Democrats Refuse to Learn Anything

By Kyle Smith

Thursday, June 09, 2022

 

Red lights are flashing and police sirens are wailing all across the Democratic Party. Yet the Democrats are striking a Frank Drebin pose: Nothing to see here, folks.

 

Substack columnist Ruy Teixeira is pleading with Democrats to abandon one or two of their craziest ideas, and make a point of breaking with one or two of their most extreme members, in his latest column, “Time for the Democrats’ Chesa Boudin Moment!” No, it isn’t. It can’t be. That would require a frank admission of error. From Joe Biden on down, the Democrats are convinced that they don’t have to change anything substantive at all. Because of their refusal to learn, November doom awaits them as surely as November chills.

 

Amusingly enough, what Teixeira suggests isn’t even substantive, merely cosmetic. Biden could accomplish much simply by disavowing Chesa Boudin, the ultra-prog district attorney of San Francisco who was recalled by voters this week in a 60–40 walloping. Boudin is the symbol of everything wrong with Democratic approaches to crime. He is not “incompetent,” as so many observers have claimed. He is in fact highly effective at accomplishing his goals, which are to lock up very few criminals and let property and drug crime blossom, all in the interests of providing aid and comfort to the criminal class, which he considers an oppressed group, at the expense of the rest of us. One of his own former assistant district attorneys, Brooke Jenkins, said that Boudin conceived of his job as that of a public defender, merely disguised as a prosecutor.

 

It would cost President Biden nothing to give Boudin, and Boudin-ism, a sound verbal thrashing. He’s gone. He just earned 40 percent support in San Francisco. How out of touch do you have to be to align with the left-most slice of the San Francisco polity? Yet just this week we learned that Biden’s own Justice Department is pulling a Chesa Boudin by intervening to give extraordinarily light sentences to a pair of far-left terrorist lawyers who firebombed a police car during the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. “The only way they hear us is through violence,” said one of the attackers. That’s a forthright confession to terrorism.

 

Boudinistas aren’t going to vote Republican this fall or any other fall. Democratic donors are not going to sit on their wallets and let Republicans retake the Senate without yet another cycle of gargantuan spending. Yet Biden, leery of his left flank, who represent such a small minority they’re a minority even in San Francisco, is stuck in an endless pattern of never doing anything congenial to his right flank, otherwise known as moderate voters.

 

During his appearance this week on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, a creaky-looking Biden made no reference to the fiasco in San Francisco, the recall, or Boudin, or more broadly to the many Democratic mistakes that pushed his approval rating this week to record lows. Instead, in between typically awkward comments such as “we’re moving in directions that are being slow” while affirming his opposition to mythical weapons that contain “300 rounds in a magazine,” Biden simply stuck with his usual strategy of trying to convince Americans that his laughable record is actually a litany of greatness: “One in seven of all the changes that have taken place in terms of solar, wind, and wind pumps, and I mean pumps and like, have occurred in the last 18 months; we’ve moved.” Kimmel opined that if Biden merely shouted these ideas more, he’d be fine: “I think you need to start yelling at people is really what I think.”

 

Biden has a fairly obvious communication problem. He can barely utter a sentence without sounding senile (“I know you get, you overstand it,” he told Kimmel, and “I think if the court overrules Roe v. Wade, and does what is draftick”). But even at his semi-lucid best, he merely repeats things he’s said before that do not impress many Americans. Never does he admit error; the problem is always that people refuse to acknowledge his successes.

 

A typical expression of the point was this remark: “So there’s a lot of major things we’ve done, but what we haven’t done is we haven’t been able to communicate it in a way that is . . . make me say it another way,” he told Kimmel. For the sake of all who oppose you, Mr. President, please: Ignore Ruy Teixeira and keep talking this way.