Now it’s come to this: Not even Maxine Waters wants to be associated with the lunatics who are turning the once-great Democratic Party into their own asylum.
Yes, even the California congresswoman, whose anti-Trump tirades have made her the party’s and media’s new pin-up gal, is rolling her eyes at some of the nutty notions gaining ground in the party of FDR, HST and JFK.
Some of the party’s positions are too far out there even for Ms. Maxine, the firebrand orator who works crowds into a frenzy with her chant: “Inpeesh Foty-Fi! Inpeesh Foty-Fi!”
Speaking of impeaching Forty-five, Ms. Maxine was the first to clamber aboard the Democratic Party’s would-be bandwagon of anti-Trump hysteria. With her at the wheel, this vehicle took on the madcap aspect of Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus, the one he and his LSD-addled “Merry Pranksters” travelled up and down the land in back in the early ’60s.
Ms. Maxine started demanding Trump’s impeachment even before his inauguration.
Let us acknowledge at the outset, however, that both parties have their bats-in-the-belfry contingents. Hardly a week goes by without the Grand Old Party demonstrating a need for a shipment of straight jackets and Thorazine.
Recently, for example, the documentarian/spoofster, Sacha Baron Cohen, enticed some Republican knuckleheads to sign on to the notion of a “Kinderguardian” program – a supposed initiative to train pre-schoolers in the use of firearms, including semiautomatics.
The bipartisan buffoonery of the two parties makes a powerful case for limited government. But keep in mind, those easily gulled GOP dolts merely gave their eager-to-please assent to a cockamamie scheme suggested by somebody else. It’s not madness Republicans are demanding from the floor of Congress or from the split-screen of the Sean Hannity show.
Democrats, on the other hand, seem to be in earnest about their whacky agenda, an agenda they’re actively promoting both on the floor of Congress and on CNN. That agenda includes:
* No borders. * Men calling themselves “transgender” allowed to wander into the ladies’ restrooms.
* Bakers forced by judicial edict to concoct confectionaries with two little bridegroom figurines on top.
* Late-term fetal extirpations galore.
* Hostile relations with the Rooskies, maybe even war with them over places we can’t even find on the map, for example, South Ossetia, population less than Trenton.
* Maximum taxation and regulatory red tape.
* Foreign trade policies that favor transnational corporations while gutting entire American communities – policies, for example, that gave a taxpayer bailout to General Motors, which now has vast empty lots in places like Ewing, N.J., and Anderson, Ind., but around 60,000 employees …. in China.
* “Climate change” diktats that drive up the price of electricity and gasoline but don’t lower global temperatures even one one-hundred-thousandths of a degree.
* Bankrupting, trillion-dollar-a-year, government-run “free” Medicare for all – a squirrely idea that even moonbat liberal California and Vermont have rejected as unrealistic.
Now even Ms. Maxine is saying “Whoa!” She took pains in a recent tete-a-tete with CNBC’s John Harwood to put a margin of distance between herself and some of her party’s more militant manifestoes. As Ms. Maxine explained it:
No. 1, she’s no socialist. She wants it known that she’s, by golly, an out-and-out capitalist! So don’t go lumping her in with those loonies – the “left of the left,” as she calls them – who are suddenly swarming all over the party.
No. 2, don’t go lumping her in with those party asylum inmates who are demanding the abolition of the agency that’s in charge of enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.
She’s espoused some nutty notions in her time. She once pushed for congressional hearings on the CIA’s complicity in the nation’s crack epidemic. (Party talking points now insist that everything the “intelligence community” says be swallowed whole, no questions asked.) But don’t go putting her in the same category as those Democrat moon-howlers who want to shut down ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Others in the party may favor flinging open the door for Mexicans, Guatemalans and El Salvadorans to flood in and provide the big employers cheap labor that erodes the wage rate for Americano Yanquis, especially African Americans. But Ms. Maxine says she gets it that the nation’s gotta police its borders.
Her immigration stance is surprising, maybe, but not necessarily her capitalism. She and her circle are known to live pretty high on the hog, as the expression goes – even as they regularly tear the top 1 percent a new orifice.
There was once an ethics inquiry on Capitol Hill into the ways her family seemed to be prospering from doing bidness with Uncle Sammy – including her banker hubby who landed several million dollars of the “TARP” (Troubled Asset Relief Program) largess that Barack Obama took to handing out upon becoming the Presidential embodiment of “Hope,” TARP being one of his first moves toward “healing the planet” and commanding “the oceans to cease rising.”
Not being a notoriously fastidious institution regarding ethics, Congress gave Ms. Maxine the all-clear. But the less easily satisfied Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington declared her one of Congress’ “most corrupt” members.
Anyway, Ms. Maxine now strives to avoid being associated with her party’s ever-expanding fringe elements. And there’s nothing out of the ordinary about that, she notes. It’s what politicians do. Why, even Uncle Bernie Sanders, the party socialist who would give America a taste of Venezuela if he had his druthers, even Uncle Bernie strives to stay in, as Ms. Maxine puts it, “the Democratic lane.”
So, even though she’s ensconced in a La La-Land California congressional district, a district that’s not exactly fussy in defining what demarcates psychopathy from the mainstream, even Ms. Maxine is taking cautious steps to cover her political caboose.
Back in ’98, this former chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus penned a letter to Fidel Castro thanking him for assisting the victims of “political persecution.” (That’s the old Commie jefe for you, sho’ ’nuff, a veritable Statue of Liberty, his beacon hand holding aloft a light for those yearning to breathe free. Yes indeedy.) And she once urged her amigo Fidel not to turn over the fugitive Joanne Chesimard (alias “Asata Shakur”), convicted in the Black Liberation Army murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster.
Still, the congresswoman will not have people stereotyping her as one of those over-the-edge, “left of left” Democrat whackjobs, no sir-ree!
Which is not to say, however, that Ms. Maxine has any plans to ease up on Trump. She’s denounced him as a white supremacist, racist, scumbag, maniac, Russia-coddling, womanizing, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, global-warming, fascist, corrupt, tax-evading, environment-despoiling, child-abusing, Nazi egg-sucker. Furthermore, she says, he promotes hatred and division with his excessive rhetoric. And she’s not taking any of that back.
In fact, she adds, castigating Trump is God’s work. “When God sends you to do something, you just do it,” she says.
From the day she arrived in Washington, Ms.Maxine has been told to please just shut the hell up. Sometimes by a fellow Democrat. On one particular day back in ’94, the presiding officer of the House at the time, Rep. Carrie Meek, D-Fla., officially declared Ms. Maxine “unruly and turbulent” and threatened to summon the sergeants at arms to shut her up by having her removed from the House floor.
Ms. Maxine recently acknowledged there’s a rising chorus of voices – mostly within her own party – urging her to zipper her mouth.
Ain’t never gonna happen, she assured her cheering supporters. “I don’t know shut up,” she said.
Indeed. ~davidneese@verizon.net
