I&I Editorial

Much of the mainstream media coverage of Thursday night’s ABC debate between a narrowed-down field of 10 Democratic presidential candidates is focusing on who scored enough points to increase their poll numbers. Did Andrew Yang help himself by announcing his campaign is about to give “$1,000 a month for an entire year to 10 American families” who compellingly describe how they’ll use the cash? Did Julián Castro succeed in making Joe Biden look senile? And so on.

But what actually stood out, for all the claims that “the American people are so much better than this,” as Sen. Kamala Harris said, and promises to “trust the American people,” as Mayor Pete Buttigieg put it, is the contempt shown on that stage in Houston for the people’s judgment – and their character.

Who would trust a people who elected a murderer as their president? According to Castro, referring to the El Paso shooter, “a few weeks ago, a shooter drove 10 miles inspired by this president to kill people who look like me and people who look like my family. White supremacy is a growing threat to this country, and we have to root it out.”

Harris added: “Obviously he didn’t pull the trigger but he’s certainly been tweeting out the ammunition.”

Adolf Hitler may not have had his hand on the valve that released the Zyklon B gas, but motivating others to commit the actual slaughter obviously makes no one guiltier in the Nazis’ mass murders. To these assembled Democrats, President Donald Trump’s tweets are identical to the Führer’s Nuremberg Rallies.

Sen. Cory Booker, echoing Castro, said, “we know Donald Trump’s a racist.” Buttigieg, asked if “people who support President Trump and his immigration policies are racist” replied, “anyone who supports this is supporting racism.”

“A racism and violence that had long been a part of America was welcomed out into the open” was Beto O’Rourke’s description of the El Paso Walmart shooting that left 22 dead. He added: “We have a white supremacist in the White House and he poses a mortal threat to people of color all across this country.”

Presumably, Trump would like to kill the people who enjoy record high employment under his policies. Apparently, white supremacist presidents giveth and taketh away.

O’Rourke went further. “Racism in America is endemic. It is foundational. We can mark the creation of this country not at the Fourth of July, 1776, but August 20, 1619, when the first kidnapped African was brought to this country against his will and in bondage and as a slave built the greatness and the success and the wealth that neither he nor his descendants would ever be able to fully participate in and enjoy.”

So forget the fireworks and cookouts on July Fourth. Under President Beto we’ll be having mass self-flagellations the 20th day of every August.

Seeking To Lead A Country Steeped In Bigotry

Many of the Democrats called for higher pay for teachers – naturally, since the public school teachers’ unions are among the party’s biggest backers. But according to O’Rourke, those same teachers are instruments of our institutionalized racism. He claimed that in his own native state of Texas, “a 5-year-old child in kindergarten is five times as likely to be disciplined or suspended or expelled based on the color of their skin.”

So why exactly would we want to give these supposed distributors of racially motivated punishments more cash? Especially when we’ll be needing so much lucre for Beto’s plan to “sign into law a reparations bill that will allow us to address this at its foundation.”

Booker said America’s institutional racism even extends to “environmental injustice,” and of course all the candidates were outdoing each other on saving the planet from the humans who infest it. Warren promised she would “by 2028 cut all carbon emissions from new buildings. By 2030, carbon emissions from cars. And by 2035, all carbon emissions from the manufacture of electricity.”

The way to save our dying planet is apparently by killing our racist country’s economy.

There was a lot more. Harris, who can’t make up her mind on her health reform proposal, claimed: “Under my Medicare For All plan, people have the choice of a private plan or a public plan.” Maybe “Medicare For Some” would be a better name for that.

Warren seems to think she can increase China’s minimum wage, not just ours: “You want to come sell goods to American consumers? Then you’ve got to raise your standards. You’ve got to raise your labor standards.”

Buttigieg as commander in chief would telegraph to our enemies at the outset of war the date of an American surrender courtesy of a “built-in three-year sunset.”

And the education policy of Biden, the supposed moderate, sounds Orwellian: “We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want help. They don’t know quite what to do.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar happily declared of herself and her fellow presidential hopefuls that “what unites us is so much bigger than what divides us.” She’s quite right. So far to the left has this party moved that all these candidates apparently believe we have a society steeped in centuries-strong racism, that its bigoted populace elected a white supremacist as president who uses social media to engineer racially motivated mass shootings. And it all happens in a world that has just a few more years before its doom at the hands of that same society of bigots.

Self-loathing is a strange, new strategy for winning the White House, but next year will reveal whether it can work.

— Written by Thomas McArdle

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