Democrats already have a reputation for over-the-top (and tortured) metaphors. They now can add hypocrisy and lies to the list.

Democrats and their metaphors

Former Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL). Source: United States House of Representatives

The Democrats always use hyperbole when commenting about anything. To them, anyone who disagrees with them is a monster—and CNAV uses that word in its original sense of “something your mother warned you about.” (It comes from the Latin word moneo, which means, “I am warning.”)

Danger, Will Robinson! Warning! That does not compute!

Examples of the over-the-top rhetoric that Democrats love to use, abound. Here is the prize example:

The Republican heath care plan is: Don’t get sick. That isn’t always going to work,…so they have a backup plan in case you do get sick…: Die quickly! That’s right, the Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick.

From former Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL). That quote might be the primary reason why he is a former Representative. And note carefully: Grayson repeated himself, so that no one could mistake his intent.

The wider context is even more damning. Grayson flat-out lied to the House of Representatives. He said that the Republicans were waving about a set of empty cards to illustrate their “health-care plan.” And when he “inquired” as to what the Republicans mean, he got documents to “prove” what he said. Needless to say, no one has ever proved such a document ever to exist.

Such scenes did not start with Grayson, nor did they end when he failed of re-election. The man now holding office as President, Barack H. Obama, bemoaned the prospect of Americans finding themselves “on your own.” He said it as he announced an Executive Order forgiving some student-loan debt or interest, a measure that Congress did not authorize. Anyone listening to Obama say the phrase “on your own” would think that Republicans were setting people up for abject failure.

The problem: in America, “on your own” has always been the norm. The Jamestown and original Plymouth settlers understood that they were “on their own.” The westward-traveling pioneers in their Conestoga wagons understood that they were “on their own.” Only a socialist could make “on your own” sound like something terrible, uncivilized, and even uncivilizable.

A reasonable protest

Peggy Noonan, who once wrote speeches for President Ronald Reagan, described the result this morning.

Where is the [man now holding office as] president in all this? He doesn’t seem to be as worried about his country’s continuance as his own. He’s out campaigning and talking of our problems, but he seems oddly oblivious to or detached from America’s deeper fears. And so he feels free to exploit divisions. It’s all the rich versus the rest, and there are a lot more of the latter.

In contrast to this, says Noonan, stands Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI). He says, quite reasonably, that the fault lies with a government that favors well-connected people with dishonest gain. It also lies with a government that spends too much in general. Raising taxes across the board will not solve this. Stopping programs that pay vast sums to the well-connected for no good reason, will.

But Ryan says something else. The man in the White House campaigned on uniting the country. Instead he divides it, as Noonan said. And that’s what the Democrats really can’t take.

Grayson does it again.

So Alan Grayson is back with another over-the-top metaphor (courtesy Real Clear Politics):

For Paul Ryan or any other Republican to talk about this, to talk about the president inciting the politics of division is much like O.J. [Simpson] saying he’s going to devote his life to finding the real killer. They’re the real killers.

That is not only ironical, but hypocritical in the extreme. Orrenthal James Simpson, by some accounts, won acquittal on a charge of murdering his wife through an unseemly case of jury nullification. (And racial jury nullification, at that.) If any party has been the friend of accused common criminals, it’s the Democrats. If any party has ever cheered when they have beaten the rap, it’s the Democrats. Do they now hold this man, who happens to be black, as an example of evil? Where were any of them when Nicole Brown Simpson begged for, and didn’t get, protection from him? Where were they when Prosecutrix Marcia Clark tried such an incompetent case? When his defense team “played the race card”? When Lance Ito played up to the cameras? (These observations are not original to CNAV. CNAV salutes former career prosecutor Vincent T. Bugliosi for making them.)

Worse than that, the Democrats now accuse elected officials of a campaign of mass murder. Such is the logical endgame of that metaphor.

Conclusion

Of course, Alan Grayson, who lied his way out of the House, has no room to talk today. But neither does any other Democrat who talks of “unity of the country” and uses metaphors of that kind—or stands by those who do.

The electorate will decide, in little more than twelve months, which side it will believe. Republicans understand, and say on the front end, that Americans have always been “on their own,” and like it that way. Democrats have only overheated rhetoric, some of it mendacious, nearly all of it hypocritical.

Featured image: a live donkey kicking a dead lion, first known use of the donkey as a mascot for the Democratic Party. Drawing: Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, 1870.