Shortly after World War II, one of the French Indo-Chinese countries – I think it was Cambodia – announced that its army had lost, misplaced or simply could not find or account for 400 missing elephants. The New Yorker magazine reprinted the headline and quipped in italics underneath, “Gee, fellows, did you look everywhere?”
Maybe the same sort of question ought to be addressed to the Democratic National Committee, which draws a total blank when it comes to anybody remembering the famous dossier on then-candidate Donald Trump for which that party had paid $9 million. The new Democrat leaders, the old Democrat leaders, all shook their heads in vain despair. There was total team amnesia regarding the matter, and it gave us an accurate and quite disgusting portrait of Democratic leaders and the American left in general.
It’s no fun going up against an opponent as bereft of honor as the American left at this point in American history. A boxer wants to feel his gloves connecting with something besides thin air. Some boxers who get knocked out in Round 1 can still say they landed a few good punches of their own. Jersey Joe Walcott had world champion Joe Louis on the floor twice before losing on points. Losing football teams can score three or four touchdowns before losing to teams that scored five or six.
“I don’t think I deserve a zero on this paper,” the student complained to the teacher.
“I don’t, either,” said she, “but it’s the lowest grade I’m allowed to give.”
I get her point. The left would be better off saying nothing rather than the infuriating clichés we hear from Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., such as, “All this talk about Hillary and uranium is a distraction!”
The media leftists are no better, harping on the “partisan” attacks from the White House. Do they think we’re going to hear words like “distraction” and “partisan” and say, “Wow, what a brilliant comeback. I guess they really put us in our place”? Of course not! They resort to those dreary, old, wet firecrackers because they’re empty, bone dry. Their comments deserve lower than zero.
In sports, there are impermissible offenses that can have the perpetrator ejected from the game. Apparently in politics, things just move along through the next news cycle, and the most heinous acts become history tomorrow and archaeology the day after. Only indictment, conviction and jail seem to limit abuse of the public by arrogant, self-serving despoilers of democracy. I self-ration myself here to just three examples.
It was cited in this space earlier that Mayor Carmen Cruz of San Juan, Puerto Rico, initially praised President Trump and his team after Hurricane Irma devastated the island. She was cautioned and corrected by a higher-ranking Democrat: “Oh, no. You’ve got to say nasty things about President Trump!” And she thereupon did!
When former President Bill Clinton was in Moscow giving one of his half-million-dollar speeches, he asked if he could possibly meet with the top players in the Russian nuclear establishment. If everybody in media today had my journalism professor in 1952, they’d have raised hell and put a chunk under it in the effort to find out why.
President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, had a truly alarming number of requests for “unmasking” of Americans on one end of the telephone line, with foreign nationals on the other. She said, yes, she had indeed requested quite a few unmaskings, but there were hundreds more that were performed in her name that she didn’t request! And who is doing what? Easy answer. Nobody is doing anything! And how can I be so smug and so sure about that? Also easy. If there were any meaningful followup, then anybody who listens to as much news as I do would have heard at least something about who was championing his way to the bottom of that absurdity.
Meanwhile, here’s an accurate portrait of the American left at this time. When the police arrived at the furniture store at 3 a.m., the front window was broken, and they caught a man with his hand in the cash register. His side of the story? He was waiting for a bus at 3 a.m., and he leaned against the store window, which broke, and when the cops arrived, he was in the cash register looking for a pencil and paper so he could leave his name and address!
