By Matt Rooney
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Yes, there was more crazy, dumb, radical, and “free” rhetoric in abundance at Thursday night’s Democrat debate in Houston, Texas. Andrew Yang actually kicked off his evening by announcing a plan to give ten families a grand total of $10,000 per month. The goal, he said, was to test his universal basic income plan, so the Democrat debate was basically a poor man’s Publishers Clearing House from the get-go.
But I’m not sure the mindless, cynical circle of unrealistic promises (paid for by other people’ money) was even the worst part, Save Jerseyans. That distinction belongs to our very own junior U.S. Senator Cory Booker, aka Spartacus, aka Gropacus.
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He was negative as all hell!
Democrats weren’t always this depressing. In his first inaugural address, President Bill Clinton famously declared “[t]here is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” For all his sins, the future 42nd president of the United States grew up far poorer – and with a much less stable home – than Cory Booker.
On Thursday night, Cory struck a very different tone than Slick Willie.
“This is a crisis of empathy in our nation,” Booker lectured the moderators during his remarks on gun control. “We can’t wait for it to personally affect us. People can’t wait for this hell to be visited upon their communities.”
Another gem: “We have a criminal justice system that is so racially biased, we have more African-Americans under criminal supervision today than all the slaves in 1850.”
He also invoked “environmental racism” (whatever the heck that is), and promised to start a White House office to combat white supremacists which, if Cory is to be believed, are everywhere.
To review: America is racist. Americans are racist. We’re also insufficiently kind/generous, and need Cory “Watershed” Booker (D-Newark) to help us break the bonds of our sinful ways. The man who couldn’t even secure clean drinking water for his home city! Got it.
If you take his rants at face value, Booker doesn’t seem to think there’s much of anything “right with America” these days. I know better. His polling position sucks and positivity isn’t as attention-grabbing as obsessive negativity. Talking up America’s greatest-in-the-world charitable giving figures and the sacrifices made by countless Americans – both white and brown – since 1850 to build a “more perfect union” just don’t fit neatly into his narrative these days.
Setting well-earned cynicism aside, and assuming for a moment that this isn’t an act, Booker’s dim view of Americans and their country isn’t only wrong for its lack of factual accuracy and balance but also strategically stupid in the context of his present political predicament. The “great” U.S. presidents (Lincoln, FDR, JFK, Reagan) were men who confronted great challenges, both at home and abroad, by inspiring Americans to awaken their inner greatness. The great emancipators weren’t boorish chastisers. Lincoln didn’t rally the North in the Civil War and end slavery by harping on “systemic racism” in the Union. Ronald Reagan didn’t defeat communism and liberal Eastern Europe by scolding Americans in foreign speeches and apologizing for his country’s past misdeeds.
Cory Booker is no “great” man.
He’s 5 minutes away from being New Jersey’s second failed presidential candidate in only three years, and he’ll have no one to blame but himself and his decidedly sucky attitude towards the USA. America deserves better than a president who thinks so poorly of it.
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