in the quest for electoral victory.
Throughout the seventies and beyond, Democrats dined on the dish of demagoguery with absolutely no scruples or ethics in their quest to lie, cheat, and thereby, steal elections. We can remember 1980 when Jimmy Carter, whose presidency was the epitome of well-meaning incompetence, played the extremist card against Ronald Reagan- suggesting that the former two-term California governor was an amiable dunce and a war monger- neither of which were even close to being factual, as Reagan’s personal diaries have otherwise proved he was erudite, intellectual and quite cerebral in every major decision he made as president. So goes the career of the under-estimated, as Reagan pounded Jimmy Carter in both the popular and electoral balloting.
Fast forward to 2012 when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, while trying to assist Barack Obama’s re-election bid, outrageously and slanderously used his office and in-chamber senate immunity to falsely accuse Republican nominee Mitt Romney of paying no income tax for the preceding dozen years- an absolute and unequivocal lie, perpetuated by an abiding and complicit mainstream media. Romney, by any measure, was and is an honorable man, who nevertheless had to prove that he had in fact paid all of his taxes- and quite a lot, actually. Yet, the damage was done, and Reid knew it. When last week, he and the White House showed absolutely no remorse for the lie that they had perpetuated (Reid even boasted, “Romney lost, didn’t he?” with a smile on his face) in the pursuit of victory, it revealed to the nation a sickening and dastardly ethos that Democrats will do anything, say anything, truth-be-damned, that winning elections, as opposed to the noblesse oblige of public service and love of country, is what they are all about, which means Hillary Clinton is well-placed and supremely suited to carry the soiled banner of the party she represents, since her own ethical and legal lapses are well-documented and increasingly obvious.
Meanwhile, the all-too-compliant major media, in conjunction with the loony liberals of leftist leprosy are presently ginning up controversy about Indiana’s version of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act ( a federal law signed by President Clinton) by suggesting that it amounts to wanton discrimination against the LGBT community when, in fact, it does not. Republican Governors Pence and Hutchinson from Indiana and Arkansas, respectively, have been cowed into amending and curtailing this legislation which exists in twenty-seven other states, because Republicans know full well that to do otherwise invites the narrative that they are nothing but extremist, bible-thumping bigots. The mass media rubber-stamps this narrative as absolute fact and a lazy and ill-informed electorate buys into the lie, just as they did in 1964 when they feared nuclear annihilation from a Goldwater presidency.
It will not matter who is the eventual Republican nominee, because whoever it is, will thus be labeled as an extremist- regardless of his positions on the issues of today. This is what the left does, all too well, but after all, they win, don’t they?
God help us, and a Happy Easter to all.
-Drew Nickell, 2 April 2015
© 2015 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved