Democrats — the last word in politics and hypocrisy
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In a way, Benjamin Disraeli, 19th-century founder of Britain’s Conservative Party, got it wrong when he said, “Finality is not the language of politics.”
What he meant was that politics keeps moving along, changing things, so no referendum, election, or other isolated event is the last word on any matter of public opinion or policy.
But I’d contend that today’s Democrats are pretty much the last word in noisome hypocrisy. And two of their least appealing protagonists offered ripe examples of this dubious accolade on Tuesday.
When the Bureau of Labor Statistics published inflation numbers for June showing the consumer price index ticked up to 2.7%, marginally higher than the expected 2.6%, Neera Tanden, who was a senior domestic policy adviser in the White House throughout former President Joe Biden’s lamentable term, posted, “Just a reminder that tariffs and higher inflation disproportionately hit working class people.”
The substance of this is true enough, as I have repeatedly written, and President Donald Trump’s imposition of some tariffs and flirtation with many more seem thoroughly misguided. The latest inflation figures do suggest some early and mild pressure on prices due to tariffs, which could make it less likely the Federal Reserve will do the president’s bidding and cut interest rates.
But there are people who have zero credibility to comment on some matters, having themselves bungled or distorted them and revealed their own general malfeasance and incompetence on the issue at hand. Tanden is one of them, for she was advising Biden — perhaps more than that, given her involvement in the abuse of his autopen signature — at precisely the time he supercharged price increases to their fastest pace in more than 40 years.
Biden inherited an inflation rate of 1.4% when he moved into the Oval Office in January 2021 and then spent trillions of dollars of borrowed money on favored leftist agenda items of the sort Tanden champions. This threw gasoline onto an overheated economy and pushed the inflation rate to 9.1% by June 2022. This was inflation of a ferocity not seen since December 1981 and put the lie to Democratic claims to be on the side of the working class. Another of their big lies was that the appalling inflation rate was left to them by Trump.
Chutzpah is a commodity in endless supply in politics. Which is why Biden administration alumni inject themselves into public debate when common decency and an average level of modesty would suggest they spend some time dedicated to decorous silence.
Shortly after Tanden’s interjection on inflation, another leading antagonist of Trump’s, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), responded to claims from Trump that Schiff had committed mortgage fraud by claiming his primary residence was in Maryland despite at the time representing a district in California.
Schiff responded with a rebuttal that was also a boast: “This baseless attempt at political retribution won’t stop me from holding him accountable.” He added that this was Trump’s “latest attempt at political retaliation against his perceived enemies.”
This is the same Schiff who led the House Democrats’ impeachment crusade during Trump’s first term. It was a campaign of entirely political warfare, not the dutiful oversight the party claimed it to be. Schiff was one of many left-wing Democrats — Tanden was another — who worked diligently to oust Trump from the office to which the nation had elected him. There was no evidence that the president, as a candidate, or his campaign colluded with Russia, as they claimed. Former special counsel Robert Mueller made this plain after a painstaking investigation, even though his team of investigators were politically motivated Democratic prosecutors who itched to topple their Republican enemy.
Yet Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, claimed falsely before Mueller’s report came out that there was “plenty of evidence of collusion or conspiracy in plain sight.”
Since there wasn’t, what was Schiff’s motive for this falsehood? Obviously, it was retribution against a perceived enemy, a deliberate effort to inflict political damage with false and (to use Schiff’s recent word) “baseless” accusations. As was noted at the time, his retaliatory fabrications “helped eradicate any residual trust the public might still have in federal institutions.” And yet here he is again, years later, still pretending he is on the moral high ground and sensible people care a hoot about his opinion.
In any field of endeavor other than politics, you’d expect someone who had disgraced themselves as spectacularly as Schiff has done by lobbing vacuous charges against a political enemy to zip his lip rather than accuse that political enemy of lobbing vacuous charges for reasons of retaliation.
In one respect, of course, this means Disraeli was right. There are always politicians willing to foist their tendentious take on the public to make sure their opponents do not get the final word.
Continue Reading at The Washington Examiner.
