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Talking to a Democrat

There is a talkative mid-life lawyer at the coffee shop who will deign to chat with me, a lowly, female retiree of a different faith and party, if there's no one else for him to talk to at. He's also trying to practice his Russian, so that makes for a pretty small group, plus he thinks all the men there are bigots and idiots (he told me one time) because they're talking sports. Anyway, today I made him the same offer that I did Chuck, as he scarfed down one of their fabulous muffins (he's put on a few pounds this winter). He could have my calories I wasn't using and they wouldn't count on him. He could eat with impunity knowing I wasn't. He didn't understand the Gore carbon footprint/exchange so I tried to explain it. I think his legal mind realized it is a scam, but he right away switched the topic to Gore's movie.

But when I said something about Clinton not signing the Kyoto Treaty, he went ballistic. Thought I'd have to scrape him off the ceiling. "You Republicans blame Clinton for everything!" he bellowed (I think he's a defense attorney and tries intimidation.) The fact that it just happened to be true and that Kyoto hasn't done a thing for those countries that did sign it, and that I had been a Democrat who voted for Clinton, also did little to defuse him. His mouth was like the roaring lion in the book of Daniel (no sinister allusions to Satan here--I know he is a liberal Catholic and has a good heart).

Since I'm probably 15 years older, I did a little history review with him and asked him to cite a single program proposed by the liberals in the last 20-30 years that had been defeated by the conservatives. Couldn't do it of course, because liberals try to put up conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives, as some sort of powerhouse bringing down the government. No one has been a bigger spender on social programs than the Bush administration. Medicare. Biggest gains under Republicans. Illegal immigration. Huge muck job by Republicans--who was president in 1986 for IRCA? Social Security. Reagan was President when I lost mine. Legal abortion. Last time I checked, we're still killing babies--what--25-35 million since Roe v. Wade? If Christian conservatives manage to roll back a week or two in a sparsely populated rural state, the Dems go crazy (oh no, a baby's made it out alive), but the law's still there. DDT. Last time I ran the numbers, we'd killed more Africans with malaria in the last 30 years than died being shipped across the Atlantic as slaves in the 18th century, but not a single bird, let alone human, ever died from spraying DDT on mosquito eggs in standing pools of swamp water. Rich Americans like Bill Gates are using their billions to buy mosquito netting and print brochures instead of reversing that disaster. Clean air laws. We've got bunches of empty factories in Ohio that have no smoke belching from the chimneys--the jobs went first to the southern U.S.A., then to Asia. Women's Rights. Leading cause of poverty in the U.S.A. is unmarried women having sex and babies before finishing school. The poverty gap is no longer racial, it is marital. And Dems have a fainting spell if someone introduces an abstinence program or a chastity pledge.

But he was so old-school-liberal in his views he only was willing to concede that blacks weren't being lynched and had moved a little closer to the front of the bus. Actually, I didn't get to bring up all these points for him--old Democrats wouldn't sit for that. His patronizing attitude for everything the liberals my age accomplished over the years is a real turn off--makes me think that nothing I did or supported for forty years mattered because it is never enough for them until we turn the country over and under.