Democrats' "pure race politics at its worst!"

In USA Today, Glenn Reynolds has written an opinion piece asking and answering the question, Do Black lives matter to Democrats?

Do Black lives matter to Democrats? As Tim Alberta recently reported, a lot of Black voters think the answer is no. That may explain why the Democrats are blocking the GOP justice reform bill in the Senate: With Black voters already discouraged, Democrats don’t want them to get the idea that Republicans may have something to offer.

Alberta’s reporting, in Politico, is striking. At the invitation of a local African-American politico, he spent an afternoon with a bunch of middle-class Black voters outside Detroit. He found they were disappointed in the Democrats, thought nothing much had changed for them during the Obama presidency, and expected Trump to win even though they planned to vote for Biden themselves.

As a woman named Ursura Moore observed: “Some people thought just because we had a Black president, he was going to make things better for Black people — he was going to free Black prisoners, wipe out Black debt. That was just ignorance. But the disappointment some of us felt with Obama — more so with the Democratic Party —that was real. And it hasn’t gone away. So, people start to wonder whether the outcome even matters. They wonder whether they should bother voting at all.”

Eric Benjamin commented: “Biden’s a politician, same as the rest of them, same as Trump. But at least with Trump you know where he stands,” he said. “If we were sitting here, me and you, and you’re pretending we’re friends, but then behind my back, you act like you don’t even know me, that’s the worst. I’d much rather you just tell me to my face that we’re not friends. That’s Trump. I respect that. The Democrats always be acting like we’re friends.”

And, most damningly, Sherry Gay-Dagnogo said: “We’re always the f------ help! And I’m tired of being the help!” she cried. “Don’t wait until it’s an election year, until you’re in trouble, to come to us and ask for help saving your a--. They always say it will be different after the next election. But it never is. And we’re sick of it.”

Even activists like Shaun King are noticing that “systemic racism” seems to happen mostly in Democratic-controlled cities and states: “Democrats, from top to bottom, are running the cities with the worst police brutality in America right now. We voted for them.”

So now comes President Donald Trump — who’s already successfully pushed a criminal-justice reform package, the First Step Act, with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, and already issued an executive order limiting police chokeholds and other abusive behavior that won praise even from Van Jones — and the Democrats are terrified that he might deliver a major reform bill in Congress before the election, and they can’t have that. Better that nothing should happen than that Black voters might see Trump as performing where the Democrats — even when they controlled the White House and had a supermajority in Congress — never did.

In the words of Black Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina: "They cannot allow this party to be seen as a party that reaches out to all communities in this nation.”

So Scott’s bill can’t pass. The bill would make lynching a federal crime. It would also place stringent reporting requirements on so-called “no-knock” raids, and tie federal grants to the elimination of police chokeholds like the one that killed George Floyd. It would also use grants to encourage the use of police bodycams.

As Washington Post columnist Mark Thiessen put it, If Democrats cared about police reform, they would have advanced Tim Scott’s bill. He called the Democrats’ move “shameful,” and observed: “If Democrats cared about getting something done, they would have allowed the Senate to move forward and sought to amend Scott’s bill on the floor. There was plenty of basis for compromise. Scott’s legislation had already incorporated a number of Democratic proposals.” Yeah, it could do more — I’d favor an end to “qualified immunity” from lawsuits for police officers and other government officials, but I very much doubt that would command a majority, even among Democrats. And the Democrats’ motives are not pure. As Scott notes, they're ”pure race politics at its worst.”

And there’s more. Not only did the Democrats block debate on the bill, but Scott has been subjected to racial slurs — Sen. Dick Durbin used the word ”token” to describe Scott’s bill, a racial code word that Scott called out. And Democrat-supporting callers to Scott's office are subjecting him to racial slurs and threats and calling him a “sellout.” That for pushing a revolutionary piece of reform legislation.

So do Black lives matter to Democrats? Not if there are votes at stake, apparently. Bear that in mind between now and November.

Four bad days in February

In Town Hall, Victor Davis Hanson writes about four bad days in February here.

Will she save the day?

Yes, James Wood is back on Twitter! Already he has posted something provocative!

Just for giggles, imagine this: the #IowaCauscuses were not a snafu, but an engineered “cluster muck” to keep the #Democrat field wide open. The #ImpeachmentSham was a way to air Biden’s corruption. The chaos leads to a brokered convention. Guess which drunken hag saves the day?

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) February 8, 2020

No hope.

In American Thinker, Clarice Feldman has some suggestions from Mary Poppins Perfect Piercing for a rant you can use while attending a New Year party. You can also read Ann Althouse's thoughts on Bret Stephens advice to his New York Times readers on how to defeat Trump in 2020, read what Eric Wemple had to say to Rachel Maddow, and analyze the exercise in futility of Pelosi's shampeachment. Clarice concludes that she can't think of anything the Democrats can do to help their cause.
Read it here.

Leaderless

Don Surber looks at the messages coming to America from the Democratic candidates. For example, Mayor Pete said last week he is for the decriminalization of all drugs.

For a half-century, Democrats argued that pot isn't any worse than booze. Now that they have finally won that argument in some quarters, they have moved on to it is OK to do any drugs, any time, anywhere!

Marijuana turned out to be a gateway drug after all as it will lead to legalizing cocaine. Never mind how this destroys communities and how it will eventually destroy our country. Democrats believe saying they will legalize everything may flip Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin back to blue, and so they say it.

...Democrats have no quality candidate for president. What person of any integrity wants to lead the party of poop? Even Hillary won't run. This is why their leading candidate is Joe Biden, who finished fifth in Iowa in 2008 with less than 1% of the vote. I won't say they are scraping the bottom of the barrel, but they are.

Read more here.

Pointing to broader Democrat pathologies

In the American Thinker, Fletch Daniels takes a look at why Kamala Harris's candidacy appears to be going in the wrong direction among people voting Democrat, and

One thing is clear. At least for the foreseeable future, no Democrat candidate will benefit from any connection to promoting law and order or providing safety and security for Americans. The Democrats are all in on lawlessness. Harris is collateral damage pointing to this broader Democrat pathology. This is one of many reasons none of them should be trusted with leadership of America.

Read more here.

Where the Dem candidates stand in the latest polls.

In PJ Media, Roger L. Simon tells us that Joe Biden is up 20 points over Bernie Sanders in the latest polls. Simon also tells us where other Democrat candidates are standing in the polls at present. Beto doesn't even get a mention. Read more here.

True!

"...upbeat, smug, and assured on their way to oblivion."

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness that in 2020, Democrats may

...be trapped by their own rhetoric and virtue signaling—and end up going the full McGovern in 2020.

...The rapid growth in domestic natural gas use has ensured that the United States has exceeded even most “green” European countries in meeting the now abandoned Paris Climate Accords.

U.S. energy production has all but eliminated the prior strategic stranglehold of the Persian Gulf states over U.S. Middle East policy or, for that matter, over American foreign policy itself.

Changing demography, little pushback from a younger generation of progressive secular Jews, and the socialist drift of the Democratic Party have all legitimized the idea that one can fixate on liberal and democratic Israel, one of 23 Middle Eastern countries, one of over 190 nations, and apply standards of social justice to it in a way not commensurate with criticism of totalitarian Cuba, Iran, or China—and then embed that bias within a larger progressive take on the “Palestinians.”

...anti-Semitism is a losing political issue, because it is never a static hatred. Once it begins, and is contextualized as “anti-Israel” or directed merely against larger “white privilege,” it only increases—and eventually will turn off most of the electorate. For Democrats to excise this hatred from their ranks, they would have to alienate anti-Semites. This they will not do—and thereby they will pay dearly for their appeasement.

...Apart from its abject immorality, infanticide is not a viable political position, and few politicians—many Democrats included—would wish to run in a general election condoning it.

...Will the impoverished white Tulare mechanic or the southern Ohioan custodian pay taxes for reparations for Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Spike Lee, Oprah, and Ta-Nehisi Coates?

Open borders and the end of ICE. Sanctuary cities and open borders are already hemorrhaging voters from the Democratic Party as Donald Trump proved in 2016. The news cycles almost weekly highlight yet another violent crime committed by an illegal alien, and somehow aided and abetted by the prior laxity of a sanctuary jurisdiction. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are not roundly despised by the Latino community; in fact, ICE officers are frequently Latinos themselves, and often are called into by immigrant communities to deport illegal alien gang members and criminals preying on those in their neighborhoods. Open borders and ending ICE are also not 51 percent issues—a fact that will become ever clearer as spring and summer caravans start pulling up at the southern border.

“Medicare for All.” Seniors, fairly or not, and logically or not, feel Medicare was a pact into which they paid while young in order to be eligible for payoffs they would receive when old. To open up Medicare for all will be felt by a growing Boomer retiring population as making a nearly insolvent Medicare available for none.

...Cancelation of student debt. The images of the archetypical college student have taken a hit in the progressive era of crybaby campus social justice warriors shouting down speakers, toppling statues, whining about safe spaces, microaggressions, and white-privilege obsessions.

“You owe us” taxes. A good way to lose donors and voters is to stick it to high-earners and do so with a certain bitter venom that they “owe” what they made to “us.”

...These nostrums are mostly socialist redistributionist schemes with no history of efficacy, but with ample evidence that they only impoverish and embitter, and they will return the Democrats in 2020 to 1972 and 1984—upbeat, smug, and assured on their way to oblivion.

...Barring a war or depression, the 2020 election, for all the Democrats’ effort to demonize, bleed, slander or impeach Donald Trump, will be as it always is: a Manichean choice. This time around it will be simply the Trump agenda versus socialism, as it was when an embattled Nixon claimed that 1972 was either “the silent majority” or “Woodstock Nation.”

In 1972, the Democrats fell into a Jacobin cycle as they vied to devour all but the most left-wing. In 2020 that prior effort will look counterrevolutionary—and we will see candidates say things and push agendas that we have likely never experienced before in this country.

Read more here.

Democrats' 2020 campaign platform

Also at the Ace of Spades blog, Oregon Muse writes,

"From what I've been able to tell from news reports, here is the Democrats' 2020 campaign platform in a nutshell: 'We hate you, we *really* hate Jews, we hate babies, we hate America, and we want you to starve. Now give us all your guns.'"