Wednesday, May 23, 2001
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Wednesday, May 23, 2001 |
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Tit for tat Some rules for Democrats By DAVE HAMRICK Last week, I gave my responses to "21 rules for being a good little Republican in 21st century America," which have been floating around on the Internet. This week, I offer my own rules for liberal Democrats, which I'm sure someone out there will want to answer. And by the way, if any of you decide to send my rules around on the Internet, I want credit. Twenty-one rules for being a good little liberal Democrat in 21st century America: 1. You have to believe that all rich people are rich because they were visited by the money fairy. 2. You have to believe that all poor people are poor because the money fairy robbed them and gave the loot to the rich. 3. You must buy into the idea that you can reduce air pollution by creating traffic jams. 4. You must be against the divisive "politics of personal destruction" as practiced by those evil, mean-spirited Republicans who want to put all the poor people on the streets, kill all the old people, keep the women barefoot and pregnant and ruin the air, water and land. 5. The following math must make sense to you: A 12 percent increase in spending is proposed, but conservatives manage to reduce that increase to 10 percent. Therefore, the budget has been "slashed" by 20 percent (or "gutted," "cut to the bone," "poor people will be put on the street and old people will die in order to give a bigger tax cut to the richest 2 percent" pick one). 6. If given a choice between security and freedom, you must choose security every time. 7. You have to like the idea of taking billions of dollars out of each state in taxes, then giving the same money back to the same states in grants, after first spending two-thirds of it on thousands of Washington bureaucrats earning huge salaries, funding study after study, going on junkets and thinking up hoops for the states to jump through in order to get their taxpayers' money back. 8. You must believe that education would be greatly improved if we would build yet another huge building in Washington and fill it with still more bureaucrats so we could siphon still more dollars out of the states and give them still smaller amounts of it back in grants after, of course, they jump through the proper hoops. 9. If there is a problem of any kind anywhere, you must believe that the scenario in number eight is the only way to solve that problem. 10. You have to stand up for freedom of speech, with the understanding that this freedom applies only to the expression of liberal ideas. 11. You must be pro-choice, as long as that doesn't mean letting people choose for themselves how to protect their families from violence. 12. You must believe that if we make owning a handgun illegal, all the robbers, rapists and killers will turn theirs in. 13. Keeping religion out of politics must be a driving concern this does not apply to black churches. 14. You have to understand the difference between Richard Nixon's enemies list and Bill and Hillary's enemies list. 15. It must make perfect sense to you that Hillary Clinton argued for Nixon's impeachment because "he lied to the American people," while demonizing Ken Starr for investigating the president's "personal life." 16. You have to believe that the only message in the song "One Tin Soldier" is that war is bad. 17. You have to believe that the way to prevent war is to have a weak military. (That's for those who didn't understand 16.) 18. You must defend to the death the right of rap stars and movie makers to market all manner of filth in any forum they choose, to anyone of any age, and fight equally hard to get televangelists and right wing talk show hosts off the air because what they say is "offensive" to you. 19. You have to believe that freedom of religion applies to everyone except evangelistic Christians and Catholics (they're against abortion, you know). 20. You have to be willing to close your mind to the knowledge that an unborn fetus is alive, and in order to "perform the procedure" you have to kill it. 21. You have to be against development, because that means cutting down trees, digging up ground, creating rain water runoff and other environmental ills, but be in favor of opening our borders to as many illegal I mean undocumented aliens as want to live here.
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