BEHIND THE MIKE

Ialready proved beyond a shadow of a doubt just how little I know about politics, evidenced by a clock cleaning I endured when I ran for the House of Representatives in 1980 in South Carolina.

That said, just how stupid are my fellow Democrats? Not only did the heart and soul of the party abandon its values, it has totally sold out to extremists on the left.

Growing up in the south, it was traditional for folks in my family to embrace the democrat party. We were conservatives primarily because we felt like we had something to conserve. Not anymore.

Along comes Bernie Sanders, who hijacked the party’s Milennial’s on the left and completely changed the bearing and direction of the entire party. How can my fellow Democrats continue to abandon all that once made the party great?

I first became active in the Democrat party when John Kennedy ran for president. Someone once asked me “Did you support Kennedy because he was Catholic?” My answer was simple, “No I supported him because I’m Catholic.”

More and more I find myself hiding in shame at what I am witnessing in my own party. In fact, increasingly I find myself voting less along the party line and more along the line of “common sense.”

For instance, unless you are an American Indian, all the rest of us are immigrants. America is the melting pot of the world. My grandfather, Elias Mack, came to this country from Beirut, Lebanon, and even served as Mayor of Lexington, SC before they found out he was an illegal alien.

He was not illegal because he climbed a fence or because he came in the back of a tractor trailer. Immigration officials at Ellis Island changed his name from Elias Skaff to Elias Mack and that screwed up his paperwork.

His old friend Strom Thurmond, who was Governor of SC at the time this occurred, assisted my grandfather in getting the error corrected, allowing him to continue his tenure as Mayor.

It would break his heart to see the way the Democrat party refuses to step up and help with a solution with the immigration problem. Why would the party delegate the solution to the Republicans by default, by doing nothing? If I were an immigrant looking for assistance in becoming a legal citizen, I would be madder than hell about that. Do the Democrats really care about immigrants?

Perhaps the party is getting what it truly deserves. Soon there will be a whole new harvest of leaders cropping up from the far left, making Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer look like they are on the right side of Genghis Khan. If Hillary Clinton can escape the nursing home or jail long enough, she might be the only hope for a party that is about to evaporate.

The entire “resist” thing baffles me. Resistance does not inspire leadership. It is only “against” and not “for” anything. It is hard to rally around a negative. It is even harder to embrace anarchy, disorder, chaos and lawlessness. That is not a revolution, it is a revolt. Frankly, it is revolting to see the party of my youth literally vanish and vaporize in front of my very eyes.

The great Italian philosopher Yogi Berra once said “The trouble with the future is it ain’t what it used to be.” The same can be said for my fellow Democrats. The party crazies have taken over… the Clintons, Maxine Waters, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders, who isn’t even a Democrat but has still managed to highjack half the party base.

Make no mistake, the party’s future ain’t what it used to be and never will be again until some resemblance of judgment, honor, integrity, decency, morality, character and nobility emerges.

Until then, my fellow Democrats will continue to erode away until there is literally nothing left on which to build.

Michael Aun CSP,  CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame, is the author of a new book about to be released “All I Want out of Life Is an Unfair Advantage”