Smash The State Update: Lying Jack*ss Christmas Edition

Hayward points out today that a normally lefty site has uncovered how the Democraps gamed the recent "nonpartisan" California re-districting process:

Why “Reform” Makes Problems Worse: A Case Study | Power Line: "The citizens’ commission had pledged to create districts based on testimony from the communities themselves, not from parties or statewide political players. To get around that, Democrats surreptitiously enlisted local voters, elected officials, labor unions and community groups to testify in support of configurations that coincided with the party’s interests.

When they appeared before the commission, those groups identified themselves as ordinary Californians and did not disclose their ties to the party. One woman who purported to represent the Asian community of the San Gabriel Valley was actually a lobbyist who grew up in rural Idaho, and lives in Sacramento.

In one instance, party operatives invented a local group to advocate for the Democrats’ map."

What a shocker, huh? After which Hayward comments:

One of my favorite books that bears on this question is Alan Ehrenhalt’s The United States of Ambition, published more than 20 years ago. While the book is about political ambition generally, Ehrenhalt spends a lot of time exploring the question of why Democrats often dominate politics even in suburban districts and areas where Republicans ought to dominate it by virtue of their larger numbers or general culture. (The classic case of this was Irvine, California, in the early 1990s, where a deep red Republican town elected the socialist Larry Agran as its mayor.) He concludes simply that Democrats work harder at it, and goes part of the way to my explanation about the substantive differences between Democrats—the party of government—and Republicans—the party of the private sector.

This is one reason why I was never very enthusiastic about term limits, even though I usually voted for them simply for the splendid insult they deliver to the political class. Democrats have an endless bench of smart and ambitious people ready to move up the ranks. Republicans, not so much.

I don’t have a good solution for this, except for getting a bigger typeface on my bumper sticker that reads “SMASH THE STATE.”

Of course, the Repubs are actually the stupid party, not the party of the private sector. And they feed at the trough more and more. But some semblance of the point remains...