The Democrat-Republican Suicide Pact

It's Mutually Assured Masochism

In my book about the evils of political consulting, Politics Lost, I described one of the great descents in the history of negative advertising. The mad genius Pat Caddell was running Senator Alan Cranston’s 1986 re-election campaign in California. There was a problem: Focus groups showed that Californians didn’t like anything about Alan Cranston. Not a thing. Zilch. What to do? Cranston was running against a moderate Republican tech executive Ed Zschau. Little was known about the guy. He was a blank canvas and Caddell painted it black. All negative, all the time. Cranston the unloved won that race. And a slimy tactic was born.

We’ve seen many such races since. And we are likely to see another in 2024. Only this time the bar has been set even lower: Both parties seem deliriously intent on providing negative ad fodder for their opponents. We have seen examples of this throughout. This week, though, was particularly redolent.

This week, the Republicans blocked aid to Ukraine as Vladimir Putin was offing his chief rival, Alexander Navalny (and the Emperor of the Outhouse Tucker Carlson was singing the praises of Moscow’s ugliness and valueless currency). But that’s foreign policy and no one much cares about that.

No, the real idiocy was reserved for the Alabama Supreme Court, which declared that frozen embryos were people and could not be destroyed. Now, this is at the periphery of the periphery of the reproductive rights issue. And even Sanity Goddess wonders what this means, if we’re talking about In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)—the most successful form of scientific baby-making. That would still be legal. But destroying unwanted embryos wouldn’t be. Unused embryos are common in IVF and they become the responsibility of the fertility clinic…and so, the University of Alabama-Birmingham has paused its IVF program. Today Joe Biden said:

“Today, in 2024 in America, women are being turned away from emergency rooms and forced to travel hundreds of miles for health care, while doctors fear prosecution for providing an abortion. And now, a court in Alabama put access to some fertility treatments at risk for families who are desperately trying to get pregnant,” Biden said. “The disregard for women’s ability to make these decisions for themselves and their families is outrageous and unacceptable.”

I guess some issues are so complicated that the mere mention of them—reproductive rights, the “right” to bear arms—makes people crazy. The possible result of the ruling is obscure: Fertility clinics in Alabama might be dissuaded from offering this service if they have the responsibility of keeping every embryo alive lest they be charged with a wrongful death suit. But we’re not talking about substance here, we’re talking politics. And I suspect one thing that ticked off Democrats was the language used by Chief Justice Tom Parker: “We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness.”

Them’s fightin’ words out in secular humanist land. Note the questionable pronoun. Everyone knows God is a woman, if they indeed exist.

Still, the GOP’s reputation for being brutally anti-woman was reinforced nationally. The Democrats’ most potent election issue in 2024, abortion rights, was enhanced up the wazoo. Kamala Harris wrote the ad today:

"On the one hand, the proponents are saying that an individual doesn’t have a right to end an unwanted pregnancy and on the other hand, the individual does not have a right to start a family,"

Unfair? Certainly. Effective? I wonder.

And there is this idiocy on the Democratic side:

It’s black history month. What does that mean? Well, in New York public schools it means indoctrination rather than education:

Last week, teachers at PS 321—the kindergarten through fifth grade school in Park Slope—supplied students with the coloring book, What We Believe, as part of a lesson for Black History Month. The book uses drawings and worksheets to promote the 13 tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement, under titles like “Queer Affirming,” “Transgender Affirming,” and “Restorative Justice.” Principle number 2, “Empathy,” is described as “engaging comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.”

Say whaaat? Comrades? I thought the Soviet Union had gone out of business. And “Connecting with their contexts?” I’m not sure that’s even English. Left-wing academic gobbledygook. One wonders if any of these agents of idiocy have elementary school-aged children. Because it gets worse: One of the 13 principles encourages “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”

Talk about self-destructive fodder. Talk about utter bullshit. After all, as Sanity readers know, there is extensive evidence—decades of sociological research—that shows a “nuclear family” is the healthiest way to raise a child. Black Lives Matter, an organization that has no remaining shred of credibility, is apparently more interested in raising gangstas.

Now this may just be one school. Let’s hope so. I fear not. And I’m certain of this: It will make a killer negative ad for Republicans next fall. Oh, you say: Only a minuscule number of Dems actually believe this crap. Remember, Defund The Police? Very few Democrats, outside AOC’s Suicide Squad, believed that either. The Republicans are still using it.

This also speaks to a deeper problem Democrats have with education. The normally—indeed, eminently—sane Ruy Teixeira has a piece in The Liberal Patriot called “The Democrats’ Education Problem.” Good idea. The Dems desperately need schooling on education—and Teixeira has shown an admirable willingness to tackle the party’s deficiencies in the past. He offers some valuable insights here. But….nowhere in the piece does the phrase “teachers unions” appear. Nor does the phrase “charter schools.” This is willful blindness. The teachers unions are a blight upon education. They say they want to be treated like professionals. Professionals are paid according to merit, not seniority. Professionals can be fired. Teachers union members are opposed to that. Indeed, the unions led the suicidal charge to keep the schools closed during Covid (which Teixeira notes without mentioning the unions). Teachers unions are also vehemently opposed to charter schools which, evidence shows, are more successful when it comes to educating poor kids than regular teacher-dominated state schools are. But this topic—the unions’ effect on stultifying the minds of poor kids—is so verboten that it can’t even be mentioned by moderate Democrats like Teixeira. (Hint: it is not for nothing that teachers represent the largest cache of delegates at every recent Democratic convention. They own the joint.)

I am SO appalled by both parties. Republicans are a death cult. Democrats have been overtaken by half-crazed woke nitwits. That’s why I’ve long been sympathetic to the idea of a third party, a party of Sanity, a party of the enlightened center, a party that does the bidding of neither the National Rifle Association nor the American Federation of Teachers. There may be several dozen voters who might support such a project. But not yet. We’ve got to get rid of Trump and the authoritarian threat first. I suspect, however, that declaring war on the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure” is not the way to do it.