I&I Editorial

It was 10:46 p.m. when Joe Biden finished his closing statement Wednesday night. At 10:50 p.m. the former Vice President was at the edge of the stage with his arm around the Rev. Al Sharpton, the professional demagogue who with his hoaxes and hatemongering has stirred up more racial discord in America than anyone.

And Biden is the “centrist” candidate.

Government dependency, the cause of so much misery, is the air that politicians of the left breathe. Ever-increasing government control is their perennial objective, promising it will solve big problems (often of government making). But it never does.

Democrats talk about “endless wars,” but the problems of poverty and crime President Trump showcased in his explosive tweets about Baltimore must never be solved, so that the left’s war against them never ends.

Despite strides against racism and against lack of economic opportunities for the underclass that were unimaginable in the 1960s, the Democrats running for president in 2020 are more intent on expanding government and worming it into Americans’ lives than some of the most power-hungry tyrants of the past, doing so purportedly to combat the phantom of “systemic racism.”

And so, actual solutions must never be given voice. Which is why during the last two nights we witnessed the bizarre new phenomenon of the Democrats again and again accusing each other of borrowing “Republican talking points” — apparently the worst sin that can be committed.

Policing Your Fellow Democrats’ Speech

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren during Tuesday night’s CNN debate said, “we should stop using Republican talking points in order to talk with each other about how to best provide that health care.” This, after she claimed Democrats “are not about trying to take away healthcare from anyone. That’s what the Republicans are trying to do” — an assertion she made in spite of President Obama breaking his oft-made promise that no one was ever going to be forced off a private health plan by ObamaCare.

Also Tuesday night, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders unhappily told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “your question is a Republican talking point” after Tapper asked whether Sanders’ Medicare For All socialized health care would necessitate raising taxes on the middle class.

Later that night, when former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, one of the less loopy candidates, criticized Warren on the massive government spending that the Green New Deal would bring, she promised there is going to be a “$23 trillion worldwide market” in fighting global warming and charged: “What you want to do instead is find the Republican talking point of a made-up piece of some other part and say, ‘Oh, we don’t really have to do anything.’”

Then, Wednesday night, California Sen. Kamala Harris responded, “We cannot keep with the Republican talking points on this,” when asked about making employer-based health insurance against the law. Several of her rivals, including Biden, fell over themselves assuring viewers they weren’t guilty of appropriating any GOP talking points.

Later, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker lamented in regard to decriminalizing border crossings by aliens that “we are playing into Republican hands … and they’re trying to divide us against each other.” Any lack of unanimity on government solutions for everything apparently must be the work of the opposing party.

The Democratic Party has embraced tremendous extremism in just a very few years. For instance, in 2009 it was not so far left to enact a public option as part of ObamaCare, despite 60 Democrat senators plus control of the House of Representatives and the presidency. There were well-grounded fears that it would be a slippery slope to single-payer socialized medicine, ending private health insurance. Now that ObamaCare has failed, massively increasing costs instead of reducing them, any Democrat who opposes a complete government health care takeover — any who echoes Obama and says “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” — is scorned as a Republican in disguise.

It isn’t just on medical care. On every issue, these candidates are radicals who only 10 years ago would have been relegated to the fringe. Slavery reparations but no scrutinizing the sources of suffering in cities run by Democrats, because to do so is racist. A dangerously, hopelessly naive “foreign policy that focuses on diplomacy, ending conflicts by people sitting at a table, not by killing each other,” as Sanders put it; or “an international diplomatic approach where we’re talking to everybody,” as Biden’s fellow “centrist,” Hickenlooper, put it. Taxpayers paying for free college tuition at a time when a college education has become Marxist indoctrination. Pretending the world will end in a decade unless we stop using coal, oil and gas ASAP.

Beto O’Rourke called Trump “a president who uses fear to try to drive us further apart.” Biden said, “We choose hope over fear.”

The truth is that all these politicians who have spent their lives deepening government’s involvement in Americans’ affairs fear the ideas of economic freedom, through which people solve their problems in, and with, liberty.

— Written by Thomas McArdle

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