For many Democrats in Congress, the media and in Hollywood, the collective freak-out over Donald Trump’s election continues apace. Their clear-eyed, sober post-election analysis of why Hillary Clinton lost has included accusing the FBI of colluding with the Kremlin, wondering why white, working-class voters in the Mid-West are racists (after backing President Obama in successive elections), and pointing to the Electoral College as an archaic relic of our antebellum past, standing athwart the “demographics is destiny” mantra they are fond of espousing.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Despite the lamentations, President-elect Trump has decided to forge ahead and do his job. He has nominated the majority of individuals that are to lead executive departments in his administration, an array made up mainly of standard, conventional Republicans. Faced with the responsibility to question these nominees on topics relevant to the positions they intend to fill, several Democrats have instead decided to posture and play politics while jostling for position in anticipation of the 2020 presidential race. As their party is left without its iconic leader and in ruins after the 2016 election, the Senate confirmation hearings serve as an excellent opportunity to make all the appropriate gestures in order to become the new talisman of progressives.
Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey took the unprecedented step of testifying against Senator Jeff Sessions, nominated to be the next Attorney General of the United States. Normally, a witness testifies before a committee to bring to light facts that have bearing on the nominee’s ability and fitness to fulfill his obligations. Furthermore, it is unheard of for a senator to provide testimony against a fellow senator in a confirmation hearing. Booker decided that the nomination of Sessions to lead the Justice Department posed such a grave threat to our democracy that he was moved to testify against him. The only problem was that Booker’s overwrought performance brought no factual testimony against Sessions, merely the opportunity for Booker to emote on camera. Booker has certainly changed his tune since last year, where he declared that he was “blessed and honored” to work with Sessions on legislation that awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to civil-rights activists. What has changed since that moment of bipartisan and senatorial comity? One could imagine that this change of heart was spurred by glowing profiles of his new Senate colleague from California, and his insistence that he deserved a few as well.
Kamala Harris, the newly elected Senator from California, already has many, many admirers. A profile in the New Republic ran down the accolades: projected as “the next Barack Obama” in the Washington Post, the “Great Blue Hope” in the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Hill, Mother Jones and The New York Times all have cited her as a 2020 presidential candidate. It makes sense that she should use the confirmation hearings of Trump nominees to signal to the party’s base that she will take on the mantle of a progressive leader of a party whose official leadership positions are occupied by people all over the age of 70.
Senator Harris sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which yesterday heard the testimony of Kansas representative Mike Pompeo, nominated by President-elect Trump to the position of CIA director. The incoming CIA director will have a myriad of pressing national security concerns that will be need to addressed immediately. Harris, though, had other priorities on her mind, mainly virtue-signaling to progressives that she will fight climate change anywhere, even Langley, Virginia.
Harris first quoted a statement from current CIA Director John Brennan, where he argued that climate change has contributed to political instability around the world. She asked Pompeo if he had any reason to doubt this assessment of CIA analysts. After Pompeo demurred, she followed up by asking Pompeo for his own personal beliefs on climate change. Pompeo responded by saying, “As the director of CIA, I would prefer today to not get into the details of climate debate and science.”
Having covered one topic so germane to the national security of the United States, Harris pivoted to another, specifically gay marriage. She brought up Pompeo’s voting record and stated position of belief in traditional marriage and his disagreement with the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that legalized gay marriage in the U.S. “Can you commit to me that your personal views on this issue will remain your personal views and will not impact internal policies that you put in place at the CIA?” Harris asked. Pompeo gave Harris his assurance that his views on marriage would not impact his management of employees at the CIA.
Politicians sometimes make the mistake of only seeking short-term victories. Case in point: one minute you’re informing GOP leaders that “you’ve won,” and you pass far-reaching legislation on party-line votes and enacting new regulations without congressional input or approval. Then, you wake up on January 20, 2017 to see that your party has lost over 60 seats in the House, 13 in the Senate, 12 governorships, and 900+ state legislative seats over the course of your presidency. Oh, and your successor is Donald Trump.
Smarter politicians take the long view, and Harris and Booker are calculating that they will be better equipped to campaign under Obama’s “legacy” in 2020 than Hillary Clinton was in 2016. They will continue to present themselves as fresh, progressive alternatives, a role that Clinton, with her corporate speech fees and quasi-criminal syndicate masquerading as a charitable foundation, could never fulfill. Whether it is asking questions about social issues and climate change before a committee hearing dedicated to national security matters, or masquerading before the cameras in order to again castigate a Republican as an irredeemable racist, both Harris and Booker intend to send a message to their party’s left flank: “I am paying attention to your concerns, and by the way, can you send a check?”
If President elect Trump keeps his promise to America as that is what got him elected (besides the obvious criminal aspect of the Clinton crime syndicate) then Americans will look forward to cleaning up the rest of the swamp of RINO’s and Left Wingnuts who opposed getting America back on track..
The delusion is strong with them.
Kamala Harris …a fitting replacement for Barbara Boxer. A new crew member for the California politicians ship of fools.
Harris is one of the worst of the worst in libturd terms! She was groomed by pee-lousey and the clan from the get go! They managed to install her as frisco’s DA, then stepped up to state AG (with help of a constitutional amendment on a ballot-that was SLIPPED in with no notice or investigation) The top two vote getters go to Nov election, since libturd demo creeps control all in the state it was a shoe in! Now we have only demo creeps running against each other every November! There is NO organized opposition anywhere in Stinkramento! Thanks to Harris and her ilk. WE are NOW a single party communist dictatorship with NO way, short of revolution, to oppose any radical laws coming from the cesspool north!! As we slowly slip further down the slippery slope of bankruptcy and chaos!
Excellent article – common sense and plain decency never found a place in liberal politics – democrats can not help themselves but slide further in irrelevance and ridiculousness.
the stupid bitch will be eliminated by her own doing
As disgraceful as Kamala Harris was as an unabashed opportunist serving as California Attorney General, she intends being disastrously worse as California Senator. The old hag Fienkenstien finally shrivelling up into resigned retirement, was a relief to Californians. Now we see the same ugliness threatening to antagonistically squat in a California Senate chair as a new carreer hypocrite. GOD HELP US FROM THIS REGURGITATION!
I still think California should split in two…Southern California and Northern California! Northern California Carrying most of the Common Sense Republican Working Class…..Southern California can have SF, LA, Hollyweird and Silicon Valley Loonies…
Excellent article! It exposes the democrats’ complete lack of political maturity the way they behave!
I hope republicans actually advance their professed principles and return decision making to the people. Otherwise they will suffer the same fate as the Dema
Can we just please unite for the good of the country ?
As always, Alex Tomescu does not disappoint. The sad point is, liberals seem comfortable with conservatives being vilified and the system corrupted. So long as liberals believe/feel (thinking is not permitted) they are doing “good” all methods to silence (destroy) the opposition is somehow “fair”.
Delusion, self-absorption, and status quo…so long “establishment” politicians. The silent majority has spoken, off the with heads of ideologues on both sides.
Excellent article, I feel that Harris will be a carbon copy of Obama, the likes of which this country should never again vote for.
Mr. Tomescu’s article using Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris as examples of the Democratic Party’s shifting to leftist/progressive politics since Donald Trump’s election is very insightful and well written as always.
Senator Kamala Harris’s grilling of the probable incoming CIA director, Mike Pompeo, on global warming was not only irrelevant, but absurd and even comical, Comical because it is doubtful that she knows the difference between Fahrenheit and Centigrade, heat and temperature, climate and weather, and, likely, carbon dioxide and methane.
Global warming is very dangerously being widely used by politicians as a smoke-screen to cover up much bigger problems around the world and as a scare tactic which many Americans believe as fact
Nobody has ever offered a more succinct indictment of the influence of politicians on major issues then H. L. Mencken, who said: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
As an example, in May 2014 Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduating students at Boston College of the “crippling consequences” of climate change. “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists,” he added, “tell us this is urgent.” Where did Mr. Kerry get the 97% figure? Perhaps from his boss, President Obama, who tweeted in May 2014 that 97% of scientists agree is real, man-made and dangerous. (cientific
It seems Obama conveniently forgot, or more likely used it as a smoke screen, the real threats to America from “hot spots”, not created by global warming, such as the Middle East, Libya, Sudan and Egypt all resulting in unstoppable terrorism in America.
So far, no one has quantified the consensus among natural scientists on global warming. In fact, it cannot be done easily, said Jon Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford University who has been studying communication strategies for decades. (Scientific American – May 2014).
Incredibly, three out of four Americans believe that the Earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it, according to a survey by researchers at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. (June 2010)
The proponents of the global warming establishment attribute the coming catastrophe to the alarming amount of “greenhouse gases”—-mostly carbon dioxide— that have entered the atmosphere due to industrialization and the accompanying increased burning of fossil fuels. Many scientists who believe global warming is a fact don’t believe it is man made but that it is due to other natural phenomena that have occurred many times before during the life of the earth
The Economist magazine shocked the global warming establishment with an article in March, 2013 that began with this lead:
“Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” That quarter corresponds to one-third of the CO2 added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution!
What if global warming isn’t a scare? What can be done about it?
Meteorologists, climatologists, physicists, and a plethora of scientists in different disciplines are not able to predict, no less control, “local weather” such as tornadoes, hurricanes, rainfall, ice storms, and droughts.
How, then, can they expect to control global warming?
Unbelievably, one of the ways that’s been suggested by so-called “scientists” is to surround the globe with highly reflective particles in order to reduce the sunlight that reaches the earth. In the early 1970s there was fear of a coming ice age and another suggestion to prevent that was to cover the ice caps with carbon to cause them to melt and stop the coming ice age that never occurred. Surrounding the earth with reflective particles would be infinitely more dangerous than global warming in that the overall results are not at all predictable and are irreversible.
Tampering, in any way, with the interaction of the sun and the earth which has controlled our climate successfully for billions of years, without man’s interference, can produce devastation and tragedy the likes of which have never been seen before. It should be kept in mind that after these billions of years man is still here on his only home—–Planet Earth!
“If climate change continues at the same rate as it has over the past 50 years, then dangerous warming—usually defined as starting at 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels—is about a century away. So we do not need to rush into subsidizing inefficient and land-hungry technologies, such as wind and solar or risk depriving poor people access to the beneficial effects of cheap electricity via fossil fuels”. (Scientific American, November 2015):
The advances in science and technology in the last century are unfathomable.
In 1936, just 80 years ago, Alan Turing invented what’s now called the Turing machine which was critical to the development of today’s digital computers that have changed the entire fabric of life on earth as never before.
There’s every reason to believe that the science of climatology will be far advanced in the next 100 years and scientists will have much better “tools” to investigate weather and climate. There will be new sources of green energy including highly efficient fuel cells and batteries both of which are now operational in many research laboratories.
It’s long been known how to break down water into its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen, but only on a laboratory scale. .Research is underway to enable this separation on a large-scale. The burning of hydrogen regenerates it back to water and enables the cycle to start all over again. Honda already has a car powered by hydrogen, generated from fuel cells, on the retail market.
In my opinion, the billions of dollars that are being spent on “questionable” global warming would, without any doubt, be much better used to enable more research on projects such as these.
“According to the GAO, annual federal climate spending has increased from $4.6 billion in 2003 to $8.8 billion in 2010, amounting to $106.7 billion over that period.” (Forbes Aug 23, 2011)
From $9.2 billion in 2011 to $91 billion in 2016 amounting to approximately $58.2 billion for that period and a total from 2003 to 2016 of $164.9 billion.
Who is funding the “global warming research” and filling the pockets of scientists who are performing the research? Unfortunately, the middle classes of the developed world are paying with their hard-earned taxes.
Roy Engstrom