Exciting Ideas From the Democrats: Slavery!

Republicans have long made a big deal of the fact that they’re the party of Lincoln, that they’re the party that ended slavery. It’s pure nonsense, of course, to try to rest on the moral superiority of what your party did almost 150 years ago. It’s not as if the Democrats are the pro-slavery party.

Or so I used to think befire I read this:

Americans would have to sign up for a new military draft after turning 18 if the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has his way.

You know, the Republicans deserved to lose this last election, for all kinds of reasons. But the problem with throwing out the Republicans is that they’re replaced by the Democrats. So we’re throwing out one set of crackpot ideas and replacing it with another.

Rep. Charles Rangel…, D-N.Y., said Sunday he sees his idea as a way to deter politicians from launching wars and to bolster U.S. troop levels insufficient to cover potential future action in Iran, North Korea and Iraq.

“There’s no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm’s way,” Rangel said.

The focus is entirely on what kind of people are joining the army. This is so typical of the Democrats: It’s all about identity politics. Those of us opposed to the War on Drugs have never been able to get the Democrats interested in decriminalization except for the sentencing disparity between powder cocaine and crack cocaine because crack’s harsher penalties hurt the black community.

The most reprehensible policies are acceptable to some Democrats as long as they are race-neutral. They think it’s better to force everyone equally to enter the military against their will than to allow people to decide freely, because minorities are more likely to decide to enlist.

If politicians like Rangel had been in charge in the 1800’s, instead of ending slavery we would have passed a law allowing whites to be enslaved too.

Update: Here’s video and a nice explanation of why this is all just theater.

(Also, I see that Representative Rangel is black. I might have had second thoughts about calling it slavery if I’d known. There are significant differences that make slavery as it was practiced in the United States much worse than conscription. But both of them are moral sinkholes.)