Perceptive and regular readers of my columns may have noticed that I am periodically annoyed by our elite leftist leaders in DC, the MSM, and the Ivy League.
If by “periodically” I mean “7 days a week, when I’m not asleep.” And if by “annoyed” I mean “infuriated.” And I do, in both cases, mean that.
But there is another type of nationally prominent lefty who just frustrates me, because they demonstrate the ability to think clearly and call out problems on both sides…but then can’t sustain that and come to the right conclusion.
There are so many people of the first type from whom to choose, and their failings are so obvious as to need little explication. So for today I’ll discuss just one, and his actions just this week, on just one issue.
The Dem in question is Jamie Raskin, and the issue is the terrorist attack in Boulder, Colorado on Sunday.
By now you all know the basic details: Muslim illegal immigrant named Muhamad (unexpectedly!) who hates Jews (unexpectedly!) uses a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to badly burn 8 Jews who were peacefully marching to plead for the release of the hostages still being held by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. (The terrorist reportedly used fire in his attack because he had been unable to get a gun, due to his illegal status.) At least two of his victims had to be airlifted to a hospital, and if they survive, will face a long and extremely painful recovery.
A few more details make the story even more infuriating. At least one of the victims was an octogenarian Holocaust survivor. A local police official – hours after video had widely circulated showing the terrorist screaming, “Free Palestine!” and, “I did it for Gaza!” – insisted that the scumbag’s motives were not known.
Then a genius named Juliette Kayyem got on CNN late that evening and blasted Kash Patel and Dan Bongino for having declared that the obviously targeted terror attack was a “targeted terror attack.” Juliette was not buying that small step to a well-supported conclusion.
But soft! What ditz through yonder camera speaks? Tis Juliette, and she’s a total moron: “It makes law enforcement look disorganized, and it makes the FBI look so juvenile, like why are you getting ahead of the police chief who says, ‘I don’t know what this is?’”
Did I mention that Juliette is a former DHS official in the Obama administration, and a former Harvard professor? Because of course she is.
Anyway, Muhamad came to the US on a tourist visa in 2022. When he broke our laws by overstaying that visa, the Biden administration demonstrated their “tough on crime” bona fides by… rewarding him with a work visa for two more years! And then he illegally stayed again, when that visa expired. (Please insert an all-caps “Unexpectedly” after each of the three previous sentences.)
So to recap: an anti-Semitic Muslim illegal immigrant carried out a horrific attack using fire. From that set of circumstances, one might logically draw the conclusion that we have serious problems involving vicious anti-Semitism, mass illegal immigration, and even a statistically over-represented tendency to violence among some (not all) adherents to a certain Religion of Peace. And possibly a “fire-control” problem.
But not if one is Jamie Raskin D-(‘oh!)- Maryland, who turned his awesome Sherlockian powers of deduction toward Boulder, and quickly arrived at the culprit: Guns!
The poor dunce went on MSNBC, and said, “We are still in the midst of a gun violence epidemic…. This is why we are for a ban on military-style assault weapons in the country. Our lax gun laws are a danger to everybody in America.”
I’m not making that up. He looked at a multi-faceted crime with zero guns involved, and decided that guns were the problem.
I thought about guns when I saw that news story, too. But my thoughts were more along the lines of, “I wish that had happened in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, or some other free state where citizens exercise their 2nd amendment rights more vigorously. Because if it had, that hateful creep would have been lucky to light up his first octogenarian before he was stitched with bullets from his tiny groin to his evil cranium.”
And THEN we would have all been spared that smoking bullet-magnet’s idiotic political slogans, and Juliette would have been justified in scratching her empty head and wondering what his motive had been.
So Juliette and Jamie are the type of leftists who drive me crazy, because they are propagandist hacks who wouldn’t tell an inconvenient truth or make a good-faith argument if their lives depended on it.
But the second type – and there aren’t a lot of them – are frustrating, because they often show that they are capable of clear thought and smart criticism, and yet continue to make common cause with those like Raskin, Schumer, et al.
John Fetterman is one. Since he recovered from his stroke, he’s frequently been a beacon of sanity in the Dem congress. He’s called out the anti-Semitism on the left, praised Trump’s closing of the border, and criticized his party’s shameful coverup of Biden’s physical and mental infirmity. But he still votes with them the vast majority of the time, even though he’s proven that he knows better.
The best example of this type is Bill Maher, who I think I’ve written about before. He’s a condescending egotist who I wouldn’t want to hang out with, but he’s intelligent and often very funny, and he regularly takes a scalpel (and a machete) to woke errors and idiocies like nobody else on the left. And yet, at the end of the day and after demonstrating that he’s got 20/20 political vision…he puts his leftist blinders back on and returns to rote conservative bashing.
Or, as one of my favorite Bible verses puts it, “As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.”
I don’t watch Maher’s program, but I often watch clips of it that show up on my various political feeds, and his discussion of Harvard’s self-destructive arrogance this past weekend was a good example.
He spends nearly 6 solid minutes tearing Ivy League education a new one, with insight and sarcasm. He points out that students aren’t being educated but indoctrinated, and indicts woke intolerance, feckless administrators, and the hypocritical arrogance of gullible, entitled youth. He points out that Harvard is “an assh*le factory.”
But then – so frustrating! – he puts on his pinko-colored glasses, and goes every kind of wrong.
The pivot comes when he grudgingly says that Harvard does turn out some decent people. But his first example tells you all you need to know: “But for every Barack Obama, there are two Josh Hawleys.” And he doesn’t mean the comparison as an insult to Obama – which it should be – or a compliment to Hawley. Which it should be.
For the next 3 minutes, he lobs evidence-less ad hominem attacks at Hawley, and then lists those on the right who have Ivy League degrees with an acid tone of disdain: Vivek, DeSantis, Cruz, SCOTUS members, etc.
That’s it. He just lists them. He doesn’t cite any stupid or evil things they’ve done, or any of their flaws. He just sneers their names, and his audience of trained seals applauds accordingly.
I keep finding myself thinking of the Parable of the Talents, and how those who squander greater gifts are judged more harshly than the less gifted who don’t make much of themselves. I look at dullards like Hank Johnson, AOC, or Eric Swalwell, and I’m not sure they even know how dumb or wrong they usually are.
But then I look at someone like Maher, deftly dissecting the destructive foolishness of the Left, before immediately backsliding into juvenile, simple-minded smears of the Right. I watch him proving that he knows better, and then acting like he doesn’t, and I shake my head.
I don’t know which is worse.
But I do know that I’d rather be on our side – even with all of our squishes and weasels! – than on theirs.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 