In America we have a two-party political system. From time to time other, splinter parties, have sprung up, but they didn’t capture the attention of the country and they just faded away. I don’t really know if the two party system is the right one, but it’s what we work with on a year-round basis. I heard a person thinking out loud during the last election for President and she said, “It’s kind of silly, that we have 50-plus candidates for Miss America, but only two for President.” Now, that’s something to think about, and there’s plenty of material about it.
The Democrat party was formed January 8, 1828, and should not be confused with the Democratic party which was born 1792. Although the terms are used interchangeably, they are not the same. Ripon, Wisconsin was the birthplace of the Republican party on March 20, 1854, and has been called the GOP, and took the elephant as its symbol. In an 1874 cartoon, Thomas Nast drew a donkey clothed in a lion’s skin – scaring off the other animals at the zoo. All the animals, except for the fearless elephant, which was labeled “the Republican vote”. The symbol endures to this day. The GOP, most people admit they think it stands for the Grand Old Party, but it initially stood for the Gallant Old Party.
Through the years since their beginnings, each party has had outstanding leaders…and some that were not quite as outstanding. In four elections from 1930 through 1936, the GOP was decimated, losing 182 House seats and 40 Senate seats. What remained in Congress after 1936 were primarily “Old Guard” conservative Republicans from rural and small-town districts in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, the Midwest, and the Prairies. These members of Congress might just as well have been cast in concrete, so solid was their constituencies, and since they stayed on and kept to a certain way of doing things, they picked up the name “the Old Guard”. The “Old Guard” Republicans took their cues from small businesses back home in their districts and they worked with some conservative Democrats, too.
Fast forward to the present. It would seem, based on what is being shown on TV, at least on the mainstream media, that the days of give-and-take in Congress are dead. Lines in the sand have been drawn by Democrats and they are not going to give an inch on anything…apparently. It’s over a year now since Donald Trump was elected but that hasn’t made an impression on the Democrats and their followers. Almost on a daily basis, there’s a march, or a protest, or just the other day, a mass howling at the moon by otherwise seemingly-sane individuals. The Left just cannot, and will not, accept that they lost the election, and Hillary is not the President.
In Fiddler On the Roof, Tevya is lamenting that because people have money, it’s accepted that “they know” …which is not always the case. There could be no argument that Hillary Clinton has lots of money, and we won’t discuss how she got most of that, at this point. However, when you weigh the amount of money she has in one hand, and the colossal upset of the election in the other, the money didn’t seem to make her any smarter, did it?
Michael Bloomberg, a very wealthy man, the former Mayor of New York City, came out with a statement about the European Union (EU) losing England when they voted to leave the EU. He said Brexit is the “single stupidest thing any country has ever done” apart from the election of Donald Trump as US president. Bloomberg argued that “it is really hard to understand why a country that was doing so well wanted to ruin it”, when the truth of the matter points to exactly the opposite. Britain was going down the toilet in the EU.
Anyone who examined the strategy that the Democratic Party has embraced ever more tightly in recent years could see its essential precariousness. It was no longer the party of the people…it was now the party of, for, and by the party itself. In the last couple of decades they have been like cats trying to cover up their waste, burying everything that might split them apart…but they failed. Things like the 1924 Democratic National Convention, also called the Klanbake, held at the Madison Square Garden in New York City from June 24 to July 9, 1924, tarnished their image. Robert Byrd, Hugo Black, Bibb Graves, Clifford Walker and George Gordon, all Democrats, were active in the KKK. To be sure, there were Republicans too, but not as many.
Last word: In recent times, there have been shootings, and quite a few of them, the notorious ones, look to have been Democrat or left-leaning. Oswald, a Socialist, assassinated JFK, and many of the others had been called Democrats but that was “unsubstantiated”. Berkeley, Ferguson, Baltimore, Charlottesville, and others were either Democrat-funded, or affiliated in some manner. The absence of truth in the media today is just another form of madness because those of us who know the truth of things see that the reporting is just one stream of blather after another. RINO’s, and you know who you are, should either get with the program, or resign. If there’s anything we don’t need more of, it’s dissension.
Image: Excerpted from: Thomas Nast — Raw scan originally uploaded from http://cartoons.osu.edu/nast/
kicking_lion.htm to en.wikipedia. Heavily cleaned-up version uploaded to en:Image:Democraticjackass.jpg by User:AnonMoos on 11:19, 28 August 2005. Ultimate source Harper’s Weekly, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=718152
