The Republicans’ Call to Arms
The Republican Party Platform, hammered out by a national committee with representatives from every state, gives Republicans a basis on which to rebuild both their party and the grassroots conservative movement. It’s a “call to arms,” a platform of bold colors with no pastel shades, just as Ronald Reagan described the 1976 Platform that Delegates adopted after rejecting the Ford-Kissinger platform.
This year’s Platform marks a complete break from the ponderous 2004 Platform, which strung together 40,000 tiresome words, praising George W. Bush on nearly every page. The 2008 Platform isn’t about personalities; it’s about principles.
The 2004 Platform had endorsed the “Free Trade Area of the Americas,” a foolish notion to bring about the economic integration of the Western Hemisphere and allow cheap labor to replace American jobs. Although endorsed by George W. Bush as one of his first acts as President, that effort was made downright ridiculous when a Communist took over Venezuela. The 2008 Platform sensibly calls for “a Western Hemisphere of sovereign nations with secure borders,” and flatly rejects the goal of a “North American Union” modeled on the European Union (which some prestigious think-tanks have been promoting).
This year gave us a clear improvement over the previous Platform in regard to the English language. In 2004, Republicans called English “our nation’s common language” and endorsed bilingual education, but the 2008 Platform supports “English as the official language in our nation” because it is “essential as a unifying cultural force” and omits mention of bilingual ed (often called language apartheid).
The 2004 Platform had lined up with the discredited, unpopular, now-defeated amnesty plan nearly passed by the U.S. Senate, which had endorsed a “new temporary worker program” and allowing illegal aliens currently holding jobs in the U.S. “to apply for citizenship in the same manner as those who apply from outside the United States.”
In a clear break, the 2008 Platform calls for building the border fence, securing our ports, enforcing existing laws against “illegal workers and lawbreaking employers,” requiring the use of E-Verify, deporting criminal aliens, denying federal funds to sanctuary cities, and refusing driver’s licenses, in-state college tuition rates, and Social Security benefits for illegal aliens.
The 2008 Platform marks a refreshing break from the previous Platform’s obsequious kowtowing to the United Nations and other international bureaucrats. The 2004 Platform had said that the United States is “committed to lasting institutions like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization.”
The 2008 Platform doesn’t mention the WTO and includes several paragraphs of criticism of the United Nations, citing its “scandal-ridden and corrupt management,” the “disproportionate” dues we are forced to pay, and its discrimination against Israel and the Vatican.
The 2008 Platform specifically rejects the United Nations Treaty on Women and the UN Treaty on the Rights of the Child, and expresses “deep reservations” about the UN Law of the Sea Treaty.
The 2008 Platform recognizes that energy independence is vital to our national security. The Platform calls for drilling in “new oilfields” in Alaska and elsewhere, as well as developing nuclear power and clean coal.
The 2008 Platform demands that “the risk of climate change” be based on “sound science without succumbing to no-growth radicalism.” The Platform cautions against “doomsday climate change scenarios.”
The plank affirming that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed,” which has been part of the Republican Platform since 1984 was, of course, included again this year. The 2008 Platform becomes the most pro-life ever by endorsing the Born Alive Infants Protection Act and the ban on partial-birth abortion, both of which identify a sharp division with Barack Obama’s legislative record.
Four years ago, many grassroots Republicans were offended by a Platform that called public schools “a foundation of a free, civil society” and bragged about having given us “the largest increase in federal education funding in history.”
The 2008 Platform better represents Republicans by standing up for parents’ rights to use vouchers, tax credits, private schools, or homeschooling, and to stop public schools from forcing students to answer personal, non-academic questionnaires without prior parental consent.
The 2008 Republican Platform has given conservatives a new lease on life and started the rebuilding of the conservative movement.
We Can’t Afford the Democrats’ Platform
Most of the Democratic Platform consists of promising benefits that will cost already burdened taxpayers aplenty. There’s no mention of how these extravagant handouts will be paid for.
For example, the Democratic Platform enthusiastically endorses the incredibly extravagant worldwide handouts in the bill sponsored by Barack Obama called “the U.S. Millennium Development Goals, which aim to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015.” The Platform promises to “double our annual investment in meeting these challenges to $50 billion by 2012.”
The Democrats say “we need stronger international institutions.” So, their Platform promises to “create a $2 billion Global Education Fund . . . with the goal of supporting a free, quality, basic education for every child in the world.”
The Democratic Platform is full of proposals to raid the pockets of John Q. Taxpayer and reduce the American standard of living. This includes “an economy-wide cap and trade program,” a plan to “reduce oil consumption by at least 35 percent, or ten million barrels per day, by 2030,” and designing legislation based on the belief that “global climate change is the planet’s greatest threat.”
These expensive plans will require a giant expansion of government money and government jobs. The Democrats must have had this result in mind when they promised they “will make government a more attractive place to work.”
The Democratic Platform goes all-out in recognizing the support of their gay rights constituency. “We support the full inclusion of all families, including same-sex couples, in the life of our nation, and support equal responsibility, benefits, and protections.”
The Platform adds, “We oppose the Defense of Marriage Act.” Overwhelmingly passed in 1996 to prevent judges from forcing other states to validate Massachusetts’ same-sex marriages, DOMA was one of the most popular laws ever passed and it was even signed by Bill Clinton.
Feminist pressure won’t let the Democrats recede from their “proudly”-stated 2004 Platform position that “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” This year’s Platform is just as pro-abortion, but uses slightly softer words, stating that the Democrats support “a woman’s ability to make her own life choices and obtain reproductive health care, including birth control” (throughout nine months and with taxpayers’ money, of course).
The 2008 Democratic Platform stridently toadies to the feminists on all their issues. The Platform reaffirms support for the Equal Rights Amendment (which was declared dead by the Supreme Court 26 years ago), enforcement of Title IX (which has canceled hundreds of men’s college athletic teams, thereby costing us dearly in the recent Olympics), passage of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (which would use a UN treaty to keep abortion legal), and the Violence Against Women Act (which puts a billion taxpayer dollars a year into the coffers of the radical feminists).
The Platform reiterates the phony feminist slogan that “women still earn 76 cents for every dollar that a man earns.” That figure is false because it includes women who have spent many years out of the workforce and, of those who do have jobs, about a third work only part-time. This plank is an endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s so-called “pay equity” bill, which the American people recognize as federal wage control, something we absolutely do not want.
The Platform promises to “expand” the Family and Medical Leave Act. “Expanding” means forcing employers to pay wages to employees who are on extended leave at times of their own choosing.
Proclaiming that “we will end the Bush Administration’s war on science,” the Democratic Platform promises to “lift the current Administration’s ban on using federal funding for embryonic stem cells.” This contrasts sharply with the genuinely pro-life Republican Platform which calls for “a ban on human cloning and a ban on the creation of or experimentation on human embryos for research purposes.”
The Democrats want the government to take care of American kids from birth through college. “We will make quality, affordable early childhood care and education available to every American child from the day he or she is born,” and “we will provide all our children a world-class education, from early childhood through college.”
The Danger of Vote Fraud
The most provocative line in the Democratic national platform adopted in Denver is: “We oppose laws that require identification in order to vote or register to vote.” Are the Democrats planning on winning the 2008 election by stuffing the ballot box? Since it’s routine to show an ID in order to board a plane and do dozens of other very ordinary things, what’s the big deal about showing an ID to exercise the most important privilege of citizenship?
That question is answered in the new book by John Fund called Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. Honest elections absolutely depend on preventing the stuffing of the ballot box by people who are not eligible to vote.
Among those who are not eligible to vote are those who are dead, who are not residents of the precinct where they vote, who are registered to vote in another state, who are underage, and especially those who are not citizens. Votes cast by any of those can cancel out your vote and, in close elections, decide the winner.
Fund describes how easy it is for unscrupulous politicians to buy voter impersonators with a little cash and get them to cast illegal votes. The Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals explained “the extreme difficulty of apprehending a voter impersonator. He enters the polling place, gives a name that is not his own, votes, and leaves. If later it is discovered that the name he gave is that of a dead person, no one at the polling place will remember the face of the person who gave that name.”
The Democrats have hysterically fought against voter ID laws in Congress, in state legislatures, and in the courts, taking what they thought was their best case, the Indiana law, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. They lost there because they ran into liberal Justice John Paul Stevens who, hailing from Chicago, was acquainted with many “flagrant examples” of election fraud going back to Mayor Richard Daley’s shenanigans that swung Illinois to John F. Kennedy in 1960.
The National Voter Registration Act (known as the Motor Voter Law), the very first law signed by President Bill Clinton, imposed fraud-friendly rules on the states by requiring them to register anyone who applies for a driver’s license, to offer mail-in registration with no identification needed, and to make it very difficult to purge dead and moved-away voters from registration rolls. The voter rolls in many U.S. cities now contain more names than the U.S. Census lists as residents over age 18.
The Motor Voter Law, according to Fund, “has fueled an explosion of phantom voters.” In the four years since passage, nearly 26 million names were added to the voter rolls nationwide. One investigation in Indiana showed that hundreds of thousands of names were people who had died, moved away, or gone to prison.
Missouri Secretary of State Matt Blunt’s report on the 2000 election showed how the Motor Voter Law facilitated fraud in one district. He reported that votes were illegally cast by 14 who were dead, 68 who voted twice, 79 who were registered from vacant lots, 62 who were federal felons, 52 who were state felons, and an undetermined number who were registered from drop-sites for multiple false registrations.
Fund’s book makes fascinating reading because of his descriptions of many specific examples of vote fraud that actually determined the outcome of elections. Fund describes in detail some of the more outrageous examples of recent vote fraud in Chicago, Indiana, St. Louis, Seattle, Milwaukee, Mississippi, and Georgia.
Fund believes that the biggest opportunity for vote fraud this year is the registration tactics of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). ACORN is a classic Saul Alinsky-style community-organizing group, and it has received hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars as well as corporate donations.
It’s no surprise that ACORN is closely associated with Barack Obama. Right after graduating from the Harvard Law school, Obama was recruited by ACORN to run a successful voter registration drive for an ACORN affiliate, Project Vote.
ACORN claims that, along with Project Vote, it registered 1.15 million new voters in 2004 and deployed 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers on Election Day.
The job of handling legitimate voters is tremendously complicated by phony registrations and by the tactic of filing new registrations on the last possible day when there is not adequate time to verify them.
In 2008, Obama was a major supporter of a Democratic housing bill that provided $200 million to community groups (such as ACORN) that are counseling homeowners facing foreclosure. ACORN is pledging to spend $35 million this year registering persons who will vote.
With the 2008 elections as close as they are predicted to be, Obama’s best chance to win is to flood new names on the registration rolls who may or may not be eligible voters. It is more important than ever that voter ID be used in order to make sure that ballot boxes are not stuffed by voter impersonators.
Democratic Platform
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Republican Platform
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