He Hate Me

My brother Carl has so many kids that he's pretty much stopped naming them. I don't have any shorties of my own and am not much interested in them, so they would all be more or less the same to me whether or not Carl had named them.

But he's got this one little girl that does something that sticks out in my mind. Just like her brothers and sisters she's generally running around demanding stuff she wants from her parents or any other adult who might be in her midst. But where the others will whine, pout, or nag at a demand denied, this one does something unique and she's done it since she was 3 years old. She just turns to anyone else standing there and screams "HE HATE ME". She channels so much venom when she does it that it can freak you out if you're not ready for it.

I guess the logic of her 3 year old mind is this: either you're giving me what I want (right now, wait is the same as no) or you must hate me. There can't be any other reason. The pure shock of this tactic does actually work for her a few times with strangers, but after a while you get used to it and just ignore her or say "you're dang right I do. Now move out." If you didn't do that, she'd never grow out of it.

HE HATE ME is pretty much where we are with the Democrats right now. It turned into a party of demanding stuff sometime during Lyndon Johnson's presidency and it hasn't stopped since. But like all seemingly free lunches, the tab for all this stuff we've been giving to Democrats for fifty years was always coming due and now it's landed on the table with a thud. We haven't been making enough cash to pay for all this stuff for a long time, and the folks lending us money to make up the difference are getting to the end of the line. It's not really a policy choice to say we need to spend less, because there is no choice. We just have to spend less. We aren't making it and we can't borrow it. So, we're just going to have to say "no" right now.

The Democrats have not reacted real well to this reality. Just like Carl's little girl when you tell her no, they pretty just yell "HE HATE ME". If you won't fund this program or that, it can't be because we're broke. It must be that you're a racist, homophobe, sexist hate-monger. And I'm afraid we won't help our Democrats grow up by trying to reason with them. No matter how loud they scream "HE HATE ME" at us, we're just going to have to keep saying no. That's what grown-ups do.