by Jeffery Rendall
It’s human nature…try thinking of a sporting event where you’re supposed to root for one side but secretly hoped the opposing team prevailed on the scoreboard. Or if you’ve watched those super hero movies, did you ever wish the bad guy won in the end?
We’re all guilty of low-level treason at some point in our lives. I confess to occasionally (and quietly) pulling for my son’s little league baseball foes if a loss meant being able to exit what would turn into an excruciating day-long tournament stay. I also admit having once favored my high school’s nemesis when a loss equated to finishing the season (and the drudgery that goes along with serving as a practice dummy every day yet never seeing any game time).
Many a professional team has been accused of “tanking it” when a draft position was at stake, too. Every year at the end of the NFL season, for example, there are typically two or three squads in contention for the top pick. Everyone denies it, but deep down are fans hoping their team will lose so they’ll “win” the chance to select player X?
Loyalties are certainly fungible when the right opportunities arise. But is the same true in politics?
It’s a plausible theory when examining the Democrats’ recent self-destructive behavior. The liberal minority party is doing an awful lot of stupid things of late, moves so blatantly foolhardy it almost appears they’re tryingto lose in November – and their followers are hoping for it too.
Take the ongoing intra-party debate over who should lead the House. The media hoots and hollers at the obvious dissention within the GOP ranks, but compared with the Democrats, Republicans actually act like peas in a pod. The Democrats’ problems center on the person of Nancy Pelosi. Should she stay or should she go?
Laura Barrón-López wrote at the Washington Examiner, “For House Democrats, the August recess was all about November. After eight years in the minority, Democrats are in their best position to retake the House, and they’re trying not to mess it up.
“But the August recess was also about Democrats’ longtime leader: Nancy Pelosi. Aware of the threat to her 16-year reign, Pelosi made the media rounds, providing interviews to the New York Times, Associated Press and NPR. She blasted out op-eds and articles about her tenure to her members, reminding them why she’s needed at the helm. And she’s raised nearly $91 million for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee this cycle, CNN reported in August.
“Simultaneously, one of her deputies, Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., began a campaign of his own, pitching himself as a potential ‘bridge’ leader should Pelosi fall short of the votes needed to become speaker. Some see Clyburn’s move as an attempt to push House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., out of the picture. Hoyer’s long presented himself as a possible bridge to the new generation. And others speculated Clyburn’s posturing is a signal from the Congressional Black Caucus that it expects to be included in any conversation about a new leader.”
At the outset can we stipulate Pelosi has done everything Democrats require of a leader and should therefore be permitted to stay as long as she likes? Talk about rooting for the other team…
Democrats instinctively expect their leaders to act atrociously towards any and all Republicans (and their proposals) and represent the true embodiment of leftist “resistance” as well as constitute the less-than-loyal opposition. With perhaps the exception of Pelosi’s kind words after Republican Rep. Steve Scalise was heinously shot (in June a year ago), the liberal California doyenne has been the epitome of a Democrat scourge of all things GOP.
What more could any Democrat ask for than Pelosi speaking on the House floor for hours begging for amnesty for illegal aliens, advocating big government at every turn, savaging the military whenever convenient, demagoguing tax cuts as “only for the rich” (and “crumbs”), feverishly defending Planned Parenthood and universal abortion on demand, standing up for same-sex marriage as a constitutional “right”, suggesting Trump is a racist and neo-Nazi sympathizer and downplaying the threat of unchecked Muslim immigration into the country?
Put another way, Pelosi is the status quo-loving Republican establishment’s partner and best pal! They probably all meet behind closed doors, throw back a few glasses of chardonnay, hammer out their swamp preservation strategies as a team and then go talk to the cameras (and pretend to hate each other, you’ve got to love it).
Further, once in a blue moon Pelosi feigns making nice with President Donald Trump only to surreptitiously stick pins in his voodoo doll when he’s safely out of sight. Just the other day Nancy all-but accused Vice President Mike Pence of being the pen behind the Trump-bashing “anonymous” New York Times op-ed. Do you think it was an accident she’d mention such a thing? Nope – ‘ol Nancy’s laying the groundwork for impeaching Pence when her and her kind are done with dispatching Trump.
Pelosi also found the perfect Democrat face to manage the party’s treachery on the senseless Robert Mueller “Russian collusion” investigation — none other than fellow California Rep. Adam “Sleazy” Schiff. Schiff may be small in stature but he’s all mouth in action — and he employs his orifice to champion the Obama deep state’s biggest offenders (such as former FBI Director James Comey and the Justice Department’s disgraced Andrew McCabe).
Lies roll off Schiff’s tongue like a rollercoaster screaming down an incline. Once he starts fibbing there’s no stopping him – no nod to civility, comity or the bounds of truth. How can Schiff sleep at night?
Perhaps it’s because he realizes Pelosi’s got his back. The 16-year Democrat leader will go to the mat for any of her caucus members and they understand she willfully takes much of the incoming flak from those fed up with Democrat excesses. Not only that, Pelosi raises and doles out tons of money to Democrat office-seekers, both incumbents and first-timers. Coming from a bluer-than-blue San Francisco area district Pelosi never worries about resources for her own campaigns – and she can buy lots of loyalty with her stash.
Democrats don’t have anyone credible waiting in the wings to replace Pelosi either. In her article Barrón-López mentioned Jim Clyburn as a “bridge” candidate… but bridge to what? Clyburn’s main claim to next-in-line status is the color of his skin (and prominent membership in the Congressional Black Caucus). There’s also rumors Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan is pondering another challenge to Pelosi’s reign — but do you think Dems would accept another Ryan as Speaker?
Wouldn’t their simple-minded backers get confused and think they’d chosen a Republican instead?
Here’s thinking Democrats will preserve Pelosi’s power if the “blue wave” actually forms and they steal back the House majority. They’re dumb enough to make it reality.
How to be so sure? These days Democrats hold up American flag-dissing former quarterback Colin Kaepernick as some sort of liberty-loving crusader for minority rights. It’s a political error of epic proportions. Juan Williams wrote the other day at The Hill, “The biggest loser for the GOP messaging plan is turning out to be President Trump’s rants about those NFL players who kneeled during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice, including the fatal shootings of unarmed black people.
“For two years, Trump has stoked racial divisions by stirring his overwhelmingly white rallies — calling out team owners for not punishing the mostly black players for continuing Colin Kaepernick’s protest…”
Williams provides several examples of Republican politicians (Gov. Scott Walker, Sen. Ted Cruz, etc.) allegedly being beaten back on the Kaepernick flag-protest issue as though the country’s suddenly turned on the stars and stripes and now identifies with a handful of ball players and their ultra-leftwing “protests” before football games. Judging by the furious rush to dump Nike stock after the company introduced Kaepernick as its spokesman, reaction is just the opposite of what Juan insisted.
By waxing poetic on Kaepernick it’s almost as though Williams secretly cheers for the other team. We know what that’s like, don’t we? We accept his support too!
As further evidence America is now lovin’ ol’ Colin K. Williams pointed to the standing ovation he (and fellow flag-trasher and out-of-work former 49ers teammate Eric Reed) received at the U.S. Open Tennis tournament this past weekend (and the words of support he received afterwards from tennis legend Serena Williams). Juan seemed proud that the mostly white crowd so warmly embraced Kaepernick and suggested it indicates times are changing in the U.S. of A.
Hardly. The U.S. Open is played in New York City proper and no doubt most of the patrons are bigtime liberal Democrat supporters to begin with. These gutless people would applaud the flushing of a toilet if a leftist cultural figure convinced them the water represented the spiraling downward of traditional America and Donald Trump’s presidency. Tennis fans (who probably paid hundreds or thousands of dollars per ticket to watch two women beat a ball back and forth across a net for hours) are the essence of non-“deplorables.”
Send Kaepernick and Reed to a NASCAR event and see how many people stand and applaud their America-savaging gestures. Hmph!
For some reason Williams doesn’t think the Kaepernick thing will play in this year’s election and even cited a Republican establishmentarian’s opinion to bolster his contention, reporting, “’I can’t imagine there is a single voter who will cast a ballot exclusively on the issue of NFL kneeling,’ Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist and former Chief of Staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), told BuzzFeed last week.
“At best, Holmes thinks attacking the players might work ‘against liberals who are trying to make cultural inroads into a conservative electorate.’”
No duh. NFL kneeling won’t decide anyone’s votes but it might get them angry enough to drag themselves off the couch and to the polls to cast a ballot. That’s all Trump and Republicans would ask for anyway – so yes, by all means, please Democrats, pretty please put Kaepernick’s kneeling act out front in your campaign commercials.
Perhaps by flaunting liberal Hollywood celebrities and brainlessly politicized athletes Democrats believe they’re attracting persuadable people to their cause. It’s almost like a tortured version of the mathematical transitive property: if Serena Williams is the greatest woman tennis player of all time… and she likes Colin Kaepernick… then anyone who’s ever played or watched tennis will take to Kaepernick too! Right? And if Democrats promote Kaepernick’s cause then those new tennis-loving folks will pull the lever for Democrat candidates!
(For the conceptually challenged, it’s Serena Williams = Colin Kaepernick = tennis player Democrat votes.)
Wow, who needs consultants when you’ve got such easy logic! The problem is Americans love winners – and Serena Williams is certainly that – but they don’t appreciate mediocre borderline failures like Colin Kaepernick telling them to feel guilty for fancying the American flag.
Or again, maybe Democrats are just covertly rooting for Republicans and don’t want to acknowledge it. Trump’s defied conventional wisdom to the point where people have a hard time divulging they like him.
Victor Davis Hanson wrote at National Review, “[A] president came along with no prior investment in the economic and foreign-policy establishment, and apparently no desire to create any, or to worry much about his own ignorance of past conventional wisdom. And so in breakneck speed he began cancelling deals, renegotiating asymmetrical agreements, and questioning protocols of decades past — and he did so without adopting the comportment of past presidents and the advice of either the administrative state or the Washington political-media establishment…
“…Even the recent anonymous New York Times op-ed author offered no real explanations of what exactly Trump has done wrong that would warrant anti-democratic removal other than to concede that Trump has done things that most felt were long overdue. And he made changes in a rude and uncouth manner that the establishment did not like — just as a nude emperor in invisible clothes does not like it when an outsider observes that he is naked.”
Democrats are busy altering the status quo too – though the radicalized changes they’re pushing cut against the grain of thousands of years of religion and tradition. Through political correctness they chastise dissenters – it makes for pretty angry people.
Trump does the opposite – he stands up for the flag and the “forgotten Americans” in regions of the country the ruling elites stopped thinking about long ago. There’s never any question which “team” the president roots for; it’s the one with hands over their hearts and tears of love in their eyes.
