Something Terrible

American Spectator - Monday July 25, 2016

by Wlady Pleszczynski

When Hillary Clinton chose Tim Kaine as her vice presidential nominee, what she was really choosing was one of the two major characteristics defining her as a politician.

Clinton could, had the notion struck her, picked Sherrod Brown or Liz Warren as her running mate. In doing so she would have fully embraced her record as a left-wing ideologue. Her party’s Hard Left base, a large segment if not a majority of which opted for Bernie Sanders as their Democrat primary choice, don’t fully believe that Hillary is a full-on leftist. That despite her record of attempting to mandate socialized medicine when given an opportunity to remake America’s healthcare system, a nearly pristine leftist voting record in the Senate, and a youth spent as a disciple of Saul Alinsky. It’s just not enough, given that her husband was something of a centrist as president, she’s raked millions of dollars in sweaty Wall Street money for indeterminate services rendered, and she conducted a rather interventionist foreign policy as Secretary of State (though with results few could argue qualify her for a promotion).

Instead, Clinton went with a choice reflecting her dominant characteristic — political inside dealing. Rather than a member of the Democrats’ socialist vanguard the nominee is Virginia senator Tim Kaine, who in this age of rigid partisanship almost qualifies as a conservative Democrat (the American Conservative Union gives him a lifetime score of 0, but the Hard Left sees him as a tool of the big banks. Kaine has been in elected office for 22 straight years, getting elected as Richmond’s mayor when he was 36 and not earning a dime in the private sector since. But as we know, the Democrats don’t have too many people with experience in real jobs among their leaders.

And as we also know, it’s a rare Democrat politician who isn’t a leftist ideologue, a Third World kleptocrat, or both.

Hillary’s going with the latter, more or less. But her convention will celebrate both.

We know that hard-core cultural Marxism and runaway wealth redistribution will be on offer; just look at the speaker list for the four-day soiree in Philadelphia. Among the names on that list are members of Mothers of the Movement; a number of women whose children were killed in interracial police shootings and who are therefore stars among the Black Lives Matter movement.

Lezley McSpadden might be the most prominent of those. She is Mike Brown’s mother. Matt Walsh, writing last week at the Blaze, summed up perfectly how offensive it is for her to be addressing the crowd in Philadelphia…

I feel empathy for any mother who loses a child, but McSpadden is not a voice for peace or unity. Perhaps her message could have some positive impact if she admitted that her son got himself killed by his own actions and then urged other parents to teach their children discipline and respect so as to avoid her son’s awful fate, but that’s most emphatically not her message. She still claims that her son’s civil rights were violated and that the cop was a racist killer. In McSpadden’s view, her son apparently had the civil right to beat and throttle a police officer without fear of consequence.

It’s perhaps understandable that a mother would struggle to come to terms with the fact that her son’s death was his own fault — although it’s somewhat less understandable that McSpadden got into physical fights only days after the incident over who gets to sell Michael Brown merchandise, and that her husband stood up in front of protesters and urged them to “Burn this bitch down.” Still, the reluctance to confront the full reality of the situation can be forgiven. Lord knows what I would say if, God forbid, my son got himself shot and his last two acts on Earth were to violently rob a convenience store then set upon a police officer and savagely beat him for no reason. My only hope is that consistent, attentive, and competent parenting will prevent him from turning into the kind of young man capable of such wickedness.

The Black Lives Matter movement won’t be the only special interest pandered to in Philly. The speaker’s list includes illegal aliens, minimum wage increase advocates, gun controllers and the disabled, among others.

We’ll even see a transgendered speaker whom you’ve never heard of. Bruce Jenner wasn’t available, so instead the Democrats have given us someone named Sarah McBride, who is advertised as the press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, one of the most prominent Gay Mafia families.

As for prominent names on the speaker list, they’ll all be there — but of the 50 governors, senators, Members of Congress and others who are supposedly addressing the convention, none of them are being put forth as keynote speakers. On Monday, those are Bernie Sanders and Michelle Obama. On Tuesday, Bill Clinton. On Wednesday, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. And on Thursday, Chelsea and Hillary Clinton.

Maybe that’s because so many of them are in such poor odor with the American public. The Democrats are trying to win not just the White House, after all, but the House and Senate and maybe even some governor’s mansions and statehouses. That’s why even though Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Sheila Jackson Lee, Terry McAuliffe, Tom Wolf and Karen Weaver (the mayor of Flint, Michigan who we all know has done such a good job) are all listed as speakers during the convention, you can bet they’ll be brief and hustled off the stage quickly.

Hillary can’t exactly deny them the right to speak, but taken as a whole that list simply validates the understanding that this is a rogue’s gallery of corrupt operators and malefactors whose only innovation as political leaders is their having developed great skill at weaponizing their failure to govern.

But that’s today’s Democrats. And the show they’ll be putting on will be a smorgasbord of sleaze, a saturnalia of socialism and a gala of grievance. It’ll be something for everybody, so long as they’re looking for government swag.

Which is why it doesn’t matter how terrible Hillary’s convention is. So long as she can trot out promises to the clientele, she can lock in the votes from people who don’t care who’s doling out the goods. She can be as awful as she wants, and so can her party. And they will be this week.

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