The Suicide of the Left - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
The Suicide of the Left
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The signs are everywhere, clearly recognizable in the wake of the collapse of the impeachment witch hunt.

• The Democrat serving as speaker of the House stands behind the president of the United States at a State of the Union address and acts like a defiant five-year-old stomping her feet in a temper tantrum. Caught on camera giving the text of his speech a “pre-rip” beneath her desk, when the chosen moment arrives she ostentatiously rips the speech in half in front of the cameras, making herself a national laughingstock.

• The Iowa Democratic Party runs its first-in-the-nation caucuses into the ground. As Karl Rove noted over in the Wall Street Journal,

The incompetence was jaw-dropping. Iowa Democratic Party leaders reportedly didn’t train the 1,800 precinct captains how to use the app that they promised would speed up the counting of votes and provide more transparency. They didn’t run a full-scale test in which captains all sent full data sets from their caucus sites in the same hour. Nor did they test the backup phone system to confirm it could handle hundreds of simultaneous calls. And they’d been warned there were problems.

• Over on CNN, host Don Lemon convulses in laughter as his two Trump-hating guests, one using a Southern accent, portray the president’s millions of supporters as illiterate, uneducated “boomer rubes.” The video goes viral, with Fox News — doubtless amused at this self-inflicted wound by its far-left competitor — headlining:

CNN Don Lemon panel faces intense backlash for mocking Trump supporters as illiterate ‘credulous rubes’

The Fox story noted,

The clip was spotted by former CNN digital producer Steve Krakauer, who blasted the panel.

“The arrogance, the dismissiveness, the smug cackling, the accents,” Krakauer reacted. “If Donald Trump wins re-election this year, I’ll remember this brief CNN segment late one Saturday night in January as the perfect encapsulation for why it happened.”

• Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib tweeted out a false tale of Israelis murdering a seven-year-old boy. The tweet drew an instant angry rebuke from the liberal Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, as Fox and numerous other outlets reported. The Fox report said this of the angry response by the liberal group to the liberal congresswoman:

Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the ADL, sharply condemned Tlaib and called on her to apologize.

This is an example of how the blood libel works in 2020. @Rashida Tlaib retweets a vicious lie steeped in centuries-old accusations used to demonize Jews, then says nothing when it’s disproven. An apology is overdue,” Greenblatt wrote on Sunday.

• As the Democrats’ House impeachment managers closed their “case” to the Senate, an open squabble broke out between managers and congressmen Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler. The Washington Times reported it this way:

Tensions within House Democrats’ impeachment team appeared to boil over onto the Senate floor Thursday night as Rep. Jerrold Nadler ran to the lectern to deliver the final answer of the night, pushing by Rep. Adam Schiff, who’s been the party’s point man for the Senate trial.

Mr. Schiff stood to answer, but Mr. Nadler was already in place.…

The move to displace Mr. Schiff set Twitter afire, and drew the attention of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who highlighted Mr. Nadler’s bogarting of the spotlight.

Mr. Schiff could be heard saying “Jerry … Jerry … Jerry … ” as Mr. Nadler ran past him to take the lectern.

• At an event celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez complained this way, as reported by Mediaite:

“I wanted to go back to what you said about our ‘left party.’ We don’t have a left party in the United States,” declared Ocasio-Cortez. “The Democratic Party is not a left party. The Democratic Party is a center or center-conservative party.

“We can’t even get a floor vote on Medicare For All. Not even a floor vote that gets voted down. We can’t even get a vote on it. So this is not a left party,” she continued, adding, “There are left members inside the Democratic Party that are working to try to make that shift happen.”

• Ocasio-Cortez has also accused Pelosi of racism, saying,

“When these comments (of Pelosi’s) first started, I kind of thought that she was keeping the progressive flank at more of an arm’s distance in order to protect more moderate members, which I understood,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Washington Post.

“But the persistent singling out … it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful … the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color,” she added.

And as that comment indicates, AOC and her “Squad” of leftists are ardent defenders of identity politics, which, as noted in this space many times, is the political descendant of the original identity politics — slavery and segregation — in which every American is supposed to be judged by skin color. In short, the far Left continues its tradition of being steeped in racism.

• Speaking of the racism of identity politics, over at the Daily Caller, Josh Wagoner, creative director at Tomahawk Strategies, noted correctly,

Democrats who speak out against identity agendas are ostracized by the radicals in their party. It has become so deeply interwoven with their party platform that it cannot be stopped, nor does it have the capacity to stop.

• And finally, there are in fact Democrats who are starting to panic over the push toward outright socialism. Over at the Wall Street Journal, William A. Galston, a former domestic policy adviser to President Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program and Wall Street Journal columnist, headlined his fear this way:

Stop Bernie Sanders Now

The socialist senator’s extreme positions will lead to Democratic disaster in November.

Galston predicted that the nomination by Democrats of Socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders would spell “an epic disaster for Democrats and the country.”

One could go on — and on and on — with examples like this. But it is clear that whether taken individually or collectively, the struggles revealed in these incidents illustrates one serious fact: The American Left is in the process of attempting suicide.

It has become a sewer of petulance, anti-Semitism, racism, socialism, and a Stalinesque political correctness. This so discredits their candidates for office from the presidency on down, not to mention their allies in institutions ranging from the media to academia and beyond, that they will never be trusted with responsible governance again. At least not until they stop behaving like a cross between a five-year-old with a temper tantrum (Pelosi), a communist-loving socialist (Sanders), and an identity-politics ideologue determined to divide and judge everyone and everything in America by race and skin color (Ocasio-Cortez and her “Squad”).

Meanwhile, a triumphant President Trump, his polls surging after the impeachment witch hunt, the economy roaring, cruises to a potential landslide reelection victory as the Democrats self-immolate.

In the words of that Napoleon maxim: Never interfere with the enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself.

Jeffrey Lord
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
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