Politics Uber Alles

     John Hinderaker pins it:

     The Democrats are bidding Andy Cuomo a fond farewell. They want to pretend that he was a successful governor and his downfall was solely attributable to sexual harassment.

     Not the untimely and unnecessary deaths of 15,000 nursing home residents? Not the immense damage done to New York’s already fragile economy by his lockdowns? Hm. Perhaps we should ask why…or rather, “Cui bono?”

     Democrats nationwide are finding themselves beleaguered politically. Consider the recall effort underway for California governor Gavin Newsom. Consider the low public opinion of administration spokesmen such as Anthony Fauci and Jen Psaki. Consider the exploding popularity of figures such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. Consider the several assessments of the upcoming midterm elections as disastrous for the Democrats in Congress. Why, you’d think that they’d done something destructive and unpopular!

     They’re in trouble. Many of them face the prospect of needing new jobs. But the party’s strategists are still analyzing and plotting out courses designed to minimize the damage. One stroke in the plan is to sacrifice a sheep or two to the pursuing wolves – but in a fashion that doesn’t imply massive policy failures or a platform founded on wrongthink.

     They chose to sacrifice Andrew Cuomo for two reasons. First, he is deeply unpopular. As a governor with a national profile, he could have weighed down Democrat prospects both in New York and nationally. Second, he could be pilloried and removed for a non-policy sin: his Bidenesque habit of groping any woman who came within arm’s length. Thus, he could be sacrificed without implications for the party’s overall policy stances.

     Cuomo, for all his faults, is not stupid. He knew his number was up, so he agreed to cooperate. The Democrats’ media allies were happy to cooperate as well. The party “pushed him off the roof where the fall was shortest:” the sexual-harassment allegations lodged against him. He and his family may yet suffer monetarily, but he’s unlikely to serve a prison term for those “he said / she said” accusations.

     Hearken to left-wing political damage control in the Year of Our Lord 2021.

     Scant wonder why the popular opinion of politicians as a class puts them on the level of organized crime. Today that’s an objective assessment, though perhaps a trifle unkind to Mafia capi. (At least their neighborhoods are orderly and peaceful.) Recall Ferdinand Lundberg’s summary from 1968:

     …it is a settled conclusion among seasoned observers that, Congress apart as a separate case, the lower legislatures — state, county, and municipal — are Augean stables of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance from year to year and decade to decade, and that they are preponderantly staffed by riffraff, or what the police define as “undesirables,” people who if they were not in influential positions would be unceremoniously told to “keep moving.” Exceptions among them are minor. Many of them, including congressmen, refuse to go before the television cameras because it is then so plainly obvious to everybody what they are. Their whole demeanor arouses instant distrust in the intelligent. They are, all too painfully, type-cast for the race track, the sideshow carnival, the back alley, the peep show, the low tavern, the bordello, the dive. Evasiveness, dissimulation, insincerity shine through their false bonhomie like beacon lights….

     As to other legislatures, Senator Estes Kefauver found representatives of the vulpine Chicago Mafia ensconced in the Illinois legislature, which has been rocked by one scandal of the standard variety after the other off and on for seventy-five years. What he didn’t bring out was that the Mafians were clearly superior types to many non-Mafians.

     Public attention, indeed, usually centers on only a few lower legislatures — Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois — and the impression is thereby fostered in the unduly trusting that the ones they don’t hear about are on the level. But such an impression is false. The ones just mentioned come into more frequent view because their jurisdictions are extremely competitive and the pickings are richer. Fierce fights over the spoils generate telltale commotion. Most of the states are quieter under strict one-party quasi-Soviet Establishment dominance, with local newspapers cut in on the gravy. Public criticism and information are held to a minimum, grousers are thrown a bone, and not many in the local populace know or really care. Even so, scandalous goings-on explode into view from time to time in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri and elsewhere — no state excepted. Any enterprising newspaper at any time could send an aggressive reporter into any one of them and come up with enough ordure to make the Founding Fathers collectively vomit up their very souls in their graves.

     Lundberg wrote that fifty-three years ago. We can no longer deem “Congress apart as a separate case.” Not with Pelosi, Schumer, and their ilk at the helm. As for the White House, is comment really required?

     The Republic is no more. We are ruled by vultures, swindlers, and fiends.

     But do have a nice day.