It’s rare in national politics for a political party to single out a state by attacking it mercilessly. It’s even rarer when that state has 55 precious electoral votes to give to the winner of the presidential contest in that state. But California is an exception. The state has always been a wonderful example of American excess, and today they feature an excess of failure.
The Republican Party doesn’t exist in any recognizable form in California. Trump won’t even bother running a lot of ads there because his odds of winning call to mind a snowball and hell. Prediction markets give the president a 5 percent chance of winning the state.
So Republicans at the convention last night did the math and figured they’d attract more votes by bashing the state than saying nice things about it.
Whatever the reason, it was damn entertaining.
Gaetz suggested socialists in places like Hollywood were manipulating Biden to enact their radical agenda.
“The woke-topians will settle for Biden because they will make him an extra in a movie written, produced and directed by others,” he said. “It’s a horror film, really. They’ll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door. And the police aren’t coming when you call. In Democrat-run cities, they’re already being defunded, disbanded.”
Cats and dogs. Living together. Mass hysteria!
The former Mrs. Gavin Newsom — the current governor of California — Kimberly Guilfoyle, made trashing Biden’s vice-presidential pick, Kamala Harris, a spectator sport.
“If you want to see the socialist Biden-Harris future for our country, just take a look at California,” said Guilfoyle, whose former husband is Gov. Gavin Newsom. “It is a place of immense wealth, immeasurable innovation, an immaculate environment, and the Democrats turned it into a land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets and blackouts in homes.”
“In President Trump’s America, we light things up,” she shouted. “We don’t dim them down.”
You want red meat? I got yer red meat right here.
Republican activist Charlie Kirk took aim at California’s tech industry.
“In this country, it means you can speak your mind without retribution — without being kicked off of social media by a self-righteous censor in Silicon Valley.”
Perhaps we’re being too hard on the people of California. Tens of thousands are voting with their feet and fleeing the state. One Arizonan observing the exodus tried to put it in perspective in one glaring example.
The fifth-largest economy in the world and home to many of the greatest technology companies on Earth can’t keep the lights on. The state’s three largest utilities turned off power to more than 410,000 homes and businesses last Friday, then again to half as many Saturday.
Gov. Gavin Newsom sprung to action on Monday by announcing more blackouts. “We failed to predict and plan these shortages,” the governor said. “And that’s simply unacceptable.”
But accept it he did, noting that the state’s near-religious promotion of solar and wind power left a gap in the reliability of its power grid. You don’t say.
Newsom is trying to blame the power companies for overselling power reserves from solar and wind power. The question is, how could Newsom be stupid enough to believe their optimistic assumptions in the first place?
The policies of the radicals aren’t evil, or even malevolent. They’re stupid. They denote a detachment from the real world. Criminals aren’t really bad people so there’s no reason to keep them in jail. Or, maybe if we wish hard enough, the dream of independence from fossil fuels will come true.
Intelligent people don’t make mistakes like that. So, really, when bashing California, all Republicans were doing last night was calling out stupid people doing stupid things.
And there’s nothing wrong with that.
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