RUTHFULLY YOURS

House Democrats made complete fools of themselves with their sit-in temper tantrum this week. Shouting their demands for an immediate vote on gun control legislation – apparently their only “serious” answer to global Islamic jihad – the Democratic disrupters caused pandemonium on the House floor on Wednesday. They sought to paralyze House proceedings with shouts of “No bill, No break!”  Representative Maxine Waters of California proclaimed, “I’m prepared to stand here until hell freezes over.” Civil rights hero Representative John Lewis of Georgia declared, “we have to occupy the floor of the House until there’s action.”

The anarchist spirits of Occupy Wall Street and student campus occupations are alive and well in the House Democratic caucus. They shed their responsibilities by flagrantly violating the rules of the institution to which they were elected, intent on creating a media spectacle. They went so far as to use social media video tools to broadcast their sit-in, after the chamber’s official cameras had been turned off.

Even when the House Republican leadership called it a day and adjourned the House until after the 4^th of July weekend, the Democrats pressed on with their occupation. Before that, as the real adult leader in the room, Speaker Paul Ryan had managed, despite the mayhem, to push through a major appropriations bill that included funding for combating the Zika virus. At least one of the House leaders was thinking of the welfare of the American people. It certainly was not the Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who even refused to leave the House floor temporarily when politely asked to do so by an officer so that the daily security sweep could be conducted.

In the midst of the Democrats’ theatrics, Representative Louis Gohmert (R-TX) introduced a note of sanity, shouting: “Radical Islam killed these people!”  Gohmert is right. The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, was a jihadist, who was committed to kill those he considered “infidels” one way or the other. The FBI had investigated him for possible ties to other jihadists and for terrorist threats he had made to co-workers, but let him slip through their net.

Moreover, Mateen would not have been stopped by the sort of legislation the Democrats are seeking, which is to use a prospective gun purchaser’s presence on a terror watch list as grounds to refuse his or her immediate purchase. Mateen had already been removed from a terrorist watch list prior to purchasing the guns he used in his killings.

However, facts are irrelevant to the Democrat disrupters. Taking a page right out of radical leftist Saul Alinsky’s playbook, they set out, in Alinsky’s words “to agitate to the point of conflict.” They eschewed debating civilly their positions with logic and on the merits, because, as Alinsky had cautioned, to do so would be “a futile procedure.” Instead, they dutifully followed Alinsky’s Rule #13 from his Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

The shouting over Speaker Ryan’s attempt to restore order to the House proceedings was in perfect keeping with Alinsky’s counsel “to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.”

Attacking the “enemy” with “moral outrage” for supposedly failing to live up to the enemy’s “book of rules” is also one of Alinsky’s principal tactics. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) followed that tactic to a tee. He charged that the House “is drenched in blood and the only way we can cleanse it is if the speaker of the House allows us to vote on this legislation.” He added, “Every day that we don’t commit to a vote, the blood is on the leadership of this House.”

However, it will be Nadler who will have blood on his hands if any refugees admitted in the future from Syria or other countries beset by Islamic terrorism commit a violent crime in the United States. Nadler opposed H.R. 4038, the American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act of 2015, which would have required additional certification procedures to ensure full vetting of Iraqi and Syrian refugees seeking to enter the United States. He claimed, without any hard evidence, that “the Syrian refugees are running away from ISIS.” He signed a letter to President Obama last year urging the administration to admit as many as 100,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2016 – ten times the administration’s own irresponsible target.

The problem is we do not know who the purported refugees really are. CIA director John Brennan said on June 16th that ISIS “is probably exploring a variety of means for infiltrating operatives into the West, including in refugee flows, smuggling routes, and legitimate methods of travel.”

“I don’t, obviously, put it past the likes of ISIL to infiltrate operatives among these refugees, so that’s a huge concern of ours,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said last September, using another name for ISIS or the Islamic State.

FBI Director James Comey admitted that screening of Iraqi refugees had been less than adequate and that vetting Syrian refugees would be even more difficult. “If we don’t know much about somebody, there won’t be anything in our data,” he said. “I can’t sit here and offer anybody an absolute assurance that there’s no risk associated with this.”

Even children may be of concern.  In early June, for example, three young Syrian refugees, aged 8, 10 and 13, reportedly raped a 13 year old girl at knifepoint.

The FBI is already strapped for resources in monitoring potential jihadist terrorists currently residing in the United States. That is one reason, along with obeisance to political correctness, that so many would-be jihadists have slipped through the cracks before going on to commit their murderous acts of terror. Greatly expanding the number of new Syrian refugees admitted to this country, as Nadler and other Democrats have proposed, will divert scarce resources to vetting those refugees in the virtually impossible task of keeping out even more would-be jihadists.

The Democrats’ solution – more gun control – is snake oil to distract the American public from the dangerous policies they are advocating in opening up our borders to many thousands of refugees from Syria and other parts of the Middle East and North Africa.

Moreover, the Democrats’ hypocrisy on the gun control issue itself is appalling. For example, the number of people shot and killed in the Democratic Party-run city of Chicago during 2016 to date is 281.  There were 1558 people shot and wounded. In June so far, 50 people have been shot and killed in Chicago. 260 have been shot and wounded. Where is the Democrats’ outrage over the slaughter of kids on Chicago’s streets, despite Chicago’s tough gun control laws? They are using the Orlando killings to grandstand for simplistic remedies, rather than deal with the underlying causes of gun violence.

The Democrats should stop following Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and engaging in mob rule. They are members of the House of Representatives, which has rules of decorum intended to allow the peoples’ business to be performed in a reasoned manner. If they cannot behave themselves, they should at minimum be censured for gross misconduct.