Fear and Shame on the Campaign Trail #2: The Week of the Dumb Democrats

This is the week when Democrats have sounded dumb — or hard of hearing.

I’m not just talking about Joe Biden, who always seems that way, or Maureen Dowd, who yesterday opined Paul Ryan was the smiliest (read: most attractive) politician to be so “cruel.” We can put that down to projection on the part of Ms. Dowd, who has made her living for the better part of thirty years now by being cruel to as many people as possible.

No, I’m talking about Democrats in general who are doing their best to misunderstand everything Paul Ryan says or has said, so that they don’t have to acknowledge that he might make sense (or that he had a Democratic co-sponsor for his budget plan they continually excoriate as “radical” without delineating what it is). That way they also don’t have to admit that they don’t have a plan of their own to deal with the imminent entitlement collapse or anything else budgetary for that matter and that their ideology is in such a rapid decline that no one publicly supports it any more.

What plans they have are described in a code word like “forward” that appears to have replaced the equally opaque “hope” and “change.” This is reminiscent of “Juche!” — the slogan of the North Koreans under Kim Il-sung, which meant something deliberately vague like “mainstream.” (How ironic that Obama’s Democrats have adopted a similar style to the Norks. I would say it’s deliberate, but I admit, in the spirit of this piece being about dumbness, that I suspect Obama isn’t educated enough, even in Marxism, of all things, to know anything about “Juche,” although I cannot say for sure. After all, we still don’t know much about Obama’s educational level at all.)

What the Democrats are banking on is that the American people can’t understand simple concepts such as Social Security and Medicare are going bankrupt at a rapid clip if we don’t reform them. Or that they don’t sprechen-sie englisch sufficiently to understand Paul Ryan when he says, as he has repeated dozens of times in dozens of venues, that his Medicare reform plan doesn’t affect anyone currently fifty-five or over.

That appeared to be news to the ever-dyspeptic Bob Beckel on The Five the other night, though it’s always hard to tell with Beckel whether he’s being disingenuous. He’s paid to opine the most outrageous liberal cant with a straight face and be Greg Gutfeld’s punching bag, a task he performs relatively well.

Nevertheless, Ryan Derangement Syndrome is everywhere. It’s even infected Republicans. A contributor right here on PJ Media’s own Tatler moaned yesterday that the Ryan nomination was a loser for just those reasons – the public couldn’t comprehend his “complicated” proposals and will accept the Democrats’ “radical” branding.

Of course, if that’s true, small “d” democracy doesn’t really work and the country’s in a pretty hopeless situation. I’m a bit more optimistic than that. “If not now, when,” as a Jewish sage once said. If we can’t get people to face economic reform now, when can we get them to face it? When things have already gone over the cliff and it’s too late?

Related to all this is the word that has been going around that Obama’s main man David Axelrod looks depressed. Why wouldn’t he be? Forced to run a campaign based on lying about or distorting what the other side says, fanning the flames of non-existent racism, etc., is a sure loser, even if you win — perhaps especially if you win. Winning ugly in this instance will not be a triumph of any sort. Obama, at his worst, may succeed in destroying America as we know it, but he would destroy himself and everyone around him in the process.

At this moment, I’m betting none of this will happen. Romney’s choice of Ryan, for me, saved the day.

UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me by nephew Isaac, who lives in Hong Kong and has traveled to North Korea, that “Juche” is often translated as “Self-reliance.” Yet more ironic – Kim Il-sung as a libertarian! Obama should pay attention.