It takes a hard kick in the ass from reality to wake some people.
I was programmed at birth to be a Democrat, a big city liberal. My parents were Irish and Catholic. Pardon any redundancy. In my slice of the East Bronx, you went to high school, you did a few years in the military, and then you came home to look for a job with Con Ed or the city. Two of my uncles were on the job, NY City cops. The guy across the street was a fireman. The neighborhood was mainly blue collar Irish, Italian, Jewish, and just a tad Puerto Rican.
The local political machine was run out of the Van Nest Society, a store front political club; or run out of the Step Inn, a bar on White Plains Road next to the fire station. The Step Inn was a microcosm of the neighborhood; the guy who owned building was Jewish, the guy who ran the saloon was Irish, and the lady who made the pizza in the back was Italian.
If you wanted a job with the borough or the city, or you needed something fixed on your street, you had to see someone at the Van Nest clubhouse or at the Step Inn. There were no other political organizations in our precinct. Little did I know at the time, but my Bronx neighborhood was a mirror image of inner cities nationwide. I never heard anyone call themselves a “conservative” and, just as surely, there were no Republican or Libertarian precinct captains in our area.
I’m sure the good sisters of Our Lady of Solace School must have mentioned that Abraham Lincoln was the founder of the Republican Party, but for years I thought that that party had been killed by the Bull Moose Party at the turn of the 20th Century. Growing up, it would have never occurred to me, or anybody I knew, that political homogeneity was a bad thing. The Democratic Party was a rain maker, an employment office, and a pot hole fixer. There were no obvious reasons to question the civic monoculture — or not to be a true believer.
For me, the road to disaffection started with a novelist and ended with several liberal politicians. The light of skepticism was lit by George Orwell, fanned by the Kennedy brothers, and flared into full blown apostasy with Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
……The second milestone on my road to apostasy appeared in March, 1968, during the Tet Offensive while I was in Vietnam. That month, Robert Kennedy announced he would oppose Lyndon Johnson and run for president. A few days later Johnson announced that he would not seek another full term. My reaction was apoplectic. If the Commander in Chief could resign in the middle of a war, what the hell was I doing in Vietnam? If I left my post, I could be shot — or rot in Leavenworth. The Vietnam War, up to that point, had been a Democratic Party foreign policy marker.
Nonetheless, for me, the worm really turned with the Kennedys. John Kennedy had cast a long shadow over Democrat politics in the 60s. He was every Irish Catholic’s pipe dream; handsome, witty, successful — and President. At the time, the nation knew little of his high-risk indiscretions, facilitated by a sympathetic press. Jack’s brothers, especially Ted, were anemic political refractions, but Bobby knew weak knees when he saw them. Johnson was ripe for the picking in 1968. To my mind, Johnson’s cowardice and Robert Kennedy’s opportunistic duplicity made Richard Nixon possible. Years later, Ross Perot would perform a similar service for Bill Clinton — twice.
Read the whole thing here: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/11/the_democrats_were_not_for_me.html
Donovan should add the fact that the Dems were responsible for yanking the war funding for our efforts in Vietnam, thus resulting in the pullout.
I’m a life-long Republican who lives in a Democratic stronghold 30 miles west of Cleveland in a town called Lorain. It didn’t take long for me to realize what the Dems were all about. I spent 30 years in the United States Army, and each trip home on leave, I saw more and more deterioration.
I have watched my town go from a reasonably employed and populated flourishing place, to a virtual ghost town. The Steel Mill and the Ford Plant are barely existing. Many of the businesses in the downtown area have been boarded up and long gone. The Lakefront area, prime for development and recreation, is languishing. The sad fact is that many of the residents are complacent to the point of being comatose.
I’m now on a fixed income. My property taxes have already gone up, yet the average home in this town is being constantly devalued. Last year, the city treasurer announced that she wanted to conduct “all-out aggressive search” to find businesses and residents not yet paying income taxes. At the same time, she wanted to increase the city income tax department budget for salaries in the amount of $179,000 to help implement the changes to collect more money. Typical DemRat thinking.
The Democratic-controlled district squeezes every penny it can from our wallets while they waste taxpayers money because they can’t stick to a budget. The newly proposed $70 million money pit aka the new Lorain High and the $17 million Southview Middle School, built right behind the old Southview High School which was only 40 years old, are prime examples.
The once thriving industrial base was wiped out, in part, by unions.
Businesses and corporations have no incentive to invest in this area, and who can blame them? The Lorain City government throws up so many roadblocks in the form of high taxes, red tape, and bureaucratic stupidity, that unless we throw all of them out and start over, they’ll be no resurgence for this town. The Democrats have sold brain-dead constituents a rancid bill of goods, and they keep buying it.
There should be a sign at the city limits that reads: “Welcome to Necropolis”.
Corrupt union cronyism and socialist politics have been a staple of the Democratic party for decades. It’s a magnet for anti-war, anti-military, anti-capitalist fruitbats, and they found themselves a comfy home. The myth of Dems and unions being for the working class and minorities has been wrung for all its worth. It’s part and parcel of a party that uses exploitation as a campaign pitch and a target audience; a monolithic, easily manipulated voting bloc that is all too willing to participate.
The entitlement culture will always expect a hand out, and the Dems will always be there to give it to them. Why work when you can suck off the public teat? That’s the message to blacks and Hispanics. The soft bigotry of low expectations. Your color entitles you to special treatment. You’re downtrodden because the eeeeevil white folks made you ‘needy’. Don’t worry about getting a job, working class blond mom will do that and pay for your welfare, to boot.
Blacks and Hispanics are used to push the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac scam, illegal aliens, voter fraud, unConstitutional ObamaCare, class war, and abject hatred of successful business. What’s really sad is that the same minorities who buy into that shit and keep voting Dems into office are the same ones who thrive on the welfare state. For them, poverty is a political angle, not something to get out of.
Welcome to the real world, Mr. Donovan. Better late than never.
Related posts:
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/obama-remarkably-out-of-his-depth/
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2008/10/08/barney-frank-bailout-critics-racially-motivated/
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/seiu-to-blacks-youre-pursuadable/
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/seiu-thug-white-workers-are-so-fucking-rabidly-racist/
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Well said, Mac. I grew up in the east Bronx and went to Catholic schools. So I probably wasn’t too bright to begin with. Eventually, I grew up and that is probably the best explanation of my world view. Cheers.
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