The Kamikaze Party - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
The Kamikaze Party
by

Any student of 20th century history will tell you that the Kamikaze strikes carried out against allied naval forces during World War II began long after it was clear that the Axis powers could not hope to win. This series of suicide attacks was nothing more than a futile and destructive exercise in fanaticism. Its sheer perversity was much like the extremist political strategy pursued by the Democrats since their defeat last Tuesday in Virginia and elsewhere. The Democratic leadership, like the fanatics who conceived and executed “Divine Wind,” refuses to face reality or pursue policies that address the genuine problems facing the country.

The morning after their Election Day drubbing, the Democratic leadership of the Senate tried to bring a radical federal takeover of the nation’s election system to the floor, a maneuver that was promptly defeated. Next, the Biden administration confirmed that it is indeed planning to pay huge cash settlements to illegal immigrants, and released a vaccine mandate that has already been blocked by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The week ended late Friday night, when the House passed a $1.2 trillion pork-packed “infrastructure” bill that will add at least $250 billion to the federal deficit. This will not improve consumer confidence as reported by the IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index:

The Six-Month Economic Outlook, a measure of how consumers feel about the economy’s prospects in the next six months, slid 2.7 points or 6.5% to 38.6 in November.  This component has fallen 23.1% since August, and the current reading is its 15-month low.… Confidence in Federal Economic Policies, a proprietary IBD/TIPP measure of how government economic policies are working, according to Americans, declined 4.2 points or 9.3% to 41.1 in November. It is the lowest reading since April 2016 (67-month low).

Such ominous data, combined with last Tuesday’s rebuke by the voters, signal that the Democrats are in real trouble and members of the party are sounding the alarm. The New York Times quotes Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) thus: “We were so willing to take seriously a global pandemic, but we’re not willing to say, ‘Yeah, inflation is a problem, and supply chain is a problem, and we don’t have enough workers in our work force.’” Yet party leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) aren’t listening. She still intends to push passage of the Build Back Better (BBB) social spending and climate bill that only 34 percent of the voters favor, according to the latest Emerson poll.

Pelosi, President Biden and other prominent Democrats have made it clear since last Tuesday’s debacle that they believe it was caused by their failure to pass this fiscally irresponsible legislation. As the editors of the New Hampshire Union Leader put it, “Biden, Nancy Pelosi and company were convinced that gifting the people with billions and billions of dollars of their own money and massive debt would have bought enough votes to push their gubernatorial candidate to victory.” But the Emerson poll is by no means the only poll that says precisely the opposite. An ABC News-Ipsos poll released two days before Election Day found that the majority of voters were not sold on BBB:

The low level of public engagement illustrates the administration’s difficulty selling the plan to America, with this poll finding that Americans are split on the impact of these plans on the country and them personally.… When asked how these plans would affect people like you, Americans are split with 25% saying it would help, 32% it would hurt, and 43% saying have no effect or don’t know.… The same is true when asked about the impact on the U.S. economy. Americans break 34% help, 34% hurt, and 32% saying no effect or don’t know.

Meanwhile, the Democrats continue to push a variety of unpopular and unscientific policies relating to COVID-19. The Biden administration has increasingly insisted that all Americans — adults and children — should be wearing masks whether or not they have been vaccinated. On November 5, for example, Director Rochelle Walensky of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tweeted the following pseudoscientific nonsense: “Masks can help reduce your chance of #COVID19 infection by more than 80%…. Masks also help protect from other illnesses like common cold and flu.” Dr. Walensky has never been particularly impressive, but this tweet is scientifically illiterate.

There is, of course, not a single peer-reviewed scientific study that supports any of Walensky’s claims for the masks as they relate to COVID-19 or any of its variants. As to the common cold and flu, her tweet doesn’t pass the laugh test. If Twitter had any real commitment to stopping the spread of misinformation, this tweet would have been pulled down within minutes after it was posted. More importantly, if she actually believes this balderdash, she should be fired. More likely she’s just following the political script fed to her by the White House. Either way, Dr. Walensky’s credibility is in tatters, and the CDC can safely be ignored regarding masks. As Matt Welch phrases it at Reason:

Nope, nunca, no more. In this family, we do not believe in junk science. We need to rip the masks off, not just from government mandates, but the whole grinning Condescension Complex, that only wants you—and especially your politically powerless kids—to sacrifice just a little bit more, just a few more months, get this cold and flu season behind us, until it’s time for the next booster, then maybe we can talk about full-time K-12 school in 2022–23, and masks will only be mandatory in every government structure from here to eternity.

Walensky’s tweet is, of course, yet another insult to the intelligence of the voters, like the demonstrably false claim that Critical Race Theory (CRT) isn’t taught in public schools. Equally insulting are the repeated assertions by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that BBB is paid for. Such claims, and many more made by the Democrats, are about an increasingly extremist party whose leaders refuse to face reality and pursue policies that address real problems facing the country. They would rather commit political suicide than foreswear leftist dogma. Tuesday’s election results suggest that the voters are inclined to accommodate the Democrats in their desire to become the Kamikaze Party.

David Catron
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David Catron is a recovering health care consultant and frequent contributor to The American Spectator. You can follow him on Twitter at @Catronicus.
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