When the leftists tell you who they are — even if it’s accidentally — believe them.
That’s what happened Thursday during an interview on, of all places, MSNBC, where South Carolina Democratic Rep. James Clyburn broke the fundamental rule of the cable channel: Never say anything true.
OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But if it were the rule, Clyburn would have broken it during his interview last week with José Díaz-Balart when he surprisingly revealed the truth about recent Democratic spending bills.
“What do you say to people who say, ‘Boy, Washington can talk about all these big programs and everything else, but I’m worried about the cost of food,” Díaz-Balart asked the House Democratic whip. “I’m seeing the cost of eggs shoot up, chicken, gasoline, you know, coming now with the winter, heating. These are all concerns that hit very directly to people who may say, you know, what’s going on in D.C. doesn’t think of us.”
Clyburn started with the statement that political liars of all stripes, from the Kremlin to the White House, have used since the dawn of the television age to announce that they were about to try to deceive, inveigle and obfuscate:
“Well,” he said. “Let me make it very clear.”
When you hear a politician utter those words, you should probably just ignore the psyop that’s about to come out of his or her mouth.
“All of us are concerned about these rising costs,” he said. “And all of us knew this would be the case when we put in place this recovery program. Any time you put more money into the economy, prices tend to rise.”
Wait, what? So, they named it the Inflation Reduction Act because it was going to raise prices? How very Washingtonian.
Do you think the Democrats will get trounced in the midterms?
Of course, having said that, Clyburn went on to carry the Biden administration’s water by blaming rising prices on “price gouging,” the Russians, OPEC — anyone he could think of other than Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
“And we do know that price gouging takes place and that’s what Sen. Warnock is concerned about down in Georgia,” he said. “We knew the moment we went to aid the Ukrainians, the Russians would do what they could possibly do to undercut this administration, so they cut this deal with OPEC nations to reduce the production of oil, so as to drive the price of gasoline up.
“We are not going to allow these kinds of intimidations, be it by big corporations who are raising prices when they should not be, or foreign countries who are doing untoward things in retaliation for our assisting our allies,” he argued — if you can call it an argument.
This is pretty typical leftist rhetoric, actually: Take some blame to disarm your opponent (though José Díaz-Balart can hardly be called an opponent of the left), then pivot to shifting the blame elsewhere and hope that last part is what your listener remembers.
And that was the coherent part of the interview. From there, Clyburn lashed into at least two straw men and set up some sort of false dichotomy between economic policy and voter suppression that even Díaz-Balart tried, and apparently failed, to understand.
You can watch the interview here, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s close to five minutes long, and I could feel the I.Q. points draining out of my ears as I tried to follow the gist of Clyburn’s argument.
The point is that they knew — Clyburn said “all of us knew” the Inflation Reduction Act would actually increase inflation. (I assume by “us,” he means “leftists” or “Democrats” or “crypto-socialists” or something along those lines; he doesn’t really define his pronoun use there.)
But did they tell America that they “knew” this when they were trying to sell the bill to voters? Did they change the name to something that would more closely resemble its contents — the Steaming Pile of Unmentionable Refuse Act, maybe? I mean, they could’ve called it SPUR. I’ve heard worse acronyms.
No, they didn’t do that. They lied, because that’s what they do when they want something.
So on the rare occasion when they actually speak the truth, you’d better listen.
