SAY WHAT? Dems Embrace Identity Politics, Admit Obamacare Failure

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: We start with a couple of very revealing statements. The first one by the newest love child of the left, Stacey Abrams, loser of last November’s Georgia gubernatorial race who claims, without evidence, that the election was stolen from her. She may add her name to the 24 Democrats already running for president, or she may be a favorite for the vice presidency. But what she said this week flies directly in the face of Democrats who deny that their party has been taken over by identity politics.

Stacey Abrams: The internal threat we face is a fear of who we are. The notion of identity politics has been peddled for the last ten years, and it's been used as a dog whistle to say that we shouldn't pay too much attention to the new voices coming into progress. I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are, and it's exactly how we won.

Tim: In other words, it matters most what your race, gender, or sexual orientation is rather than the content of your character.

But as health care continues to be an issue of primary concern for the American people, there also was, finally, an admission by one of the architects of Obamacare, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), that Obamacare has been a failure.

Jan Schakowsky: I've been for Medicare for all since many of you have been born, but I'm also the co-sponsor of Medicare for America. I helped write the Affordable Care Act. I'm for improving it. I'm for all the plans because what we have now is not working.

Tim: And yet despite the now admitted failure of Obamacare, voters in last year's midterm election still somehow trusted Democrats more than Republicans to fix health care, which mostly tells you that the GOP has failed to come up with any kind of viable health care alternative.

We thought that maybe we'd have some kind of infrastructure proposal or agreement at least by now after President Trump, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) met a while back and seemed to agree on the essentials. But then right before a follow-up meeting, Pelosi torpedoed any chance at a deal by running to the cameras and saying this:

Nancy Pelosi: We believe that no one is above the law, including the president of the United States, and we believe that the president of the United States is engaged in a cover-up. In a cover-up.

Tim: Apparently covering up a crime that did not occur. But never mind that. Trump reacted with predictable swiftness and decisiveness, walking out of the meeting.

Donald Trump: I said, let's have the meeting on infrastructure. We'll get that done easily. That's one of the easy ones. Instead of walking in happily into a meeting, I walk in to look at people that had just said that I was doing a cover-up. I don't do cover-ups.

Tim: Then, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer ran to the cameras and described how Trump refused to meet with them after being accused of orchestrating a cover-up.

Chuck Schumer: To watch what happened in the White House would make your jaw drop. We Democrats believe in infrastructure. We believe our roads and bridges need repair. We believe that rural America as well as inner-city America needs broadband. We believe that to bring clean new energy around the country, we need a power grid modernized and updated. We believe in modernizing our transportation fleet with electric cars. We believe in all these things. We are interested in doing infrastructure. It's clear the president isn't.

Tim: But Schumer, and particularly Pelosi, obviously didn't want a deal that might make Trump look good, either. If they did, Pelosi would not have accused the president of an impeachable crime right before meeting with him. Duh. How obvious can it get? But what's not as obvious is how Pelosi should deal with demands for impeaching Trump from her restless left-wing base, especially when there are so many conflicting signals from various Democrats. On the one side, presidential candidates like Beto O'Rourke are pandering to the base.

Beto O'Rourke: We should begin impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump (cheers). Not something that I take lightly. It's an incredibly serious, sober decision that we should make as a country. Really the last resort, when every other option has failed us.

Tim: Translation? If we couldn't get him on collusion or obstruction, let's just go ahead and impeach him and figure out the reason later. But the view of Capitol Hill veteran insider from South Carolina, Rep. James Clyburn, long-time Democratic congressman, is quite different. He was asked about it by Chuck Todd on NBC.

Chuck Todd: If you did a secret ballot among the Democratic caucus, yes or no on impeachment, what would the majority likely be?

James Clyburn: Oh, the majority would be "no." The majority would be for staying steady, staying focused, stay on what we're doing because this thing is moving in our direction.

Tim: Is it? Is it really? As Matthew Continetti of The Washington Free Beacon said on Fox News, Pelosi is being pushed from all sides.

Matthew Continetti: Pelosi has a big problem on her hands, and the problem is that the initial strategy of presenting voters a pseudo impeachment by dragging out these hearings was thwarted by President Trump and his policy of no cooperation across the board. So this has now put the Democrats in a box where the only way that they can attempt to get some of the answers or some of the big publicity they want is through opening an impeachment -- even though Pelosi knows impeachment would be futile and likely to backfire politically.

Tim: Now, Pelosi's not the only Democrat who's got a problem. Consider Joe Biden, the runaway front runner in the Democrats' presidential primary at this early stage. How is he going to deal with a scandal that could be as bad or worse than Hillary Clinton's email scandal in 2016? It is described by Peter Schweizer in his book “Secret Empires,” which includes a ton of research on Biden and his son.

Peter Schweizer: Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son, got on the payroll of a very corrupt Ukrainian energy company called Burisma in the spring of 2014 where he was paid about $50,000 a month to do "regulatory compliance" for this company. The problem, of course, is Hunter Biden had no background in Ukraine, no background in energy. What he did have was a father who was vice president of the United States who was responsible for all aid flow of Western dollars going to Ukraine, and Joe Biden made decisions about when to look the other way when money disappeared.

Tim: Indeed, one of the lingering questions of the presidential campaign will be how Joe Biden explains away this building scandal, and the one about Biden and his son’s ties to China, and how the son got a huge business deal with China right after the father made a state visit to China.

Meanwhile, we're hearing rumblings of war with Iran, which reportedly has made provocative moves in recent days, threatening to kill and kidnap U.S. soldiers. So Trump has ramped up our readiness to a situation that Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) of the Senate Armed Services Committee says represents a credible threat.

Tom Cotton: There can be no doubt that we've seen serious, credible, and increased reporting of threats from Iran across the Middle East. Whether their own forces like the Revolutionary Guard Corps, or through their proxies, like some of the rebel groups that they support in places like Yemen, or paramilitary forces in Iraq. The steps that the administration has taken on the recommendation of the Department of Defense, like moving an aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf, or B-52 bombers into the region, are all prudent steps not to take military action against Iran but to try to deter military action by Iran.

Tim: So we are using our capability on offense to play defense with Iran, as the economic sanctions imposed by President Trump continue to cripple the Iranian economy and embolden increasingly widespread opposition to the now 50-year-old Islamic regime in Tehran.

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