(NOTE: I read The New York Times Opinion section so that others don’t have to. While I could write something every day that mocks the lunacy there, I decided to just highlight a few of them once a week. I’ll also offer one from The Washington Post so they don’t feel left out. I provide the actual headline from the op-ed and go from there. Enjoy.)
It’s “Panic at the Disco!” time for the Democrats, and you can almost smell the flop sweat while reading the op-eds in the Times and WaPo. Since we’ve been looking for themes lately, one shows in the last two that we will cover.
Off to the loony bin.
1: Tim Ryan Is Winning the War for the Soul of the Democratic Party
If this is true, then the Democrats have bigger problems than I thought. Tim Ryan has spent the last few weeks very publicly complaining that the national party has all but abandoned him in his race against Republican J.D. Vance. Then again, we often discuss the disconnect between D.C. Democrats and their party faithful in flyover country, so Ryan may actually be connecting in a way his Beltway colleagues haven’t been. Let’s be honest: the Dems have all but abandoned the American workers they use to pretend to be the champions of.
I doubt that anyone who wrote the following could be sniffing around the truth though:
Mr. Ryan seems like an unlikely object of such caustic rhetoric. A 49-year-old former college-football quarterback, he is the paragon of affability, a genial Everyman whose introductory campaign video is so innocuous that it might easily be mistaken for an insurance commercial. His great passions, outside of politics, are yoga and mindfulness practice.
“We have to love each other, we have to care about each other, we have to see the best in each other, we have to forgive each other,” he declared when he won the Democratic Senate primary in May.
Once again, it seems like the Democrats have never heard of the internet. Last month, Congressman Mindfulness said that Democrats needed to “kill and confront” the MAGA movement. We all know what Dems mean when they say “confront” these days, don’t we?
In his two debates with Mr. Vance, Ryan didn’t focus much on making his case for being the savior of the middle class. Rather, he heaped one personal attack on top of another, which only served to help Vance clean his clock in both encounters.
Cool fairy tale, though.
2: Kari Ann Lake’s Hijacking of Martin Luther King
This is another wordbarf from Charles M. Blowhard. As is typical of any of Blow’s work, it’s light on facts and heavy on vicious hyperbole. For example:
She is Donald Trump in lipstick. But she delivers her divisiveness in the calm and measured tones of a person reading the news rather than a man who froths at the mic.
She parrots Trump’s disgusting generalizations about immigrants, saying last month: “The media might have a field day with this one, but I’m going to just repeat something President Trump said a long time ago, and it got him in a lot of trouble. They are bringing drugs. They are bringing crime, and they are rapists, and that’s who’s coming across our border. That’s a fact.”
Blow splits his time between Atlanta and NYC, so he doesn’t know the first thing about the border that I live 60 miles away from. When Donald Trump first declared his candidacy, I was unsure about so many things about him as a candidate. The only thing I knew for certain was that everything he said about the border was true. So shut it, Chuckie.
One thing I have noticed in the last two weeks is an ever-increasing number of hit pieces on Kari Lake. She was roundly dismissed and generally ignored when she first won the nomination. Now she’s the monster the lefties all see under their beds, and it’s fun to watch. As I recently wrote in my Morning Briefing, Lake may be the greatest thing to happen to the GOP this election year.
3: What if We Let Majoritarian Democracy Take Root?
Here we have Jamelle Bouie at his pedestrian worst. This is also where we see the mini-theme emerge.
Whenever things aren’t going well for the Democrats, they suddenly can’t shut up about blowing up the Constitution or anything else they feel is standing in the way of their hegemonic dreams. When they can no longer move goalposts (which they’re brilliant at doing), they become full-throated advocates for rule changes that they feel will give them the one-party edge.
They’re closer than ever to gutting the Constitution, but the coming midterms should provide a substantial roadblock for at least a few more years.
PostScript: Maryland should give incarcerated people access to the ballot
This little gem was written by a woman who represents a group called “Reproductive Justice Inside,” so you just know it’s going to be full of… something.
So we see more calls for rule changes here. The way the Democrats have been fighting for criminals to get out early and/or to vote, it’s almost as if they’re saying that every felon in America is a leftist.
OK, I can buy that.
Everyone needs a cause, I guess, but this one seems to make little sense. If there’s one thing Maryland isn’t short of, it’s Democrats. Sure, they elected Republican Larry Hogan as governor, but northeastern Republicans always come with a big asterisk. They’re essentially moderate Democrats from 1978. I’m not sure that Hogan could spell “GOP” if you spotted him the “g” and the “o.”
But “Yay criminals!” or something, right Dems?
Watching the electoral terror unfold in the Opinion sections of the Times and WaPo these next two weeks should be better than cable. I hope you’re all looking forward to it as much as I am.
Thanks for stopping by!
Please consider subscribing to the Morning Briefing here. It’s free and it helps keep me off the streets.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member