Speaking at a pro-abortion rally outside the Supreme Court last week, Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., went off-script for a moment and said:

"I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

There are a lot of words to describe Schumer’s attack: threatening, thuggish, bullying, dangerous, ugly, inappropriate. But the first word to describe it is stupid. It was dumb.

CAL THOMAS: CHUCK SCHUMER ABANDONED SHAME WITH SUPREME COURT COMMENTS

When you watch the video, your first reaction is not to get angry; it’s to roll your eyes.

Schumer has been in Congress for more than half his 69 years. He was not acting like a violent hood; he was acting like a juvenile showoff, talking tough for a whipped-up crowd so they would like him.

Who among us has not gotten caught up in emotion and said something that we immediately regret? The main difference here is that when politicians do it, there are usually cameras around.

Schumer’s obvious next step was to issue a two-sentence apology after the speech. Aside from some pushback on Twitter or talk radio for a day, that would have been the end of it.

But that’s not what Chuck Schumer did. And that’s the real story here, one much more interesting than a politician’s gaffe.

Rather than apologize, Schumer doubled down. His office said Schumer’s threat – “you Gorsuch” and “you Kavanagh,” remember – was actually directed toward Senate Republicans.

This was a transparent lie, almost as humiliating to the people who heard it as it must have been to the staffers who wrote it, to say nothing of the shameless “leader” who authorized it.

All of a sudden, Schumer’s botched ad lib became exactly what he intended to say! The mistake was not Schumer’s, he said, but every other English-speaker on Earth.

Why would an intelligent political leader take ownership of a foolish slip-of-the-tongue, and thereby turn it into a monstrous threat? The answer: because he’s a Democrat in 2020.

All day, Schumer adopted the faux tough-guy attitude of Jack Nicholson’s corrupt general in "A Few Good Men," publicly admitting that yes, he “ordered the Code Red.” But to everyone else, he looked more like Pee-Wee Herman crashing his bicycle, flying over the handlebars into a crowd of kids and saying, “I meant to do that.”

Why would an intelligent political leader take ownership of a foolish slip-of-the-tongue, and thereby turn it into a monstrous threat? The answer: because he’s a Democrat in 2020.

Schumer knew that the Left, including the monolithically leftist and pro-abortion news media, would have his back. Reporters and pundits did everything they could to paper over Schumer’s scandal. They said it was Republicans who started it, by tearing down “norms.” They said Schumer’s comments were less bad than President Trump’s criticisms of certain court decisions. And the next day, when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell addressed his floor speech to the controversy, the media said McConnell was “set to pour gasoline on the controversy.”

To the news media, the real story was not Schumer’s gaffe or his vicious doubling down on it. Or his ignoble non-apology apology that only made liars out of allies who put their own integrity on the line to defend him a few hours earlier.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR OPINION NEWSLETTER

No, the real story was that evil Republicans’ ugly partisanship was dragging good, virtuous Democrats down with them. To the Left, progressives never make mistakes, never owe apologies, and should never suffer political consequences.

In their single-minded hatred of Donald Trump, their ruthless abuses of power and the truth, the Left acts less like a movement than a conspiracy. But what a phony, pathetic gang they make.

They justify their silly tough-guy act – Schumer’s threat, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ripping up of Trump’s State of the Union speech, Joe Biden calling a town hall questioner “fat” and lying about being arrested with Nelson Mandela – by telling themselves that’s what Trump does. But the secret to the president’s unorthodox but effective style is that his rhetorical flourishes aren’t empty.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Behind his tough talk is a substantive indictment of exactly the kind of elitist, self-serving dishonesty and privilege that Schumer and the Left once again exhibited last week.

The Left talks big; Trump does, bigly (as he says). The Schumer imbroglio shows why it’s going to stay that way for another five years.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE BY JIM DEMINT