It exposes wholesale Democrat failures.
Monday night’s Iowa caucuses were an epic fail for Democrats. Thanks to a star-crossed ballot-tabulation program written by alumni of the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns, final results are still unavailable as of this writing, early Thursday morning. The party that is desperate to control every American’s health-care options, energy purchases, consumer decisions, and much more could not smoothly stage a caucus and count its votes. As the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen explained, Democrats created a balloting system so needlessly convoluted that it spun them into a nearly terminal tizzy. Even worse, arrogant Democrats rejected the Department of Homeland Security’s offer to test this technology’s security and reliability.
Democrats were so busy hallucinating about nonexistent Russian collusion and obsessing over Ukraine-o-rama that they never noticed the electoral fiasco ticking like a briefcase bomb, right beneath their upturned noses.
This unmitigated fiasco should strip Democrats of the right to claim that they have any idea of what they’re doing. This fine mess confirms yet again that virtually everything the Democrats touch turns to manure.
Democrats’ impeachment gambit was supposed to drive President Donald J. Trump from office or, more likely, leave him savaged on the floor, slowly bleeding, with his reelection plans in tatters.
Instead, the U.S. Senate acquitted Trump on Wednesday, after House Democrats, with zero Republican concurrence, voted on December 18 to charge the president with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. But rather than a political hemorrhage, hapless Democrats gave him a transfusion.
“President Donald Trump’s job approval rating has risen to 49 percent, his highest in Gallup polling since he took office in 2017,” Jeffrey M. Jones wrote Tuesday for Gallup’s website. “His 94 percent approval rating among Republicans is up 6 percentage points from early January and is 3 points higher than his previous best among his fellow partisans. The 42 percent approval rating among independents is up 5 points, and ties three other polls as his best among that group. Democratic approval is 7 percent, down slightly from 10 percent.”
Trump’s brightening halo is lighting a path for the GOP.
“As Trump’s job approval rating has improved, so has the image of the Republican Party,” Jones noted. “Now, 51 percent of Americans view the Republican Party favorably, up from 43 percent in September. It is the first time GOP favorability has exceeded 50 percent since 2005.”
“Meanwhile, 45 percent of Americans have a positive opinion of the Democratic Party, a slight dip from 48 percent in September.”
“Additionally, the poll finds 48 percent of Americans identifying as Republicans or leaning toward that party, compared with 44 percent Democratic identification or leaning,” Jones concluded. “Recent Gallup polls had shown a fairly even partisan distribution, after the Democratic Party held advantages for much of 2019.”
Beyond the impeachment disaster, Democrats seem incapable of getting anything right.
Major cities run by Democrats such as New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle are overrun with al fresco mentally ill vagrants, drunks, and drug addicts. These urban centers teem with garbage, hypodermic needles, human waste, and rats. In downtown L.A., fleas are suspected to have transmitted typhus from rodents to as many as six LAPD officers and Elizabeth Greenwood, a public attorney at City Hall.
Meanwhile, as “the homeless” turn sidewalks and gutters into toilets, the resulting runoff bypasses sewage-treatment facilities and pours directly through storm drains into the Pacific, hikes E. coli levels, and sickens marine mammals.
Crime is climbing in big Democratic jurisdictions, as left-wing anti-police hatred handcuffs cops. California’s Proposition 47 essentially decriminalized property thefts below $950. The predictable result? A burgeoning shoplifting industry.
New York State’s new “bail reform” frees criminal suspects soon after arrest. This has turbocharged recidivism. One Gotham crook repeatedly was arrested, released, and rearrested across six bank robberies. Because he successfully used handwritten demands, rather than a gun, to steal money, his “nonviolent” behavior was no big deal under Democrats’ new “reform.”
“Right now, it’s almost a lawless society,” a source told the New York Post, amid a 16.4 percent hike in major crimes in 2020, including a 34.7 percent spike in robberies, a 40.7 percent bump in shooting victims, and a 70 percent jump in car thefts. “Criminals now know there are no consequences for their actions, and they are causing havoc for innocent people of New York City.”
This situation has become fatal. The Empire State’s “reform” includes new rules that give defense attorneys the names of witnesses to crimes for which their clients have been accused. As the New York Post reported Thursday, Nassau County officials believe that MS-13 members killed Wilmer Maldonado, who was prepared to testify against the murderous gang. The court-issued protective order that shielded Maldonado’s identity was superseded by New York State’s new soft-on-crime statutes. In December, prosecutors gave Maldonado’s name to an arrested suspect’s legal team. On Sunday, Maldonado was found behind an abandoned house in New Cassel. He had been bludgeoned to death.
“The system failed,” Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder told journalists Wednesday. “This man is dead because we didn’t do enough . . . and this law is not helping us.”
Government schools are largely a system of institutionalized child abuse in Democratic districts. As millions of students are cheated out of learning, teachers’ unions pay Democratic politicians to look away. Most gleefully comply, in one of this country’s most vulgar, corrupt symbioses.
Americans are escaping high-tax, big-government, Democrat-operated states such as California, Illinois, and New York and fleeing to low-tax, limited-government, Republican-managed states such as Arizona, Texas, and Florida.
And now, the neo-socialist Democratic Party that cannot organize a farm-state caucus promises to nationalize health care, erase America’s borders, and padlock ICE. Democrats want to ply illegal aliens with free tuition, free medical treatment, drivers’ licenses, and even local-election ballots. Democrats crave more fugitive cities and fugitive states, to shield sometimes-violent illegal-alien criminals from federal immigration authorities. Democrats want inmates to vote from their prison cells and hope to inflict a $33 trillion Green New Deal on America’s taxpayers.
It’s well past time for Americans to say, “Hell No!” to the Democratic Party.
Last but not least, let’s hope that Monday’s meltdown finally kills the Iowa caucuses. This odd quadrennial exercise has more perverse and highly destructive side effects than a failed experimental drug.
Politicians — especially presidential aspirants — buy the votes of Hawkeye State farmers by promising them a parade of agriculture subsidies, protections, and mandates to purchase their output. Absent the Iowa caucuses and a desire to bribe these First-in-the-Nation farmers, the ethanol program would have died a merciful death by now. Alas, even President Trump has embraced this boondoggle.
Turning food into fuel is folly. The ethanol, soybean, and other wasteful and distortive programs that pay Iowans for their votes with taxpayer money should be plowed under like last season’s corn stalks.
Scuttling the Iowa caucuses might begin to end the lustful embrace of pandering politicians and subsidy-hungry farmers.