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Barking mad and proud of it

By Wesley Pruden - The Washington Times - Monday, June 25, 2018

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Bonnie and Clyde sometimes called themselves “bank inspectors,” but they were only kidding. The Palestinian Authority, the famous terrorist collective pretending to be a nation, collects $350 million from the U.S. Treasury every year to pay “salaries” to imprisoned terrorists, make love offerings to families of dead terrorists, celebrate terrorists as heroes, build monuments to dead criminals, and other bad things. And that’s no joke.

The Palestinian Authority was even invited to an international conference in Paris the other day to talk about how to prevent financing of terrorism, to behead the venomous snake before it bites. That’s the sickest joke of all.

Here at home sweet home, a prominent member of Congress wants to organize vigilantes to follow Cabinet secretaries and others prominent in the U.S. government into their homes, shops, churches, and restaurants to harass, intimidate and harangue them simply because they don’t like the president they work for.

In Asia, a celebrated leader who presides over a barbaric gulag, kills members of his own family to keep a grip on his restive nation, is invited to parley with the president of the United States, who treats him as a legitimate “world leader” and smothers him with tight hugs and sloppy kisses.

Everybody in the Southern Hemisphere, having turned much of their half of the globe into a starving slum, is trying to make a getaway to the north. The man expected to be elected president of Mexico later this summer calls on “les miserables” of the south to migrate north to the United States, declaring it a “human right.”

“And soon, very soon — after the victory of our movement — we will defend all the migrants in the American continent and all the migrants in the world,” said Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is widely expected to be elected president of Mexico next week. Migrants of the south, he told an interviewer the other day, “must leave their towns and find a life in the United States.”

The world, which in truth did not have far to go, has finally gone bananas. Elizabeth Warren, the erratic Democratic senator from Massachusetts who thinks she will be elected chief of the tribe in the year 2020, says it’s the president of the United States who “is taking America to a dark and ugly place.” But Pocahontas is too late. America and the world are already there.

Mob rule is the prescription of certain of her colleagues on Capitol Hill. That’s Rep. Maxine Waters’ solution to the chaos abroad in the land. She told a rally in Los Angeles, ground zero of political fantasy, that “we must make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from [the Trump] Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Miss Waters is not every Democrat’s cup of tea, and many Democrats on Capitol Hill and in other places, are not happy that she has become the public face of the Democratic impeachment dream. A growing number of Democrats have noticed that there’s only four months go until Nov. 6 and the congressional midterm elections, and the party is still playing the old game of “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

Everybody in America knows by now that the Democrats are frustrated, angry, sore, and unanimously unhappy about having lost the 2016 election. If you want to scream, take a number. The Democrats still sane understand there’s nothing left to gain by endlessly repeating, as if on a loop of audiotape, that they think Donald Trump is the anti-Christ. Dreams of a blue wave are in full retreat, and if Democrats hope to win big, or even medium-sized, it will require more than sitting around and talking about how awful the president is, and how nice it would be if the Democrats could practice up for 2020 by taking back the House.

Kicking a few people out of restaurants can be satisfying but that won’t get it done. It might not even be legal. David Cole, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, tells the website Law & Crime restaurateurs tempted to follow the Red Hen’s crusade to restore morality to America through fine cuisine and gustatory piety, that public-accommodations laws prohibit businesses that are open to the public from discriminating against people based on certain characteristics is risky. Keeping the toilets clean and the shrimp out of the sun may be more important than monitoring private morality. Americans cherish the doctrine of separation of church and kitchen. Especially when the world beyond the dining room has gone barking mad.

• Wesley Pruden is editor in chief emeritus of The Times.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/25/barking-mad-and-proud-of-it/