The Democratic Party: like an overpopulated hamster cage

You probably remember seeing it in a biology-class movie in high school, or maybe on one of the science-related channels on cable TV: a hamster cage that is overrun with the little rodents, all of them desperately searching for food, fighting off the aggressive attacks of their fellows, scrambling aimlessly in panic – even resorting to cannibalism.

Amidst all the chatter about the civil war going on between establishment Republicans and their Tea Party opponents, has anybody noticed the disarray in the Democratic Party? The rank-and-file running from their leaders, the “gentry liberals” struggling against the public unions, Nancy Pelosi kicking Maxine Waters’ staffers out of a public event, Democratic candidates from sea to shining sea suddenly backing away from their president’s signature issue, and, for that matter, from the president himself. It’s a case of too many Democrats and too little good news on the economy, too many liberals and too little respect for the constitution, too many statists and too few malleable, gullible taxpayers. And Mother Nature’s going to take care of business this November with a culling of the horde, through the natural selection of the ballot box.

Biology. Always a fascinating subject.

And so is psychology. What modern-day Freud or Jung can decipher for us the strongly-held belief in some quarters that a previous, and repudiated, dabbling in the occult is somehow more menacing in political life than a previous – and, as far as I know, unrepudiated - belief in Marxism (oh, and also Jeremiah-Wright-style black liberation theology)? Christine O’Donnell, at least, has ended her acquaintance with something that (arguably) truly exists; Christopher Coons once believed, and may still believe, in a statist paradise that has never been anything but a fairytale (but, as history has shown, not at all a harmless one). I’ll take the witch over the tovarich any day.

Besides, if O’Donnell really were a witch, Fox News would be conducting interviews with Karl Rove via live-feed from a lily-pad.