Idiots and socialists -- but I repeat myself

Compared to being a Republican, being a Democrat is a snap. One major difference is that whereas our politicians generally have to remember from one day to another their lies and contradictions, the left never thinks of calling their party leaders on the carpet.

This truism was brought home for me when Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., promised to slow walk Trump's Cabinet choices through their confirmation hearings after spending the past eight years calling Republicans "obstructionists."

Again, the point was driven home during those hearings when the likes of Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken and Schumer excoriated the various secretaries-in-waiting for their various stock deals, some going back more than 20 years. Only Senate Democrats could possibly be that confident the folks at home wouldn't be muttering: "What about your insider trading? How is it that no matter how modest your financial situation may have been when you were first elected to Congress, somehow you all manage to wind up millionaires in the blink of an eye?"

When then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to do everything in his power to ensure that Obama would be a one-term president, the Democrats carried on as if McConnell had burned a cross on the front lawn of the White House. But when over a third of House Democrats spurned the inauguration and saw to it that only two of Trump's Cabinet positions were filled by the time Trump was sworn in, the liberals claimed they were merely being principled and conscientious.

Trump's inaugural speech promised to return power to the people, and the liberals labeled it "dark and corrosive." No doubt that's how they see it because they really do want power to remain in the hands of the federal government. Even though the founders did everything they could to keep the central authorities shackled by constitutional limitations, liberals approved Obama's going around Congress and making laws by presidential whim. These people pay lip service to democratic institutions, but they prefer fascism, so long as they're the ones wearing the hobnailed boots.

When Trump said: "When you open your heart to patriotism, there's no room for prejudice," those on the left bristled. So far as they're concerned, without stoking the fires of racial prejudice, it's possible that no Democrat might ever again win a presidential election.

According to the DNC playbook, every black and Hispanic must be encouraged to rail against Whitey, blaming the white race for everything from their high school dropout rate, their dependence on drugs within an illegal drug economy, an astronomical illegitimate birth rate and crime stats that are the sole reason America ranks among the most violent industrialized nations in the world instead of one of the least. And as there are precious few white gangs in the nation, not even Lewis Farrakhan can honestly claim that black and Hispanic gangs exist as counterweights.

Recently, a reader asked me how it is that even at this late date, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and the members of the Congressional Black Caucus can still get away with their race-baiting tactics.

"It's easy," I replied. "When you tell people that their problems in no way reflect on them, but can be laid at the feet of scapegoats who have conspired to keep them poor, ignorant and dependent, it's music to their ears. Still, even I find it amazing that these race hustlers can still keep the con going 150 years after the end of slavery and a half-century after the belated death of Jim Crow."

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When I hear those on the left prattle on about economics, I have a problem figuring out if it's poverty that troubles them or merely income inequality. After all, when you take from the wealthy and hand it over to the poor, you succeed in making the wealthy permanently poor; but the previously poor are only temporarily a little richer than they were, because the same things that made them poor in the first place –lack of education, ambition, character – remain unchanged, and they will quickly revert.

The real problem with poverty in America is that, thanks to the welfare industry that provides all the essentials to people who never do a lick of work, the generational poor have no incentive to change their ways.

For the unproductive, it's always easier and more fun to break a window and burn a car than to learn how to repair a window or build a car.

On the other hand, Trump's remark was little more than high-sounding piffle. There have been few groups as truly and tragically patriotic as the Southern Confederacy, but of course that still left plenty of room for prejudice.

Ron Radosh, a generally sensible historian, sent out an article headlined "Trump and the Truth: Why is He Spending Time on the Size of His Crowds?"

The quick answer is that he does it because the media insisted on playing down the size of the inaugural crowd or to bother mentioning that the miserable weather diminished the potential numbers just as it does with baseball games and other outdoor events.

But Radosh concluded with "Trump promised to 'drain the swamp' and put the people back in charge, but he failed to do this with his appointees. Many of them are fantastically wealthy individuals who would be comfortable in the board room of Goldman Sachs or as the CEO of the largest oil and gas company in the world as, of course, Rex Tillerson was until recently."

Because I know Ron to generally be a level-headed conservative who has devoted years of his life to proving that Alger Hiss, along with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were Soviet agents and not sacrificial lambs, to say I was surprised would be a gross understatement. To me, it read as if dictated by Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

I replied: "You lost me there, Ron. Does being wealthy preclude someone from being a person? I don't recall Trump's vowing to place poor people in his Cabinet and, frankly, I can't imagine why that would be such a great idea.

"I acknowledge that my Cabinet would look a lot different from Trump's, but that's because I know very few wealthy people. I'm not suggesting that the best way to select a Cabinet would be to toss the names of millionaires and billionaires in a hat and pick 15. But if you're Trump and you personally know people who are rich, accomplished and generally see eye-to-eye with your aspirations for America, it seems to me you'd have to be an idiot or a socialist – there I go, repeating myself – to object."

I'm reminded me of an email I received the other day. On top was a photo of Rex Tillerson, captioned "I own $240 million worth of ExxonMobil stock. Everyone is demanding that I divest my stake in this company in order to serve as Donald Trump's Secretary of State."

Below was a photo of John Kerry, captioned "My wife, Teresa Heinz-Kerry, is the heiress to the Heinz Ketchup fortune. She is worth between $750 million and $1.2 billion. No one batted an eye at my being named Secretary of State under Barack Obama."

Among the more annoying of the post-inaugural complaints I heard from pundits was that Donald Trump should have reached out to Democrats and made a more unifying speech. Now, really, does anyone really believe that if he had broken out in several choruses of "Kumbaya," Chuck Schumer would have agreed to speed up the confirmation hearings or that Madonna, Gloria Steinem, Ashley Judd and their fellow man-hating harridans would have called off their obscenity-riddled, misandristic march?

I'll give the final word to Rob O'Neill, the Navy SEAL who personally killed Osama bin Laden. When asked what he thinks of Gen. James Mattis being appointed secretary of defense, he reported: "General Mattis has a bear rug in his home. The bear isn't dead, it's just afraid to move."

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