Matthew Yglesias, writing for Vox, may have best summed up the Democratic Party’s – and by extension, Tom Perez’s – asinine choice of Steve Beshear as the messenger tasked with delivering the response to President Trump’s first-ever address to a joint session of congress. Yglesias writes of the former Kentucky Governor, “Beshear isn’t a rising star in the Democratic Party. He’s not one of its federal legislative leaders, he’s not a nationally recognized figure, and he’s not a legendarily skilled orator. He’s also not a woman, an immigrant, a person of color, or otherwise someone who’ll break new ground or excite the Democratic base on an identity level.”
This isn’t what any thinking person would characterize as a flattering introduction, but it speaks volumes about the decision making that occurs within the increasingly irrelevant party of the Left. It’s beyond comprehension why Tom Perez, the newly minted DNC chair, thought it would be a good idea to wheel out as their spokesman a white-bread septuagenarian who opposes gay marriage and has been implicated by multiple accusers in a strong-arm scandal. If this is how Mr. Perez plans on running the show over there across the aisle, we on the Right can breathe a collective sigh of relief.
President Trump’s first address to a joint session of congress was the Democrats’ first big-time opportunity to take a big-time swipe at the POTUS on a big-time national stage and they whiffed it. Big time. The Democrats should be cracking open the bubbly and celebrating a news cycle narrative about an unpopular Republican president on the ropes after yet another disastrous public outing. But that’s not what’s happening at all. After failing to obstruct the lion’s share of President Trump’s cabinet appointees, after failing time and again to step up and defend Obamacare until now when it’s too late, the Democrats find themselves with yet another missed opportunity because they couldn’t get their house in order and because President Trump caught them flat-footed. Again.
Control over the narrative, even within a friendly media, is slipping through their fingers. They’re in damage control mode as evidenced by Congressman Emanuel Cleaver’s appearance on MSNBC where he bemoaned the lack of fresh champions to rally a new generation of suckers voters to the liberal cause. Whether Congressman Cleaver was there as an official messenger of the DNC or of his own accord, is unclear.
Desperate as they are to manipulate the narrative to their advantage, the Democrats have resorted to one of the few tactics left available to them: Hunting for scalps. They crowed over Flynn and they crucified Milo with all the grace and class of Salome receiving the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. Now that Jeff Sessions has caught a wicked bout of foot-in-mouth disease they have another reason to slam their fist on the table and make all sorts of outrageous demands, such as calling for Mr. Sessions’ resignation. It’s also worth noting that this latest episode works as a great distraction from Rick Perry and Ben Carson’s respective confirmations and a stellar speech by a confident President Trump.
The distractions won’t last. If anyone can find a way to stymie themselves, it’s the Democrats under Tom Perez’ leadership.
Evidence of the dysfunction in the DNC isn’t difficult to find.
Van Jones, no friend to President Trump, the Republican Party, the Right in general, liberty, freedom, restrained government, or any of the traditions that once made our nation great, was borderline gushing about the address, using the word “extraordinary” to describe a moment in the speech as President’s Trump’s informal but official ascendancy to the top spot in American politics.
(It’s worth mentioning that in short order the Left turned on Van Jones in a stunning, yet not unsurprising, display of political cannibalism, e.g., Keith Olberman, the king of liberal histrionics, told Van Jones to STFU via twitter.)
Van Jones isn’t alone in his praise of the president’s speech. Standard bearers of the liberal mainstream media like Michael Sherer have expressed cautious optimism and Stephen Collinson, writing for fake news empire CNN, mustered the manhood to be surprisingly complimentary in many of his words regarding the speech, no small feat considering the ire our president has directed at the Clinton News Network.
This isn’t a good start to Tom Perez’ career as showrunner at the DNC but one can’t help but wonder if it’s not actually part of the plan for some out of touch and inadvertently suicidal reason.
Mr. Perez isn’t a stranger to leftist radicalism. He’s a proud persecutor of the peaceful exercise of free-speech and has used the apparatus of the state to push his personal politics in the courts. That he had no evidence to support his oppression of political foes is immaterial to Mr. Perez. Advancing his ideology by chilling free speech and suppressing legal and natural rights is part and parcel of the radical liberal agenda.
When advancing the cause of extremist leftism, Mr. Perez is fine with double standards such as when he shrugged his shoulders at the “racial harassment of black employees who were willing to work on civil rights cases against black defendants, as well as DOJ employees who lied under oath in the Inspector General investigation about harassment of conservative lawyers”.
Mr. Perez understands full well that advancing the noxious cause of the liberal agenda means abandoning ethics because the importance of the cause transcends such trivial concerns as honesty.
For all these reasons and more, we on the Right should be pleased with Tom Perez’ rise to the top of the DNC. The choice of Steve Beshear to be the feeble rebuttal to President Trump underscores dysfunction and incompetence at the highest levels in the desperate Democratic Party. Mr. Perez’ own record indicates a move by the party away from the center, further to the extreme left, to a place where the moderates, the Blue Dogs, and Reagan Democrats won’t want to go. It’s one part cluelessness and one part unbridled radicalism combined together into an unwitting suicide pact for a party that can’t get its act together. And it won’t get its act together, not anytime soon, and perhaps not in time to salvage what remains. The liberal partisan elites have duped themselves into believing most Americans are hungry for fanaticism. We’re not and it’s a hard lesson Mr. Perez and his cohorts will have to learn.
Original artwork by Jesse Comeau
Well, they didn’t move so extreme left that they picked Keith Ellison, which would have been too much for many Democratic party stalwarts, such as Alan Dershowitz, who threatened to leave the party if Ellison was chosen. But they did choose Ellison as #2.