Desperate Housewives, Desperate Dems

Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
Feb 6, 2006

My sense is that a large majority of Americans know in our hearts that there aren't really any people out there as disingenuous and unprincipled as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Teddy Kennedy and Chuck Schumer. And yet they keep showing up on our TV screens. I've been tempted, as perhaps you have also, to ask, "Who are these people and why are they getting so much airtime?"

I think I've come up with an answer, and it doesn't have to do with the typical reasons cited, which have come to focus overwhelmingly on the leftist bias of the mainstream print and television media that dictate that Dems' positions be given preferential treatment.

While I don't doubt that this is true, I'd like to propose another hypothesis: A reality television producer has insinuated several "reality TV characters," in the person of the aforementioned Reid, Pelosi, Kennedy, and Schumer, into, well, "reality." The Democrat equivalent of the Fab Four are not, in fact, representatives elected to national office, but are rather "characters" some over-the-top ingenious TV producer has managed to insert into the political scene as it is captured and rebroadcast electronically. Politics has become reality TV. I can find no other explanation.

We watch Fear Factor and American Idol for many of the same reasons we watch the Democrats when they appear on television: We really can't believe that there are such sleazy and disgusting and rudderless and desperate people out there, and we need a TV show to remind us just how fortunate we are that we're middle Americans and actually hold certain positive values dear. If these bozos didn't exist, reality TV would have to invent them.

And, I assert, it has.

I put this proposition forth because we know in our hearts that there aren't any real people out there as devious and praetorian as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Teddy Kennedy and Chuck Schumer. These characters have got to be part of the latest "reality" TV venture, right? I'm talking about the hippest, most up-to-date iteration of reality television, in which producers have become so sophisticated that they're able to slip their own surrogates into live-action TV, where most of the people are real but, in this case, the Democrats are confederates. Are you with me?

I mean, you're not seriously trying to sell me on the idea that anyone not part of a reality TV series could be so stupid and feckless as to cause Sam Alito's wife to break down in tears on national television by verbally assaulting her husband, a guy who is by all accounts — including those of the left-leaning American Bar Association, which gave Alito its highest recommendation — eminently qualified to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and a good guy in the bargain. I simply will not believe that human beings who live in the world are quite as clueless as Democrats are proving themselves to be. The Democrat leadership have got to be confederates ingeniously placed by an as-yet-unidentified reality TV producer.

Let me take my argument further: These reality TV characters posing as Democrats don't really expect us to believe that real people focus so tightly on a single issue, abortion, that they are unable to understand that even if the issue does surface in front of the Supreme Court, and even if the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, that abortion will still be legal in the U.S., do they?

Let's posit a likely scenario. Like many Americans, I would prefer that Congress have been able to enact legislation legalizing abortion rather than its having become the law of the land based on a judicial decision in a court case, and I certainly think that the wispy constitutional "right to privacy" principle on which the decision rested is highly questionable and has led to subsequent serious judicial abuse. I also think most people would come down on the side of both men and women exercising greater responsibility with regard to their sexual activities and not producing so many unwanted babies, but we don't live in a perfect world.

The point here is that even if Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court, it's highly unlikely that abortion will be broadly outlawed in America. In this event, the matter will revert to the legislatures of each state for resolution. In many states in the U.S. abortion is currently legal by state law, and my sense is that most others would almost certainly quickly enact legislation to legalize abortion in their states in the event Roe v. Wade is overturned. Popular opinion favors legalized abortion by a fairly wide margin, although with limitations as to the time during a pregnancy when abortion can be performed, and with the caveat that that margin has dwindled somewhat in recent polls.

I don't think that if Roe v. Wade is reversed by the Supreme Court it will signal the end of legalized abortion in America by any stretch of the imagination. It may well be that the reality television characters purporting to be left-liberal Democrats are more worried about the threat to judicial activism that overturning Roe v. Wade might represent than about the ultimate effect on the availability of abortion that might result from such a turn of events. To this point, judicial activism seems to have become the sole stratagem available to them as they cling to what little remains of their political influence.

And even if you don't accept my analysis of Dems' position as regards the recurring abortion debate, you still have to explain how anyone but reality TV characters, artfully inserted into the political process by a genius producer, could have given themselves a standing ovation (during the President's State of the Union address, no less) for having torpedoed the President's social security reform proposals! Sheer broadcast television genius, I have to say. Who but actors given the roles of their lives could imagine that undermining the President's attempts to face up to what is arguably the serious impending crisis represented by the Federal Government's inability to fund Social Security that will occur within a decade or so, depending on whose numbers you accept . . . who but such actors could see this as a positive?

And yet, that's precisely what Democrats did during the President's speech. They celebrated their own inability to face up to the serious issues that loom ahead for our country, more particularly for senior citizens a decade or two hence. These faux-Dems celebrated their own unwillingness to even so much as propose an alternative approach to dealing with this looming problem by giving themselves a standing ovation.

Whether you look at their inability to take a measured and rational position regarding an issue (abortion) on which most Americans are pretty much in agreement with them, or their childishly petulant celebration of having undermined for blatantly political reasons legitimate proposed solutions regarding Social Security, there's only one conclusion to be drawn: Not only do Democrats not have any constructive programs to offer in place of those they controvert, they might not even be Democrats any more.

The facts argue that Democrat Party leadership has been placed in the hands of a sophisticated, not to say mephistopholean, reality TV producer, who has guaranteed that their performances, while bearing no perceptible relationship to the serious issues we as a nation confront, will nonetheless provide endless, albeit head-scratching, entertainment to those of us in the real world who indulge in the guilty pleasure of watching the Democrat Party implode before our very eyes.