About That ‘Blue Wave’
By Conrad Black
October 24, 2018 11:35 AM
Remember the Democrats’ predictions of a scorched earth in 2016?
As we enter the last two weeks of the midterm-election campaigns, the Democratic claims of a blue wave have given way to stark resignation that President Trump will add from two to five senators to the existing slender Republican majority, and that the House of Representatives will be a squeaker. This is the same trajectory that afflicted the Democratic promises of “scorched earth†and total obstruction nearly two years ago, and the following year of incessant repetitions that impeachment was imminent, and that collusion with Russia and the Trump campaign probable.
The same happened to the fatuous conjuration that we had a “constitutional crisis†because the president was clearly mentally incompetent in the terms of the 25th Amendment. Only the Democrats’ hammerlock on the traditional national political media and its uniform hostility to Trump has allowed the Democrats to remain in contention for a partially successful result in November. The justified exhilaration of breaking the nonwhite barrier in electing an African-American president in 2008 was tarnished by the failure of President Obama’s high-tax, highly regulated economic policy, preaching resignation to sluggish economic growth; and by the failure of his pacifistic, semi-isolationist foreign policy. And apart from that evanescent post-electoral exhilaration, the Democrats have had no policy since the bloom came off the Clinton rose in the Lewinsky affair, except to proclaim from the rooftops that they are neither George W. Bush nor Donald Trump.
I will not descend to the guilt by association that the Democrats have been wallowing in these many years: Obama implied that anyone who didn’t like his Iran nuclear giveaway wanted to go to war, and that any reservation about political correctness was a smokescreen for racism, homophobia, misogyny, miscellaneous bigotry, and what Kafka called “nameless crimes.†It is not fair to say that the Democrats as a party foment violence and incivility as a tactic. However, it is a reasonable observation that almost all those who incite and commit acts of political incivility prefer the Democrats to the Republicans and are generally engaged in attacking and harassing Republicans and not Democrats. From the lunatic who almost killed Republican congressman Scalise to the obnoxious idiots who heckled Henry Kissinger at New York University last week (41 years after he retired from government) and tried to disrupt the Kavanaugh hearings, to spontaneous pests who beset White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell as they attempted to eat their dinners in restaurants in the past couple of months, all the forces of incivility are anti-Republican. As Democrats are never bothered in this way (other than one outburst of intra-Democratic shouting at a Nancy Pelosi constituents’ meeting some months ago), it may safely be inferred that the partisans of the Democrats are the authors of all these infantile outrages. Hillary Clinton said as much last week when she unctuously assured viewers that the way to “restore civility†is to elect Democratic congressional majorities.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/democrats-election-hopes-blue-wave-fading/
