One truthful Democrat emerges to call out party’s ‘delusions’ By Michael Goodwin
https://nypost.com/2019/04/06/one-truthful-democrat-emerges-to-call-out-partys-delusions/
Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator and governor, was always one of my favorite politicians in part because his politics weren’t perfectly polished. Among other free-wheeling moments, he called fellow Democrat Bill Clinton an “uncommonly good liar” and said a requirement for becoming president is that you must “want it more than life itself.”
Kerrey moved on to academia and now to an investment bank, but hasn’t lost the willingness to break ranks with his party. The habit surfaces in a withering criticism of current Democrats, where he says they are suffering from two major “delusions.”
“The first,” he writes in an op-ed in the Omaha World-Herald, “is that Americans long for a president who will ask us to pay more for the pleasure of increasing the role of the federal government in our lives.”
He cites as examples the foolish push for the Green New Deal, wealth taxes and Medicare-for-all, all of which are being embraced by 2020 candidates.
The Dems’ second delusion, he says, “is that Americans were robbed of the truth when Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and Attorney General William Barr concluded that President Trump did not collude with Russia in 2016.” He goes on to say there is no reason to think the full report will change the finding that Trump is an innocent man.
Those are remarkable observations — but Kerrey isn’t finished. He also supports the movement to find out what the FBI was up to in 2016, and why it led the nation down the Russia rabbit hole.
“Congress needs to investigate how the Department of Justice got this one so wrong,” he writes. “If the president of the United States is vulnerable to prosecutorial abuse, then God help all the rest of us.”
He makes several recommendations, including one that the congressional probe should be carried out by a nonpartisan commission of outsiders. He told me in a brief interview that the probe should complement, but not replace, anything Sen. Lindsey Graham does with the Judiciary Committee, or anything done by the Justice Department or its inspector general.
As he put it in the interview, he wants an independent commission because “we need something the public can trust.”
Taken together, the op-ed and his comments amount to a damning indictment of his party and Washington writ large. Who can argue?
The problem, of course, is that all leading Democrats are drinking the Kool-Aid that America is ready to embrace extreme, left-wing policies and that Mueller and Barr are covering up for Trump and Vladimir Putin.
This is the stuff of moon bats and tin-foil hats, yet if there is a major Dem in power with the courage to say so, I’ve missed it. The whole party, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi included, seems determined to hold hands and jump off a cliff.
Which is why Kerrey’s voice is so important and timely. Hopefully, other Dems will summon the courage to join him.
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