It's official, dear readers: the hiatus is over.
At the end of April, I wrote that I would be taking a brief hiatus from my very old habit of beginning each work day by reading the Opinion sections of The New York Times and The Washington Post. I do that so that other conservatives don't have to. Monitoring and writing about the leftist media crazy has been my forte for a couple of decades now.
As I mentioned in April, things were getting a little too crazy and I needed a quick break. Honestly, I was planning on a couple of weeks at most. Well, that lasted over two months and only ended because I was feverishly looking for something to write about last Thursday and, out of habit, wandered blindly into the Times' Opinion asylum. In almost no time, I cranked out this gem and realized that mocking the Opinion idiots is where I belong.
In Wednesday's New York Times, I happened upon something rare: an Opinion regular who almost got something right. Thomas Edsall wrote a column titled: "If the Democrats Actually Want to Win, This Is What They Have to Do." Here's the beginning of it:
Even now, according to a new survey by the left-leaning group Data for Progress, the Democratic Party has a net negative rating of minus 29 percentage points among swing voters, worse than the minus 25 for the Republican Party. Democrats seeking to restore their party’s credibility with the electorate as a whole, but especially among those crucial swing voters, might consider adding three planks — on immigration, urban disorder and transgender issues — to the 2028 Democratic platform.
Why? Because it is these three issues that serve to reinforce the perception that Democrats are willing to sacrifice the interests of the working and middle classes in favor of special interest constituencies.
I am more than a little queasy making these suggestions, but I think the Democratic Party needs to perform a kind of brutal surgery on itself.
A little background is in order before we get to that. A few years ago — during the Biden horror — I was writing a weekly column called the "Trump Derangement Syndrome Meltdown of the Week." Edsall was the subject of the very first one, and would make return appearances to the column. I was quite surprised to see him even tiptoeing in the vicinity of common sense.
Edsall really does get a lot of stuff right in this article, which makes me wonder if we're not dealing with some sort of Invasion of the Body Snatchers event here. He lost me, however, when he wrote that he was "more than a little queasy" bringing any of this up. Anyone who truly wants the Democratic Party to undergo a course correction and at least glance backward toward the very distant center needs to be shouting down the crazies and doing it with gusto. Apologetic wusses will only be drowned out by the always cacophonous commie leftists.
In every one of his Opinion pieces, Edsall reaches out to a variety of people for input on the topic. In this one, he questioned Democratic operatives from varying parts of the left-of-center spectrum. There was one who was from what's supposedly a "centrist" Dem think tank who seemed to get it more than the rest. Her name is Lanae Erickson and, like Edsall, she seemed to almost on the cusp of being sensible. She offered a lot of tough love talk on how the Dems should be approaching hot-button issues like biological males competing in female sports. After positing that Dems should "reject the chaos created by a lack of serious border policy during the early Biden years," she came up with this:
We must restore public trust in the immigration system and in Democrats’ willingness to enforce the laws by securing the border, reforming asylum and barring claims between ports of entry, and enshrining and adhering to clear enforcement priorities — deporting violent criminals and new arrivals who do not have a legal right to stay, not grandmothers who are picking their children’s kids up from school.
So, she wants Dems to get tougher going forward but, hey, let's let all of the illegals who aren't rapists or murderers stay. In other words, she wants to condemn the Biden open borders mess but reap the potential electoral bounty it offers the Democrats. It always comes back to that.
Almost all of what's suggested in the article would amount to being no more than lip service for Democratic candidates or the official platform. The party has gone so far left that they would never truly have their hearts in any of these shifts on the issues. It would all merely be part of a big ruse, like the "Joe Biden is a kindly centrist" snake oil sales job they did in 2020.
It is very telling, though, that The New York Times is saying, "Hey, maybe pump the brakes on the crazy a little bit." Like so many things since 2020, it once again proves that everything we have been saying about them is right.
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