As published in the Leavenworth Times Community Blog, April 30, 2013.  

As an outsider looking through the lens of a conservative eye, I’m hardly objective about Democrats.  I see them as a pestilence on the Earth, but that may be a slight exaggeration.  But, there are some facts to base my criticisms on, and they are obvious and irrefutable.  It’s my evaluation of them that people may argue with.

The facts?  The Democrat Party is a huge umbrella under which many self-promoting groups come together to act at a national level.  State and federal government employees, unions, ethnic minorities, women’s rights advocates (often, these are women), welfare and disability insurance recipients, trial lawyers, environmentalists, Socialists, Communists, Gays/Lesbians, and immigrants (currently or recently illegal) make up the bulk of the party.   The less education you’ve had, the more likely you are a Democrat.  Strangely, however, a majority of Jews and university professors live on the left and vote with them.  I use the word ‘strangely’ because I think they should be smart enough to know better.

Individual Democrat party members range from moderate to liberal to socialist or even communist.  Some are more moderate in economic matters than social, or vice versa.  Those on the far left may actually hate the United States, or believe that our country does more harm than good.  Some are extreme on one issue, such as women’s right to abortion or the environment, and may be moderate on most other issues.  In this essay, I’m talking about the party as a whole, rather than individuals.

Democrats contend with Republicans for power in the United States.  Political power brings money (in astronomical amounts) and benefits.  Democrats endlessly employ certain tactics, such as:  They characterize all the groups they represent as “victims” who deserve “rights.”  They love to throw money and privileges to their groups.  When in power, they employ tax and spend policies: always seeking to raise taxes, and always sending money toward their constituents at the expense of the other party.  It’s a way of paying for votes, and it’s very effective.

They falsely and endlessly characterize Republicans as wanting to cut taxes on the rich, and businesses as being huge greedy trolls. 

Democrats describe what they do in another way: they are helping the poor and those who can’t (or won’t) help themselves.  They are promoting “fairness” (which is whatever they say it is) and “diversity” and “equality”.   

The Democrat Party’s 2012 platform is much like the Republican Party 2012 platform (download as pdf from here).  These were the platforms used with the 2012 elections.  Platform planks are promises to follow certain policies if elected.  At a high level, the platforms are similar.  As always, the devil is in the details.
My evaluation begins here. 

Take any plank in the Democrat platform, such as cutting waste, reducing the deficit, asking all to pay their fair share –  ???.  Meaningless words.  That’s the problem: the Democrats are great wordsmiths, but you can’t believe anything they say or any promise they make. 

Standing way back, let’s look at what’s really happening, at the most basic level:  Democrats want to have the working taxpayers support everyone else.  Group A supports or heavily subsidizes Group B.  But A is shrinking and B is growing.  That’s unsustainable.  B is already almost as large as A.  Group B includes all government employees as well as those on welfare, Social Security, and Medicare.  There are now eleven states with more people on government aid than employed:  California, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Illinois, New York, Hawaii, Kentucky, Ohio, and Maine.

Does the “war on poverty” help reduce poverty?  I don’t think so.  It just makes more poor people, and keeps them there.

Democrats, the Progressives of this world, refuse to reform anything economic.  No tax reform, no entitlements reform, no budget reform, no reduction of the deficit, and ever increasing taxation is the general pattern they follow.  In late April, the White House came out in favor of taxing all sales on the internet.

Currently, they’re all excited about gun control and immigration reform.  Their gun control legislation wouldn’t have stopped anything.  I did agree with more extensive background checks, but in my opinion everything else they wanted was meaningless.  Limit clips to 10 bullets?  Multiple clips can be carried, and it takes only seconds to change them.  The immigration reform has been tried before, but unless the border is really closed, it will never work. 

I see the current administration as the most corrupt in history.  Money always flows to Democrat supporters, often in the billions.  A big payment to Petrobas, the Brazilian oil company George Soros has invested heavily in, the GM settlement which gave so much to the unions while screwing the investors, and subsidies to Solyndra and other failed companies run by Obama supporters are examples. 

Obama promised a transparent administration, yet Obamacare was so secretly developed that even the Democrats who voted it into law hadn’t read it and didn’t really know what was in it.  The Benghazi affair was deliberately misrepresented by the administration as other than what it was: a terrorist attack on our embassy. 

To sum up, I evaluate Democrats as a plague on humanity, whereas they seem to see themselves as saviors.  The truth is probably somewhere between those extremes, but a bit closer to my view.  To be “fair”,  I plan to write a critical and totally unbiased essay on the Republican Party.