What Democrats believe

The fuzzy language of the actual Democratic platform and the candidate’s recent centrist makeover notwithstanding, it will still be safe to say that he and the vast majority of his fellow Democrats accept, among others, the following propositions:

> That exploring and drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, offshore or just about anywhere is bad. So, too, are nuclear power, coal and any other kind of energy source except windmills.

> That racial preferences must be preserved because assumptions of group entitlement and grievance are central to how most Democrats perceive American society. Group rights are now more important than individual rights as we move toward a new caste system based on race, ethnicity and gender. Anyone alarmed by such trends is racist or sexist.

> That the use of American military power is to be avoided and appeasement of various kinds should be used instead to deal with potential aggressors like Iran and North Korea. Democrats are the doves of American politics and no Democratic president should continence the use of military force without United Nations approval.

> That health care should be reformed by moving toward some version of socialized medicine similar to the British system, or at least Canada’s. Any proposals that would shift health care (or anything else ) in a more market-oriented direction are, accordingly, to be vigorously opposed. Socialism may be dead as a viable ideology, but Democrats realize that the more people dependent upon government for the necessities of life, the more Democrats there will be.

> That the war on terror should be halted because the terrorist threat is overblown. Indeed, the far bigger threat all along has been the Bush administration and its overzealous anti-terrorism policies.

> That all nominees to the federal courts must embrace the idea of a “living” constitution, defined as a constitution flexible enough to mean whatever judges choose it to mean. This way, liberals can achieve through the courts and ideologically congenial judges those things that the Constitution might not permit and / or which elected legislatures won’t enact.

Democrat politicians inwardly agree with all of this, but shrewdly recognize that such a mélange of environment extremism, abortion on demand and blame-America-first pacifism doesn’t appeal much beyond the faculty lounge; hence, the slipping and sliding and obfuscating and repositioning that will occur between Denver and November.

[safe in the knowledge that the Old Media will help keep their secrets]

http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/235272/