‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’ When Rahm Emanuel said that during the economic meltdown of 2008-2009, his Machiavellian cynicism was instantly recognized as the calling card of the new breed of Democrat that he and his boss, Barack ‘Bring-a-gun-to-the fight‘ Obama, embodied.
We saw it then, when the gargantuan pseudo-stimulus package stimulated little apart from the federal debt, and we are seeing it again now as Democrats hold up an emergency spending bill (also gargantuan) in order to fill it with profligate and politically tendentious provisions. As Rep. Jim Clyburn put it, ‘This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.’
Rahm Emanuel could not have put it any better.
Nor could Barack Obama, who came to office promising to ‘fundamentally transform the United States of America’, and came perilously close to doing so.
The nation is in the grip of a panic sparked by the outbreak a new flu virus from China. I had been used to calling it ‘the Wuhan flu’ (or ‘Wu-flu’ for short) after its place of origin. But I think that the moniker settled on by the Epoch Times is better: the CCP virus, after the Chinese Communist party, which was instrumental in suppressing news of the virus when it first emerged last fall, then in facilitating its spread by, among other things, letting about five million people leave Wuhan for the lunar new year holidays.
I suspect that the danger posed by the virus is overstated, but the panic certainly is not, as witness the tsunami of hysteria sweeping over the country (and not just this country) as well as the breathtaking crash of the stock market and disintegration of small businesses across the land. The Trump administration has been moving with astonishing speed, innovation, and efficiency to battle both the health risks posed by the virus and the economic pandemonium the virus has brought in its wake. One measure of the disruption we face is neatly captured in this graph from BuzzFeed representing US unemployment.
The president and his team have been moving heaven and earth to deal with the crisis. But what have the Democrats been doing? First, they killed the spending bill in the Senate over the weekend (but not with any help from Comrade Bernie Sanders, who was busy on a phone call with AOC and other members of the Squad).
Why would they do this? For the simple reason that Clyburn enunciated. They are not interested in helping people. They are interested in wielding power and pushing their left-wing political agenda.
So, the Democrats have denied Americans the help they need now in order to include in the bill such things as 1) greater collective bargaining power for labor unions, 2) more stringent fuel emissions standards for the airline industry (which is already reeling under the weight of the crisis) and 3) an expansion of wind and solar tax credit.
That’s not all. The Democrats want to tie a bailout plan for Planned Parenthood to the bill, just to be sure that no opportunity for extinguishing new life is left behind. They want to include a minimum wage provision (just to be sure that closed small businesses stay closed) and various election ‘reforms’, such as same-day voter registration and the option to vote by mail. Such innovations are an invitation to voter fraud, which of course disproportionately benefits Democrats. There are provisions for ‘pay equity’ — ‘a comparison of pay amongst racial and ethnic minorities…as compared to their white counterparts’ — and ‘corporate board diversity’, which would require corporations to list the ‘gender, race, and ethnic identity’ of board members, et cetera, et cetera.
None of these provisions has anything to do with battling the CCP virus or the economic chaos and human misery it has instigated. They all have to do with exploiting a national emergency for the grubbiest of partisan motives. As Sen. Bob Menendez asked: ‘How many times are we going to get a shot at a trillion-dollar-plus program?’
Looking at the public response to this disgusting and heavy-handed effort at political blackmail, I’d say that the Democrats overplayed their hand this time. Gertrude Stein once observed that it was very important to know how far to go when going too far. The Democrats ignored that sage advice. In an email communication, the Fox columnist Christian Whiton asked how people were enjoying their ’30-day free trial of socialism?’ Not very much is the answer, and I hope that, come November, the Democrats will have ample reason to rue their shameful efforts to exploit a national emergency for partisan gain.
