Timothy Egan's liberalism, badly concealed in his previous guise as a news reporter for the New York Times, is in full and angry bloom in his columns, like "The Junk Politics of 2015," from the upcoming edition of the New York Times Sunday Review, mocking the Republicans with personal insults while dismissing Democratic problems. It included this howler: "At least one Republican wants to sic the Internal Revenue Service on his political enemies." Didn't Obama's IRS do exactly that to the Tea Party?
After talking about the empty calories of campaign rhetoric, Egan treats Republican skepticism of Obama-care and global warming as ridiculous:
.... We have a fledgling health care plan that’s given coverage to 15 million Americans who never had any -- and one party wants to take it away. And we’re muddling through the hottest year on record, so far, surpassing the last warmest one, 2014.
And yet, what are the leaders-in-waiting talking about? Roll the highlight reel of our junk politics, starting with the also-rans:
At least one Republican wants to sic the Internal Revenue Service on his political enemies. So promised Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, in a remarkable statement overlooked at the kids’ table debate last week. “I guarantee you under President Jindal, January 2017, the Department of Justice and the I.R.S. and everybody else we can send from the federal government will be going into Planned Parenthood.”
No mention of Obama's IRS, led by Lois Lerner, actually targeting his political enemies in the Tea Party during the 2012 presidential campaign.
Then Egan went personal with anti-Republican insults.
Other Republicans think we should be living in a theocracy. “It’s time we recognize the Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being,” said Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, testing the latest version of his church-lady demagogy. He wants to ignore the high court on both gay marriage and abortion -- breaking the law while waving his Bible.
Huckabee would also use the force of government to intervene with any woman seeking an abortion, claiming a constitutional right, the 14th and 5th Amendments, to protect a zygote. When he mentioned this Brave New World idea in the debate, no one challenged him. Instead, other candidates were equally extreme, refusing to make abortion exceptions even when the life of a woman is at stake. This is junk women’s health care, driven by religious fanaticism.
That's the "Brave New World" otherwise known as scientific fact: A zygote is a new living organism with its own DNA distinct from its mother and its father.
Next he criticized Republican governors Scott Walker and Chris Christie as total failures, even though both were somehow easily won second terms.
Those governors want to apply their ruinous models to the rest of the country. In the same vein, a failed former chief executive officer, Carly Fiorina, having fired 30,000 employees and driven her company’s stock price into the ground, feels more qualified than ever to be president. She’s never held elective office and rarely voted while living in California. A junk comeback.
And of course, Donald Trump:
Which gets us to Donald Trump, who boasts of four company bankruptcies, and paying people to come to his wedding. He is “a very smart person” and will be “phenomenal to the women” just like “the blacks.” It’s hard for women to attack him, he says, “because I’m so good-looking.”
By contrast, Egan let Hillary and Bernie off easy, dismissing Clinton's email scandal as "boring" and spinning Sanders' frosty relationship with black liberal activists by implying that a "noisy intruder" who refused to let Sanders speak at a podium was a closet Republican, or something -- his charge is awfully vague.
Finally, to the Democrats. A 73-year-old socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is getting lots of attention because Hillary Clinton’s email story is boring, by Clinton scandal standards. When a noisy intruder, an African-American, jumped to the podium and refused to let Sanders speak, it was widely interpreted as a big problem for the candidate and race relations.
Wrong. The censor with the mouth was, it turns out, a self-described “extremist Christian,” from a family that once backed Sarah Palin. Some members of Black Lives Matter distanced themselves from her.
Egan is evidently talking about Marissa Janae Johnson.
