From the moment I sat down to wait
for my appointment and first began reading the new book I received as a gift
from my daughter, I knew that this would be, not just a good read, but a great
one. It is as though I’m hearing my own self in what he writes, and it is because
of his factual, forthright style of expressing how I’m feeling and realizing
what’s going on, that I’ve decided to share snippets of the first chapter, but
at full length the concluding section in the first chapter titled “Grounds for
Optimism”, for it is extremely pertinent to what is important at this time for
our country.
Guilty by Reason of Insanity: Why the Democrats Must Not
Win
By David Limbaugh
Chapter One: The Threat Within
The chapter begins with an
explanation of America’s founding principles. As a brief overview to give the
reader a sense of where he’s going, I shall quote only the first paragraph
which will do the job nicely.
“The world is going crazy and
America is rapidly following suit. The left’s decades-long assault on our
traditional values and constitutional liberties has immeasurably damaged our
society and our republic. Up is down. Right is wrong. Good is evil. Words are
twisted to represent the opposite of their actual meaning. Intellectual and
moral anarchy abound. Radical leftist ideas are hailed as mainstream, while
conservative ideas are demonized as extreme.”
America’s Founding Principles
“The modern left, then, is in an
all-out war against Western civilization and the values and liberties it
produced. It is at odds with the Constitution, American sovereignty, and the
free market. It does not believe in American exceptionalism. A Gallup poll
showed that 51 percent of Democrats are very proud or extremely proud to be an
American, compared to 95 percent of Republicans. While a higher percentage of
Democrats were proud when Obama was president, Republican pride in the nation
remained the same during those years.”
Assaulting the Constitutional Order
“Republicans believe in maximizing
our liberties and prosperity through pro-growth policies that expand the
economic pie by unshackling people from stifling taxes and regulations and
unleashing their entrepreneurial spirit. Democrats see the economic pie as
finite and the economy as a zero-sum game where one man’s gain is another’s
loss. They believe enlightened central planners are wiser and more beneficent
than the invisible hand of the market, and they support redistributionist
schemes to equalize incomes. Just as they exploit racial and gender politics,
they employ class warfare to augment their political power. It would be bad
enough if they merely sought to pick economic winners and losers, but they also
vilify the successful and inspire others to resent them. Some Democrats have
conveniently reinterpreted America’s founding principles as demands for equal
economic outcomes rather than equal opportunity – in other words, as a call for
socialism."
A Nation Born in Hell
“Conservatives are not indifferent
to America’s past sins, but we are proud of America’s history and its freedom
tradition, which has been a remarkable force for good in the world. The left
portrays America’s history as a mortality tale of evil, slavery-loving whites
dispossessing Native Americans of the land. In short, America is drenched in
evil and born in hell. It must forever atone. We saw this in leftists’
reactions to President Trump’s Fourth of July ‘Salute to America.’ Liberal
media networks ABC, CBS, and NBC refused to air the event while progressives
roundly denounced the military’s participation, revealing their fundamental
loathing of traditional patriotic displays. Indeed, the left staged its own
counterprogramming: activists burned American flags in front of the White
House, and the New York Times produced a video debunking the ‘myth’ that
the United States is ‘the greatest nation on Earth.’ “
Identity Politics as a Ticket to Power
“Democrats talk a good game of unity
and bipartisanship, but their every action aims to divide us into balkanized,
competing groups, suspicious and jealous of one another and in constant
conflict. They realize their political power depends on convincing identity
groups that Republicans are oppressing them and that their only hope is to
trust Democrats to protect them. Liberals once abhorred segregation and
vigorously advocated integration. Martin Luther King Jr. famously taught that
people should be judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their
character. Today’s left, however, speaks of racial harmony from one side of
their mouth, but from the other comes a shrill message of identity politics,
which holds that we must fixate on a person’s color rather than his character,
heart, or personal behavior.”
The Left’s Achilles’ Heel
“Progressives project themselves as
morally superior guardians of the victim groups conservatives allegedly
oppress. This is why they exempt themselves from accountability for their own
racist statements, such as former senator Joe Biden’s casual description of
Barack Obama as ‘the first mainstream African American who is articulate and
bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean that’s a storybook, man.’
Similarly, former senator Harry Reid exclaimed that Obama could win the
presidency because he was ‘light-skinned’ and didn’t speak with a ‘negro
dialect.’ According to the left’s rule book, one’s morality is not determined
by his behavior but his political views and group identity. As members of the
morally enlightened tribe of progressivism, liberals can be forgiven for an
occasional heresy from the established orthodoxy when it’s politically
expedient to do so.”
Democrat Denial (3rd / 4th paragraph)
“But [Democrats] are in denial
about their policy failures. They embrace their ideology with dogmatic fervor,
more as a matter of faith than evidence. They reject the inconvenient fact that
Jimmy Carter’s misery index and pessimistic projections of permanent economic
malaise were obliterated by Ronald Reagan’s ‘Morning in America,’ and that
Donald Trump’s explosive economy has dwarfed Obama’s anemic one, shattering
Obama’s Carter-like predictions of economic mediocrity. The Democrats’ powers
of rationalization have grown in proportion to the failure of their policies,
so they delude themselves into believing that Trump’s robust economy is merely
an extension of the Obama ‘recovery’ while ignoring the indisputable fact that
Trump’s policies have markedly improved the plight of minorities and women. A Politico
headline summed up the left’s self-deception: ‘Trump Inherits Obama Boom.’ “
This disconnect
has frustrated, confused, and outraged leftists – and their outrage is directed
not at themselves for clinging to false promises, but at conservatives. They
can’t accept that people they deem morally inferior have superior solutions for
society’s problems. Even if conservatives’ free-market policies are more
effective, why should they get credit when they don’t care about people?
“Bipartisan Compromises Lead to Expanded Government”
“It’s time to jettison the myth
that liberals are more conciliatory than conservatives. Modern American history
shows that political compromise through the decades has invariably advanced
leftist ideas, putting America on a steady march toward socialism. But liberals
have masterfully sold themselves as being amenable to compromise, while it’s
the hard-hearted Republicans who supposedly refuse to negotiate. The liberal
media have reinforced this canard for years. For example, they have
successfully blamed Republicans for all government shutdowns. Some believe this
is because the GOP is seen as anti-government and the Democratic Party as
pro-government. In reality, the media present Republicans as harsh, extremist,
and uncompromising, even though Republicans have not grown more conservative
since the Reagan years, while Democrats have moved radically to the left.
Republicans may sometimes appear entrenched, but it’s because we have had to
ratchet up our resistance to the left’s increasing extremism.”
Suiting Up for the Culture War
“Whether we like it or not, the
left is waging a fierce culture war against our traditional values. Its
worldview rejects the biblical teaching that man is fallen despite being
created in God’s image. Most leftists believe that Christianity hindered man’s
enlightenment for centuries and that the advancement of science and reason
alone, particularly in the Enlightenment era, placed man on an inexorable path
toward progress and moral perfection. They conveniently ignore the enormous
blessings to humanity derived from Christianity as well as the deaths of a
hundred million people in the twentieth century alone at the hands of godless
Nazi, fascist, and communist regimes. They are trapped in a spiritual void they
seek to fill through myriad utopian and idolatrous pursuits, from socialism, to
the environment, to social causes. Conservatives oppose leftists’ utopian
dreams, which solidifies the left’s perception that conservatives are immoral,
uncaring, and on the wrong side of history. They view conservatives as heretics
who reject the left’s secularist worldview and oppose scientific, moral, and
quasi-spiritual ‘progress.’ Metaphorically, at least, they want to burn us at
the stake.”
Grounds for Optimism
We deny at our own
peril the gravity of the threats we face. Will patriots remain mindful of the
urgency of these threats? I believe they will – because of their passionate
love for this nation and their unwavering dedication to preserving it for their
children and their descendants.
Indeed, despite our beleaguered condition,
there are reasons for optimism. Trump’s election signals that America is
finally coming to its senses and patriots want to fight back. Americans didn’t
elect Trump because he’s a celebrity entertainer or because we are bigots, as alleged.
Quite the opposite is true. Trump didn’t arise in a vacuum. He is not the cause
of our nation’s division. He didn’t start a groundswell movement behind new
ideas he was articulating. Rather, he rose to power as a direct result of
existing divisions and because establishment Republicans had failed to impede,
let alone reverse, the leftist juggernaut.
Under Trump’s
leadership, conservatives have made great strides toward turning the tide, but
progressives are not taking theses countermeasures sitting down. They have
tenaciously redoubled their resolve to destroy Trump and disable his
presidency. Each time they are thwarted, they regroup and re-attack. We must
understand that we are locked in a perpetual struggle against relentless
opponents and resolve to fight them with equal or greater force.
Our task is
enormously difficult. Some conservatives don’t want to admit that some of our
own fellow Americans, wittingly or unwittingly, are working to change America
into something our founding fathers wouldn’t recognize. But we mustn’t grow
numb to what the modern Democrat Party has become.
Some discount the
severity of the threat because they believe only part of the party has gone
over the starboard side into the deep end. Nancy Pelosi and others from the old
guard are battling AOC and her fellow travelers for control of the party, but
that fight is more about power than ideology. Some commentators think otherwise
– that if the young Turks would just settle down, the old guard would bring the
party back to the center. Columnist Niall Ferguson, for example, opined that
the Democrats will lose the 2020 election because ‘they are not one party, but
two: a liberal and a socialist. The former can beat Donald Trump – but not if
it is associated with the latter.’ “
I believe Trump
has a very good chance of being reelected, but not because the Democrats are
two parties. Nancy Pelosi and her ilk are certainly more circumspect about
their leftist views and would probably take us on a slightly slower path toward
socialism if they had their druthers – but they would take us there
nevertheless. All twenty-plus Democratic presidential candidates favor
socialized medicine, healthcare for illegal immigrants, draconian environmental
measures, and the balance for the far-left agenda. Though Pelosi dismisses the
party’s AOC wing as merely ‘five people,’ AOC and her cabal control the
narrative, and seventy Democrats have voted with her 95 percent of the time.
Not only are they committed believers in socialism, but their hold on power
depends on greatly expanding the dependency cycle, including to illegal
immigrants. Recall that no less an establishment Democrat than Hillary Clinton
based her presidential campaign on a promise to amplify President Obama’s
decidedly leftist agenda. Ferguson is correct, in my view, that the Democrats
will commit political suicide if they embrace AOC’s ‘campus socialism.’ But
regardless of whether they nominate an openly socialist presidential candidate,
they’ve already played their hand, and it’s clear they will pursue a radical
agenda if they win the presidency or regain full control of the legislative
branch.
The 2020
presidential and congressional elections could determine whether this country
heads permanently down the dark road of socialism, cultural Marxism, and
eventually totalitarianism, or returns to its founding freedom tradition. We
must work for the reelection of President Trump and congressional conservatives
to reverse this leftist assault on America. To prevail in this war for our
nation, which we did not start but moral duty to fight, we must present our
message more clearly and expose the destructiveness of progressive policies and
politics, which requires us to understand the left’s thinking and why it is so
inimical to the American idea. To that end I have written this book.