Posts tagged as “Democratic Party”

Because of Racialist Thinking, Dems Like Biden Were Slow to Recognize and Confront the Coronavirus

Because of Racialist Thinking, Dems Like Biden Were Slow to Recognize and Confront the Coronavirus

By John R Guardiano on April 23, 2020

Ellen, one of my most loyal readers, says I make an unfair assumption when, in my last post, I wrote:

What’s more, it is highly doubtful that Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, or any other Democratic presidential wannabe would have responded any earlier or more effectively [to the coronavirus pandemic], given their obsession with “racism,” “bigotry,” and “xenophobia.”

This obsession likely would have prevented a Democratic president from acknowledging Chinese culpability early on and then confronting China.

But as I pointed out in the piece, I don’t think this requires any great leap of faith or logic, given what Biden, Sanders, and other leading Democratic officeholders said (and did not say) when the coronavirus first emerged as a public health concern here in the United States—and “given the Democrats’ obsession with ‘racism,’ ‘bigotry,’ and ‘xenophobia.’”

I should have included that first italicized thought in the piece, and have since updated the post accordingly. Still, even without that specific thought, the argument—and the evidence—is there, I think.

Democrats MIA. Simply put, back in January and February, when it became increasingly apparent that the coronavirus was a ticking time bomb waiting to happen, top Democrats, like Trump, were slow to recognize the problem. Dave Seminara observes in the Wall Street Journal, for instance, that:

Democratic candidates held five televised debates, lasting nearly 11 hours from Jan. 14 through March 15. They offered no policy proposals that haven’t already been enacted and said little about the virus in the four events in January and February…

At no point during any of the debates did a Democratic candidate suggest that the country should have been locked down or taken other social-distancing measures sooner.

As Arthur Conan Doyle observed: “It is easy to be wise after the event.”

On the other hand, it it is true that, as Tony Blinken observes, Biden said this in the Feb. 25, 2020, Democratic presidential debate:

I would be on the phone with China and making it clear: “We are going to need to be in your country. You have to be open; you have to be clear; we have to know what’s going on. We have to be there with you.” And insist on it—and insist, insist, insist.

Blinken is Biden’s senior foreign policy adviser. He served as Deputy Secretary of State and Deputy National Security Adviser for Obama.

In this Biden campaign video, Blinken makes a compelling indictment of Trump for being soft on China. However, his case for Biden’s prescience re: the coronavirus is much weaker.

Yes, Biden made this one tough comment about insisting on access to China. However, to the best of my knowledge, it is one comment made in isolation, and it lacks follow-through in anything else Biden has said.

Moreover, a month before Biden sounded off (once) against China, Trump already had established his coronavirus task force, while declaring COVID-19 a public health emergency.

Trump already had imposed his so-called China travel ban; and, two days earlier (Feb. 23), he had requested a $2.5 billion supplemental specifically to combat the coronavirus.

Biden, meanwhile, reports Robert C. O’Brien in the Wall Street Journal

criticized the president’s “xenophobia” and “fear-mongering.” He stressed that “diseases have no borders.” It took until April 3 for Mr. Biden to do a 180 and come out in support of the president’s travel restriction.

O’Brien is Trump’s National Security Adviser.

Democrats’ obsession with “racism,” “bigotry,” and “xenophobia” is a real problem: it distorts their thinking and prevents them from seeing clearly looming threats, both domestically and internationally.

And even the toughest-minded Democrats can’t help but be adversely affected because they have to work within the confines of a political party obsessed with, and paralyzed by, racialist thinking and racialist modes of analysis.

Note, for instance, that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s first response was to attack Trump’s China travel restrictions as “just an excuse [for the president] to further his ongoing war against immigrants.”

Biden, moreover, bizarrely is being accused now of “racism” and “xenophobia” because of a perfectly legitimate campaign ad that says Trump “rolled over for the Chinese.”

Massachusetts Democrat Seth Moulton, likewise, withdrew his support of a bipartisan congressional resolution condemning China’s coronavirus response “following criticism that it played in President Donald Trump’s attempts to blame China for the global pandemic,” reports Boston.com.

Moulton is a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War and a promising national security hawk within the Democratic Party. Yet, even he felt compelled to apologize (!) for supporting this bipartisan Congressional resolution condemning China’s communist dictatorial regime.

Incredible—but, sadly, unsurprising. Moulton faces a “progressive” primary challenge and knows he must toe the line. The far left, after all, rules the Democratic Party and composes the lyrics which Moulton, Biden, and other center-left Dems must sing—or else.

Then, of course, there is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who downplayed the threat of the coronavirus during a Feb. 24 walking tour of San Francisco’s Chinatown, ostensibly because she wanted to combat… yes, you guessed it: “racism” and “discrimination”!

The bottom line: although Trump was slow to recognize that the coronavirus was a public health emergency which required strong and decisive preventative action, there is little reason to think his Democratic opponents, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, would have responded any earlier or more effectively.

And a big reason for this is the Dems’ inability to forthrightly confront threats when doing so might invite the wrath of the PC police and bring down upon them the dreaded, albeit utterly false, charge of “racism,” “bigotry,” and “xenophobia.”

Consequently, they cannot be trusted to protect America and defend Americans.

Feature photo: CNN.

Schumer’s Attack on the Supreme Court Is the Democrats’ Latest Attempt to Intimidate and Politicize the Judiciary

Schumer’s Attack on the Supreme Court Is the Democrats’ Latest Attempt to Intimidate and Politicize the Judiciary

By John R Guardiano on March 6, 2020

Most independent observers, left and right, have rightly lambasted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) for literally threatening two Supreme Court justices if they do not rule in favor of abortion rights in a case now pending before the Court.

What no one seems to have noticed, though, is that Schumer’s threat is part and parcel of the Democratic Party’s dangerous and decades-long politicization of the judiciary, and its ongoing attempt to subvert the courts to serve blatantly political ends.

Most of the Democratic presidential candidates, for instance, supported a court-packing scheme to ensure that the Supreme Court rules in a “progressive” way which ensures politically correct or desirable results.

Pete Buttigieg, for example, proposed expanding the number of justices on the court from nine to 15 through a selection process ostensibly designed to depoliticize the Court, but which, in reality, is itself highly politicized.

Joe Biden, who will be the Democratic presidential nominee, says he’s opposed to a Court-packing scheme. Yet, he nonetheless pledges to subject his Court appointments to a political litmus test in which would-be justices must affirm their commitment to Roe-v.-Wade, abortion rights, and other left-wing, “progressive” political goals.

Politicization. This is, sadly, unsurprising. The attempt to politicize the courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, has reached a fever pitch on the left, with well-funded left-wing groups making this a high priority.

The left’s attack on the independence and integrity of the judiciary is also dangerous. This “is something we recognize as a banana-republic tactic when we see it in other countries,” writes National Review’s Dan McLaughlin. “Court-packing,” he notes,

is a Rubicon we should dread to cross. It last appeared on the national agenda in 1937, the high-water mark of one-party federal government at home and ideological authoritarianism around the globe.

Even then, it was roundly rejected by the American body politic. In one swoop, it would irreparably destroy the American tradition of judicial independence of the political branches.

In short order, this would end the American experiment of the rule of law and a government of separated and limited powers.

But Democrats and the left care little for what they clearly consider to be Constitutional niceties. What matters to them are results.

And, if they cannot achieve their desired political ends through the legislative branch of government, as the Constitution prescribes, then they will seek redress in the judiciary and the courts.

This has been happening for decades, as Democrats and the left have short-circuited the democratic process to achieve political results in the courts that they never could have achieved—or would have achieved more slowly and incrementally—in Congress and the state legislatures.

However, the left’s grip on the judiciary, and the Supreme Court in particular, is threatened now with the appointments of a new generation of originalist justices and judges who have a more modest and limited view of the judiciary’s role in American political life.

Indeed, as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, famously put it in his 2005 Congressional confirmation hearing:

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role.

Democrats and the left, though, don’t view the Court’s role as limited; they view it as supreme, at least if it is pursuing a left-wing political agenda. Consequently, they are positively apoplectic that they are losing their grip on the judiciary.

That’s why they went to war over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, deploying mob intimidation tactics that we more often see in a banana-republic, not a mature and modern democracy.

Justice Kavanaugh, of course, and his colleague Justice Gorsuch, are the Court’s newest members; they were appointed by President Trump; and they have yet to fully rule on a host of matters, including but not limited to, abortion.

Sen. Schumer is not a stupid man. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and he boasts of achieving a perfect score on his SATs. He knew exactly what he was doing: He was laying down a marker for these new justices, and letting them know that they had better rule in politically correct fashion—or else.

Schumer has since apologized, but the damage to the rule of law and the integrity of our political and legal institutions already has been done. Democrats and the left have put the justices, and the judiciary more generally, on notice:

If you do not hew to the “progressive” political agenda, “you will pay the price,” as Schumer put it. “You won’t know what hit you,” and you will reap “the whirlwind.” This is frightening talk, made all the more dangerous because of the mob intimidation tactics sanctioned and encouraged by Democrats and the left.

And what makes these remarks all the more frightening is the spate of mass shootings in recent years by deranged individuals with political axes to grind.

It was only three years ago, after all, that a nut with a manifest hatred for Republicans almost wiped out the entire House Republican leadership and some two dozen GOP congressmen.

Unsurprising. Unfortunately, we should not be surprised by Schumer’s dangerous attempt to cow and intimidate the Supreme Court’s newest justices.

Democrats and the left have long made it their life’s political work to capture the judiciary and to use the courts for blatantly political purposes. And, to a disconcerting extent, they have been successful.

But with Trump’s appointment of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Court, that project is now threatened, and Democrats and the left are lashing out. Indeed, Schumer’s condemnable outburst wasn’t their first such attack and, sadly, it won’t be their last.

Feature photo credit: News Thud.

As the So-Called Public Option Shows, There Are No Moderate Democratic Presidential Candidates

As the So-Called Public Option Shows, There Are No Moderate Democratic Presidential Candidates

By John R Guardiano on January 23, 2020

The media typically portray the Democratic Party primary contest as a race between far-left “progressives,” such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and more “moderate” candidates such as Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and Peter Buttigieg. But this divide reflects stylistic and personality differences more than it does genuine differences in politics and policy.

In truth, the Democratic presidential candidates are all frighteningly progressive or left-wing. They really don’t have any substantive disagreements.

In fact, the one big disagreement that they ostensibly do have—on health insurance, and whether to provide “Medicare for All”(Sanders and Warren) or just “Medicare for All Who Want It” via a “public option” (Biden, Klobuchar, and Buttigieg)—turns out to be a complete ruse.

A so-called public option “would increase the federal deficit dramatically and destabilize the market for private health insurance, threatening health-care quality and choice,” reports Lanhee Chen in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“Some 123 million people—roughly 1 in 3 Americans—he notes, would be enrolled in the public option by 2025, broadly displacing existing insurance.”

In other words, the “public option” is just a more politically palatable way of displacing private-sector health insurance with a “single-payer” government monopoly over time. Sanders and Warren would eliminate private-sector health insurance proudly and openly; Biden, Klobuchar, and Buttigieg would do so more discreetly and stealthily.

But the end result would be the same: a government monopoly on the health insurance market and the elimination of choice and competition in health care.

To progressives who distrust markets and love big government, this might sound good. What’s not to like?! they might say. The problem is that a government monopoly will result in skyrocketing and unsustainable costs and deteriorating healthcare for patients and consumers. Chen explains:

“Many health-care providers would suffer a dramatic drop in income, while at the same time experiencing greater demand for their services.

“Longer wait times and narrower provider networks would likely follow for those enrolled in the public option, harming patients’ health and reducing consumer choice.

“Declines in provider payments would also affect investment decisions by hospitals and may lead to fewer new doctors and other medical providers…

“We estimate that federal spending on the public option would exceed total military spending by 2042 and match combined spending on Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and ACA [the Affordable Care Act or ‘ObamaCare’] subsidies by 2049.

“In the latter year the public option would become the third most expensive government program, behind only Medicare and Social Security. The public option alone would raise the federal debt by 30% of gross domestic product over the next 30 years.”

And good luck with financing this disastrous scheme. Chen estimates that “if tax increases to pay for a politically realistic public option were limited to high-income filers, the top marginal rate would have to rise from the current 37% to 73% in 2049—a level not seen since the 1960s.

“Such large rate increases,” he observes, “would undoubtedly have [adverse] economic effects, causing revenue to fall short of our static estimates.”

In short, there is nothing “moderate” or reasonable about the so-called public option. It is a radical and dangerous idea that will wreak havoc in the health insurance market and lead to the elimination of private-sector health insurance.

America deserves better and American voters deserve the truth about the Democrats now running for president: There’s not a moderate in the bunch. They are all far-left progressives now.

Feature photo/illustration credit: Lydia Zuraw/California Healthline illustration; Getty Images, via California Healthline.

Vladimir Putin Is More Focused on Economic Growth Than the Dem Presidential Candidates

Vladimir Putin Is More Focused on Economic Growth Than the Dem Presidential Candidates

By John R Guardiano on January 15, 2020

If you want to get a sense of how backward and upside down our politics has become, juxtapose these two events: yesterday’s Democratic Presidential debate and today’s speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin on the state of the Russian Federation.

The Democratic Presidential candidates talked about their myriad plans to grow the size and scope of government; yet, the words economic growth never once left their lips. But in the absence of robust economic growth, it is impossible to see how these Dem presidential wanna-bees could finance their costly schemes to create new and vast federal entitlements such as “Medicare for All.”

“‘We are literally talking about increases in government spending that would double the size of government as a share of gross domestic product,” Maya MacGuineas told CNN reporter Ron Brownstein. Brownstein and MacGuineas calculate that Sanders is proposing an astronomical $30 trillion to $60 trillion in new spending over the next 10 years.

MacGuinease is “President of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit group that advocates [for] reducing federal deficits.”

Admittedly, Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren) may be in a league of their own when it comes to making government huge again. But the rest of the Democratic field isn’t far behind, truth be told. They all want to make the government much bigger and more dominant vis-a-vis the private sector. Economic growth to them is just assumed and taken as a given

Not so for Putin, who, according to CNBC, told the Russian people:

“High economic growth rates are essential. This is the only way to overcome poverty and ensure steady and perceptible increases in income. This is the key to success.

“[By] 2021, Russia’s economic growth rate must exceed 3% and stay above the global average afterwards. This objective should not be discarded,” he said.

Putin said that areas to focus on were labor productivity, improving Russia’s business climate, removing ‘infrastructural constraints for economic development’ and lastly, “training modern personnel.”

Clearly, Putin is more focused on economic growth than the Democratic presidential candidates! The Russian dictator realizes that, unless his country’s economy grows much more rapidly than it is now, all of his dreams and aspirations for a greater, imperial Russia are for naught.

Would that Bernie, Elizabeth, Pete, and Joe all had similar situational awareness and understanding.