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Townhall...
Democrats Think
You’re Stupid
by Armstrong Williams
Apr 24, 2012
Barack Obama thinks that you’re stupid. And, if you’re one of the 45%
of us who still support him after Solyndra, after Fast and Furious,
after the GSA scandal, after the voter ID controversy, after the
Buffett Rule, after the Secret Service Scandal, and so on, you might be.
If you don’t believe me that he thinks you’re stupid, consider the
following.
I watched Meet the Press recently, and their roundtable on the War on
Women—that is, the Democrats’ agitprop to frighten women to the safe,
warm, familiar cocoon of the Democratic Party. They’ve been doing it
for decades, and the fact that they are returning to this tactic now
tells me that they are afraid—Rasmussen has Romney up by two points
already and it’s only April; he doesn’t even have the nomination
officially yet; the real money hasn’t been spent yet.
The fact that they are using this tactic means that they actually
believe that it will work—that is, that you are dumb enough to fall for
it. The only thing more infuriating than that would be if it actually
did work, and the fate of United States of America—and thereby the
world—was determined by such pettiness.
Fortunately, it does not yet appear that it will happen that way. Men
vote too. We can all thank God that, despite the Democratic elite’s
low, cynical, deterministic view of the world,it is simply not good
enough to divide people up into campsbased upon characteristics
determined before they were born and slap a red or blue label on each
one. People are still free, thinking beings, not just automata
resulting from their genetics and environment. Thank God!
You can imagine my shame, then, to see that Republicans have stooped to
the level of Democrats in playing divisive politics—and playing it on
Democrats’ terms. Representative Bachmann, whom I admire greatly and
who I think is a great voice for the conservative movement, debated
Senator Gillibrand, for what proved to be a good demonstration that
what they were doing was a waste of time.
In order to get around disputing the false premise that “forcing
insurance companies to cover contraception” is the same thing as
“helping women,” Representative Bachmann had to logically contort her
way into arguing that high gas prices, high food prices also hurt women.
No kidding. They hurt everyone—why is it even worth saying?
Not to be outdone, Senator Gillibrand would not let Representative
Bachmann get away with saying something pointless—she managed to lower
the debate even further. As Democrats have done for decades, she
brought up sexual liberty as being a women’s issue (as though it did
not take two to, um, tango).
The meta-question was, who understands women better, Democrats or
Republicans? As a Republican, I hope that the answer is neither. We
shouldn’t be pitting the genders against each other any more than we
should be pitting the races against each other; it accomplishes nothing
for our country, no matter how many liberal base (and I mean that in
more than one sense) voters donate to re-elect Obama.
I reject the whole notion that women have some sixth sense that men
don’t have, or that women are affected disproportionately by economic
realities. The market doesn’t care who you are—all the market cares
about is what you bring to the table. That’s what makes it so beautiful.
It goes against the spirit of the Constitution, of the Enlightenment,
and of classical liberalism more generally to put the genders in
rivalry, or even to speak of them as having inherent inequalities. In
fact, this is usually the criticism of classical liberalism—that, in
contrast to previous schools of political thought, such as
Aristotelianism or Thomism, it is atomistic, and treats people as
“individuals” or “actors” (who don’t exist) rather than men and women
(who do exist).
Conservatives should not be trying to out-factionalize the
factionalizers; we should instead be returning to our principles—free
markets not free healthcare; free minds, not free contraception. That’s
real fairness—the blind equality of the market, not the pandering of
hack politicians to frighten the ignorant into line.
Read this and other articles at Townhall
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