“Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
It is ironic that President Richard Nixon’s most profound quote, an ethics quote, in fact, should have come as he left the Presidency, in his farewell remarks immediately after resigning his office in 1974 as impeachment and removal seemed unavoidable. It is doubly ironic that his words so prophetically apply at this moment to the target of his own hate that destroyed Nixon, the Democratic Party.
That the entire, ugly spectacle of a great political party shredding its own ideals and capitulating to unreasoning, all-consuming hate as its sole reason for being is not a new observation at Ethics Alarms, but it has reached its apotheosis in the enthusiastic embrace of Michael Bloomberg by so many Democrats. His route to the final, total corruption of the party that once styled itself as the heralds of peace and love was cleared and paved once Democrats, pushed by the fanatics of the “resistance,” abandoned policy commitment and fealty to America ideals and principles. The party devoted its energy and passion to making its attack on Donald Trump entirely personal, betting that never ceasing ad hominem rhetoric abetted by the now almost completely submissive left-biased media would be sufficient to bring down the Trump Presidency, hopefully without the messiness of an election, but if not, then at the polls in November.
Never before has the brief for defeating an incumbant President been based on sheer hatred and little else. The reason why this is true becomes more evident every day, for Nixon was right. Hate is destroying the soul of the Democratic Party and its members. Its strategy of employing the atomic version of the politics of personal destruction, which the decried during the Clinton years, has torn the country apart to an extent that may have rendered it ungovernable. Democrats have embraced to a degree no previous major political party has in U.S. history the totalitarian tactic of the Big Lie as a means of denigrating and encouraging fear and hatred of our nation’s leader.
The erstwhile party of peace and love now fuels the violent antifa, and encourages its supporters to harass and physically attack citizens for the “offense” of wearing a baseball cap bearing Donald Trump’s unremarkable campaign slogan. Joe Biden has been repeating the line “Let’s take back our country” in his speeches, which means exactly the same thing. But hate has turned Democrats into indefensible, flamboyant hypocrites.
The party that has screamed for three years that Donald Trump endangers our democracy with his “rejections of democratic norms” just engineered an impeachment that lacked a legal or Constitutional basis. The excepted norm for that divisive and unsettling act has always been that it must be non-partisan: this impeachment was openly and completely partisan. Never before has a party resolved to impeach an elected President from the moment he was elected, and then openly searched for a justification for doing so. The norm of political discourse in Congress has always been restraint in rhetoric regarding the President, yet Democrats allowed a prominent member to proclaim “impeach the motherfucker!” on multiple occasions. The Speaker of the House, well aware of the procedural and traditional “norms” of the annual State of the Union Address, used the occasion to signal her party’s hate by symbolically tearing up the President’s speech on live, coast-to-coast television. The “norm” of accepting the results dictated by our Constitutional institutions and processes is perhaps the most crucial one, yet Democrats began the Presidency of Donald Trump by refusing to accept the legitimacy of his election, and after the Senate acquitted the President of the Democratic House’s contrived impeachment, Speaker Pelosi denied that he had in fact been acquitted.
The perversion of the Democratic Party’s mission, purpose and principles was apparent as soon as it initially installed Joe Biden as the favorite to be its candidate in November. The alleged party of women, #MeToo and enlightened respect for non-males in the workplace absurdly encouraged the return of an unapologetic sexist and workplace sexual harasser. The party of the young attempted to anoint a 77 year old relic of old-style politics, not because he embodied the party’s supposed goals and ideals, but because he seemed to represent the best chance of removing the hated Donald Trump.
“…and then you destroy yourself.”
As Biden–predictably—faltered, the final proof of the Democrats being consumed by self-destroying hatred arrived in the form of American autocrat and oligarch, Michael Bloomberg. New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow was moved by Democratic support for the ex-New York mayor to issue one of his few coherent and relatively accurate op-eds since President Trump’s election, protesting the result of the hate Blow himself has helped foment:
It is truly a devastating sight to watch liberals who have winced for years at Donald Trump’s issues on wealth, race and women allow fear, propaganda and influence mercenaries to push them into supporting a man who has his own issues concerning wealth, women and race. …How many people, who stormed Washington during the Women’s March, cheered #MeToo and recoiled in horror as Trump was accused by multiple women of sexual impropriety, are now willing to ignore the accusations against Bloomberg?
…But the campaign and many political pundits are pushing one talking point, hard: that no one else can defeat Trump but Bloomberg….That’s exceedingly dangerous. Bloomberg was a Republican mayor. He agrees with liberals on some policies, but he is by no means a liberal. Not at alI…
I don’t trust Bloomberg. When he had political power, he used it to harm. I don’t ever want to see him with political power again, “ramming through” social programs that harm vulnerable people.
Why are Bloomberg’s poll numbers rising even as the evidence that he is at least as loathsome a character as Donald Trump? That’s because hate has replaced patriotism and responsible civic conduct among a critical number of Democrats, and the party’s rhetoric and behavior is responsible.
Here, in the words of Sean Davis, is the hero Democrats have selected for themselves:
God said, “I need a know-it-all Wall Street banker who made more money by getting fired than most men will make their entire lives working an honest job…Somebody who would tell a female employee to kill her own baby so she could work longer hours, a grieving family that it’s a waste to give medical care to old people, or a farmer that growing food is easy and any idiot with half a brain could manage it. Someone who could tell a mother that parenting was as simple as hiring ‘some black who doesn’t even have to speak English’ to raise her dumb kid…I need somebody willing to randomly accost black men for no good reason other than having the wrong color skin. I need somebody who will say that the best way to reduce crime is to target black kids and ‘throw them up against the walls and frisk them’ for the crime of being black. Someone who will brag that one side effect of putting ‘all the cops in the minority neighborhoods’ is that you end up ‘arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities..somebody willing to tell those awful poors that they need to be disproportionately taxed for their own good because they’re too stupid to know what’s good for them… So God made a Bloomberg.”
No, hate made Bloomberg, and in 2019, the Democratic Party has become the party of hate. Whether or not it will destroy itself as Richard Nixon explained has yet to be determined, but it is well on its way.
The more serious question is whether it will destroy the nation as well.
Ethics Alarms 
Is the hate really something new? Or is it simply viewed as the most expedient tactic?
James Carville was recently quoted as saying – paraphrasing here, because I’m too lazy to look it up – that the role of the party was to win, so that it could assume power.
Assume power. Not lead, not advance, not serve in the national interest. Assume power. Carville may be a slimeball, but he’s a talented slimeball. He understands political strategy and tactics as well as anyone.
I’ve little doubt that rank-and-file Dems really do have the best interests of the nation at heart. But given the shady dealings we’ve witnessed by those who actually pull the levers of the party – from choosing candidates to using Executive-branch rulemaking to create regulations far beyond those intended by enabling legislation – I really question whether party leadership shares those values.
The only conclusion I can draw, based on observation, is that the national interest has little or nothing to do with it. Power, and the perks that come with it, are apparently all that matters.
Consider how the Democratic Party and Executive branch ran roughshod over the Constitution and the process under Obama, only partially returned to check when Republicans managed to seize back control of the House in 2011 and the Senate in 2015.
The Dems want to get the band back together. They want the power back.
I have long felt that this nation works best when the chambers of Congress are split by party control, and that single-party control of both Congress and the Executive branch generally produces a bad result. Philosophically, I still hold to that, but given that most of the news media is now firmly aligned with the Democratic party – not quite state-controlled media, but awfully damned close – the equation is now grossly out of balance.
Perhaps we’ve reached a point at which single-party control of the Legislative and Executive branches IS actually in the national interest, with a howling media mob offering the necessary counter to unchecked advance of a specific agenda. If Republicans had both chambers and retained the White House, that might happen – at least until the pendulum swings and Dems gain back all three. History suggests that they ultimately will.
At that point, we WILL have the equivalent of state-controlled media, because conservative media casts a far fainter shadow. It will likely be a frightening time.
This isn’t to say that only the Dems are power-hungry and the GOP is immune. Republicans are every bit as horny for power, and every bit as underhanded in their attempts to gain it. The only thing that tilts me in their grudging favor is that they seem to do a bit less damage when they hold it.
Here is as good a place as ever for a mea culpa with an explanation, since Arthur has been kind enough to flag some of my worst typo attacks.
I just fixed about ten little typos here, the kind my last proof usually addresses. This time, I was rushing to get this post, which kept me awake last night, up while rushing to get Grace to her orthopod appointment on time. I decided to post it without the last eyeballing—maybe a bad call, since I knew I was typing faster than my skills justify.
The good news is that the doctor told Grace to lose teh sling, and to start physical therapy.
THAT is GREAT news!
PT ain’t fun, but it gets you better.
“This isn’t to say that only the Dems are power-hungry and the GOP is immune.”
The term you are searching for is ‘The Swamp.’ The establishment elites, regardless of the lies they tell to get elected, are in this for money and power. Straight up.
Amen brother. Praise the Lord and pass the…
Here is something relevant.
https://reason.com/2019/06/05/a-skeptics-look-at-administrative-constitutionalism/
It is interesting that in the ‘Republicans gain control scenario’, the ‘state controlled media’ would be violently opposed to the Democratically-elected government. This exposes the truth that ‘the state’ is no longer controlled by the people or their representatives.
In fairness, “The norm of political discourse in Congress has always been restraint in rhetoric regarding the President…”, may be a reaction to an extreme lack of civility and restraint on the part of the object of their ire.
That said, as is so often the case, you’re right on the mark.
The Democrats have been formalizing, processing, and propagating their hatred as no political party has so monolithically done before. We’ll see how many are willing to dance to their tune of hate on November 3.
Bias just makes people stupid, hate destroys them completely.
Do the Democrats even care that Bloomberg’s media group will literally be state-run media?
I have visions of Bloomberg’s news organization being forbidden from criticizing a President Bloomberg or other media outlets complaining because his own employees get access to him first.
Shouldn’t Bloomberg divest himself of all his assets?
He says he will!
I have a strong feeling tonight that the Democratic debate will be pretty ugly with Bloomberg getting hammered. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Mini Mike back together again! At least Clinton was likable for awhile.