The false narrative of Operation Trump-Russia is the latest in a long train of episodes wherein Democrats have actively defended the indefensible.  Emerging in the 1820s to counter the Whigs in favor of Andrew Jackson in 1828, the Democratic Party has had an age-old tradition of fighting to advance every bad idea in American history. 

To their limited credit, Old Hickory's political team have had brief spurts of decency.  In their early days, the Jacksonians opposed centralized government, particularly as related to economics.  A late 19th-century faction called the Bourbon Democrats, among whom was President Grover Cleveland, championed fiscal responsibility.  Cleveland famously vetoed the 1887 Texas Seed Bill, which would have appropriated $10,000 to farmers in the Lone Star State for drought relief.  Cleveland upheld constitutionalism with this veto, expressing the following:

I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit[.] ... Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.

In the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt, despite his admiration for European socialism, resolved to fight the Axis powers until America won total victory.  John Kennedy espoused policies of economic expansion predicated on lowering taxes.  Jimmy Carter was visibly pained that he failed in his mission to rescue the hostages in Iran.  Even Bill Clinton argued for border security and signed welfare reform into being.

Having listed the few examples of the donkey party's positive contributions, let us now review the broader body of their work, which is nothing less than a noxious litany of bigotry, sexism, hysterics, and hedonism.

The 19th century showcased the Democrats' greatest wickedness in their aggressive promotion of slavery.  John Calhoun asserted that, despite the grotesque inhumanity of this "peculiar institution" as practiced in the American South, slavery was a "positive good" for both master and slave.  Two feckless antebellum presidents, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, allowed the expansion of involuntary servitude into the Western territories.  George McClellan, a Democrat who was the first Union commander, failed to prosecute the Civil War properly.  He ran against Lincoln in 1864 on a conciliation platform that would have ended the war with Northern capitulation and the continuation of slavery.

Heading into the 20th century, the Democrats moved on from slavery to a hundred years of Jim Crow.  Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the federal workforce and screened the KKK propaganda film Birth of a Nation in the White House.  After a confrontation with the NAACP's W.E.B. Dubois and William Monroe Trotter about his racist policies (implemented in spite of the fact that Dubois's endorsement during the 1912 election helped him garner a greater percentage of black votes than any previous Democrat), Wilson callously told the New York Times, "If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it."  The 1924 Democratic National Convention is colloquially labeled the "Klanbake" since the KKK dominated the event, leading to the nomination of John W. Davis, who favored poll taxes and opposed women's voting rights and anti-discrimination legislation.  The insulting and violent segregationism of the Democratic Party lasted all the way to cynical presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who supported civil rights for black Americans only when he saw an opening to buy their votes through redistributive government programs.   

In the midst of their career of oppressing blacks, the Democrats also found a way to mistreat other groups of people.  The women's suffrage movement got its legislative start when Republican Senator A.A. Sargent introduced the 19th Amendment in 1878, and this bill was voted down by congressional Democrats.  It did not pass until four decades hence:

[T]he Republicans won landslide victories in the House and the Senate, giving them the power to pass the amendment despite continued opposition from most elected Democrats – including President Woodrow Wilson, to whom the suffragettes frequently referred as "Kaiser Wilson."

In 1939, FDR rejected nearly a thousand Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany on the S.S. St. Louis, forcing them back to Europe, where it was by divine intervention that they succeeded in securing asylum in Belgium, France, Holland, and England.  He then violated the constitutional rights of some 100,000 Japanese-Americans by seizing their property and imprisoning them as a war powers measure.  The SCOTUS's ensuing Korematsu decision endorsed Roosevelt's oppression of these Americans, the majority opinion being authored by Justice Hugo Black, a Democrat who in the 1920s had been a Klansman and who had filibustered an anti-lynching bill in the Senate in 1935.

The Democrats moved away from tyrannizing women and minorities sometime in the mid-1960s as they embraced open immorality and lies.  Since the Great Society, Democrats have championed endless welfare programs funded by the immoral theft of tax dollars from hardworking Americans.  This Democrat policy of wealth redistribution encourages millions of our fellow citizens to practice the sin of sloth, trapping them in sheeplike dependency on the outstretched hand of Big Brother, who drops just enough crumbs to keep them fed and voting D each election cycle.  According to DNC chairman Tom Perez, abortion (i.e., the murder of babies) is a sacrament that no Democrat is permitted to oppose.  Illegal immigration does not receive condemnation like what Harry Reid and Bill Clinton heaped upon it back in the 1990s; today it is honored as some sort of humanitarian cause célèbre among Democrats.  The biological reality of binary gender is rejected by modern Democrats, who are on a crusade to have grown men relieve themselves in bathroom stalls next to little girls.  The Democrats' open hatred of Christianity has put a septuagenarian grandmother into bankruptcy because her religious beliefs prevent her from willingly doing floral arrangements for a same-sex couple's ceremony.  The party of Schumer and Pelosi promotes apocalyptic hysteria and imposes draconian regulations on industries of all kinds to force compliance with their ideological fanaticism over the mendacious climate change phenomenon.  

Democrats upended one sixth of the economy through Obamacare.  By forcing citizens to buy health insurance or pay a fine to the most onerous government collection agency, they subverted America's beloved founding principle of individual liberty.  They have covered up the Clinton family's crimes for decades and slandered anyone who suggests that Hillary endangered our national security by her email misconduct.  They poured out praise on Barack Obama while preventing him from being held accountable for running illegal guns into Mexico, paying cash ransom to Iran for hostages, and violating immigration law through executive amnesty.  And now they want to impeach Donald Trump because of a baseless allegation about election shenanigans.

Concerned Americans are infuriated by the Democrats' obsession with the nonexistent scandal of Operation Trump-Russia, but we recognize that these latest histrionics are a historical continuation of their defense of everything contemptible, tyrannical, and false.  They ought to change their mascot from a donkey to a zebra – neither Democrats nor zebras can change their stripes. 

John Steinreich has an M.A. in church history from Colorado Theological Seminary.  He has authored two Christian-themed books available on Kindle: The Words of God? – the Bible, the Qur'an and How They Are Lived in the Post-9/11 World and A Great Cloud of Witnesses – Lessons for Modern Day Christians from Church History.  His works are also on Lulu Press.