Democrats Living Dangerously

Okay, boys and girls, remember when, in April 2015, Hillary Clinton urged the Democratic National Committee to play up Trump because she so desperately wanted to run against him?  Judging from the recent primaries for the midterm general elections, it seems that the Democrats have learned nothing from promoting the most dangerous Republican candidates.

Democrats have been running ads highlighting the records of Republican election-deniers - the folks who say that Trump won the election of 2020 - in order to help get them nominated so the Democrats, theoretically, can beat these candidates in November.  I touched on that in commenting about the 2022 Pennsylvania gubernatorial primary.  The Democrats have gotten similarly involved in primaries in numerous elections in various states, like the Maryland gubernatorial primary and now the Michigan U.S. House primary in the district based in Grand Rapids, where Republican U.S. Representative Peter Meijer was running for re-election.

The operative word here is "was."  Meijer, a scion of the family that owns the Midwestern pharmacy chain that bears their name, was one of ten House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump for the January 6 insurrection.  He's the sort of Republican I would like to see more of in Congress, because he stood up for principle.  Democrats praised him for standing up to Trump.  But then the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee went ahead and showed their admiration for Meijer by stabbing him in the back and spending money to get his election-denying opponent, John Gibbs, nominated for the November election to give the Democrats a greater chance of winning a House seat in a U.S. House district that hasn't elected a Democrat to represent it since 1990.  Gibbs won.  (In a foreboding sign of how this might backfire on Democrats, their candidate in that district, Hillary Scholten, hasn't gotten any mention from the national media.)

What the hell are these Democrats doing monkeying with the business like this?  All they're doing is helping GOP election-deniers get one giant step closer to winning office.  And some of them have real shots at winning.  If they do win, it will be in part because Democrats helped them get nominated.  Why don't Democrats stop wasting their money on messing with the Republican primaries and start spending it on helping Democrats win in the general elections?  Their cynical political game reeks, and the Democrats could pay a heavy price for it.

Meanwhile, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - who has endorsed the  Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's tactic of interfering in Republican primaries - made a dangerous move this week by visiting Taiwan and, as the U.S.'s third-highest-ranking elected official, speaking defiantly and forcefully about American support for the Taiwanese government and the Taiwanese people.  China considers Taiwan, a country Americans are obliged to defend, to be a breakaway province and hopes to reunite it with the mainland by force if necessary.  (Taiwan's government, the Republic of China, ran all of China until it was driven off the mainland by the Communists in 1949 and has been reduced to just the island of Taiwan and a few small islands off the mainland coast.  Ironically, Taiwan had just been returned to China by Japan after fifty years of Japanese rule.)   

China responded to Pelosi by sending over two dozen warships to the Taiwan Strait and blasted Pelosi for impugning Chinese sovereignty.  So, if World War III breaks out in the Far East, this could be where it starts.

Waving the proverbial red flag in the face of Xi Jinping (who salutes a literal red flag, with a few yellow stars added to boot) is a pretty dumb thing to do when U.S.-China relations are tense enough, and leading government and intelligence officials in Washington told Pelosi to please, please, please not go ahead with her Taiwan visit.  Alas, Pelosi doesn't take orders from anyone and makes clear to everyone else that her way is the way it's going to be.  In other words, she's a typical Italian mom. 😛