While addressing the California Democratic Party State Organizing Convention in San Francisco on Saturday night, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper said something eminently sensible: “If we want to beat Donald Trump and achieve big progressive goals, socialism is not the answer.”
The audience interrupted his remarks with sustained boos that lasted for 30 seconds.
When Hickenlooper spoke against universal healthcare, the audience booed him again.
Perspective on the viewpoint of progressive Democrats was provided by the speaker who followed Hickenlooper to the podium, Washington Governor Jay Inslee. He said “I am the governor who doesn’t think we should be ashamed of our progressive values.” For that he received sustained applause from the same audience.
In an interview with The Hill following his talk, Hickenlooper continued to sound reasonable:
If we don’t draw a clear distinction between Democrats and our candidates and socialism, the Republicans will paint us into a corner that we can’t get out of. Massive government expansions may not be strictly speaking socialism but trust me, Republicans will make it seem like socialism. In places like Ohio and Michigan and North Carolina and Wisconsin, places we have to win to beat Trump, we’ll be starting out ten yards behind.
Some in the audience said these reasonable and sensible remarks were Hickenlooper’s death knell. One attendee, Jonathan Tasini, a labor activist who endorsed Bernie Sanders, said that Hickenlooper had effectively “talked his way out of the 2020 race.”
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Not that Hickenlooper was ever really in the race. His middle-of-the-road reasonableness keeps him from measuring any kind of support as measured by Real Clear Politics. Out of the nearly two dozen 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls RCP is tracking, Hickenlooper didn’t even make the top 13. Number 13, Tim Ryan, registered a scant 0.7 percent in recent polls, so Hickenlooper is well behind even Ryan.
Is this a measure of just how far off the rails progressive Democrats have gone? Consider this: Starting in 2017, California law now bars law enforcement from arresting sex workers who are under the age of 18 for soliciting or engaging in prostitution, or loitering with the intent to do so. Fossten, writing for the Spartan Report, called the move insane: “It ignores experience, common sense and most of all, human nature — especially its darker side.”
Or consider just how Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) plans on paying for her Green New Deal, estimated to cost more than $70 trillion: Don’t ask. She said to just write the checks. AOC is relying on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which The New American explored back in February. A brainchild of Stephanie Kelton, professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University, MMT justifies spending whatever it takes to make the planet acceptably green. Just don’t ask the foolish question of how to pay for it: “We must change the way we approach the federal budget. We must give up our obsession with trying to ‘pay for’ everything with new revenue or spending cuts.… Politicians need to reject the urge to ask ‘how are we going to pay for it?’ and avoid the trap when it is asked of them.”
Or how about the pushback Joe Biden is getting for trying to be a “middle-of-the-road” Democrat? As The New American noted, when Biden suggested modifying the Green New Deal to make it more acceptable to mainline Democrats, AOC “went predictably insane.” She said: “There is no ‘middle ground’ with climate change and denial.… We’re not going to solve the climate crisis with this [Biden’s] lack of leadership. Our kids’ lives are at stake.”
Another measure of progressive Democrats’ insanity is their willingness to attempt to use the 25th Amendment’s Section 4 to remove President Trump from office owing to what they claim is his inability to “discharge the powers and duties” of his office. This is called “projection” — the claim that the mental instability from which they suffer is being exhibited by Trump instead — and is a classic clue for the derangement diagnosis. In medicine the general term “psychosis” includes the presence of delusions or hallucinations, or both. With progressive Democrats’ almost complete divorce from reality, experience, logic, or history, the diagnosis of insanity is reasonable.
David Kupelian, vice president and managing editor at World Net Daily (WND), summed up the present insanity being promoted by progressive Democrats:
They now proudly advocate allowing convicted mass-murdering terrorists like the Boston Marathon bomber to vote; they want to destroy America’s oil, gas and coal industries; end private [health] insurance; kill babies after they’re born; invite never-ending hordes of illegal aliens to invade our country; and impose socialism on the most successful free-market nation in history.
Will American voters want crazies running the country in 2021? They’ll have that opportunity to decide next November.
Photo: AP Images
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, writing primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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