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(51?e Ahuattce The ADVANCE, November 9, 2022/Page 7A
A free press is not a privilege but
organic necessity in a great society.
-Walter Uppmann
COMMENTARY
out of
CONTEXT
A compilation of quotations on a variety of
issues by national, state and regional writers,
well-known personalities, just plain everyday
people and from various publications
collected by the editors of THE ADVANCE.
Quotes for our Times:
Matt Vespa is the Senior Editor at Townhall.
com: There's the HUGE red flag for dems in lat
est WSJ poll.
The bubble mentality of the Left killed
them. Do these people not know that roughly
two-thirds of the country are living paycheck-
to-paycheck and that consumer debt has
reached record levels? The suburban mom
might be pro-choice, but putting food on the
table, having her kids clothed, and keeping
a roof over her family's head is more vital. All
three areas are being hammered by infla
tion that Joe Biden and the Democrats seem
incapable of addressing, partially because
they don't care. Inflation has been an issue
for months — inaction at this point is either
gross incompetence or intentionally dismis
sive.
Byron York, chief political correspondent
for The Washington Examiner. Biden’s agenda
and the filibuster.
Now, however, Senate Democrats face
the prospect of returning to the minority. And
— you guessed it — the filibuster will again be
come good. Democrats will use it to stop the
"radical agenda" of the GOP. It will likely not
be a hair-on-fire urgent issue, because Sen
ate Democrats know they have a backstop in
the White House, where the Democrat in the
Oval Office will veto any unwanted legislation
Republicans might improbably get through
the Senate. But the filibuster will, once again,
be good.
But that is all details. The bottom line is
that, as far as the legislation that Biden and
Democrats want to pass is concerned, the
party will be over.
Tucker Carlson, host of FOX News Chan
nel’s flagship primetime cable news program,
Tucker Carlson Tonight Affirmative action is
immoral.
The U.S. military was the single most im
pressive institution in American life for genera
tions, precisely because it was meritocratic,
because people advanced on the basis of
individual effort and not on the basis of group
interest. It has been completely corrupted in
the most recent generation, and that corrup
tion has accelerated under Joe Biden.
The result of that? The Army is now dramati
cally short of its recruitment goal because no
body, no normal person of any color, wants to
join a rigged system. That's the truth. They've
wrecked the military with this mind poison,
which is evil. It was evil when it was practiced
in the South 60 years ago, and it's evil now.
Greg Gutfeld, host of Gutfeld! and co-host
of The Five: California has a mad man prob
lem.
If Nancy or Gavin had actually listened
to our channel, maybe that nut would have
already been institutionalized. Maybe there
would have been more police, more secu
rity. That's all we talk about. That's our wheel-
house.
But no, it's like they only watch CNN and
MSNBC or "The View" where you dispense bad
advice like it's fentanyl. So now they can't
even be honest about crime when one of
their own gets hit with a hammer. But I guess
when Democrats play Whac-A-Mole with any
speech they don't like, everything looks like a
nail.
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No, Democracy Is
Not on the Ballot
RICH 1
LOWRY
COLUMN |
Democracy is under threat
— the wrong candidates could
win more votes than their op
ponents in hotly contested free
and fair elections.
That’s the worry of pro
gressives insisting that “de
mocracy is on the ballot” in
the midterms.
This trope, repeated end
lessly on the center-left, is of
fered as a reason why voters of
conscience should cast aside
their other concerns and vote
Democrat up and down the
ballot.
If this argument seems a
touch self-serving — indeed
functionally indistinguishable
from run-of-the-mill partisan
salesmanship — it’s because it
is.
As it happens, there is
nothing in the actual behavior
of Democrats to suggest that
they take their own rhetoric
seriously and that they believe
“Stop the Steal” stalwarts run
ning for, and potentially win
ning, key races is indeed a na
tional emergency.
If they really thought there
were an existential threat to
democracy, Democrats would
be eager to ally with Republi
cans who don’t deny the 2020
election results. Of course,
Democrats are trying to defeat
these candidates just as assidu
ously as the MAGA faithful
— in other words, it’s partisan
ship as usual.
If Democrats believed that
the pro-Trump candidates are
committed to overturning our
system of government, they
would try to block them every
step of the way. Instead, they
have often promoted exactly
these candidates in the GOP
primaries in the (sometimes
flagrantly mistaken) belief that
they’d be easier to defeat in the
general. One would think a na
tional emergency calls for es
chewing cynicism, not engag
ing in grotesque displays of it.
If the norms of our system
are at risk, one might also think
it’d be important to foster and
protect them in every way pos
sible. Not a chance. President
Joe Biden was happy to unilat
erally create a massive student
debt forgiveness program in a
shameless exercise in imperial
government, and Democrats
muse openly about packing
the Supreme Court and ending
the filibuster to remove incon
venient checks on their power.
If election denial is itself a
dire threat, progressives should
have made a pariah of Stacey
Abrams, who denied her loss
in the Georgia gubernatorial
election in 2018 and spread
misinformation about alleged
voter suppression in a state
with a model electoral system;
to the contrary, they made her
a national celebrity and hap
pily repeated her dubious
claims.
If the election is about
protecting democracy over
and above anything else, Dem
ocrats should be setting aside
all their positions on hot-but-
ton issues that make Republi
cans reluctant to vote for them
— on abortion, climate
change, guns, and so on. Natu
rally, they are more dug in on
these issues than ever. If they
have to choose between pro
tecting democracy and ad
vancing their pet left-wing
causes, the pet left-wing causes
win every time.
At the very least, if Demo
crats fear that MAGA candi
dates will try to change the
2024 election result in Con
gress after the fact, they should
feel some urgency about pass
ing the Electoral Count Re
form Act, which attempts to
tighten up the rules to prevent
such gamesmanship. Demo
crats are bragging about pass
ing all sorts of bills this year,
yet not the one most relevant
to what they say is the fore
most issue of our times. Biden
is promising if he gets a Demo-
Please see Lowry page 9A
GRITTY
Democrats Must
Stop Dividing
Our Country
As Democrats see
the likelihood of the
House and the Senate
shifting to Republi
can control, they have
rolled out their big
gest gun to try to
minimize the dam
age.
Former President
Barack Obama, the
most popular Democrat in the country, has
hit the campaign trail to try to salvage vic
tories in close and critical races.
Obama’s headline message has been
about the importance of voting. Meaning,
turnout is critical for Democrats, and, in
particular, high turnout among Black vot
ers.
Certainly, in Georgia, where the Senate
race between incumbent Democrat Ra
phael Warnock and Republican challenger
Herschel Walker rides on a razor’s edge, the
Black vote is critical.
Unfortunately, despite the charisma
and charm of the former president, the
message he is delivering is destructive for
his party and for the country.
He is pitting Americans against Ameri
cans. Blacks against whites. The wealthy
against the poor.
“In your gut, you should have a sense:
Who cares about you?” asks Obama.
Obama emerged onto the national
scene as a young Illinois state assemblyman
when he addressed the Democratic Na
tional Convention in 2004. In that speech,
he captured hearts and minds by reminding
the nation that we are “E Pluribus Unum.
Out of Many, One ... There’s not a liberal
America and a conservative America ... a
Black America and a White America ...
There’s the United States of America.”
The message of that young idealist,
looking to pave a path for his own political
ambition, has totally disappeared now that
those ambitions have been achieved.
Please see Star page 11A
By Star Parker
Tick or Treat
From the Porch
By Amber Nagle
Last
week, as mil
lions of chil
dren around
the world
stepped into
their Hal
loween costumes — ghosts, witches,
superheroes, dinosaurs, etc. — and
prepared to go door-to-door in search
of candy, I spent some quality time
with my husband on the sofa. No, we
weren’t watching a movie or drinking
wine from fancy glasses and chatting
about our days. I was lying flat on my
belly underneath a bright LED lamp
while my husband probed around in
a small hole on my back with a needle
and tweezers — very romantic.
“Can you see anything?” I asked
every few minutes.
“I think I see something in there,”
he said. “I’m trying.”
Let me explain.
I jumped in the shower around
5:30 p.m. on Halloween, and as I was
applying lathery soap to my back, I
felt something — something I’ve felt
many times in the years that I’ve lived
in the woods of Northwest Georgia.
Our woods are brimming with ticks,
and we’ve all had them on us — my
husband, our dogs, our friends, our
family, and me. Before I could process
it, my fingers were picking at it in an
effort to remove it as fast as I possibly
could. With my slick hands, I gripped
it and pulled, then looked down at it
and realized that it didn’t look like a
full size tick. Part of its head seemed
to be missing.
I placed the tick on my wash
cloth, rinsed off and stepped out of
the shower. As I dried off, I glanced
in the mirror to see where the tick
had been, I gasped in horror. The re
gion around the tick bite was bright
red and larger in diameter than a
silver dollar. In the dozens of times
I’ve pulled ticks from my body or my
husband’s body, I have never seen the
redness I saw last Monday night.
A few minutes later, I was ana
lyzing the tick with a big magnifying
glass, and just as I thought, the tick’s
tiny head was no longer on his ugly,
brown body.
I turned and looked at my hus
band.
“I think part of his head is still in
me,” I said. “I’ll get a needle and twee
zers and some alcohol.”
My husband isn’t good with nee
dles or blood. He can’t even watch Dr.
Pimple Popper or My 600-Lb Life on
television, because there’s usually a
scene involving a scalpel, blood and/
or organs.
I crawled onto the couch with my
shirt pulled up and scooted under
neath the light, and for half an hour, I
could feel him picking at the tick bite
site with the sharp edge.
“Hey, remember when we were
kids?” I asked, trying to lighten the
mood. “We had a game called Op
eration, and the objective was to pull
things out of a man’s body through
tiny holes in a board with a pair of
tweezers. If you touched the edge,
it would buzz and the patient’s nose
would light up. Did you and your sis
ter have that game?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he
concentrated on the task at hand.
“I can’t get it,” he said, finally giv
ing up. “I’m sorry. I think it is deep
down in there, but it is bleeding and
I just can’t see it any more.”
So the next morning, I found
myself at the doctor’s office explain
ing to the receptionist, the first nurse,
the second nurse, and the doctor that
I was pretty certain that part of a tick
was still in my back. A few minutes
later, I was on the surface of an ex
amination table underneath another
bright light, and the doctor was pick
ing at the wound, which was very
sore, by the way.
“Ahhh. I see something in there,”
he said. “Maybe I should numb it and
get it out of you...”
“No need to numb it,” I said. “I
used to watch Westerns with my fa
ther, so I know what to do. I’ll just lie
here and grit my teeth together like
I’m biting a bullet. You just get the
darn thing out of me.”
Well, to be honest, I didn’t say,
“darn.”
Twenty minutes or so later, the
doctor pulled back and said, “I got it.”
Please see Amber page 11A