Let's Talk Sense...
Sunday, July 11, 2004 Volume XXIX, No. 3
Roswell, New Mexico
Readership this date: 23,433
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In this issue...
Kerry-Edwards and the "Two Americas"
The Selection of Edwards: Why we are Not Surprised
John Edwards' Actual View: Deeds not Words
Overlooked by Media: Edwards' Rip-off of Mario Cuomo
"Two Americas" theme is an Ancient Democrat
Shibboleth
How to go See Fahrenheit 9/11
Senator Rod Adair Rejects Bush's Offer
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In the next Issue:
Anti-Semitism Continues to Grow in Democrat Party
Virginia Congressman Jim Moran's wild Statements about
Jews
South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings talks about Jews'
Votes
Georgia's Cynthia McKinney on the Comeback Trail this
August
(Her father said her loss in August 2002 was because
of "J-E-W-S")
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Kerry-Edwards and the "Two Americas"
Picking John Edwards Should Surprise No One
Let's face it. John Kerry has faced only two previous decisions
that involved having to choose a mate with whom to enter a close
relationship. In each instance he has chosen the one with the most
money. Now he's three for three.
John Edwards' Actual View: Deeds vs. Words
John Edwards has shown himself eager to join John Kerry in the theme
of the "Two Americas," with these two remarkably wealthy
men positioning themselves as the collective voice of the poor.
Under this scenario President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are
left to campaign on behalf of the interests of "the rich."
If the American people take this proposition seriously, the thinking
goes, the logical outcome of such a juxtaposition must of course
be a 95-5 victory for the Democrat "Dream Team." This
is just one example of the way liberals think about America.
It occurs to us that in fact John Edwards' actual life, career and
demonstrated values do indeed support and reflect a sincere view
of "Two Americas." And they are two very distinct Americas.
Edwards' concept is revealed in the way he has played out his career
as a trial lawyer, a career so successful he might be called the
King of Torts. At the very least, he is a sue-happy trial lawyer
who is a national hero, if not icon, among the national trial lawyer
organizations and general membership.
Here are the real Two Americas for John Edwards and his fellow trial
lawyers:
One is the America of Edwards' clients. They are the people who
put the "class," if you will, in "class action"
lawsuits. They are the 20,000 "little people" who receive
a payout of $500 each (a total of $10,000,000) after Edwards, or
one of his buddies, completes work on a "complicated"
lawsuit.
The other America consists of only Edwards himself, or a colleague,
who walks away with $5,000,000 (the one-third share of the take).
One America consists of the plaintiffs, the other America is represented
by their lawyers.
Other examples of the two Americas: 200,000 little people in the
first America who get $166.67 each to settle yet another "class
action" lawsuit, while the second America (Edwards again, or
a trial lawyer ally) pockets $16,665,000 for his time and trouble.
Again of course that just represents the two-thirds/one-third cuts
taken by the two Americas.
Those are the only "Two Americas" experiences that John
Edwards has lived out in his life or personally knows anything about,
despite his barefoot-boy-from-Carolina-rags-to-riches-tale. We have
no idea why the media never question him when he describes his father
as a "mill worker," making it sound as though he were
some kind of male version of Norma Rae, living in a trailer house
somewhere near the end Tobacco Road and fighting for "justice"
in his spare time. (You picture Edwards' dad in the middle of the
deafening roar of a cotton mill holding up a sign exhorting his
brethren to "strike" for higher wages or better working
conditions, or some kind of figurative Democrat symbolism for sure.)
Problem is John Edwards' father was a cotton mill supervisor, not
a minimum wage or sub-par wage factory worker grinding out the days
under horrible working conditions.
Not only was his father a supervisor, he was a "time-study"
man. This means that as he climbed the corporate ladder at Milliken
& Company, one of his tasks was to calculate worker productivity.
He studied plants and shifts, developing statistical analyses to
determine how the company could get more work out of the same force
in the same amount of hours on the job. Not surprisingly, these
kinds of supervisors were not particularly popular among the Norma
Rae types---the everyday workers who believed that management was
trying to drain them of every last ounce of energy, as well as sacrifice
their personal safety
Edwards' real dad is not "Norman Rae" Edwards, to make
up a name to fit the picture his son has tried to paint. He is Wallace
Edwards, an honorable man as far a we know, who worked his way up
from supervisor at Milliken & Co. to become a plant manager.
Eventually, he retired from the corporation and became a consultant
to the textile industry.
The point is John Edwards did not start out as a poor, underfed,
minority child in the depression who had to scrape for everything
he ever got, being molded along the way into a committed advocate
for the poor and oppressed, a background that has steeled him to
a lifelong task of fighting injustice.
John Edwards was born and raised in middle class America, like the
overwhelming majority of Americans. He was probably worse off than
some, but far better off than most. He grew up wanting to be rich,
and when he went to college he figured out that one way to do that
was to become a trial lawyer and sue people. He became a trial lawyer.
He sued people. He won lots of times. He became rich. His total
loot was $55,000,000 out of a lifetime winnings (this kind of reads
like the back of a baseball card for trial lawyers, but we don't
know how else to report it) was $152,000,000. It is all perfectly
legal. And we are sure that some, if not many, of his clients were
people who had legitimate cases, with some, again perhaps many,
clearly deserving of compensatory awards. Those are the facts. All
we ask is that Edwards top making up stuff about his life.
Overlooked by Media: Edwards' Rip-off of Mario Cuomo
We had our own immediate response to the "Two Americas"
theme emphasized so much last week by the new Kerry-Edwards "Dream
Team." We have not seen any other media outlet enunciate the
same view, so we will talk about it today. (Apparently we should
have picked up on this a long time ago, but since we did not spend
much time covering the primaries, we missed John Edwards' initial
run-through of this theme last winter.) Our first thought was that
this particular theme is not at all new, and in fact it is arguably
a rather crass rip-off of Mario Cuomo.
Then-New York Governor Mario Cuomo made his famous "Tale of
Two Cities" speech at the 1984 Democrat Convention in San Francisco.
It electrified the crowd, and of course the American media, if not
necessarily the American people. In fact, it was a defining moment
in Democrat Party history.
The post-Vietnam Democrat Party, having won the presidency in 1976,
largely because of Watergate, and having lost it back in 1980, largely
because of incompetence, was truly coming of age. It had already
embraced the "nuclear freeze" movement with wild-eyed
enthusiasm, signaling to the American people that it believed the
Cold War was simply not worth fighting any more. Como is a smart
man who realized the public might be a little jittery about the
Democrats' foreign policy notions. He decided to try to get people
focused on domestic issues. Bade bang, bade boom---the "Tale
of Two Cities" speech.
It is significant that former Washington Senator Henry ME. "Scoop"
Jackson had died in September 1983. Hubert Humphrey of course had
died some five years earlier. With them gone, and with LAB and Joke's
Vietnam policies being defined as failures, the Democrat Party was
fully and near-unanimously committed to global retreat as the new
paradigm. Democrat Cold Warriors abandoned the party in droves and
were christened "neoconservatives."
This left people like Ted Kennedy, Alan Cranston, and yes, John
Kerry---and virtually every single member of the Democrat Who's
Who of today----completely in charge of the party. Just how wrong
they have been on foreign policy is breathtaking in scope. The same
people who today are arguing to take control of American security,
in what may well be our time of greatest peril, have been consistently,
thoroughly and loudly wrong on every single question regarding our
national security over the past 25 years. But that is a story for
another day.
Cuomo saw the vulnerability of the modern Democrat Party, now led
by modern liberals, while the Cold War was still the foreseeable
reality. He decided to ratchet up the class warfare card. His speech
painted a stark contrast between rich and poor America. Cuomo is
a gifted speaker. His delivery was superb. He became the darling
of the party. They begged him to run for years thereafter. He wouldn't
do it.
Then he got beat by George Pataki in 1994. He was last seen hawking
a gig on talk radio. Enter John Edwards, reviving the Cuomo message.
No one even remembered Mario.
"Two Americas" theme is an Ancient Democrat Shibboleth
It is not as if Cuomo had raised a new theme. He was only elevating
it during a time of peace, trying to redirect the country's attention
to domestic issues.
The theme itself, "Party of the Rich vs. Party of the 'Little
Man'" had in fact been the Democrats' stock in trade since
its inception in 1828. It was an Andrew Jackson' slogan, not FDR's
as many today no doubt suspect, although FDR used it to be sure.
The Democrats' most common slogan---and most common smear---is not
an outgrowth of the Great Depression, and the contrast Democrats
drew between the supposed policies of Herbert Hoover and Franklin
Delano Roosevelt.
The "party of the common people" theme was developed by
Jackson, with his close aide and confidant (and co-founder of the
Democrat Party) Martin Van Buren. In some ways, Van Buren was not
unlike the Karl Rove of his day---thinking, strategizing, organizing
and trying to figure out ways to turn policy initiatives and outlines
into means of persuading significant components of the electorate.
(Considering that Van Buren eventually became president, perhaps
it is better to say that Rove is not unlike a modern day Van Buren.)
In any case, Van Buren and Jackson invented the modern political
party which they promptly named the Democratic Party. They referred
to Democrat rule as "The Democracy."
Jackson and Van Buren called their rivals in the old Democratic-Republican
Party, to which they themselves had once belonged, the "party
of the rich." When their rivals formed a short-lived (1832-1836)
opposition party called the National Republicans, Jackson called
them the "party of the rich."
When the National Republicans went belly up, and the Whigs came
into being, they called the Whigs the "party of the rich."
In the 1850s, with the Whigs at death's door, the Democrats called
the Free Soilers the party of the rich, then they called the American
Party the party of the rich. Then they called the Anti-Nebraska
Democrats the party of the rich. Finally, when the new Republican
Party got firmly established they began calling the GOP the party
of the rich. (This of course was mightily ironic in that their hard-core
base consisted of a half million slave owners, traders and plantation
owners who owned $2 Billion--an unimaginable sum in today's dollars---in
human capital.) But then again, the Democrats have never been short
on gall, chutzpah, as we would say.
They have never abandoned this theme. They figure if it is a good
slogan why change it? It is good, in a certain sense. There will
most likely always be more upper middle class, middle class, working
class and poor people than rich people. If you can paint your opponent
as the party of only 1%, 2 ½ %, or 5%, or the population,
they reason, you have a leg up with the rest of the population.
True, it is untrue. But the Democrats are nothing if not students
of human nature. They know that resentment and envy are ancient
sins and ancient traits. They will always be with us. We can hope
that---for most people---those traits, those impulses are and will
be buried deep in the psyche, deep in the "less-better"
angels of our nature.
But they count on those feelings nonetheless, hoping that at the
right times, with the right message, with the right circumstances
in individuals' lives, they can be aroused, they can be appealed
to, and that they will surface to the Democrats' benefit. They have
before. In presidential elections, in gubernatorial elections, in
elections for congress and state legislatures. No doubt they will
continue to do so, here and there, forever.
This is what we face. When we say "we," we do not mean
the Republican Party. Yes, they face it, and have faced all their
150 years of existence. But we mean, the American people, the people
who want to be governed not by the impulses of mankind at his most
base, but by the better angels of our nature. It is for us to hope,
and pray, that we will be guided by those other traits we also have,
and can also call on---fair-mindedness, calm reason and logic, fairness,
a concern for the common weal, and yes, faith---not only in God,
but in the soundness of the values and foundations of our very existence,
which also has its Providential underpinnings.
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Fahrenheit 9/11: How to Go See It
Yes, you need to see it. It is a part of American political history.
You can't know what is wrong about it and what is phony about it
without seeing it. Perhaps most important of all you cannot truly
understand what the modern Democrat Party is all about without seeing
it. One of the first principles of political contests, is to know
your opposition.
Republican readers need to see it. 4,000 Democrat readers need to
see it---you will enjoy it.
First of all, you need to know how to see it. Only see it in a multi-plex
theater. Buy a ticket for something else, say King Arthur, or Spiderman
2. Then once inside, just go see Fahrenheit 9/11. That way you get
to see a movie that it is important to know about, but you don't
end up actually rewarding Michael Moore.
We will publish a review soon.
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Senator Rod Adair Rejects Bush's Offer
Senator Rod Adair of Roswell announced today that he has informed
President Bush that he will not accept appointment to the position
of Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland. Instead, he has decided to serve the additional 4½
years remaining in his terms as State Senator for Chaves and Lincoln
Counties. In a letter to President Bush, Adair wrote:
"I am honored and flattered that you are seriously considering
me for this august and prestigious position. I must tell you, however,
that I respectfully remove myself from the selection process and
withdraw my name from consideration for the ambassadorial position.
As you know, when I ran for state senator, I made a commitment to
the people of Chaves and Lincoln Counties to serve a full term."
Adair, who took office in January 1997, has said repeatedly for
months that he was not interested in being the Ambassador to the
Court of Saint James. Even though, as friends often said, "he
is of British heritage, and he speaks the language fluently."
But in an Albuquerque Journal article by Michael Coleman, it was
said that:
"many veteran observers said it would have surprised them
if he rejected an actual offer from the President."
"We've been consistent about this all along," said Charlotte
Edman, campaign treasurer for Senator Adair, in a telephone interview
Sunday. "This letter just puts a final exclamation point on
it."
(This article is intended as a parody of the recent coverage of
the Bill Richardson/Vice Presidential non-story, and is not meant
to be taken as fact.)
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2004 marks the Sesquicentennial of the Republican Party, founded
150 years ago in such places as Ripon, Wisconsin and Jackson, Michigan.
Senator Rod Adair is speaking around the state on the history of
the Republican Party and its unique role in shaping America: on
1) Civil Rights, which the party invented; 2) its internal development
program the building of roads, ports, the transcontinental railroad,
the interstate highway system, land grant colleges and the settling
of America through the Homestead Act; 3) The creation of the idea
of conservation and the environmental movement (also invented by
the Republican Party), the setting aside of national parks; 4) the
GOP's national policies that fostered the building of American industry,
allowing its development at a critical time in our history, creating
the biggest and strongest economy the world has ever known; 5) the
construct of anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws to ensure a functioning
economy based on private enterprise and fair trade rules and practices;
6) its determination to end slavery, and the GOP's century-long
heroic struggle against the Democrat Party to end segregation, lynching,
poll taxes, voting rights discrimination, and the intimidating power
of the Ku Klux Klan; 7) Winning the battle for Women's suffrage,
and many more victories in the realm of public policy.
All these accomplishments leading up to the Republican Party's role
near the end of the 20th Century---by then alone in the struggle---in
continuing a determined fight to win the Cold War; and into the
21st Century leading America and the world in the fight against
global terrorism. If you would like Senator Adair to speak to your
organization, please click here: SenatorRodAdair@dfn.com and let
us know.
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Subscribe to Let's Talk Sense..., Legislative Update, or New Mexico Political Journal by contacting New Mexico Demographic Research at nmdr@dfn.com You may also visit www.rodadair.com.
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Still to come:
LUTHER, the Movie: It's the Gospel, Stupid (a review)