DCCC chair: Not ALL Republicans are racist

The Democrats’ scorched-earth strategy to survive the 2014 midterm elections grinds despicably forward, as the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY), turned up on CNN’s “State of the Union” to do a bit of damning with faint praise.  When host Candy Crowley asked Israel if he thought Republicans were racists, he replied: “Not all of them, no, of course not.  But to a significant extent, the Republican base does have elements that are animated by racism, and that’s unfortunate.”

That’s your Democrat Party, America: they have nothing left at all except hatred  and slander, occasionally delivered with the backs of their hands.  No ideas, nothing positive, no way to explain or justify years of hideous failure… it’s going to be all racism and sexism, all the time, all the way through November.  (Watch to the end of the clip to get an idea of what Democrats think will happen after that, if their amnesty dreams come true.  A midterm election loss is a small price to pay in exchange for permanently retooling the American electorate!)

Talking heads like Rep. Israel will try to make this ugly strategy look respectable, carving out a modest exception for the tame Republicans they like… but they’ll moan about how even the Republicans they can work with are still captives of the nefarious fringe, afraid to incur the wrath of the racist elements lurking in their base.  They’ll sound the alarm against hidden bigots who supposedly guide GOP politicians with “dog whistles” that only Democrats can hear.

The more vicious operators in the Democrat machine, meanwhile, will deliver more concentrated doses of racialist poison.  The story will be kept alive in many ways – ranging from subtle hatemongering like Israel’s to garbage like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi comparing today’s Republicans to the Democrats who threw Japanese-Americans into internment camps during World War II… or (as in the clip Crowley plays here) babbling about imaginary Republicans whispering to her that they’d be all in favor of amnesty, if the current wave of illegal immigrants was Irish.

Democrats see this strategy as a cost-free way to marginalize their opponents and rally their base.  The media makes them pay no great price for this remorseless wave of slander; the occasional warnings of potential backlash are almost charming in their naivete.  The most serious realistic downside for Democrats could be greater mobilization of Republican base voters, angry at being constantly accused of bigotry, but in this particular midterm the GOP faithful are already fired up.

Meanwhile, Democrats will never have to worry about getting whistled off the field by media referees, the way Republicans surely would be if they tried something like this.  Try replacing Israel with a Republican, and imagine he’s offering the same sort of grudging admission that not all Democrats are communists, anti-American, or anti-Semitic.  He’d be run out of town on a rail, but Israel gets to dump his load of toxic waste without facing anything worse than a little chin-pulling about whether his strategy might have some drawbacks.  Not a word is spoken about whether it’s morally wrong to slander millions of Americans as racists, without a shred of evidence… not to mention the moral horror of asserting that all dissent from a President of a certain racial background is illegitimate.  If you’d care to play the what-if game a little further, imagine Condoleeza Rice winning the White House in 2016, and a top Republican operative saying that not all Democrat opposition to her policies is due to racism, but it’s significant problem among elements of their electorate.

Rep. Israel is not some fire-breathing left-wing blogger.  He – along with Pelosi, Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama, and other high officials – has a responsibility to elevate the discourse in this country, not prod the American people into savage tribal warfare because he thinks it might help him keep a Senate seat or two.  Our national political leadership shouldn’t be doing hatchet jobs on broad sections of the American public.  We should all be sick and tired of Ruling Class aristocrats using amateur psychoanalysis to dismiss our concerns as mental aberrations.  Individuals may hold some ghastly beliefs about each others’ motivations, but the people who set the tone for our national conversation should not be indulging their worst instincts to spread fear and hate among the population.