Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Oh, Now Democrats Care About Legitimacy

Brian Snyder/Reuters
Suddenly, Democratic partisans are in high dudgeon at Donald Trump and his legal team spreading irresponsible and self-defeating stolen-election conspiracy theories. For example, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent complains that Trump’s approach is “designed to place a cloud of illegitimacy over Biden’s presidency.” Julie Pace and Steven Sloan of the Associated Press fret that “Republicans risk leaving millions of Americans with the false impression that the results of the+ 2020 race are illegitimate. . . . Biden will almost certainly be viewed as an illegitimate president by some voters, potentially denying him that period of goodwill that typically greets a new president.” They quote Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett: “Their intent is to delegitimize this election and thereby delegitimize President-elect Biden’s presidency. It is damaging to the democracy. Once again they’re putting their short-term political interests ahead of the interests of the country.”
Well, well, well, how the worm has turned. Are Democrats and their media partisans actually against undermining the legitimacy of American elections and weaponizing that to weaken the presidency? Some of us were not born yesterday. As has often been the case, the real problem with Trump’s rhetoric is that it comes straight out of the Democratic playbook for undermining the legitimacy of an American election.
The George W. Bush Years
As I detailed at length back in 2016, Democrats had no qualms about years and years of corrosive assaults on the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s presidency. A sample:
In July 2004, John Kerry darkly lectured the NAACP about “a million disenfranchised African Americans and the most tainted election in history” . . . Leading Democrats still won’t admit that George W. Bush was the legitimate winner of the 2000 election. Al Gore, in his concession speech at the end of the recount fight, accepted only “the finality of this outcome” . . . Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman decried a “Constitutional coup”. Hillary Clinton, in 2002, told a crowd at a Democratic fundraiser that Bush “merely had been ‘selected’ president, not elected”. Jimmy Carter, in a 2014 interview, insisted that Bush had not actually won the election. Paul Begala tweeted at Ralph Nader in August 2016 that “I’d say what was disgraceful was Ralph running interference for Dubya so Sup Crt could steal the election.”. . . Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who was the Chair of the Democratic Party this year, told an interviewer in September 2016 that Al Gore had really won Florida.

The 2004 election, even after a more decisive ending, was likewise dogged by Democratic conspiracy theories that ran amok . . . Kerry, who didn’t concede until the following day, reportedly still believes to this day that Ohio was stolen. You can read this 2005 Mother Jones article for a flavor of the breadth and depth of the conviction on the left that the 2004 election was stolen – the author finally grudgingly concedes, after reviewing the many sources asserting this, that “it remains far from clear that Bush stole the election, and I say that as someone who has written that Bush did steal Florida and the White House in 2000.” Josh Marshall, in 2006, accused Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell of “Helping steal the 2004 election . . .”

For anyone old enough to have lived through the Bush years, this barely scratches the surface. Carl Cannon and Caitlin Huey-Burns noted more examples from 2001:
Read the rest from Dan McLaughlin HERE 
 
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1 comment:

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