Archive for the ‘Democrats’ Category

The Democrats’ cynical move to protect one of their own – Los Angeles Times

California Republicans are wrong to try to recall Sen. Josh Newman (D-Fullerton) from office for casting a vote they dont like, and they have compounded the offense by doing it in a dishonest way. Voters in this mostly Orange and Los Angeles County district are being told that signing a recall petition will stop the car tax that they say Newman voted for which it wont.

And besides, thats not what the Newman recall is really about, anyway. The states GOP sees a chance to strip the Democrats of their supermajority in the Senate by forcing this one legislator into a special recall election where turnout might swing more conservative. The so-called car tax (which is really a desperately needed plan to invest $52 billion in Californias aging transportation infrastructure) is just a fig leaf for political power play.

But Democratic lawmakers have responded to this nakedly political act with, were sorry to say, an even more nakedly self-serving political act. They are trying to ram through last-minute changes to the states long-standing recall process that would slow if not stop this one particular recall election. The new provisions include an extension of the time voters have to rescind a signature from a recall petition and a requirement that county registrars verify every single individual signature rather than use the standard sample method of verification, among other changes that collectively would cause the process to drag on for months.

Because the rule changes are in whats known as a budget trailer bill, they will be voted on Thursday without a full public hearing process and, if passed, will go into effect immediately. The new rules would be retroactive, meaning that the Newman recall would have to adjust mid-course.

Democrats say the hastily written rules are justified because of what they say is a new tactic of using recall elections to undo legitimate elections, and because of the unprecedented level of deceit in this campaign. But neither misleading campaigns nor recall attempts are new to California politics. Just two years ago, Sens. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) and Bill Monning (D-Carmel) were the subject of recall attempt by people furious about the passage of SB 277, a law making it more difficult for children to avoid having public school vaccinations. Over the years, dozens of recalls have been launched against legislators and governors from both parties. The difference is that most of those recalls did not have the money or momentum to qualify for the ballot, and the one against Newman just might.

Were not saying theres no merit to the proposed changes. Perhaps it makes sense to give voters a longer time to retract a signature. Maybe a 3% sampling of signatures on a petition isnt sufficient. But there are many questions that need to be answered before a wholesale rewrite of the election law is approved, and they wont be answered without hearings and public testimony from elections experts, county registrars and voters. This bill is being slipped into law too quickly.

And whats most irksome is that the new law, if approved, would be applied retroactively to the Newman recall. Its simply not fair to change the rules in the middle of the process. Recall proponents in this case followed the legal process that has been in place for years and that few had suggested were problematic until now. If the proponents broke the law by lying about the content of the recall petition and its not clear they did then theres a legal remedy. In fact, Newman's supporters on Wednesday filed a complaint with state and local authorities asking for an investigation into the recall tactics.

For the record, it seems hasty and irresponsible to recall a lawmaker like Newman over a single vote. If an elected official is proven corrupt or incompetent or makes a practice of casting votes at odds with the will of his or her constituents, then, yes, a recall shouldnt be out of the question.

Newman cast a hard vote on the transportation funding package, and it was the right choice. Both Republicans and Democrats have made wrong ones in response.

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The Democrats' cynical move to protect one of their own - Los Angeles Times

Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror – The Weekly Standard

Camille Paglia is one America's smartest and most fearless writers. Like Elvis, she's the kind of superstar who really needs no introductionthough it is worth pointing out that Pantheon has just published a collection of her essays on sex, gender, and feminism, titled Free Women, Free Men. It's fantastic and if you love her work, it's must-reading. (And there's another collection due out in the Fall of 2018, which is more good news.)

Last week I sat down with Paglia over email to talk about Donald Trump, Islamist terrorism, and the transgender crusade. Here's a transcript of our conversation:

JVL: Donald Trump has recently feuded with Jim Comey, Bob Mueller, Sadiq Kahn, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, NATOwe'll stop the list there. You were one of a very small number of people who understood Trump's populist appeal early on. Looking at his presidency so far, do think he's continuing to deliver on that appeal? What is he doing right? What is he doing wrong?

Camille Paglia: Some background is necessary. First of all, I must make my political affiliations crystal clear. I am a registered Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary and for Jill Stein in the general election. Since last Fall, I've had my eye on Kamala Harris, the new senator from California, and I hope to vote for her in the next presidential primary.

Like many others, I initially did not take Donald Trump's candidacy seriously. I dismissed him as a "carnival barker" in my Salon column and assumed his entire political operation was a publicity stunt that he would soon tire of. However, Trump steadily gained momentum because of the startling incompetence and mediocrity of his GOP opponents. What seems forgotten is that everyone, including the Hillary Clinton campaign, thought that Marco Rubio would be the Republican nominee. The moment was ideal for a Latino candidate with national appeal who could challenge the Democratic hold on Florida.

Thus Rubio's primary-run flame-out was a spectacular embarrassment. Under TV's unsparing camera eye, he looked like a shallow, dithery adolescent, utterly unprepared to be commander-in-chief in an era of terrorism. Trump's frankly arrogant self-confidence spooked and crushed Rubioit was a total fiasco. Ben Carson, meanwhile, with his professorial deep-think and spiritualistic eye-closing, often seemed to be beaming himself to another galaxy. With every debate, Ted Cruz, despite his avid national following, accumulated more and more detractors, repelled by his brittle self-dramatizations and lugubrious megalomania.

There were two genial, moderate Mid-Western governors who could have wrested the nomination from Trump and performed strongly versus Hillary in the generalOhio's John Kasich and Wisconsin's Scott Walker. But they blew it because of their personal limitations: On television, Kasich came across as a clumsy, lumbering blowhard while Walker shrank into a nervous, timid mouse with a frozen Pee-wee Herman smile.

The point here is that Donald Trump won the nomination fair and square against a host of serious, experienced opponents who simply failed to connect with a majority of GOP primary voters. However, there were too many unknowns about Trump, who had never held elective office and whose randy history in the shadowy demimonde of casinos and beauty pageants laid him open to a cascade of feverish accusations and innuendos from the ever-churning gnomes of the cash-propelled Clinton propaganda machine. In actuality, the sexism allegations about Trump were relatively few and minor, compared to the long list of lurid claims about the predatory Bill Clinton.

My position continues to be that Hillary, with her supercilious, Marie Antoinette-style entitlement, was a disastrously wrong candidate for 2016 and that she secured the nomination only through overt chicanery by the Democratic National Committee, assisted by a corrupt national media who, for over a year, imposed a virtual blackout on potential primary rivals. Bernie Sanders had the populist passion, economic message, government record, and personal warmth to counter Trump. It was Sanders, for example, who addressed the crisis of crippling student debt, an issue that other candidates (including Hillary) then took up. Despite his history of embarrassing gaffes, the affable, plain-spoken Joe Biden, in my view, could also have defeated Trump, but he was blocked from running at literally the last moment by President Barack Obama, for reasons that the major media refused to explore.

After Trump's victory (for which there were abundant signs in the preceding months), both the Democratic party and the big-city media urgently needed to do a scathingly honest self-analysis, because the election results plainly demonstrated that Trump was speaking to vital concerns (jobs, immigration, and terrorism among them) for which the Democrats had few concrete solutions. Indeed, throughout the campaign, too many leading Democratic politicians were preoccupied with domestic issues and acted strangely uninterested in international affairs. Among the electorate, the most fervid Hillary acolytes (especially young and middle-aged women and assorted show biz celebs) seemed obtusely indifferent to her tepid performance as Secretary of State, during which she doggedly piled up air miles while accomplishing virtually nothing except the destabilization of North Africa.

Had Hillary won, everyone would have expected disappointed Trump voters to show a modicum of respect for the electoral results as well as for the historic ceremony of the inauguration, during which former combatants momentarily unite to pay homage to the peaceful transition of power in our democracy. But that was not the reaction of a vast cadre of Democrats shocked by Trump's win. In an abject failure of leadership that may be one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of the modern Democratic party, Chuck Schumer, who had risen to become the Senate Democratic leader after the retirement of Harry Reid, asserted absolutely no moral authority as the party spun out of control in a nationwide orgy of rage and spite. Nor were there statesmanlike words of caution and restraint from two seasoned politicians whom I have admired for decades and believe should have run for president long agoSenator Dianne Feinstein and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. How do Democrats imagine they can ever expand their electoral support if they go on and on in this self-destructive way, impugning half the nation as vile racists and homophobes?

All of which brings us to the issue of Trump's performance to date. The initial conundrum was: could he shift from being the slashing, caustic ex-reality show star of the campaign to a more measured, presidential persona? Perhaps to the dismay of his diehard critics, Trump did indeed make that transition at the Capitol on inauguration morning, when he appeared grave and focused, palpably conveying a sense of the awesome burdens of the highest office. As for his particular actions as president, I am no fan of executive orders, which usurp congressional prerogatives and which I was already denouncing when Obama was constantly signing them (with very little protest, one might add, from the mainstream media).

Trump's "travel ban" executive order in late January was obviously bungledissued way too fast and with woefully insufficient research (pertaining, for example, to green-card holders, who should have been exempted from the start). The administration bears full responsibility for fanning the flames of an already aroused "Resistance." However, I fail to see the "chaos" in the White House that the mainstream media (as well as conservative Never Trumpers) keep harping onor rather, I see no more chaos than was abundantly present during the first six months of both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Trump seems to be methodically trying to fulfill his campaign promises, notably regarding the economy and deregulationthe approaches to which will always be contested in our two-party system. His progress has thus far been in stops and starts, partly because of the passivity, and sometimes petulance, of the mundane GOP leadership.

There seems to be a huge conceptual gap between Trump and his most implacable critics on the left. Many highly educated, upper-middle-class Democrats regard themselves as exemplars of "compassion" (which they have elevated into a supreme political principle) and yet they routinely assail Trump voters as ignorant, callous hate-mongers. These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. It's no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge "barnyard language" out of English.

Last week, that conceptual gap was on prominent display, as the media, consumed with their preposterous Russian fantasies, were fixated on former FBI director James Comey's maudlin testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. (Comey is an effete charlatan who should have been fired within 48 hours of either Hillary or Trump taking office.) Meanwhile, Trump was going about his business. The following morning, he made remarks at the Department of Transportation about "regulatory relief," excerpts of which I happened to hear on my car radio that afternoon. His words about iron, aluminum, and steel seemed to cut like a knife through the airwaves. I later found the entire text on the White House website. Some key passages:

We are here today to focus on solving one of the biggest obstacles to creating this new and desperately needed infrastructure, and that is the painfully slow, costly, and time-consuming process of getting permits and approvals to build. And I also knew that from the private sector. It is a long, slow, unnecessarily burdensome process. My administration is committed to ending these terrible delays once and for all. The excruciating wait time for permitting has inflicted enormous financial pain to cities and states all throughout our nation and has blocked many important projects from ever getting off the ground

For too long, America has poured trillions and trillions of dollars into rebuilding foreign countries while allowing our own countrythe country that we loveand its infrastructure to fall into a state of total disrepair. We have structurally deficient bridges, clogged roads, crumbling dams and locks. Our rivers are in trouble. Our railways are aging. And chronic traffic that slows commerce and diminishes our citizens' quality of life. Other than that, we're doing very well. Instead of rebuilding our country, Washington has spent decades building a dense thicket of rules, regulations and red tape. It took only four years to build the Golden Gate Bridge and five years to build the Hoover Dam and less than one year to build the Empire State Building. People don't believe that. It took less than one year. But today, it can take 10 years and far more than that just to get the approvals and permits needed to build a major infrastructure project.

These charts beside me are actually a simplified version of our highway permitting process. It includes 16 different approvals involving 10 different federal agencies being governed by 26 different statutes. As one exampleand this happened just 30 minutes agoI was sitting with a great group of people responsible for their state's economic development and roadways. All of you are in the room now. And one gentleman from Maryland was talking about an 18-mile road. And he brought with him some of the approvals that they've gotten and paid for. They spent $29 million for an environmental report, weighing 70 pounds and costing $24,000 per page

I was not elected to continue a failed system. I was elected to change it. All of us in government service were elected to solve the problems that have plagued our nation. We are here to think big, to act boldly, and to rise above the petty partisan squabbling of Washington D.C. We are here to take action. It's time to start building in our country, with American workers and with American iron and aluminum and steel. It's time to put up soaring new infrastructure that inspires pride in our people and our towns.

No longer can we allow these rules and regulations to tie down our economy, chain up our prosperity, and sap our great American spirit. That is why we will lift these restrictions and unleash the full potential of the United States of America. We will get rid of the redundancy and duplication that wastes your time and your money. Our goal is to give you one point of contact to deliver one decisionyes or nofor the entire federal government, and to deliver that decision quickly, whether it's a road, whether it's a highway, a bridge, a dam.

To do this, we are setting up a new council to help project managers navigate the bureaucratic maze. This council will also improve transparency by creating a new online dashboard allowing everyone to easily track major projects through every stage of the approval process. This council will make sure that every federal agency that is consistently delaying projects by missing deadlines will face tough, new penalties

Together, we will build projects to inspire our youth, employ our workers, and create true prosperity for our people. We will pour new concrete, lay new brick, and watch new sparks light our factories as we forge metal from the furnaces of our Rust Belt and our beloved heartlandwhich has been forgotten. It's not forgotten anymore.

We will put new American steel into the spine of our country. American workers will construct gleaming new lanes of commerce across our landscape. They will build these monuments from coast to coast, and from city to city. And with these new roads, bridges, airports and seaports, we will embark on a wonderful new journey into a bright and glorious future. We will build again. We will grow again. We will thrive again. And we will make America great again.

Of course this rousing speech (with its can-do World War Two spirit) got scant coverage in the mainstream media. Drunk with words, spin, and snark, middle-class journalists can't be bothered to notice the complex physical constructions that make modern civilization possible. The laborers who build and maintain these marvels are recognized only if they can be shoehorned into victim status. But if they dare to think for themselves and vote differently from their liberal overlords, they are branded as rubes and pariahs.

In summary: to have any hope of retaking the White House, Democrats must get off their high horse, lose the rabid rhetoric, and reorient themselves toward practical reality and the free country they are damned lucky to live in.

JVL: One of the other big news stories for the last few weeks has been terrorism in Great Britain. Everyone goes to great pains to say that this isn't "Islamic" terrorism, but rather "Islamist" ("Islam-ish?") terrorism. Does nomenclature matter here? Does the fact that Western liberalism gets so wrapped up in knots over how to talk about its antagonists mean anything?

CP: You've nailed it about Western liberalism's obsession with language, to the exclusion of wide-ranging study of world history or systematic observation of present social conditions. Liberalism of the 1950s and '60s exalted civil liberties, individualism, and dissident thought and speech. "Question authority" was our generational rubric when I was in college. But today's liberalism has become grotesquely mechanistic and authoritarian: It's all about reducing individuals to a group identity, defining that group in permanent victim terms, and denying others their democratic right to challenge that group and its ideology. Political correctness represents the fossilized institutionalization of once-vital revolutionary ideas, which have become mere rote formulas. It is repressively Stalinist, dependent on a labyrinthine, parasitic bureaucracy to enforce its empty dictates.

The reluctance or inability of Western liberals to candidly confront jihadism has been catastrophically counterproductive insofar as it has inspired an ongoing upsurge in right-wing politics in Europe and the United States. Citizens have an absolute right to demand basic security from their government. The contortions to which so many liberals resort to avoid connecting bombings, massacres, persecutions, and cultural vandalism to Islamic jihadism is remarkable, given their usual animosity to religion, above all Christianity. Some commentators have suggested a link to racial preconceptions: that is, Islam remains beyond criticism because it is largely a religion of non-whites whose two holy cities occupy territory once oppressed by Western imperialism.

For a quarter century, I have been calling for comparative religion to be made the core curriculum of higher education. (I am speaking as an atheist.) Knowledge of the great world religionsHinduism, Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, Islamis the true multiculturalism. Everyone should have a general familiarity with the beliefs, texts, rituals, art, and shrines of all the major religions. Only via a direct encounter with the Qu'ran and Hadith, for example, can anyone know what they say about jihad and how those strikingly numerous passages have been interpreted in different ways over time.

Right now, too many secular Western liberals treat Islam with paternalistic condescensionwaving at it vaguely from a benevolent distance but making no effort to engage with its intricate mixed messages, which can inspire toward good or spur acts of devastating impact on the international stage.

JVL: I keep waiting for the showdown between feminism and transgenderism, but it always keeps slipping beneath the horizon. I've been looking at how the La Leche Leaguewhich stood at the crossroads of feminism once upon a timehas in the last couple years bowed completely to the transgender project. Their central text is (for now) The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, but they've officially changed their stance to include men and fathers who breastfeed. The actual wording of their policy is wonderful: "It is now recognized that some men are able to breastfeed." Left unsaid is the corollary that some women are biologically unable to breastfeed. Though this would go against the League's founding principles, one supposes. What does one make of all of this?

CP: Feminists have clashed with transgender activists much more publicly in the United Kingdom than here. For example, two years ago there was an acrimonious organized campaign, including a petition with 3,000 claimed signatures, to cancel a lecture by Germaine Greer at Cardiff University because of her "offensive" views of transgenderism. Greer, a literary scholar who was one of the great pioneers of second-wave feminism, has always denied that men who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery are actually "women." Her Cardiff lecture (on "Women and Power" in the twentieth century) eventually went forward, under heavy security.

And in 2014, Gender Hurts, a book by radical Australian feminist Sheila Jeffreys, created a heated controversy in the United Kingdom. Jeffreys identifies transsexualism with misogyny and describes it as a form of "mutilation." She and her feminist allies encountered prolonged difficulties in securing a London speaking venue because of threats and agitation by transgender activists. Finally, Conway Hall was made available: Jeffrey's forceful, detailed lecture there in July of last year is fully available on YouTube. In it she argues among other things, that the pharmaceutical industry, having lost income when routine estrogen therapy for menopausal women was abandoned because of its health risks, has been promoting the relatively new idea of transgenderism in order to create a permanent class of customers who will need to take prescribed hormones for life.

Although I describe myself as transgender (I was donning flamboyant male costumes from early childhood on), I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows. Furthermore, I condemn the escalating prescription of puberty blockers (whose long-term effects are unknown) for children. I regard this practice as a criminal violation of human rights.

It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women's studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.

The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.

In a democracy, everyone, no matter how nonconformist or eccentric, should be free from harassment and abuse. But at the same time, no one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of their eccentricity. The categories "trans-man" and "trans-woman" are highly accurate and deserving of respect. But like Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys, I reject state-sponsored coercion to call someone a "woman" or a "man" simply on the basis of his or her subjective feeling about it. We may well take the path of good will and defer to courtesy on such occasions, but it is our choice alone.

As for the La Leche League, they are hardly prepared to take up the cudgels in the bruising culture wars. Awash with the milk of human kindness, they are probably stuck in nurturance mode. Naturally, they snap to attention at the sound of squalling babies, no matter what their age. It's up to literature professors and writers to defend the integrity of English, which like all languages changes slowly and organically over time. But with so many humanities departments swallowed up in the poststructuralist tar pit, the glorious medium of English may have to fight the gender commissars on its own.

Excerpt from:
Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror - The Weekly Standard

GOP Congressman ‘Regrets’ Blaming Democrats’ Rhetoric For Virginia Shooting – HuffPost

Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) expressed regret for suggesting that Democratic rhetoric about President Donald Trump had inspired a gunman to target Republican lawmakers at a congressional baseball practice on Wednesday morning.

James Hodgkinson,the suspect who allegedly opened fire at the baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia, was a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) with a record of violent behavior.

Reacting to the shooting shortly after it occurred on Wednesday morning in an interview on Buffalo, New Yorks WBEN radio, Collins identified the finger-pointing, just the tone and the angst, and the anger directed at Donald Trump, his supporters as a contributing factor in the rampage.

I can only hope that the Democrats do tone down the rhetoric, Collins added.

Later in the day, however, Collins released a statement calling on all sides, rather than just Democrats, to use more careful language.

Its time for all of us, including myself, to tone down our rhetoric and recognize that we are all of one country and all proud Americans, he said.

On Thursday, Collins went further, admitting it had been a mistake to pin the blame on Democrats in the first place.

I do regret certainly what I said at 8:05 in the morning. Ive been careful to clarify it moving forward, Collins said on MSNBC.

Mark Makela / Reuters

Collins also suggested that he views lawful gun ownership as part of the solution to preventing future violent incidents, because people with the guns could ward off attackers.

I do believe that a law-abiding citizen that is armed, thats out in public, will keep himself, his staff and, in some cases, the public safe. Im a strong believer in the NRA, Collins said. I do have a carry permit. And I have become certainly lax. We sometimes take our security for granted.

Democrats have universally condemned the violent attack on the congressional baseball practice.

Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, took to the floor of the Senate to express his revulsionthat the shooter, Hodgkinson,was a supporter of his who had volunteered on his presidential campaign.

I am sickened by this despicable act, and let me be as clear as I can be: Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms, the Vermont senator said.

The annual congressional baseball gameis slated to continue as planned at 7:05 pm on Thursday.

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GOP Congressman 'Regrets' Blaming Democrats' Rhetoric For Virginia Shooting - HuffPost

Nancy Pelosi just went off on Republicans attacking Democrats over the Scalise shooting – CNN

It didn't.

And now, less than 36 hours removed from the shots ringing out in Alexandria, Virginia, we are already into the condemnation stage of our all-too-predictable political process.

Pelosi was asked Thursday about "the possibility that this incident could be used against Democrats or the Democratic Party politically" because some conservatives had suggested "vitriolic rhetoric from the left being in some way to blame."

Here's how she responded:

"I think that the comments made by my Republican colleagues are outrageous, beneath the dignity of the job that they hold, beneath the dignity of the respect that we would like Congress to command. How dare they say such thing? How dare they? Well I won't even go into the whole thing. I can't even begin, probably as we sit here, they're running caricatures of me in Georgia once again, earned over a hundred million dollars of vitriolic things that they say, that resulted in calls to my home constantly, threats in front of my grandchildren. Really, predicated on their comments and their paid ads. So this sick individual does something despicable and it was horrible what he did, hateful. But for them to all of a sudden be sanctimonious as if, they don't, never seen such a thing before. And I don't even want to go into the President of the United States. But in terms of some of the language that he has used."

Think the question touched a nerve?

Pelosi's broader point is that demonizing the people who disagree with you isn't unique to Democrats.

And, she's right. Both parties -- particularly in the last decade or so -- have embraced the idea that people who disagree with your political views are, at best, misguided and, at worst, evil. Phrases like "disagree without being disagreeable" or "reasonable people can disagree" have disappeared from our political dialogue. People who disagree with you are to be scorned, shunned and ignored -- not engaged.

People hate the "both sides do it" nature of some corners of mainstream journalism, believing that it creates a sense of equivalency when there is none. Fair enough.

But in this case, both sides do do it! Casting your political opponents as not just wrong but dangerous motivates the bases of the respective parties. And fired-up bases turn out. And that, for most politicians, is plenty of justification to keep playing to the extremes rather than trying to land somewhere in between those two poles.

Until the electorate stops rewarding politicians for saying the most outlandish things about the other party, they will keep right on doing it -- no matter how many attacks like the one Wednesday morning happen. Depressing but true.

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Nancy Pelosi just went off on Republicans attacking Democrats over the Scalise shooting - CNN

Five Ways Russian Hysteria May Backfire on Democrats – LifeZette

Democrats are vowing to make Russian collusion hysteria an issue through the November 2018 midterm elections.

Democrats should absolutely continue to press on Russia in Congress and in the national press, said Josh Schwerin, spokesman for Priorities USA, speaking to McClatchys D.C. news service.

And Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) said he would introduce articles of impeachment, to be filed in the House.

It has more senior Democrats concerned. At a caucus meeting on Tuesday, House Democrats reportedly told impeachment-eager Democrats that they were risking the rest of the caucus in their zeal to get President Donald Trump at all costs.

The Russian narrative as far as Trump is concerned was largely seen as having fallenapart after fired FBI Director James Comey's testimony last week to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Comey told the committee that Trump was not under investigation for any collusion.

Comey even went a bit further than that, dismissing a Feb. 14 story in The New York Times that suggested Trump associates met with Russian intelligence officials in the lead-up to the Nov. 8 election.

The Comey remarks on the Times story seemed to bury the narrative the conspiracy theory that there was collusion between "Trump associates" and Russian hackers.

But thenarrative and many Democrats just can't quit each other, despite the obvious pitfalls and potential for ugly backfire. Here are the top five reasons staying obsessed withRussia through 2018 could get ugly for Democrats.

Violence

This potential downside would have been lower on any list, until Wednesday morning.

But Democrats have been saying since the 2016 election that Trump was a stoogeto Russia, helping the regime of Vladimir Putin undermine American democracy. Alleging the president was too close with Russia and worked with the Kremlin to win the White House has become a key narrative employedto undermine the president.

But you cannot keep saying the president and his associates conspired with Russians without riling up the wackos and provoking a nasty and violent fringe element.

That's just what many Democrats and liberal commentators did when a gunman took shots at Republican members of Congress practicing their game at an Alexandria baseball park Wednesday. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) remainedin critical condition as of Wednesday night.

Forgetting the Actual Hacking Democrats are also making clear they don't care about the main problem caused by Russian hacking into Democratic campaigns: That foreign governments routinely hack into our political and governmental systems.

In 2015, the Chinese reportedly hacked into the Office of Personnel Management and made off with a massive volume of vital data, such as information on those with top secret clearances.

The issue of foreignhacking is serious business and deserves serious attention. It won't be getting it from Democrats anytime soon.

Political Damage

If the Democrats keep insisting there is some sort of political element within the United States to Russian hacking, they risk repeating their mistake of 2016 losing focus of the jobs issue.

Americans care about the economy, their wages and other important issues like their health care. An intense focus on issues of D.C. intrigue could lose Democrats ground in thehigh-stakes midterm elections in 2018.

One Democratic consultant told LifeZetteit's a gamble worth taking because Democrats have lost most elections, even on their key issues, since 2010.

A Leftward Tilt Democrats also risk moving their party to the left for years to come, also music to Republicans' ears.

Right now, the main people pushing the Russian narrative are far left-wingers such as Sherman, Rep. Maxine Waters and Rep. Ted Lieu all from California.

The angry voices get the Democrats plenty of attention. But the move also risks one thing more: alienating voters outside of California and the Northeast, the only areas where Democrats seem to thrive despite talking the most Russia and about their various left-wing wish lists including universalhealth care and clamping down on energy production.

A Failure to Impeach Thereal ultimate objective for many Democrats pushing the Russian collusion issueis to get Trump removed from office.

But impeachment and removal is unlikely, even if Democrats win the House and Senate in 2018.

Thus, Democrats face disappointing their base, and making Trump a political martyr.

Waiting on such a backfire especially as the economy booms worked for former Democratic President Bill Clinton, whom the House Republicans actually impeached in late 1998 for obstruction of justice and perjury.

The Senate declined to remove Clinton in February 1999, and Republicans lost their Senate majority in 2001 and only won the White House by a few hundred votes in Florida.

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Five Ways Russian Hysteria May Backfire on Democrats - LifeZette