Friday, January 10, 2020


You know what's killing America? Meanness. You know who's really, really mean? Like, extremely mean?

No, not who you're thinking. And no, not all his allies in Congress, on the federal bench, or at Fox News. Not his lawyer-slash-unofficial-secretary-of-state either.

The real meanies in America are Democrats. So I learn from the absurdly named Tristan Justice at The Federalist, who's having a sad because Marianne Williamson is no longer a candidate for president.
While there were many reasons Marianne Williamson is ending her longshot presidential campaign that never really got started in the first place, it was an American addiction to contempt that ultimately drowned her presidential ambitions before they could even reach the surface....

Williamson’s love it seems, lost to the contemptuous forces driving American politics and embedded in the Democratic primary. Each of the leading candidates in the race are eager to engage in the type of spiteful back and forth with the president to drum up support among their base no matter how damaging to the nation’s civil discourse. Just this week for example, former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg cast blame on Trump for the downed Ukrainian passenger over Iran. Former Vice President Joe Biden once challenged Trump to a fist-fight. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has called Trump a “loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud,” and a “loud orange elephant in the room.” Senator Bernie Sanders promised civility on the trail but hired a “Twitter Attack Dog” as described by the Atlantic. And never forget that the Democratic nominee in 2016, Hillary Clinton, condemned Trump’s supporters as “deplorable.”
Yes, that's right: American is uncivil, and 100% of the fault lies with Democrats, according to Mr. Justice.

Oh, okay, not 100%:
Trump on the other hand, has certainly not helped restore the spirit of civility in the nation’s discourse. The president has famously promised to cover attendee legal fees for beating up protestors who heckle at his rallies.
Apparently, Justice believes this is the only example of uncivil behavior in Trump's 73 years on Earth.

Oh, and Democrats also dislike Marianne Williamson because they hate God. So we learn from Justice's Federalist colleague Emily Jashinsky:
... despite Williamson’s failure to catch much traction in the race, she leaves Democrats with at least one serious lesson to internalize. It was best conveyed in conversation with Ross Douthat last August, when Williamson sharply criticized the “over-secularization of the Democratic Party,” particularly in contrast with other moments in history: (Emphasis added.)
I grew up, once again, in a time when things were different than this. Bobby Kennedy talked about the soul of America, Martin Luther King talking about political issues within a larger spiritual context. It’s only been in the last few decades that Democratic and progressive politics has become so overly secularized and so overly corporatized. This is an aberration in my mind. And I’m enough of a student of American history to know that. Franklin Roosevelt said a prayer on the radio as soon as the D-Day invasion began. Look at the second inaugural address of Abraham Lincoln. He contextualized the entire Civil War in terms of what it represented spiritually and was quoting from the Bible and so forth. I believe that the over-secularization of the Democratic Party has not served it. And I don’t believe that it has served the Democratic Party to make people of faith feel so diminished sometimes. I feel it myself in this campaign.
... the experience did bring Williamson to the wise observation that today’s Democrats are secular in ways even the party’s prior champions were not, and in ways that hamper their ability to appeal as broadly as possible too.
I guess none of the six million people who watched a YouTube video of Barack Obama singing "Amazing Grace" were Democrats.

Jashinsky sees proof of her assertion that Democrats hate God in the release this week of an ad critical of Trump's Evangelical followers ... an ad that was, um, made by Republicans:
They aren’t openly Democrats, but a group of Never Trump operatives proved Williamson’s point in a video they released Thursday that poked clumsily at the president’s Christian supporters. To borrow her language, it does not serve the political opponents of religious voters to diminish them, or laugh them out of their movements.
That would be this ad, which might not be particularly effective, but is mocking the religious hypocrisy of Trump and his supporters in the evangelical elite, not religion per se:

The folks behind the ad include George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, and Rick Wilson -- folks who built careers in the Republican Party. But the ad is bad, and it's Democrats' fault -- obviously, because everything is, isn't it?

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