The panicked attempts to move Joe Biden off center stage in
the Democratic Party continued last Tuesday night as media commentary centered
on the “new star” of the left, Elizabeth Warren — described
by CNN as “now a front runner” as though she had previously been an
afterthought like Robert Francis O’Rourke or Amy Klobuchar. We also saw the
confirmation of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the new power and kingmaker in the Democratic
Party, thanks to reports of her plan
to endorse Bernie Sanders and drag the rest of her sorry “squad” along with
her.
Warren’s rise to prominence at Biden’s expense lends
credence to the idea that the “Trump blackmailed Ukraine” foolishness is the product
of a whistleblower with professional
ties to a Democratic candidate, as the intelligence community’s inspector general
recently said in Congressional testimony. This mischief has dual purpose: It
undermines the president while weakening Biden, whose self-confessed blackmail
threat to Ukraine’s government over its investigation of his son Hunter’s
corrupt practices there will receive greater attention in any proceeding
against Trump. An evil move but a clever one.
According to Nate Silver’s polling organization Five
Thirty-Eight, Warren scored just above average on the performance/likeability
trend line, with Pete Buttigieg and Sanders; Biden was below the line, with
Kamela Harris and Cory Booker. Tulsi
Gabbard was in the lowest and leftmost position; it’s doubtful she’ll continue
much longer.
What were we promised by the men and women who would be
president? Much more than putting an end to Donald Trump.
Most will rejoin the ineffective but crippling Paris Climate
Accord. Klobuchar will do it on day one. A return to Obama-era
emissions standards and gas mileage mandates will follow.Harris
will do away with Trump’s tax cuts and shut
down “for-profit prisons.” She doesn’t say where their prisoners will go. Perhaps
to San Francisco, whose Rep.
Nancy Pelosi thinks walls are “immoral.”
Booker wants to tighten restrictions on the sale of
firearms, decriminalize marijuana federally and make DACA recipients citizens. Buttigieg
wants to eliminate the Electoral College.
There was much more, from the charmingly loony to the totalitarian.
But it all comes down to this: If elected, a Democrat will raise your taxes,
take away your health care and your firearms, limit your ability to speak your
mind. Any Democrat will open our borders, destroy our economy in vain search
for an environment without carbon dioxide, pile on regulations and remake
American culture beyond recognition. We know this because they’ve told us they
will. Each and every one of them thinks that’s exactly what most Americans
want. What they haven’t said is that all this will make us poorer, more divided
and less safe — save for those rich and well-connected enough to rent politicians
to protect their interests.
Their penultimate goal is the eradication of Donald Trump.
Not just his removal from office in an attempt to reverse the election of 2016;
that’s just the first step. Afterward, he and his family must be destroyed by
our politicized federal judiciary, and their remains scattered to the winds as
a warning to anyone in the future who has the effrontery to challenge the
political oligarchy and their allies in the Washington bureaucracy and national
media. Americans must be persuaded that, to use a phrase familiar to some,
“resistance is futile.”
Every Democratic candidate has indicated that afterward they
will work to remake the country into an earthly paradise in which capitalism
will cease, but every need will be addressed; every wrong, real or imagined,
righted; every wish fulfilled. A few, like Buttigieg, might have a momentary
flash of reason and ask how all this will be done when it will require more
money than the nation has. But none has yet bothered to reflect that no society
on Earth has even come within shouting distance of the Socialist pipe dream
they are all selling. Not the 19th century French Syndicalists nor their
small-scale counterparts in various communes in this country and Europe. Not
the Russian Marxists nor the Chinese who followed them. Not the hermit kingdoms
of Albania or North Korea. Not Cuba. Not Venezuela. Not even contemporary
Scandinavian countries, where robust capitalist economies fund ample social
spending. To insist, in light of this abbreviated list of spectacular failures,
that they will succeed seems the height of egoism.
Which we should consider carefully, lest in the fury of the moment we allow ourselves to be persuaded to rush off a cliff.
Morgan Liddick’s column “On Your Right” publishes Tuesdays in the Summit Daily News. Liddick spent 27 years working for the U.S. Foreign Service, primarily living abroad. He also spent 12 years teaching U.S. history and Western civilization at community colleges in Colorado and Texas. He lived in Summit County as recently as 2015. Contact him at mcliddick@hotmail.com.