Today’s Alice in Wonderland political rhetoric means almost no outlandish assertion is completely surprising. There are so many false, new orthodoxies that attempting to compile a comprehensive list would be a fool’s errand. Here’s just a taste: Words are violence, violence is speech, women can impregnate men, silencing dissent is tolerance, black lives matter except if taken or blighted by other black people, etc.
Against such absurdities, perhaps the ironies of the Democratic National Convention were not so egregious. But as they tumbled forth, stupefaction was avoided by appreciation of the chutzpah it took to tell such whoppers.
Where to start? How about New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo? He lectured the convention about his heroic leadership tackling the coronavirus pandemic. “For all the suffering and tears,” he intoned, “our way worked, and it was beautiful.” Then he hammered President Trump, saying voters learned a “critical lesson” about “how many lives can be lost when our government is incompetent.”
Such cool effrontery! Wasn’t this the man whose bungled pandemic response made his state a cardinal case of government incompetence? He stopped nursing homes refusing admission to people infected with COVID-19. Carriers were thus housed among the elderly, for whom COVID-19 was most likely to be fatal. There were at least 6,400 deaths linked to the disease in New York nursing homes. That’s also an undercount due to Cuomo’s math chicanery.
Yet he puffs his chest and berates the federal response. Admirers of Cuomo’s pandemic briefings dubbed themselves “cuomosexuals” — you can hear the fans squealing — and convention Democrats lapped it up. He’s even landed a book deal to trumpet his wonderfulness.
Then came Sen. Bernie Sanders, with his usual dismal recitation of America’s failings. His theme was to warn America about Trump’s supposed tendency toward tyranny. “Under this administration,” Sanders inveighed, “authoritarianism has taken root in our country. I and my family, and many of yours, know the insidious way authoritarianism destroys democracy, decency, and humanity.”
This was surely one of the emptiest boasts ever ventured by a politician with a track record. Sanders is a lifetime supporter of Soviet socialism who lauded Fidel Castro whenever the opportunity arose. He fails to notice authoritarianism not only when it’s brutalizing people around him but also when it’s hosting him on his honeymoon. In 1988, he took his new bride for a holiday to the USSR. He was, the Washington Post reports, “enthralled with the hospitality and the lessons that could be brought home.” This was five years after Ronald Reagan, a politician with real insight into authoritarianism, denounced the “evil empire.”
If authoritarianism cloaks itself in anti-capitalist rhetoric, Sanders loves it. He wants to siphon power away from individuals to centralized federal authority. Yet he tells the DNC and the nation, “As long as I am here, I will work with progressives, with moderates, and yes, with conservatives, to preserve this nation from the threat that so many of our heroes fought and died to defeat.” No, he won’t. As long as he draws breath, he’ll work for Biden’s declared aim to “transform” America, so it is engulfed by the ideology that our founding principles and heroes have until now kept at bay.
After Sanders’s promise to keep on keeping on, the star-turn of the DNC’s first night was Michelle Obama, who delivered a slashing speech of denunciation against Trump. She framed this as a reluctant duty for, you understand, she really dislikes politics: “I know a lot of folks are reluctant to tune into a political convention right now or to politics in general. Believe me. I get that.” But in time of emergency, one must set aside personal distaste. Obama did “because I love this country with all my heart …”
This is the same Michelle Obama who in 2008, at the age of 44, declared, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country …” It is not possible to believe that someone who spent more than 20 years feeling no pride for her country actually loves it with all her heart. Hardly any commentators, and no Democrat, will say this heroine is implausible.
There were many, many examples from the DNC of frankly unbelievable, self-deluding propaganda. It swept down upon a suffering nation like an avalanche, containing no genuine admiration for the country it wishes to govern, no trace of self-awareness, no doubt of its own rightness — a great, cold, smothering, torrent of deadly virtue.
