Who Will Follow Biden Into No Man’s Land?

If Afghanistan was the worst disaster in American military history, not in terms of lives lost but of profound incompetence in planning and executing a vital military operation, last week must stand as the single greatest one-week showcase of political miscalculation in modern American history.

The administration had run on and propelled itself through its first year in office on the slogan “Build Back Better” and particularly on the multitrillion-dollar cornucopia of expanded money supply scattered among the favored causes of the Sanders Democrats. The Democrats’ most important legislative measures are the Freedom to Vote and John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Acts to assure an almost indefinite Democratic hold on the federal government by banning voter identification rules (which are popular with all groups of voters), expanding mailed and harvested ballots, and restricting voter roll updates and signature validation. These measures passed their trial run when enacted in the swing states of the 2020 election generally by state governors and courts, and not the state legislatures as required by the Constitution, supposedly to encourage voting despite the COVID pandemic.

The Democrats have also made it clear that they intend to impose no restraints at all on the influx of illegal aliens, who could total 6 to 8 million people for the current presidential term, whom the Democrats propose to permit to vote without becoming citizens (which, like much of this protracted attempted coup d’etat, is unconstitutional, if anyone still cares).

The tactical plan—though in the aftermath of its attempted application, it strains credulity that any person with an IQ as high as double figures could have imagined that it would be successful—was to attempt to observe the anniversary of the disturbances at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a manner so theatrical and evocative of ancient American concerns for political freedom that an ambiance could be confected in which the preposterous election-rigging measures before the Senate now would sweep through on a tidal wave of misguided patriotism.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), never the most riveting of interviewees, had an extended session in Statuary Hall, fielding the softest questions the lickspittles of the Democratic national political media could devise. As Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham, always lacerating when reporting on the Democrats’ sleazy antics, quipped on her nightly program, Pelosi was so boring that CNN lost 90 percent of its (comparatively small) audience and “the statues got up and left.”

The feeble basis upon which the Democrats have launched this coup is that the Republican attempt to strengthen the verification and the authenticity of ballots in a number of states that were deficient on these points in 2020 is an assault upon the right of African Americans to vote.

For those who have not acquired or have forgotten how to translate the puerile shibboleths of the Biden spokespeople, this was why there was all the hysteria about “Jim Crow on steroids.” It is inconceivable that more than one percent of qualified American voters, whatever their pigmentation, could believe such bunk. Yet Joe Biden rose, as he thought, to the tactical requirements and went to Atlanta to say that those who sided with the Republicans in these matters preferred brutal 1960s arch-segregationist Alabama sheriff Bull Connor to the late Congressman John Lewis, Alabama Governor George Wallace to Martin Luther King, and the Confederate President Jefferson Davis to the emancipator of the slaves and co-founder of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln.

This is political rhetoric and historical insight of a piece with rabidly partisan historian Douglas Brinkley comparing clearing trespassers out of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 with the liberation of the Nazi death camps in 1945, and Pelosi’s assertion that the rather commodious enclosures set up by President Obama but identified with President Trump in which the children abandoned by illegal migrants enjoyed the best lodging and best nutrition of their lives, were also reminiscent of Auschwitz.

People who know nothing about history but yet insist upon drawing absurdly ignorant and defamatory historical comparisons don’t succeed in demonizing unexceptionable current political activity; they trivialize and render ambiguous monstrous and soul-destroying atrocities of other times and countries. Comparing Trump to Hitler makes Hitler seem less bad rather than making Trump seem worse.

As last week sluggishly proceeded, it was a constant challenge to keep in mind that the subject of these frenzied verbal assaults was a series of measures conscientiously designed to assure that every eligible person could vote and that it would be much harder to steal elections than it was in the chronically uncertain conditions of November 2020. After the legislative rule changes necessary to enable Build Back Better and the vote-rigging bills failed, the Supreme Court declared most applications of the administration’s vaccine mandates to be unconstitutional.

Nothing is working and the public is deserting in millions.

I mustn’t shortchange the other participants in last week’s immense Democratic fiasco. Hillary Clinton, in a sequel to her tear-filled lamentation that she was unable to tell her mother in heaven that she had been elected president of the United States, implied, as Biden entered what appears to be a political death plunge, that she was going to have a try at it again. (Whatever America longs for, it is not a return of the Clintons.)

Tom Friedman of the New York Times, as faithful and punctual in disgorging political absurdities as the famous “Old Faithful” geyser at Yellowstone National Park, hallucinated that the addition of U.S. Representaitve Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate would produce something akin to an Israeli grand coalition government. If Cheney joined Biden, Harris, or Clinton, the effect would be to assure that the Democrats received practically no votes. If the presidential candidate was Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who was also mentioned last week, they would merely have to struggle desperately to lose by fewer than 20 million votes.

A barometer I have been watching to see when the cynicism of the media would require it to put some blue water between themselves and this foundering regime they did so much to elect is the Wall Street Journal commentator and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. It finally happened last week: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a pretty inveterate NeverTrumper, denounced Biden’s Atlanta address in stern terms and Peggy got on board: It was a “Breaking Point” and Biden had “united the majority against him.” In a famous phrase of Schiller’s, “Late you come, but still you come.” The media cheerleaders are taking to the boats.

Kamala Harris, shaken by disparagements of her habit of responding to questions with peals of laughter, and to revelations she was deemed to have negative charisma, handled the typical putty questions of a Democratic interviewer who asked if it was time to change strategies given that even the leftish Quinnipiac poll had demoted Biden down to a 33 percent approval rating. She responded with the translucent Demosthenian gem that the administration has “to continue to do what we are doing and the time to do it is every day.”

If that doesn’t rouse the Democratic Party and media out of the trenches and send them leaping up into no man’s land to face the massed artillery and machine-gun fire of the great majority of Americans who regard them as hopelessly incompetent placeholders, nothing will.