Say what you will about us, conservatives and libertarians at least have no need to misrepresent their own ideas and goals to win elections, but the left find it necessary to feint to the right during campaigns.

Comic relief was provided in recent copy of Artvoice by the writer who was spooked by skateboarders discussing deficits, yet it’s sad that while the left express hate for libertarians, vestigial liberalism-in-tow doesn’t balk. Is the posture that the campaign is not about increasing collectivization uncomfortable?

A lot about the current battle isn’t under discussion at all. Did the expanding party machine system and public sector empire of the Democrats affect economy, education, culture, and other issues? While AV has creditable journalistic outbursts pursuing perfidies of area figures, you join major and “alternative” media in willing naivete dealing with these topics. How, for instance, did the exclusive affiliation of the Klan, George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Civil War draft riots gain its proprietorship of the cause of American blacks? Could traditional arm-twisting and ostracism, kicking a lot of civil rights figures aside, not beginning or ending with James Meredith, have been instrumental in building the current civil rights establishment and perceptions? Could LBJ’s moving civil rights agendas to social payouts and accompanying federal moneys swaying public figures have made Southern Dems “change their ways”? News and history not told never happened, right?

The vast network of organizational supporters, virtuosity in group identity politics, and dependency cultivation have on many levels already succeeded in reaching LBJ’s goal cementing his party’s power in perpetuity.

Go ahead, keep cartooning us, and taking your cartoons literally. If you’re content with the growing armies of appointed officials, poverty professionals, padded public payrolls, and new IRS hires we’ve been saddled with, don’t give any of this another thought.

Given the downward trend of American education in recent generations, college grads have pretty much become another group identity for Democratchics to take for granted.

- Dan Hoffman, Buffalo

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