In Tampa we saw a Republican Party fired with enthusiasm, blessed with rising young political stars like Paul Ryan, Mia Love, and Marco Rubio, and running a ticket brimming with brains, real-world experience, and fresh ideas of the sort needed to get our economy out of the fiscal ditch Obama and the Dems drove it into. So what will we see this week in Charlotte?
Watch any episode of “Walking Dead” and you’ll get a preview. Progressive ideas are beyond old. They’re dead. Yet they’re still walking around, mindless zombies reflexively moaning left-wing clichés and petrified orthodoxy. And just as the victims of zombies also become zombies when gnawed on by the undead, progressivism has spread by taking over schools, popular culture, the mainstream media, and for now the White House and Senate. With a record of failure and a total absence of any plan for turning the economy out of the path of the fiscal iceberg, all the Dems can do in Charlotte is set those rotting ideas loose to hunt down any still uninfected voters and chew away at their brains.
So expect the Dems to unleash the zombies, those reeking ideas like the “war on women.” The Convention will feature a whole slate of privileged women repeating feminist bromides that had some currency maybe in 1970. Expect hysterical charges about “taking away our right to choose,” which is zombie-speak for slandering and bullying Catholic institutions trying to protect religious freedom from government mandates to pay for birth control, or for demonizing those state legislatures trying to restrict infanticide disguised as third-trimester or partial-birth abortions. Creaky feminist clichés about “fearing strong women” and “silencing women’s voices” will also be on hand, coming from extremely vocal women who enjoy greater wealth, education, privilege, political power, influence, and leisure than most of the men in this country.
Of course, another moldering zombie sure to take center-stage in Charlotte is the “racism” charge progressives rely on to misdirect voters from their abject failures. Musty rhetoric last suitable in the Jim Crow era will fill the air, with dark warnings about “disenfranchisement” and “voter suppression.” We will hear decried the whole catalogue of “dog-whistle” words that mask the conservative racist hatred of Obama. Michelle Malkin has conveniently listed them: “angry,” “Chicago,” “Constitution,” “experienced,” “Food Stamp president,” “golf,” “kitchen cabinet,” “Obamacare,” “privileged,” “professor,” and “you people” are all ordinary words and phrases that allegedly seethe with hidden racist meaning. But if these benign words are the subsonic “dog whistles” Republicans use to stir up their party’s racist impulses, how come only Democrats can hear them? Doesn’t that make them the “dogs” rabid with racism? Maybe that’s why they’re the ones who think any mention of “welfare” means black people, even though more whites are on relief than blacks. Or perhaps that explains their campaign against voter identification requirements: somehow black people alone are incapable of obtaining a photo i.d. So who are the racists?
But the biggest, most rotten zombie we will see in Charlotte is the class-warfare rhetoric that has already dominated Obama’s campaign. Obama and crew have no new ideas for rescuing the economy from a Greece-like meltdown. Nor do they have an answer for the Republican Convention’s celebrations of self-reliance, self-improvement, hard work, entrepreneurship, and acceptance of risk and responsibility that success requires and that freedom makes possible. These all are part of America’s DNA, the virtues that made this country the richest and most powerful in history. And the alternatives to these virtues––the dependency, stagnation, passivity, indolence, rent-seeking, and buck-passing that for more than a century have attended every species of big-government socialism that ever existed––these alternatives to American virtues have been tried for a century and failed miserably. Indeed, we’re watching their slow-motion dissolution in the Eurozone even as we speak.
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