OPINION:
Some progressives are grousing that Joe Biden’s Cabinet choices aren’t sufficiently Marxist. They want Bernie Sanders named as Labor secretary, for instance. The Nation magazine is less critical but also wants more lefties.
You just can’t please some people. The fabricated “Office of the President-Elect” has announced what amounts to a reunion of the Obama administration’s radical crew, and then some.
Take Susan Rice. After the United Nations ambassador was caught lying about the terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, you’d think she’d be finished in public life.
Well, no. That’s not how it works. Ms. Rice, after all, worked for the guy who told us we wouldn’t lose our doctor or health insurance if Obamacare were enacted.
On Sunday morning talk shows, Ms. Rice insisted that the attack in Libya that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans was not premeditated. She instead blamed “a hateful and offensive video that was widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world.” Patently false.
President Obama promoted her the next year to national security adviser, and she’s been named to run Joe Biden’s domestic policy council, a “highly influential group with broad sway over the administration’s approach to issues including immigration, healthcare and racial inequality,” gushed the leftist British paper The Guardian.
Speaking of immigration, CBS News reported that Mr. Biden is “expected to quickly start dismantling President Trump’s immigration agenda.”
Well, why not? All the radical, anti-U.S. sovereignty groups were on board the Biden bus, and they expect not only open borders but citizenship and voting rights for 20 million illegal immigrants already here.
As a step in that direction, Mr. Biden has selected Alejandro Mayorkas to head the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Mayorkas was Mr. Obama’s director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and deputy secretary of Homeland Security. He implemented Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which suspended enforcement for illegal aliens brought here as children.
Contending it was an unconstitutional expansion of immigration law, Mr. Trump halted DACA in September 2017. However, a federal judge reinstated it this past Nov. 20. So, Mr. Mayorkas can move onto other ways to encourage illegal immigration, such as halting wall construction or even tearing it down.
The most in-your-face appointment is that of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to head Health and Human Services. During his 24 years in Congress, Mr. Becerra compiled an extreme, pro-abortion record. In 2017, Mr. Becerra succeeded Kamala Harris as California’s AG after she was elected to the U.S. Senate. He continued to hammer away at the Little Sisters of the Poor despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling exempting the nuns from having to provide abortifacients to employees.
He also continued Ms. Harris’ Torquemada-like prosecution of undercover journalist David Daleiden and his associate Sandra Merritt. They were charged with 15 felonies for filming Planned Parenthood executives discussing the sale of baby body parts. That case is still pending.
Finally, Mr. Becerra tried to force crisis pregnancy centers to refer clients to abortionists and even post ads for abortionists at their clinics and on their websites. The Supreme Court rebuked him, ruling that such forced speech violated the First Amendment.
Moving along with his plan for healing and unity, Mr. Biden tapped Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge for secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
In June 2019, as reported by DiscovertheNetworks.org, Ms. Fudge read a letter on the House floor from a constituent who stated: “It is glaringly apparent that many who support the president’s [Donald Trump’s] administration are either racists, steeped in religious beliefs, ignorant, or as my mother used to say, just plain dumb.”
In 2014, Rep. Fudge railed against a grand jury’s decision not to indict White police officer Darren Wilson for defending himself against an attack by teenaged robbery suspect Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Calling it “yet another slap in our [Black people’s] face,” she said it was “a blatant miscarriage of justice.”
The false narrative that Brown had said “hands up, don’t shoot” instead of attacking the officer and trying to take his gun, is still a Black Lives Matter mantra.
There’s more. Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, a top leftist think tank funded by George Soros, is slated to head the Office of Management and Budget.
Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey have been nominated for the Council of Economic Advisers. They “cut their teeth at the labor-backed, progressive Economic Policy Institute,” according to the Nation, which also approves of jetsetter John Kerry’s nomination as special envoy on climate change.
Overall, the Nation seems mostly happy despite quibbling that some appointees are establishment types and not left-wing loons.
Keep in mind that, according to former radical David Horowitz, the Nation “supported every Communist dictator in their heyday — Stalin, Mao, Fidel, Ho, even Pol Pot — and on every issue involving conflict between the United States and any of its sworn enemies during the Cold War, invariably tilted towards (and often actively sided with) the enemy side.”
The Nation’s longtime editor and now publisher emeritus, Victor Navasky, was an editor for The New York Times Magazine and wrote for The Times’ Book Review before moving over to the Nation.
It must have been a seamless transition.
Many Americans are praying hard that truth will come out and there won’t be an ill-gotten transition at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
• Robert Knight is a contributor to The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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