The Democratic Lumping Technique

After what seemed like a long absence Katrina Vanden Huevel of The Nation Magazine has begun to appear on television and last week she was in the roundtable discussion on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. She offered her typical diatribe of Republican and conservative sins saying they were anti-minority, anti-poor, anti-immigrant, etc. Like most liberals she likes to mix terms to confuse the issue and make her opposition appear to be not just against something, but against everything. For example when discussing immigration Katrina likes to say conservatives and Republicans hate all immigrants, no matter how many times Republicans say they support legal immigration and are against "illegal immigration" Lumping legal and illegal immigration together makes for easy tirades and putting the opposition in a not-so-pretty box. This week on ABC Katrina aired the latest effort to confuse voters by saying people who are in favor of reducing entitlements must mean they are for cuts in Social Security and Medicare, when she knows that entitlement reform will be focused on those entitlements that are taxpayer-funded in contrast to Social Security and Medicare, which are tax-payer supported. To be sure there is abuse and fraud in both programs than can discovered and corrected and we can find ways to make them self-supporting through growth and reform. However, once again by lumping "entitlements" as all part of the same thing liberals and Democrats hope all the tax-payer funded, non-self-supporting entitlements will escape scrutiny. There is little doubt that "entitlement reform" is likely to become part of the discussion as we approach the 2012 election. It is important to recognize this little Democratic device and call it when we see it.