Robert Reich Is At It Again

Robert Reich is at it again. In case you don’t know him, Bobby is Professor of Public Policy at the U of C in Berkeley, which should tell you a lot right there, was a member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet, and was on the “transition team” for Barack Obama. He may or may not be senile, but he certainly is batshit crazy, which does not keep him from being a darling of the Democratic Party.

Back in 2010, when a BP Oil drilling platform had blown out and was spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, he said that, “It’s time for the federal government to put BP under temporary receivership, which gives the government authority to take over BP’s operations in the Gulf of Mexico until the gusher is stopped.”

The logic that he gave for this rather bizarre suggestion was that, “If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP’s north American operations into temporary receivership...”

The government did not “take over” either of those two corporations, of course, it loaned them tens of billions of dollars in exchange for controlling interest in their stock, which could have been done by any financial institution that had that much money. Not to mention that those were American corporations and that any attempt by the American government to place a British corporation “into temporary receivership” would certainly have had a very interesting outcome.

Now he is issuing a dire warning about what will happen in the event of a Democratic victory in the 2020 election, opening with, “The United States is now headed by someone pathologically incapable of admitting defeat.”

Psychologists call that “projection.” Accusing another person of doing what I myself am doing so that I do not have to recognize it in myself and take responsibility for doing it.

How many “reasons” have Hillary Clinton and the Democrats come up with for the loss in 2016? Russian interference, James Comey and “self hating white women,” are just a few of the many that come to mind. When the phrase “pathologically incapable of admitting defeat” is uttered, who comes to mind? Who, on election night, sent her followers home without speaking to them?

Reich engages in a lengthy diatribe about how Trump and his followers believed before the election that it would be rigged against them, but he fails to mention that the Democratic primary election actually was rigged in favor of the establishment candidate, and that the fact of that bias and election rigging is supported by a wealth of direct evidence, and resulted in the forced resignation of the DNC chairperson. Nor does he mention that is Democrats who have actually refused to accept the outcome of the 2016 election and have complained endlessly since the election that they lost only because the other side cheated.

Reich reminds us that, “when an election is over, the peaceful transition of power reminds the public that our allegiance is not toward a particular person but to our system of government.” And yet it is Democrats whose allegiance is to their own candidate and their own partisan power who are preventing that “peaceful transition of power.”

“[W]hat happens,” Reich asks, “if an incumbent president claims our system is no longer trustworthy?” Easily answered. The same thing that is happening today when the losing side, in pursuit of their own political advantage, claims that our system is no longer trustworthy.