A Book Review Worth Sharing

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 (3^rd / 4^th 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.