Unmasking the Blue Dog 'Democrats'

July 30, 12:06 PMLA Independent ExaminerDion Rabouin

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Better. More truthful.

Let’s get one thing straight, the Blue Dog “Democrats” are not Democrats. They’re not. They are Republicans.

It has become necessary to say this because pundits and regular folk alike seem to be astonished that health care reform is taking so long even though there is an overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress. The only problem is that there isn’t an overwhelming majority of Democrats in the House or the Senate because many of the so-called Democrats are actually Republicans. There are about 52 of them in the House and a handful more unofficial members in the Senate.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  

To be honest, my favorite Senator (after Strom Thurman, who will always be my favorite Senator, even in death. Anyone who can serve in the Senate for 50 years even after running for president on the Segregationist Party ticket, being 90 years-old and being discovered to have fathered a half-black child with his maid, defies the traditional life and death boundaries that burden mortal men) is “Blue Pup” Evan Bayh. I like his politics, even though he’s basically the equivalent of a slutty hostess at The Blue Dog Restaurant. He doesn’t really have any influence or power whatsoever within the group, but he’s a pretty new face the Blue Dogs use to shill their message to the media.

Ideologically, I’m probably more in line with these people than the rest of the Dems in the House or the Senate. But let us not confuse ourselves, these people are not Democrats.

Yes, they would have been Democrats back in 1963 – back when Strom Thurman was a Democrat. They would have fit right in with the Southern Democrats, which is actually where this whole Blue Dog business began. But that was then and this is now.

The idea of the Southern Democrat is all but dead for one thing, and for another the Blue Dogs are almost exclusively from Northern states. Most of the staunch Southern Democrats who refused to join the Republican Party because they hated Abraham Lincoln – no matter how far their ideology drifted toward the Republicans or, rather, how far the Republican ideology drifted toward theirs – have died at this point or are all but obsolete.

Don’t believe me? Here are the basic tenets of the Blue Dog Democrat manifesto:

They support gun rights, oppose abortion in any form and have anti-abortion voting records, oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants, oppose welfare and entitlements, support free trade and back bankruptcy and tort reform. Oh, and their homepage has a national debt ticker.

Those would be a great set of tenets to found a party upon, except that there is already a political party that espouses those principles, they’re called Republicans. These are essentially the founding ideals of Goldwater conservatism. The Blue Dogs don’t have any “official” positions on anything other than fiscal conservatism, but check their voting records.

In essence the Blue Dog “Democrats” are what’s left of the sane wing of the Republican Party, you know, the guys (and gals) who still want our children taught science in science class and are willing to concede that tax dollars spent need to be spent on something other than the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

So, Obama and Pelosi – two of the more liberal politicians in the country – aren’t trying to pass a health care bill through a group of their true-blue peers, they’re trying to pass it through a group of Democrats, Republicans and Republicans masquerading as Democrats.

Really, when you break it down, things aren’t much different than they always were.