Say What is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where we unveil some of the most wacky, astonishing, and damnable things uttered by politicians and the chattering class.
Tim Donner: The mud will soon hit the fan for Democrats growing increasingly fretful about the upcoming revelations on the origins of the Obama administration’s spying on the Trump campaign. This involved using a disinformation dossier from Trump’s political enemies to secure a FISA warrant to justify the surveillance and then spreading preposterous allegations that led to a two-year investigation. The Justice Department will soon release the findings from the inspector general’s internal probe and then from Attorney General William Barr’s own investigation into the matter.
In a revealing interview on CBS that ought to leave Democrats in something of a state of panic, Barr repeated his belief that the Trump campaign was spied on and that he’s dealing with a lot of troubling questions.
William Barr
William Barr: I think there’s nothing wrong with spying. The question is always whether it’s authorized by law … I had a lot of questions about what was going on, and I assumed that I’d get answers when I went in, and I have not gotten answers that are at all satisfactory. In fact, I have probably more questions, and that some of the facts that I’ve learned don’t hang together with the official explanations of what happened … Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they’re doing is in the higher interest, the better good. They don’t realize that what they’re doing is really antithetical to the democratic system we have.
Tim: Ominous words. Democrats know that the cold, hard facts of how, when, and why the Obama Justice Department spied on the Trump campaign will soon be made public, and they have reason to be afraid. Very afraid.
Now, you would think that Joe Biden would’ve learned by now that if there are two things he simply could not do as a presidential candidate, they are continuing to put his hands on those of the opposite sex and presenting other people’s ideas as his own. But old Uncle Joe has now revived both those issues in recent days. First, putting his arm around a 10-year-old girl for a picture, and then making light of all those women he creeped out with his handsy conduct. Then, we discover that his campaign copied and pasted the exact words of certain environmental organizations on its website without attribution, ripping open an old wound from the first of Biden’s two previous and disastrous presidential campaigns. That would be 1987, when he was forced to withdraw from the presidential race after it was discovered that he plagiarized a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock almost word for word. Here it was, 32 years ago.
Joe Biden: Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife, who’s sitting out there in the audience, is the first in her family to ever go to college?
Neil Kinnock: Why am I the first Kinnock to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family? Was it because they were weak, those people who would work eight hours underground and then come up and play football?
Joe Biden: My ancestors who worked in the coal mines in Northeast Pennsylvania and who’d come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?
Neil Kinnock: Anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had, because they didn’t have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? It wasn’t that. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.
Joe Biden: No, it’s not because they weren’t as smart. It’s not because they didn’t work as hard. It’s because they didn’t have a platform upon which to stand.
Tim: So the P-word, plagiarism, rears its ugly head again for the bumbling Democratic front runner, in a mistake that had even Trump-hating elite media types at NBC and CNN calling Biden’s campaign amateur hour.
Chuck Todd, MSNBC: Joe Biden has his name on the public policy institute at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s been preparing to run for president at least for the last 18 months, perhaps longer than that, in different ways. Why are they cutting and pasting climate change proposals at the last minute? Is this a sloppy campaign? Are they not up and running? What’s going on?
Garrett Haake, MSNBC: This was obviously a junior-varsity moment for this campaign in what should be very much the varsity-level squad. It’s embarrassing.
John King, CNN: This is a pretty amateur mistake for the front-runner’s campaign to make on a substantial policy rollout, when they had to know, when team Biden got together planning to announce his campaign, the one thing they cannot do is plagiarize.
Tim: But if being criticized by his friends in the elite media wasn’t enough, Biden’s big but somewhat dwindling lead in the 24-person presidential primary race now has made him a magnet for attacks from the other 23 candidates, all to his left, who decry his relatively moderate positions as insufficiently radical, on climate change, among other issues. Here are Bernie, Fauxcahontas, and Mayor Pete.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT): We cannot go back to the old ways. We have got to go forward with a new and progressive agenda. We have got to make it clear that when the future of the planet is at stake, there is no middle ground.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA): Our country is in a time of crisis. The time for small ideas is over.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg: The riskiest thing we could do is try too hard to play it safe.
Tim: Now, another issue the Democratic president candidates will use against Biden is abortion, after Biden reaffirmed his longstanding support for the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funding for abortions (he later changed his position again). As Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon said on Fox News, this is yet another issue sure to tail Biden throughout this primary full of far-left candidates.
Matthew Continetti: This is a Biden test, because even though Democrats, of course, oppose the Hyde Amendment on taxpayer funding of abortion, the public at large actually supports Hyde Amendment. They oppose taxpayer funding for abortion. This is revealed in polls by Marist on the abortion issue every year, including this one. So here’s Biden’s conflict, between appealing to the Democratic base, which has moved left on this question and others, and a general election candidacy, where support for the Hyde Amendment would not harm him.
Tim: Indeed, that is a question Biden likely will ask himself every day for as long as he remains atop the Democrats’ presidential field: How far left will I have to go to win the nomination without setting myself up for a mighty fall in the head-to-head general election race against President Trump?
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