I received a call the other night from someone I didn’t recognize who wanted to ask me two quick questions. It ended up he was a campaign worker for a candidate in PA’s 12th congressional district, Lee Griffin, running for the seat currently held by Fred Keller. Once I was oriented to the purpose of the call I asked if his guy was a Democrat, and eventually, after some equivocation, the answer was yes. I explained that I cannot find it in myself to vote for anyone who aligns themselves with the hatred and racism of the Democrats, a party of, by, and for “Black Lives Matter,” which itself is an organization that primarily caters to privileged white and black leftists and manipulates and exploits black Americans for personal and political power and profit- quintessential racism. The caller, who was very polite, said that his guy Griffin wasn’t a racist because he had an inter-racial marriage. The call ended amicably. Admitting to my own embarrassment that I should have known who Lee Griffin was, I decided to take a look at his campaign website, leegriffinforcongress.com, which to me has the feel of zealous religiosity rather than a political tone.

There was a time when the Democrat party was in fact a political party, and in my lifetime they defined themselves as the party of the workingman, as compared to the Republicans being the party of the wealthy. Whether this was true or not is debatable, but nevertheless the Democrats were a political enterprise, and ran the gamut of union workers, law and order types, and the occasional wacko (like any party), but no one questioned their basic allegiance to the idea and fact of the US: George McGovern was pretty far out there in 1972 but he was a decorated and courageous WW2 bomber pilot.