The Gang That Can't Think Straight

We can attribute it to talent or to plain ordinary hap, but Donald Trump has managed to collect a group of enemies who excel at nothing but ineptitude.  After all, he was lucky to have to run his first political campaign against an incompetent fraud. 

For someone whose relationships with women have been occasionally dodgy, Trump was lucky to run against the nation’s leading enabler of sexual harassment, a woman who rushed to the barricades to defend her husband against a credible rape charge.

Now, Victor Davis Hanson opines, Trump has been fortunate to have amassed a three headed enemy, comprised of Nancy Pelosi, the mainstream media and Joe Biden. (via Maggie’s Farm) How lucky can a guy get?

Today’s Democratic Party, having failed to understand the concept of contradiction, is railing about Trump’s failure to exercise presidential authority, all the while doing everything in their power to make it more difficult for him to exercise executive authority. It’s the gang that can’t think straight.

In Congress, it is led by a doddering Nancy Pelosi. Lionized as a practitioner of strategic politics, Pelosi is responsible for tying the country up in an impeachment charade during the time when the coronavirus was making its way around the world. After distracting the president, her party could then denounce the president for being unfocused.

Pelosi’s tactic was simple. Use the virus to destroy the Trump presidency… in the name of democracy, of course. And, let’s ignore the fact that Trump’s travel ban helped diminish the tide of virus arriving from China.

Hanson writes:

Pelosi then quickly weaponized the viral crisis in hopes that COVID-19 could do what Robert Mueller’s dream team and impeachment had not done—destroy the administration of Donald Trump before the November 2020 election. Only such an obsession explains why any sober politico would damn Trump as culpable in January for ignoring the viral dangers, while nearly a month after his necessary and controversial travel ban of January 31—that stopped perhaps 7,000 Chinese citizens entering California per day, some on direct flights from Wuhan—she was doing a photo-op tour to urge the public to get out and shop in San Francisco’s crowded Chinatown: “That’s what we’re trying to do today is to say everything is fine here“.

And then, the eminently strategic Pelosi indulged a childish act of insolent impudence after Trump’s State of the Union message. 

The night before an impeached Trump was acquitted in the Senate, and five days after Trump had controversially stopped incoming Chinese visitors, Pelosi tore up his State of the Union address before a national television audience, a level of spiteful vitriol not seen in the U.S. Congress since the years leading up to the Civil War.

Pelosi has been trying to use the crisis to advance a leftist political agenda, even holding up a rescue bill. Obstructionism has now moved to the United States Senate where Democrats are holding up another stimulus bill… because they know it will benefit Trump’s re-election.

When the Congress finally agreed to call a truce and pass a bipartisan “rescue bill” to stave off a depression and deliver some relief to millions of unemployed, Pelosi single-handedly delayed passage to insert irrelevant progressive treats into the authorization—until she was reprimanded by her own party to cease and desist.

Now, Pelosi is calling for a truth commission, the better to investigate the Trump response to the coronavirus. Again, this will tie the administration down with subpoenas and prevent it from focusing on the task at hand.

And yet, the Democrats effectively used the 9/11 commission to exculpate the Clinton administration for any responsibility for lax terrorist preparations, pinning it all on Condoleezza Rice. As it happened, commission Republicans were not smart enough to understand that the purpose of the commission was to blame them for Islamist terrorism. In some sense, they deserve what they got.

Hanson describes the Pelosi strategy, and the simple fact that many Democrats downplayed the virus, even after the Trump administration had gotten serious about it:

She is now, in the middle of an epidemic, insanely talking about a “truth” impeachment-light commission to investigate Trump. She is absolutely clueless of the nihilistic circus that would ensue when her own previous on-the-record statements, the parasitic investment practices of U.S. senators of both parties, the bizarre behavior of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, the empty January braggadocio of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and Joe Biden’s smearing of the Trump travel ban would be fully aired.

If Pelosi is bad, the mainstream media is worse, a lot worse. Inhabited by millennials, it has long since taken leave of its responsibility to report the news. It’s purpose in life is to harass the president and his administration. 

While we extol the virtue of our free press, and compare it favorably to the state-run press in China, our journalists have not merely lost the ability to think-- they learned mindlessness in college-- but their most elite members, the White House press corps, sees itself as a firing squad, each trying to outdo the other with gotcha questions designed to make the president look bad. That is their only goal, or perhaps it’s all that they know how to do.

Hanson describes the scrum:

Watching the media deal with the daily White House briefings reminds the country that we have never had journalism of this low character before—not in the acrimony over the Founding, not in the furor during the Civil War, not even in the age of yellow journalism at the turn of the 20th century.

Reporters do not wish to transmit knowledge to the public that might aid in confronting the virus. They do not even wish to clarify murky statements from public officials to ensure Americans know exactly what the government wants them to do.

The press tries to turn different members of the presidential task force against each other. It consistently lauds anyone who disagrees with the president while defaming anyone who agrees with him. It’s beyond appalling:

But the White House press obsesses over a second agenda, too. It must always prove that previously respected figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, once embraced by the liberal media in their pre-Trump days, either are in revolt against their doltish boss or brain-washed into obsequious enslavement to the president. Often the media advances both antithetical scenarios near simultaneously.

In other words, it would be hard, for anyone other than the current press corps, on Monday to paint Fauci and Birx as frustrated scientists at the mercy of a moron who refuses to listen to science, while on Tuesday writing off both as Trump toadies who have joined the forces of darkness.

As noted above, these dimwits do not understand the laws of contradiction. Their only guiding principle is a visceral hatred of Trump.

The only constant is that whatever Trump advocated, they are against, even if lives are at stake. And whatever Trump policy seems to be working for the good of the country, they either deny or ignore it.

And then, as though Trump’s good fortune knows no limits, the Democratic Party, a group that has been diagnosing Trump for one or another form of narcissism, is now preparing to choose, as its presidential standard bearer, a man who is manifestly suffering from senile dementia. 

Naturally, the psychiatrists who are happy to ignore the most basic ethical principles of their profession in diagnosing Trump’s supposed character and personality flaws have not a word to say about the evidently diminished Biden.

Hanson writes about Biden’s performance from his Delaware bunker:

But what followed was an ungodly disaster, as if the problem all along never was Biden’s weariness, but Biden himself. A rested Biden’s botched commentaries only convinced observers that a President Biden at this moment would be a veritable catastrophe. Biden seemed more confused from his home than he was on the campaign stump. He tried reading from a teleprompter script, and then talking ex tempore, and then both, and found he could do neither.

Biden’s smartest move would be to allay all of the doubts about his mental functioning by choosing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as his running mate. As noted yesterday on this blog, while Cuomo is the new media darling, New York State, the place where he has manifested such excellent executive leadership skills, is leading the nation and perhaps even the world in coronavirus infections and deaths.

Then again, Biden did promise his left flank that he would nominate a woman, and he is apparently locked in to that commitment:

Biden earlier also had promised a diversity vice president and is now wedded to that commitment. But the only Democrat in the present crisis who is winning mainstream media acclaim is Governor Andrew Cuomo, despite the paradox that he was also once exaggerating his own readiness for the virus and bragging about the openness of New York to the world. So far, he governs a state with the greatest numbers of virus cases as well as deaths and per capita fatality rates—facts which according to the blame—game logic of the Left are political fodder.

So, what is the Democratic strategy? Quite simply, Hanson says, to emphasize everything that has gone wrong and to blame it all on Trump. For now they want to ensure that America cannot be opened again for business, because that would help Trump. 

Once Trump reopens the country they will be out screeching about every new case and every new death. They will do everything in their power to make Trump into the virus. A bad economy is good for Democrats:

For now, the media, Pelosi, and Biden, along with the Left in general, wish to perpetuate a sense of viral Armageddon to make it politically impossible for Trump to initiate a graduated plan of returning America to work. Their hope is for a summer and fall of continued lockdown, a near depression rather than a mere recession, and enough public furor to end Trump in November—while hoping that a sudden post-election end to the lockdown will allow the natural recovery of Trump’s booming economy on their watch in 2021.

Missing in all these calculations is empathy for those who are ill and the losses that such macabre expectations certainly entail. Also absent is a sense of the irony that, by unfairly scapegoating Trump in hours of darkness, they are ensuring that in the upcoming dawn, he will be credited by their same logic with owning what will likely be an impressive U.S. response to suppressing the virus and reviving the economy.