Time and time again I’ve written that these self-praising never-Trumper ex-Republicans can’t get through an essay without making sh** up about liberals and Democrats and reminding everyone that we still suck, that we’re still just a bunch of annoying commie social justice warriors who hate success and want government to control every aspect of your life, and oh by the way, our party is “becoming more extreme” and has been “lurching to the left” lately.
The latest is Peter Wehner in The Atlantic, telling us what he’s “Gained from Leaving the Republican Party” which I seem to have missed because I couldn’t make it past this tripe:
...unlike some vocal Trump critics who have left the GOP, I remain philosophically conservative.
Well, aren’t you just extra-special.
This means that the modern-day Democratic Party, lurching further and further to the left, doesn’t have room for me.
Oh, hell’s bells. Here we go with the lurching part. But wait, he’s got proof! See:
(A 2018 Pew Research poll found that 46 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters identified themselves as liberal, compared with 28 percent a decade before.)
Wow, more liberals “identif[y] themselves as liberal” than they did 10 years ago. Because what people call themselves is the best indicator of what they believe in policy-wise. And poll responses about what people call themselves is proof positive of what an actual political party (i.e., its elected officeholders and candidates, who apparently were not polled) is doing. It couldn’t possibly have to do with the Atwater/Luntz/Gingrich effect making “liberal” a dirty word 30 years ago is wearing off, could it? Naaah.
But wait, he’s got more proof! See:
Two illustrations of the journey the party has taken: First, it wasn’t that long ago that referring to a Democratic Party politician as a democratic socialist was viewed as a libel; today democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez galvanize the party’s base.
Love the use of passive voice in that “First” part; someone, somewhere, at some unspecified point in time, “viewed” the act of “referring to a Democratic Party politician as a democratic socialist … as a libel.”
Who? When? Where? How? Who is he talking about? Whose mind(s) is he reading here? Who ever said, or wrote, that (s)he “viewed” the act of “referring to a Democratic Party politician as a democratic socialist … as a libel”??
That the “today” part might well be true is beside the point.
But wait, more proof! See:
Second, the Democratic Party has moved from a stance that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” to Governor Andrew Cuomo lighting up New York City's Freedom Tower in pink after signing a bill “celebrating the legal right to abort fetuses that could survive outside the womb,” as Alexandra DeSanctis put it in The Atlantic.
Jeebus fleebing cripes on a popsicle stick.
This is where he lost me; this is where I stopped reading. You say shit like this, you lose all credibility, all pretense at magnanimity, and any right to be taken seriously. It’s dishonest, it’s offensive, and it’s infuriating.
And, just for the record, Alexandra DeSanctis is a staff writer for The National Review, and is identified in the linked Atlantic piece as such. Have a look at her C.V., if you have the stomach for it. I’m quite certain (although I can’t “prove”) that Governor Cuomo did not have DeSanctis’s spin in mind. Note also how Wehner name-drops DeSanctis at the end rather than the beginning, making the reader think that the “celebrating...” quote came from Cuomo, or from the referenced “bill.”
They. Really. Can’t. Help. Themselves.