In the Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel writes:
Mrs. Pelosi this week accomplished the remarkable feat of sidelining Mr. Trump and owning most of the unpleasant headlines herself. House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler explained that his sprawling Trump investigation was primarily designed to convince voters that Democrats were “not just trying to steal the last—to reverse the results of the last election.” This required his colleagues to deny furiously that the party has already decided on impeachment.
Then there was the crackup between House party elders who wanted Democrats to condemn the anti-Semitism of Rep. Ilhan Omar, and woke freshmen who wanted to turn smears against Jews into a fuzzy discussion of hurt feelings. Members battled for days, only for Mrs. Pelosi on Thursday to roll over to the progressive left’s demand that any resolution condemn “hate” in general and not anti-Semitism specifically. Even CNN described all this as “chaos.”
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The reigning political wisdom is that none of this will matter in the end. Democrats will brawl, but their anti-Trump fervor will ultimately unite them around a standard-bearer. Then again, these are not usual political times. And it seems equally possible that the same anti-Trump contempt will push them to overreach in their investigations and indulge in policy prescriptions that prove too extreme for a center-right country.
It’s too soon to know. For now, all we can do is sit back and enjoy the Democratic show.
As a blogger, watching the train wreck, it’s been a content-rich environment, although “enjoy” is obviously the wrong a word. Because as an American, watching Ilhan Omar bring Corbynism to the Democratic Party, as Bret Stephens wrote yesterday, it’s been a particularly painful week. In the 1975, Milton Friedman wrote:
I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.
Sadly, as with the 1970s, these are not those times.
UPDATE: AOC’s “Democratic Socialists of America” Chant for the Destruction of Israel.
h/t ED