Democrats long have tried to cloak themselves in self-aggrandizing, high ideals. They talk about issues that do not exist or cannot be fixed; that way, there is no way to hold them accountable for results.
Their current and fashionable worries are climate change and getting rid of guns. Instead of working on tangible and needed ideas like paving roads, education, stopping wars, crime, the deficit and curtailing the administrative state, they love to "virtue signal," focusing on fake problems of their own making. In every lament and simplistic solution, they are the heroes in their own narrative.
It is clear that global warming is the No. 1 cause of documentaries and town hall broadcasts on CNN. Last week all of the Democrat candidates waxed pious about all the tax dollars they would spend and all our freedoms they would curtail to solve this dubious "existential threat." Fake problems are easier to solve than real ones. Millennials want to save Earth but won't clean their rooms in their parents' basements.
Liberals have been wrong on a whole host of fashionable "worries," starting in the 70's when they protested and ended the United States' nuclear energy program. Now, as it turns out, that is the most efficient and zero carbon-emitting form of energy. Yet they stopped it with their know-it-all protests. Remember how acid rain and then the hole in the ozone layer were going to kill us? Sun was going to come through the depleted ozone layer, making all Americans as tanned as George Hamilton.
Even recycling has been determined to be ineffective. The left in Los Angeles and New York started drinking bottled water in plastic containers. We in middle America poured water out of the tap into a glass, but they were cool and knew best. Now they are shocked that non-biodegradable plastic bottles and straws ravage the oceans and choke sea turtles. When four pounds of cocaine washed ashore in Florida during Dorian, those sea turtles wished they had their straws back.
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Obama is so concerned about sea levels rising that he just bought a $14 million oceanfront home. And the media say Trump didn't take Hurricane Dorian or climate change seriously? Yes, Trump is sanguine about the issue, but Dorian was another "cry wolf" scare, at least for our coastline. It blew over two lawn chairs in Alabama, so he was right. Trump comes closer to being a meteorologist than any other politician or journalist; at least he slept with a woman named Stormy.
The gun issue is the next unfixable problem over which lefties love to wring their collective hands. According to the top academic in the field, James Alan Fox, the numbers of mass shootings are not up. In Nick Gillespie's recent interview with Dr. Fox for Reason, titled, "There Is No Evidence of an 'Epidemic of Mass Shootings,'" the data are clear: Mass shootings are actually down from the mid-'90s. The media's agenda-driven hysteria and coverage do not focus on reality.
So, with faux climate change and fake "facts" on mass shootings, the left wants to take your gas-powered cars and your guns over a manufactured political, rather than fact-based, crisis. Remember the movie/docudrama about when a government took guns from citizens under false pretenses? It was called "Schindler's List."
Bowing to the pressures of the left, Walmart said it was going to stop selling Confederate emblem goods, and last week said it would stop selling rifle bullets to end mass shootings. Saks Fifth Avenue felt the need to virtue signal, too. Focusing on the many people killed in auto accidents, Saks said to end those deaths, it would stop selling auto parts.
Walmart not selling Confederate stuff, and now no bullets? I bet their cracker aisle is not going to be very crowded.
Contact Ron Hart at Ron@RonaldHart.com or Twitter @RonaldHart.