Someone please tell me what bizarro world Democratic activists inhabit -- those who are grumbling that Republicans are unscrupulous partisan warriors imposing their agenda by government coercion and trampling the innocent, passive left in the process.
This is frighteningly delusional and shockingly divorced from reality.
Without question, Democrats and their never-Trump supporters on the right would have us believe that Donald Trump is the very creator of partisan politics, someone who has gobsmacked the unsuspecting collegial political left into abject impotence.
By their telling, Barack Obama was an exemplar of bipartisanship, a man who never met a Republican he wasn't willing to work with. Obama really meant it when he said he was ushering in a new era of cultural harmony in America centered on our "common humanity" -- a favorite phrase of the left that conveys no meaning and serves no purpose other than to cloak a militant call to political activism with an elegant lilt.
The left knows that Trump didn't introduce partisan stridency to American politics. It's been with us since the beginning of the republic. In fact, Obama was one of the most partisan presidents of the modern era. He demanded the wholesale adoption of his agenda -- not compromise and conciliation. He is the one who rammed through Obamacare against the will of the people, the one who responded to pleas for compromise with "I won," "I'm the president" and "Elections have consequences."
Obama said: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." "I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them just to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess." "I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they're independent or whether they are Republican, and I want you to argue with them and get in their face." "We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose a-- to kick." "If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, 'We're going to punish our enemies, and we're going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us' -- if they don't see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election -- then I think it's going to be harder. And that's why I think it's so important that people focus on voting on Nov. 2."
And Trump is the authoritarian? Really? How about Obama's endless use of lawless orders, such as on immigration, to implement an agenda that he couldn't get passed through the duly elected legislative branch? How about the targeting of conservative groups by his IRS and overreaching by his Environmental Protection Agency? Trump's tough rhetoric somehow constitutes an abuse of authority when Obama's actual usurpations didn't?
And consider what Hillary Clinton has to say about working with Republicans. This week on CNN, she said: "You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That's why I believe if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and/or the Senate, that's when civility can start again."
Which major political party is bullying members of the other one out of restaurants? Which is refusing to accept the Supreme Court confirmation process and disrupting congressional proceedings and shrieking outside the Supreme Court like maniacal demons waging full-scale spiritual warfare?
Which party demands partisan lockstep among members of a gender or race and ridicules women and blacks (Kanye West) as sellout know-nothing traitors if they stray from the party's plantation? Do you ever see people pressured to leave their media jobs for supporting a liberal cause? Well, a CBS reporter in California resigned after expressing favorable comments about Brett Kavanaugh. Do you ever see liberal students punished by conservative university professors (what few there are) for expressing their political views? Name one Hollywood liberal afraid to express a political opinion because he or she could lose work. Name one conservative initiative on any college campus to impose a speech code on students.
Conservatives have awakened from their slumber and their naive complacency, realizing that the cultural and political left, the liberal media and the Democratic Party apparatus are relentless warriors engaged in an ongoing struggle to impose their agenda by any means possible, irrespective of the Constitution and rule of law.
That's a primary reason President Trump has become so popular among conservatives. He is showing Republicans that he understands we are in a fight over the future of this nation and is providing a template for fighting back.
When a recent caller to my brother's radio show complained that Democrats and liberals are fighting dirty and that we can't save this nation unless we begin to get right down in the mud with them, Rush gently corrected him, saying, "We don't need to fight dirty to win; we just need to fight as fiercely and intensely as they do."
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