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What is the Democratic Party today?
A
Fraught Moment
By James Howard Kunstler
December 09, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
- The last time the Democratic Party blew up
in a presidential election year was 1860. It
had evolved from Jefferson’s 1800 bloc of
yeoman farmers to Andrew Jackson’s rowdy
caucus of frontier populists in the 1830s,
and settled into a slough of pro-slavery
apologists by the 1850s, including two
do-nothing Democratic presidents, Pierce and
Buchanan. The party held a nominating
convention in the spring of 1860 and
couldn’t come up with a candidate when a
claque of southern “fire-eaters” walked out.
They tried again a few months later and
cracked up into three separate parties with
three nominees — and of course Mr. Lincoln
won the election. The result was the
bloodiest war in US history.
That’s one way to drain a swamp. Historical
obfuscators might say the Civil War was a
lofty, legalistic quarrel over “state’s
rights,” but of course it was really about
the intolerable depravity of slavery. A
hundred years later, the mysterious
inversions of history converted the old
slaver’s party into the Civil Rights party.
That had a good fifty-year run. It included
a hearty side-dish of anti-war sentiment,
and a general disposition against the Big
Brother treatment of citizens, including
especially the overreach of the CIA and the
FBI.
What is the Democratic Party today? Well,
it’s the cheerleading squad for “seventeen”
government agencies that add up to the
craftily-labeled “intel community,”
a warm-and-fuzzy coalition of snoops, false
witnesses, rogue lawfare cadres,
seditionists, and bad-faith artists working
sedulously to hide their previous misdeeds
with ever-fresh ones. They’re the party
against free speech, the party against due
process of law, the party determined to
provoke war with Russia. They’re the party
of sexual confusion, sexual hysteria, and
sexual conflict, the party of kangaroo
courts, cancel culture, erasing boundaries
(including national borders), and of making
up rules for all that as they go along —
like the Nazis and Soviets used to do. The
ideas and policies they advocate are so
comprehensively crazy that their old support
of slavery looks quaintly straightforward in
comparison.
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It’s taken a while for the full
efflorescence of these political pathologies
to present. But now they are finally on
display for all to see in what is supposed
to be a climactic impeachment melodrama. The
impeachment process itself has revealed the
party’s genius for inventing new
debaucheries of law and government
misconduct — the latest being Rep Adam
Schiff’s blatantly illegal cadging of his
opponents’ phone logs. And now, after three
years of unchallenged wickedness, they
literally face the moment of truth.
That is, when all the many players in this
grand game of Gotcha have to face the
consequences of what they have done. The
Horowitz report is necessarily limited to
the DOJ inspector general’s narrow mission
scope: the IG can only interview current
employees of the agency and its stepchild,
the FBI, which means that key players in the
Gotcha game such as former FBI director
Comey, former acting director McCabe, fired
special agent Peter Strzok and notably
ex-CIA director John Brennan were outside of
Mr. Horowitz’s sphere of operations. His
scope was also supposedly limited to the
issues around FISA warrant mischief — though
those complex shenanigans may have led the
IG to other related dodges, cons, and crimes
outright. The IG has no real law enforcement
powers. He can only refer or recommend
further action. Nevertheless, a great miasma
of anxiety oppresses the Democratic Party
now as it awaits whatever Mr. Horowitz has
to say about these matters.
The
party’s propaganda arms at The New York
Times, the WashPo, and cable
news networks worked up a frenzy of
distractions and ruses this past week — for
instance the “bombshell” that
International-Man-of-Mystery Joseph Mifsud
was not a hireling of the FBI. Of
course, nobody ever claimed he was. Rather,
he is suspected of being an agent of the
Italian intel service with links to British
intel, both used by the CIA as beards for
its nefarious activities around its own
election meddling of 2016. House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic caucus has been
busy with ersatz impeachment proceedings,
which are invidiously scheduled to continue
next week as a smokescreen to conceal the
Horowitz findings. It’s been a frantic
campaign for them at a fraught moment in
this long saga — but the odor of desperation
is thick and rank.
Of
course, behind the Horowitz report loom the
specters of Barr & Durham. Whatever they’ve
been up to has been hermetically sealed in a
globe of silence even more oppressive and
nightmarish for the Dems than the IG’s
inquiry. Barr & Durham are able to make
things stick, most crucially genuine
criminal culpability for the entire
RussiaGate fiasco and all of its offshoots,
including the most recent “Whistleblower”
caper — a patently treasonous scheme. Who
knows if and when indictments start raining
down, but there’s a chance that it will be a
very hard rain indeed.
I’m
not so sure that the Democratic Party can
survive the washing away of its beloved narrative by
that hard rain. They are also faced with a
field of manifestly lame presidential
candidates, especially the current leader of
the pack, Joe Biden, fumbling and doddering
his way down the campaign trail in an
apparent effort to dodge being investigated
for the grifts of his Veep years. All this
may be enough to put the party down, like a
dog that has peed on the carpet one time too
many. Somebody else, from some other hastily
assembled party, may have to stand against
Mr. Trump in 2020.
This article was originally published by
"Lew
Rockwell"
- -
James Howard Kunstler is the author of
The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic, The
Geography of Nowhere, the World Made By
Hand novels, and more than a dozen other
books. He lives in Washington County,
New York.
Copyright © 2019
Kunstler.com
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