QOTD - St Patricks

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day, America. On behalf of Irish Americans everywhere, I invite all of you to share our cultural tradition of soda bread, corned beef, and drinking way too much, just as our Mexican-American brethren have watched Cinco De Mayo become de facto Drink Too Many Margaritas Day, our German-American friends have seen Oktoberfest become Drink Beer Outdoors Week, and our French-American brethren have seen Mardi Gras turn into Remove Your Top for Beads While Inebriated Week. Don’t let anyone tell you America is xenophobic; we’ve always been a big-hearted, joyous people willing to reach out and fully embrace any other culture’s annual excuse to drink.

Jim Geraghty, National Review

The divide and conquer thought process has been refined to the point of reducto ad absurdum by the left. This country is based on being a melting pot where everyone’s ideas are tossed in and the best ones are incorporated into the American culture. Identity politics assures everyone that they can never become an American no matter how long they and their family have lived here since to be an American, they would have to give up some bits of their culture from the “old country”. Winning elections based on this results in dividing the populace into ever diminishing groups until you think you can win an election based on aggrieved “minority” groups alone, which seems to have been the Clinton strategy in the last one.

This incidentally is a close copy of the Italian model in which members of Parliament are elected at large, and pretty close to every city block has its own political party. The advent of the internet has aggravated this by letting people with similar views contact one another and thus form parties big enough to place a member in office. No matter how looney.  Porn fans have 3 or 4 members last I looked.

At some point, as one pursues this, the question comes up among the constituents: Exactly how aggrieved do I have to be to vote for candidate X, and do I want to be associated with some of the really far-out whackadoodles. At this point the party of aggrievement may discover that the upper limit of suffering voters is lower than a majority at the polls.