Hypocrisy, Thy Name is Progressive

The title may be obvious to the politically aware, the close observers of the news cycle, those who pay rapt attention to world events.  But those qualifiers cut out a substantial portion of voters.  It's not an exaggeration to say a significant slice of the electorate is simply unaware of the extent to which the Progressive Woke Left is the party of "do as I say, not as I do."

For their sake, and to give the politically challenged some accurate talking points to arm themselves with when engaging in a calm, measured discussion of the facts with today's Wokists (unlikely as that may be, unfortunately), let's list some of the more notable examples.

The COVID vaccine was bad under President Trump, but it's great under Biden

As President Trump took immediate charge of the COVID threat (like restricting travel to and from China and Europe, activating the Defense Production Act, sending the hospital ships Comfort and Mercy to New York and California, and much more), perhaps the most important thing he did was spearhead "Operation Warp Speed" to get the vaccines developed in record time.

A vaccine normally takes about three to five years to do the research, conduct all the clinical trials, get the official signoffs and approvals every step of the way, etc.  It's an arduous process, especially in the lawsuit-crazed American business climate.  But President Trump cut through the red tape, provided vital government financial assistance to the pharmaceutical companies, and massaged the approval process to drastically compress the timeline.  Hence, the vaccines were ready before the end of 2020, far sooner than is normally the case and much sooner than President Trump's critics had hoped.  (We'll leave aside, for now, any thoughts that the vaccines were not authorized until after the November 3 presidential election because of politically motivated reasons.)

During the vaccine development process, several high-profile Democrats (like Kamala Harris and N.Y. governor Andrew Cuomo) opined that if President Trump had any direct role, then they would not take the vaccine or recommend its use to others.  This was utter, complete political nonsense, as if Donald Trump himself was working in his basement with a seventh-grade chemistry kit.

Yet once Joe Biden was awarded the election, suddenly, the vaccines became manna from heaven, created by a divine hand, and anyone who doesn't immediately take the vaccine is now considered an oppositional, conservative sloth, bent on prolonging the pandemic for nefarious reasons and looking to infect the more enlightened among us.  When Donald Trump was president, the left said the vaccines were unsafe, highly questionable.  Now that Joe Biden is "president," suddenly these very same vaccines are regarded by the Woke as the yardsticks by which we measure civilized people.  Our entire society is now being re-ordered by the current administration depending on who has taken the vaccine or not, while under President Trump, they were regarded by the entire Progressive faction as highly suspect and wholly inadequate.  This is stunning, unintellectual hypocrisy on an unimaginable, daily life–diminishing level.

Progressives want to eliminate the filibuster

The current Senate filibuster practice requiring a three-fifths vote (60 votes) to end cloture has been in place since 1975.  Although not an "official" rule of governance, the thought that the most important legislation should require 60 Senate votes out of 100 senators generally ensures that even some minority party participation is required since the majority party has historically rarely had a 60-40 advantage.  Typically it's in the mid-50s to mid-40s.  In today's 50-50 split, ten Republican votes are needed to avoid the filibuster.  Senate majority leaders have resorted to all kinds of procedural tricks to get around the 60-vote requirement, such as when the disingenuous Harry Reid pulled out the obscure "Reconciliation Act" from left field to negate the fact that Republican Scott Brown had become the "41st senator" when he won the seat vacated by Teddy Kennedy's death in 2009.

In 2016, Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell dissolved the 60-vote requirement for Supreme Court confirmation in favor of a simple 51-vote majority.  The then-minority Democrats screamed bloody murder, as typified by this Chuck Schumer rant in 2003.  The sanctity of the 60-vote requirement was said by Democrats to be critical to the very foundation of our democracy, essential to American ideals and the way our society functioned.

Yet once the Progressives were back in power in 2021 (by virtue of their questionable twin Senate runoff "victories" in red Georgia), all of a sudden, the elimination of the filibuster — supposedly so injurious to the bedrock of American government, according to the Progressives — became essential, the filibuster somehow having become "racist" overnight.  Once again, like the vaccine, the degree to which the Progressives shamelessly do a 180 when it suits their political agenda is breathtaking.

There are countless other examples of totally absurd Progressive hypocrisy today, including:

  • Using wasteful, inefficient private jets to fly in luxury to world Green/environmental conferences
  • Employing armed personal security details while trying to restrict or eliminate the 2nd Amendment rights of the general population
  • Unending months of destructive nationwide BLM/Antifa riots, resulting in numerous deaths, astonishingly excused as "free speech," but a lone conservative protest — January 6, with zero protester-caused deaths — somehow denounced as an "insurrection"
  • High-profile Progressives like Bernie Sanders and Michael Moore getting fabulously wealthy under the rules of capitalism while espousing the forced confiscation of other people's hard-earned resources
  • Claiming — without a shred of evidence — that the 2016 elections were suspect, while ignoring the mountains of unquestionable proof of 2020 voter fraud, much of it caught on video
  • Requiring COVID vaccines for re-entry to work or school, but welcoming unrestricted illegal immigration without any health screening, because Progressives believe that those illegal aliens will enlarge their voter rolls in the future

There's an old cliché that says, "If liberals didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all."  This is truer now than ever before.  The difference is that 50 years ago, the notion of a Kennedy-styled "Limousine Liberal" was just an annoying aspect of our political life.  But today, Progressive hypocrisy threatens to tear American society and culture apart at the seams, and the window to reverse it may be closing too fast to stop.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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