Thursday Afternoon Notes

All pointing in one direction: the continuing mental decline of the left

• I’m reading through some of Jill Lepore’s typically deficient new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (so that you don’t have to), and there is this gem to savor:

“[Ted] Kennedy had been questioning Scalia while waiting for the [Senate Judiciary] committee’s ranking Democrat, Joseph R. Biden, the junior senator from Delaware, to arrive from another meeting. Biden sought a national stage, but when he got one, he often talked for too long and without making a great deal of sense. ‘Obviously, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about,’ he once said in the middle of remarks at a Judiciary Committee hearing about revising the criminal code.” [Emphasis added.]

As I always say, liberals are slow learners; they’re just figuring this out about Biden now? At this rate, they’ll figure out Kamala Harris around the year 2065.

• Now here’s a very peculiar and revealing tweet from The Lightworker:

So, why Hungary and Poland? Do they not have free, multi-party elections? In what way do their democracies to be “strengthened”?

Here is another example of one of the axioms of my Lexicon of Modern Political Terms, in which a “threat to democracy” is any time Democrats lose an election, or “populism” is when the wrong cause or party wins an election. Hungary and Poland are being targeted by the Obamanauts for resisting the transnational agenda of the European Union and electing the wrong people. That’s the whole story here.

Meanwhile, I wonder of Obama might have to add Germany to his list of democracies needing “strengthening” before too much longer. Latest poll shows the AfD (Alternative for Deutscheland Party) is currently in the lead in polls in Germany.

Incidentally, the AfD’s voting strength is lopsided toward younger voters, which means the future belongs to them:

Good thing the AfF is not in power, or bad things might happen to Muslim immigrants. Oh, wait:

Now why can’t we do that?

Chaser: The British Labour Party, barely in office for one year, has sunk to a 15% approval rating. Once Nigel Farage gets installed as prime minister, Obama will need to add England to his list of endangered democracies. Good thing he already sent back the Churchill bust from the White House.

• I asked here previously, “Are Democrats Really This Dumb?”, and they seem to be working overtime to answer in the affirmative.

First, how’s that government shutdown going for you, Democrats? I’ve wracked my brain, but can’t remember a single instance when Republicans won any of the many government shutdowns they instigated over the years. Why do Democrats think it will work any better for them?

But then there’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the gift that keeps on giving (and grifting):

She probably means Dow Chemical or DuPont or something, but it is doubtful that either company was remotely responsible for any of the Cuyahoga River fires that all happened nearly (checks notes) 60 years ago now.

But beyond the factual accuracy, it is quite revealing that when the left needs to get its emotional outrage up, they have to recur to distant events that most Americans today weren’t alive to witness. For environmentalists, the rivers are always on fire; for the civil rights demagogues, it’s always the beatings at the Edmund Pettis Bridge (done by Democrats, they somehow always leave out of the re-tellings). At a certain point, nostalgia loses its appeal, and then you lose elections.

One notable thing is that with all the outrage over Trump’s pressure on universities, the charge of “McCarthyism” seems largely missing from the left’s vocabulary. It seems that old bonfire has gone out.