Time's Joel Stein Dreams Up Hard-left Party Platform for Dems
He's compared Chick-fil-A to apartheid-era South Africa, News Corps chief Rupert Murdoch to an Arab dictator, and called Christianity a death cult. So naturally Time magazine humor writer Joel Stein is the perfect person to appoint himself write a "tongue-in-cheek" Democratic Party platform heavy on snark and equally heavy on hard-left positions on fiscal and social issues. Just as well, I suppose, as left-wing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is too busy dreaming up fictional biased newscasting that embodies his dream of an even bolder, more transparently liberal media.
Stein noted that he "enlisted the help of Elaine Kamarck, a public policy lecturer at Harvard and former platform author," adding that her take on his seven-page draft was that he "mostly... [has] the tone right" although the actual platform wound doubtless be "a bit drier."
To be fair, while most of the fake platform does sound remarkably what you'd expect from unapologetic liberal spinmeisters, there is at least one dig at the Left, centered on the overwrought war-on-women meme:
The Republican’s War on Women is a war on all Americans. Women are our mothers, our daughters and the people who we hooked up with in college one night and feel bad about not calling again but we weren’t sure what to say. Point is: We should be nice to women.
So we want women to be free. Free to choose to work, to stay home and to get as many abortions as they want. Aborting unwanted children, economists have proven, is also the greatest crime prevention tool we have. You want to keep crime down, keep Roe v. Wade intact. Let us be clear: Abortions are awesome.
Of course, as I noted yesterday, it's no secret that the Democratic Party platform committee is highly unlikely to have anything favorable to pro-life Americans.
Also of note in Stein's wish-list of a platform are policy planks that sound remarkably more like a Green Party platform than a Democratic one, like...:
We will legalize marijuana, freeing law enforcement to pursue dangerous criminals and freeing much needed jail space for those criminals.
...and:
More than 70% of all antibiotics are used on healthy livestock. This has caused the creation of dangerous superbugs, such as MIRSA. We will outlaw such uses of antibiotics, which endanger all of us. We will work to end factory farming, which is not only morally corrupt but toxic to our health and our environment.
And as far as same-sex marriage goes, Stein clearly would like the Democratic policy position to be significantly to the left of President Obama's relatively cautious I'm-personally-for-it-but-let's-leave-it-to-the-states fudge:
Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Americans can no longer be denied their civil rights. Now that this administration has given them the right to serve openly in our military, we are going to do the right thing and make sure they have the right to marry in every state and territory in the United States of America. They will now be full participants in the American fabric, everywhere and under the protection of our laws.
