Yellow Dog Democrats: A New Definition

By

William D. Dannenmaier

About forty years ago, a man invaded an apartment where eight student nurses had gathered. He took them, one by one, into an adjacent room and killed each in turn. I read about the slaughter in the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

I was reminded of that about forty years later when a television program discussing convicted murderers in Illinois showed him laughing and talking with friends while in prison. I was disgusted – with the politicians of Illinois – for providing that pleasant life for such a beast.

At the time, I couldn’t understand why not a single one of those students ran out of the door to safety while he was occupied with killing one of her friends in an adjacent room. Perhaps my background increased that puzzlement. In Korea in 1953, I served as a radio/scout with the 15^th Infantry Regiment. We were all volunteers and had an unspoken agreement that we would not be captured. If trapped, better to fight until we could escape or until we were killed than to be captured. (I mentioned that quiet agreement to a military historian. He said it was a good agreement. He claimed that not a single scout who had been captured in Korea was ever seen again.) If the remaining seven girls had run when that murderer took the first one in to kill at least some of them would have lived. Why taxpayers have spent tens of thousands of dollars each of the many years since that atrocity to keep him alive, well fed and happy is a mystery to me.

Now we have the same puzzling behavior at Virginia Tech. An entire class of students, probably twenty or twenty-five and mostly male, permitted themselves to be slaughtered by one man with a pistol. They appear to have made no attempt to fight or run. If, as a group, all of them had rushed that gunman most would have lived. He did not have the ability to kill that many in that small a space if they had attacked, even if his nerves had permitted him to stay and fight – one against many. Even if only half of them had rushed him, most would have lived. Instead, they chose to die.

The Democratic Party must be proud of them, at least the leadership must be. Isn’t that what Pelosi, Reid, Murtha, Kerry and other leaders of the party are proposing to do in Iraq? They voted for the war, but when the going gets a little tough these multi-millionaires want to cut and run. A nation of three hundred million with the most advanced technology in the world and the strongest army must surrender, according to Democratic leaders, to a few thousands of insurgents imbedded among people who really don’t want them but, justifiably, fear to expose them to soldiers who are about to surrender.

When I was a boy, a strict Democrat was called a Yellow-Dog Democrat. My neighbors, who were Democrats, were proud of that term. Following the assassination of President Lincoln an unholy alliance of military leaders and Republican political hacks seized power and invaded the South, stealing everything in sight. They were called “carpet baggers” because their only possessions when they first arrived were packed in simple “carpet” bags. Bitterly resented, the Klu Klux Klan was formed initially as a defense against those thieves. They caused so much resentment and hatred that almost a hundred years later Southern Democrats were still saying, “I’d vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for a Republican.”

But now the meaning of “Yellow Dog Democrat” has changed. Under the current Democratic leadership, it refers to the type of cowardly cur and people who lie down, whine and roll on their backs in surrender when they perceive a threat. Nationally, these people are a disgrace, but what is worse is that the Democratic “don’t run, don’t fight, just surrender” theory is being taught to young people throughout the country. Can you think of any other reason that so many young people would quietly stand to be slaughtered?

Most extraordinary is the recent announcement by Senator Hillary Clinton that the United States might have to confront Iran militarily. At the same moment that her fellow Democrats are calling for retreat and surrender to the Islamic terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan she is proposing that the United States enter Iran. Then again, it would be another place to retreat from. A Yellow Dog always needs a reason to cower, whine and roll over – belly up.