RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez’s weekend victory over Keith Ellison in the race to become DNC chairman shows Democrats learned nothing from their historic shellacking in November and that Barack Obama remains firmly in control of the party.

The win by community organizer and Obama loyalist Perez effectively constitutes a merger of sorts between the Democratic National Committee and Obama’s well-funded Trump-resisting pressure group, Organizing for Action. Perez replaces interim DNC chairman Donna Brazile who herself replaced Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. The congresswoman was forced out last summer after her role in rigging the nomination process in favor of Hillary Clinton was exposed.

The Perez victory is also a sign that it’s business as usual for the deeply divided party that voters reduced to a regional rump in November and whose leaders think they lost because of bad messaging instead of bad ideas. The DNC, after all, is on record as endorsing the violent, racist Black Lives Matter movement and of accusing American police officers of systematically committing genocide against blacks. These people have learned nothing and are anxious to do the bidding of their unruly radical base that is already determined to impeach President Trump after a little over a month in office.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Washington, D.C., the consensus before the vote among conservatives this writer spoke to seemed to be that Ellison would be the better choice to lead Democrats because he is less palatable to Americans in the heartland who are turned off by his pro-Islamist, racist rhetoric. “Ellison would scare the sh** out of Americans in what the Left calls ‘flyover country,’” one participant said.

Alas, it was not to be.

On Saturday in Atlanta, Perez won the post in the second round of balloting, defeating the Muslim congressman from Minnesota on a vote of 235 to 200. To promote unity in the severely divided party, Perez asked that Ellison be made deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee. DNC members approved the appointment on a voice vote.

After the vote, Perez vowed to rebuild the party at all levels from “school board to the Senate” and reach out to disaffected voters in rural America. “We lead with our values and we lead with our actions,” he said, adding the party will concentrate on defending Social Security and Medicare and on “growing good jobs in this economy.”

“You know, our unity as a party is our greatest strength. And it’s his worst nightmare,” he said in a reference to President Trump. “And, frankly, what we need to be looking at is whether this election was rigged by Donald Trump and his buddy Vladimir Putin.”

Of course the lie that Trump is Putin’s puppet is central to the Left’s narrative. This is why dirty trickster Ryan Clayton of Americans Take Action Inc. handed out about a thousand small Russian flags emblazoned with “TRUMP” in the middle to the audience at CPAC which met at the Gaylord Hotel in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C.

The idea behind this piece of mischievous performance art was to get audience members waving the little Russian flags while the TV cameras were rolling during President Trump’s speech to the assembled conservatives. The Russian flag, like the American, is red, white, and blue and most in the mass gathering of non-vexillologists didn’t realize they were being punked. But someone noticed that the flags were Russian and CPAC staffers promptly collected them from the audience before the prank could fully succeed.

Back in Atlanta, Perez, who was labor secretary and the nation’s top civil rights enforcer under Barack Obama, denounced President Trump.

“Someday they’re going to study this era in American history and they’re gonna study it alongside the Know-Nothing movement,” the new DNC chairman said. “And they’re gonna ask the question of all of us: ‘Where were you in 2017, when we had the worst president in the history of the United States?’”

“And we will all be able to say: The united Democratic Party led the resistance, ensuring that this president was a one-term president and [that we] elected Democrats across this country.”

President Trump sarcastically congratulated Perez.

“Congratulations to Thomas Perez, who has just been named Chairman of the DNC,” he tweeted. “I could not be happier for him, or for the Republican Party!”

Perez responded on Twitter. “Call me Tom,” he wrote. “And don’t get too happy. @keithellison and I, and Democrats united across the country, will be your worst nightmare.”

But uniting Democrats will be a tall order. Feelings are still raw among supporters of self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) whom they quite justifiably feel was robbed of the party’s presidential nod by a super-delegate-heavy system stacked against him.

On social media, Democrats let Perez have it and castigated DNC members for voting down a ban on corporate donations to the party.

Rain Duran tweeted, “Yes, I’m sure Trump is shook by the ‘corporate cash first, working class last’ strategy again.”

Celeste Holmes (Twitter handle: @Dallas4Bernie), tweeted that the DNC “just sent a big FU [f*** you] 2 Independents (who # [count] more than registered Dems) & progressives, confirming our #DemExited[.]”

User @GeeOhPees2 tweeted, “No Tom you guys completely blew it. No progressive want [sic] unity with you after this #demexit[.]”

Other leftists expressed their displeasure at Perez’s win. Jim Dean, chairman of Democracy for America, said his election was “incredibly disappointing” and said the “resistance will persist … with or without the leadership of the Democratic National Committee.” Dan Cantor, executive director of the ACORN-founded Working Families Party, said Democrats “missed an opportunity.”

After the election result was announced at the DNC meeting in Atlanta, Ellison supporters angrily chanted, “Party for the people, not big money,” CNN reports.

Alexa Vaca, an Ellison supporter who backed Sanders during the primaries, said the party “didn’t learn their lesson.”

“They are not going to be in touch with the people and they are not ready to move in a new direction despite the rhetoric.”

Far-left journalist Glenn Greenwald described Perez as someone who “despite his progressive credentials, is viewed — with good reason — as a reliable functionary and trustworthy loyalist by those who have controlled the party and run it into the ground.”

Perez’s victory has been characterized as a win for the establishment wing of the party. This is a fair statement to make because Obama is the party establishment now. His ugly racial politics and in-your-face tactics are now accepted best practices at the DNC. It’s not so much that the party has moved further left since Obama secured the nomination in 2008 – it is more the case that the radical left-wing community organizer culture has thoroughly consumed the party apparatus. The ends justify the means, as the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s use of violent paid agitators at Trump campaign rallies in 2016 demonstrates.

In his heart Bill Clinton is a radical, but as president in the 1990s, he knew when to cut his losses. In office he wasn’t a full-on practitioner of Saul Alinsky-approved tactics as Obama was. He nominated fellow radicals Lani “quota queen” Guinier and Bill Lann Lee for the important Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights post (Lanier dropped out under fire; Lee was recess-appointed over Senate opposition.) (Incidentally, Perez held that same post at the Justice Department before he moved over to the Department of Labor.)

But it is difficult to imagine President Clinton nominating and standing by cop-killer-loving Dego Adegbile for the key civil rights post, as Obama did. Ideologically, Guinier, Lee, and Adegbile are difficult to tell apart, but Clinton, who at least pretended to like the police, wouldn’t have stood by someone like Adegbile who built his career on representing Mumia abu Jamal, the unrepentant Philadelphia cop murderer.

Some in the media have described Perez as a moderate, which is abject nonsense. Perez and Ellison are Tweedledum and Tweedledee, both left-wing extremists who have a burning desire to punish America for its past sins and continue Obama’s fundamental transformation of the United States.

There is no easily discernible ideological difference between Perez and Ellison. They differ somewhat only in style and tone. Perez sounds like a radical, well-educated, but presentable lawyer (he is one) while Ellison, also a lawyer, is a man who comes across as a cross between Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan.

Both would have been likely to further tarnish their party’s brand but Ellison would have been more frightening to the people in middle America whom Democrats need to avoid their approaching extinction.

Perez, the outspoken champion of illegal aliens, comes across in speeches as more sophisticated and articulate – and at least superficially reasonable – compared to Ellison. Ellison, with his ties to the Nation of Islam and other fringe groups, is significantly more abrasive, in-your-face, and arguably threatening in the eyes of the average voter. Both have close ties to the HAMAS front group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Perez is a past president of Casa de Maryland, an advocacy group for illegals funded by George Soros and the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.

A former top aide to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), at the Department of Justice, Perez refused to prosecute hate crimes committed against white Americans. He also collaborated with ACORN-affiliated Project Vote to weaken electoral integrity-related law enforcement. Voter ID laws, in his twisted view, are racist, calculated to deprive minorities of their voting rights.

He was reportedly instrumental in the DoJ’s dismissal – over the objections of the government attorneys handling the matter – of a case involving two New Black Panther Party members who brandished weapons and intimidated white voters in Philadelphia on Election Day 2008. An inspector general found that Perez believed voter protection statutes “did not cover white citizens.”

Perez’s refusal to disavow Saudi-style anti-blasphemy laws shocked Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) at a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee’s panel on the Constitution in 2012.

“Will you tell us … that this administration’s Department of Justice will never entertain or advance a proposal that criminalizes speech against any religion?” Franks asked four times to no avail.

Perez believes that America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear Islam. He has worked with hardcore Islamist groups such as the terrorist-linked Islamic Society of North America and applauded Islamists for lobbying against airline security measures.

Perez believes the government should require racial discrimination in order to benefit those the Left deems to have been historically oppressed. He favors the use of affirmative action in hiring at higher education and healthcare facilities. He believes medical schools should lower admission standards for black applicants.

Perez openly holds business people in contempt. The only difference between bankers and Ku Klux Klan members is that bankers discriminate “with a smile” and “fine print,” but they are “every bit as destructive as the cross burned in the neighborhood,” he has said.

It’s not the like the other candidates in the hotly contested race to be the face of the Democratic Party were much better than Perez and Ellison.

Among the also-rans were pandering leftist Jehmu Greene, a former ACORN operative and Rock the Vote president, and Idaho Democratic Party executive director Sally Boynton Brown, a white woman who said that Democrats have to be taught “how to be sensitive and how to shut their mouths if they’re white.”

Today’s Democratic Party is so fully in the grip of extreme left-wingers that the selection of a radical to chair the DNC was inevitable.