Thursday, March 28, 2024
Miles from the Mainstream
D. R. ZUKERMAN, proprietor

Who, indeed, wants to
undermine U.S. democracy?

January 19, 2017 --

Who knows but by the time of the swearing-in of our 45th president, most House Democrats will boycott the inauguration. Consider the course of the neo-Leninists. First they demanded vote recounts; then pressure on the members of the Electoral College; then disinformation about the crucial role of the Kremlin in Hillary Clinton’s defeat. And then the pronouncement of Rep. John Lewis, hero of the struggle for civil rights (and whose demonstrations to integrate lunch counters in in Nashville, Tennessee, the fall of 1962, this writer joined) that the election Donald J. Trump was not “legitimate.”

Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, chatting on the John Batchelor Show, January 13, cited the comment of Lewis as an example of the attempt by Democrats to undermine the Trump presidency. Hearing that observation, LPR immediate realized – but that is precisely what the Democrats, joined by the intelligence community, are accusing the Russians of trying to do -- to our political institutions. Are the accusations from the left simply a bait and switch exercise?

LPR found a response to Lewis from Max Boot, also mentioned elsewhere in this LPR posting. At the end of his October 17, 2016 column in the Los Angeles Times, Boot denounced Mr. Trump for “assigning blame for his potential defeat to a shadowy cabal that includes such groups as international bankers and ethnic minorities.”

Boot continued: “In the process [Trump] is violating the most basic tenet of democracy: The willingness of one side to accept defeat at the polls and acknowledge the legitimacy of the winning side.”

Boot then indicated that for the losing side to challenge the legitimacy of the winner is to “fray the very fabric of our democracy, ” and to take us “to some very dark places where no previous presidential nominee has ever gone.”