Just how stupid do the Democrats think you are?  Pretty stupid.

I was listening to Rush the other day and heard a sound bite from Nancy Pelosi exhorting her fellow lawmakers to “follow the Golden Rule” when dealing with Islamo-fascist terrorism. 

I find it interesting that Speaker-to-be Pelosi couldn’t actually bring herself to say “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  I assume this is because even the most self-deluded, Bush-hating, Democrat conspiracy nuts know that regardless of what the U.S. does, the Islamo-Nazis are going to keep on cutting off the heads of the people they capture (that is, those they don’t just kill outright).  So, she put it in the double-negative, completely incomprehensible format of “don’t do unto others as you would not have them do unto you,” which allowed her to say the phrase “Golden Rule” without actually having to cite it in its intended form. 

This wasn’t just the accidental by-product of a confused mind, although as a general matter I’d be willing to take a shot at making that case for Congresswoman Pelosi and other leading Democrats and Liberals. Speaking this way has a number of additional advantages as well. 

First, it allowed her to say something that sounded moral and religious while keeping a straight face, at least while the cameras were rolling.  This way she wouldn’t confuse her supporters by sounding like Jerry Falwell, who regularly quotes the Bible and says other religiously-inspired things like this.  Those who’ve heard about the Golden Rule before could identify the reference and thus recognize her good Christian intentions, while those who think the “Golden Rule” is a new S&M video about blonde Amazon female supremacists could identify with her supposed intentions as well.

Second, by saying it this way, even if her sentiments are perceived properly, you have to read her words a couple of times to understand her.  This means that the phrase won’t come back to haunt her as directly as some of her previous comments.  I’m thinking here of her December 16, 1998 statement:  "Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.” 

Maybe it’s just me, but that sounds like someone who sincerely believed that Iraq was a hostile country trying to acquire WMDs and was actively hiding this fact from UN inspectors.  I seem to remember there was some fellow who also said that Iraq was a hostile country trying to acquire WMDs and was actively hiding this fact from UN inspectors, but Nancy Pelosi said to ignore that guy because he was a liar.  Rather than risk confusion like this again, the Golden Rule was re-formatted into a more plausibly-deniable, marginally-coherent statement should actual, real-world events once again illustrate her political naiveté and come back to bite her.  

But there was a third, equally compelling reason for Ms. Pelosi to invoke this “Golden Rule” imagery.  Going back to the exit polls from the 2004 election, Democrats were shocked to discover that “values” played an important role in the decisions of many voters.  To their shock and horror, a Morality Gap of the magnitude of the 1950’s Missile Gap had suddenly appeared, and Democrats found themselves on the wrong side of the equation.

After huddling with their top strategists, Pelosi and other party leaders launched a quick, pre-emptive strike designed to restore the value-balance imbalance.  Democrats would show that they were just as moral and God-fearing as those right-wing Christian fundamentalists who hijacked the Republican Party, and they would illustrate this at every opportunity.  Thus, we were treated to the following point-counterpoint debates on important political and social issues:

God-Fearing Republicans:  “We oppose aborting an otherwise healthy, developing child when the life of the mother is not at stake.”

God-Fearing Democrats:  “We are moral God-Fearing Democrats who oppose Republican attempts to place any limitations on a Woman’s Constitutional Right to Choose.” 

God-Fearing Republicans:  “We support the President’s plan to reduce taxes to stimulate the economy.”

God-Fearing Democrats:  “We need to raise taxes on the rich (without defining ‘rich’ as a family of 4 with a combined income of $50,000) because it is the moral thing to do.”

Notice the pattern?  It’s a little tricky, so you may need to re-read the Democrat passages a couple of times to appreciate the brilliant subtlety of their strategy and tactics.  Give up?  Okay, here it is.  Maintain the same old Democrat policies that the people rejected, but inject the word “moral” into each sentence.  No need to say why supporting abortion or raising taxes is moral.  Just use the word over and over, and pretty soon you will be seen as a moral alternative to Republican policies.

I think this tactic lasted about two weeks, maybe three, before it disappeared from the Democrat lexicon.  Some simply found it too hard to remember inserting this unfamiliar, foreign-sounding phrase into their standard politically motivated diatribes.  Ending a long, rambling attack on Bush for something you supported wholeheartedly under Clinton with, “Oh yeah!  And it’s the moral thing to do too,” just seemed to make the ramble appear even more rambling.

Then there was the other, equally troublesome issue.  Try as they might, it’s a little hard to say that something like partial birth abortion is a wonderfully moral thing.  You can rationalize the act a dozen ways from Next Tuesday, but none of these manufactured reasons lends itself easily to a connection with morality or religion. 

Even saying that working toward a voluntary reduction in elective abortions is a hard moral case to make.  It would go something like, “Instead of a thousand innocent human lives we’ll kill today, our goal is only 750.”  This doesn’t quite work for me, not even if you tried really hard and knocked off another, say, twenty or thirty abortions a day.  From a moral standpoint, it’s a little like giving a community service award to the neighborhood child molester because he only raped twenty little boys and girls in 2005, instead of his usual thirty-five.   

Which brings us to the launch of WWW.FaithfulDemocrats.com, the brainchild of former Democratic Party Chairman David Wilhelm.  Its purpose is to show that Democrats go to church too (well, those who aren’t offended by the antique notion that there actually is a God who establishes what is right and wrong independent of human consensus).  And these Democrats — church going or otherwise — are moral people just like Republican conservatives.  And how do we know this?  They just told us they were.  Weren’t you listening?

If the only thing I had to comment on was the self-delusion of Democrats who think that words are a substitute for genuine actions, I wouldn’t have written this essay.  What’s new about that?  The only difference between what the Democrats believe about Iraq today and what they believed in 1998 is the political affiliation of the guy in the Oval Office.  Remember these little gems?

"Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face."
– Madeline Albright, Feb 18, 1998

"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten time since 1983."
— Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18,1998

"[WE] urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs." 
— Letter to President Clinton, signed by Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI), Tom Daschle (D-SD), John Kerry ( D - MA), and others Oct. 9, 1998

Okay.  So I still would have written the essay just to make fun of Democrat duplicity, but my essay would have ended here.  However, with Pelosi taking things to a new level by invoking her own rendition of the “Golden Rule,” these people aren’t simply being dishonest or disingenuous by manipulating words (that is, when not forgetting that they said them at all).  They think you’re too stupid to know that they’re being dishonest!

Think of it this way.  If your boss comes into your office and finds you bidding on the latest Elvis memorabilia on Ebay instead of crunching the numbers for the quarterly report he asked you to finish, unless that document is sitting on your desk waiting to be handed to him, do you think anything you say is going to be believed?  If you come home early from work and you see the pool boy giving your wife mouth-to-mouth with her clothing scattered around the room, unless those clothes are wet, her skin is blue, and she’s still not breathing, exactly what kind of explanation are you prepared to accept to account for what your “lying eyes” are telling you? 

Well, you might not have an answer, but Nancy, Sluggo and the rest of her gang sure would.  They’d either re-define the issue (your boss is invading your privacy in violation of your Constitutional rights), or condemn you as a racist because the pool boy isn’t a legal resident of the United States, and you’re denying him the same right to a good life as you have because your ancestors killed all the Indians and took their land.  The fact that your ancestors may have been fighting off pogroms of their own back in Poland or some other country before legally emigrating to the U.S. is beside the point.  

This is why the Democrats have been, and will remain, at a political disadvantage for the foreseeable future.  You don’t possess values because you say you do, or because you have a website with the word “faith” in it.  Your actions must reflect your words.  And those actions must be built on what are commonly recognized as values, not a new creative definition of that term that allows you to do anything you want and say it is “moral.”

Further, from an effectiveness standpoint, you start at a disadvantage when you think of the people who hold traditional values as toothless, inbred, bible-thumping ignoramuses.  Just because you think these people will believe anything doesn’t mean they will believe anything — from you!  Contrary to popular Liberal belief, some of these people are actually smart, and not all of them are looking for the government to be their new mommy and daddy.  When you approach politics from the nanny-state point of view, it’s easy to deceive yourself that everyone is a child looking for your guidance.

But you aren’t their parents, and they aren’t your children, no matter how much this paradigm fits your pre-conceived notions.  And you act on this paradigm at your own peril.  It’s one thing to convince your six-year-old kid that you really believe in Santa Claus too so they’ll think you share the same world view, and another to try this when they’re twenty-six. 

I remember when my daughter was eight-years-old.  It was three weeks before Christmas and she came into my den and said “Daddy, I want to know the truth.  There is no Easter Bunny, is there?”

“No honey,” I said.  “It’s Mommy and me.”

“I thought so,” she smiled.  “There was no way a big rabbit could carry all those baskets.  And the tooth fairy too.  She’s not real either, is she?”

“No,” I said again, and my daughter smiled, proud that she figured it out.  “That’s also Mommy and me.”

“But Santa,” she became very serious.  “I know he’s real.  Isn’t he?”

I looked at her for a few moments with her eyes locked on me.  I didn’t want to spoil her Christmas, but she had insisted that I tell her the truth.  So remembering what my wife, the school teacher, said about how she would handle this day when it finally came, I smiled at our daughter and said, “Honey, Santa will always be real as long as you believe in him.”

Immensely pleased with myself for answering her question without actually answering it, I sat back in my chair and watched her contemplate the remark.  Then she looked me directly in the eye and said, “That doesn’t make any sense.”  So I told her the direct, unvarnished truth, which of course made her burst into tears, and put me on the couch for the next two nights when my wife found out what I did. 

As I lay there in the dark watching the cat’s eyes watch me from across the living room, I formed a couple of thoughts that have stayed with me until this day. 

First, I would have been better off letting my wife answer that question like she wanted to, since as I reflected a bit more on our earlier conversation, finessing that issue to get us past December 25 had a couple of other steps to it.  My wife, clearly, was the best one suited for that job, and no amount of hubris or self-delusion was going to magically transform me into the better person — just like during times of war and national crisis, we can make similar judgments about the two political parties. 

For all of Bush’s supposed mistakes in Iraq, if either Gore or Kerry were in office we’d still be at the UN debating sanctions against Afghanistan, or discussing the language of Resolution #147 on Iraq.  And with each new attack on American soil or against Americans traveling abroad, we’d be debating in Congress the level of proof needed to indict Osama, Saddam, and all the others, or conversely, the best way to show them we still mean them no harm, even after certain East Coast cities have disappeared in a mushroom cloud.

And second, if an eight-year-old girl can see through the massive internal contradictions and inherent stupidity of a statement like I made about Santa Claus, what makes Nancy, Harry, Teddy, or any other Democrat think we believe that their opposition to Bush is nothing more than a principled defense of the Constitution and reflects a basic appreciation for the dignity and rights of all human life?   Well, at least those lives that weren’t prematurely aborted.

To accept reality, you must first embrace it.  I don’t hold out much hope for the Pelosi Brigade coming to this same conclusion.  It’s over a month until the midterm elections, and I expect the Democrat morality meter to be operating at full tilt as they try to persuade middle America that Republicans and Conservatives do not have any special lock on these issues. 

In their view, there is nothing fundamentally different about the two parties with respect to the embrace of good old fashioned morality-inspired American values.  Republicans and conservatives have unfairly carved out this territory, and it’s time the Democrats took back their fair share.  When it comes right down to it, what really separates the two parties on the issue of morality? 

After all, they can spell that word too.