Democrats’ Ghosts Old and New Stalk Chicago Convention

Ghosts Old and New are walking the floor of the United Center in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention this week. Technically, some of them are even still alive.

As I have noted in these columns before, Chicago is truly the City of Destiny for the Democratic Party of the United States. On at least four occasions over the past 128 years – in 1896, 1932, 1944 and 1968 – the future of the party and of the United States of America were decided when the Democrats approved their presidential candidate in the legendary windy city.

To this one may also add the Republican National Convention in 1860, which fatefully picked Abraham Lincoln to be the party’s first successful presidential candidate: that epochal event led directly to the secession of the 11 Southern states and the bloodiest event in American history – the US Civil War of 1861-65.

The consequences of that Republican gathering in Chicago in 1860 also ejected the Democrats from any real federal national power for half a century – disregarding the two separate and exceedingly timid four-year terms of President Grover Cleveland from 1885 to 1889 and 1893 to 1897.

In 1932, it was in Chicago that the Democrats finally truly revived their fortunes by selecting New York State Governor Franklin Roosevelt as their presidential candidate. And in 1944, the party’s big city bosses again meeting in Chicago prevailed upon a dying Roosevelt to replace his vice president, dreamy, idealistic and not very street-smart Henry Wallace, with tough, no-nonsense Senator Harry Truman, future architect of the US Deep State and Cold War militarism, on the presidential ticket as Roosevelt’s inevitable successor.

The Democrats entered this week’s convention buoyed up yet also fearfully timid. Being historically illiterate, especially about their own party and country, they will not even remember, let alone be embarrassed by Lincoln’s nomination in Chicago as the foe of slavery when it was still unanimously defended by almost all Southern Democrats.

Nor will this week’s Democrats in Chicago remember how their own party then committed national hara-kiri again 36 years later in 1896, and again in Chicago, by selecting firebrand speechifier William Jennings Bryan as its candidate for the first of three failed presidential campaigns. The other two came in 1900 and 1908.

Today’s Democrats do remember all too well the humiliating, chaotic days of protest and rage at their convention in Chicago in 1968. Then Chicago Democratic Mayor Richard Daley allowed his own tightly controlled police force to rampage out of control. And this took place in front of the television cameras of the three great networks – CBS, NBC and ABC. They all blithely transmitted the images to more than 100 million people across America as Dailey’s cops clubbed down and beat to a pulp legions of longhaired (or so it seemed) antiwar protestors.

After that, Democratic candidate Vice President Hubert Humphrey lost his national election to Republican Richard Nixon – a figure loathed by the media and the liberal establishment of the day almost as much as Donald Trump is now. Yet Nixon only won by the narrowest of margins.

Humphrey had a long, storied career as a foe of racial segregation, a decent and reforming mayor of Minneapolis (in Minnesota, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz’s home state today), veteran senator and Johnson’s loyal though increasingly unhappy vice president.

In other words, Humphrey had everything putative presidential candidate Kamala Harris does not have today: a long and solid record of experience and genuine achievement at every level of state and national government.

And that of course was precisely why Humphrey lost in 1968 and why Harris still might win the presidency this year.

For it is precisely because Harris has no experience, expertise and competence whatsoever in either state or national government that she has been immune so far to attacks from the Republicans.

As long as the US mainstream media holds its protective shield over Harris’s endless bungles, nonexistent record and sordid long tryst with veteran San Francisco Mayor and then Speaker of the California State Assembly Willie Brown, then, like some weird hero – or villain – out of Greek mythology or Superman-DC comic books for the past 86 years, she is safe.

Only if Harris becomes visible and unleashes her mindless wit and ghastly cackle over any extended period will her spell of invulnerability be broken.

And that is why the Democratic National Convention in always unruly Chicago is being orchestrated at such breakneck speed this year.

All the most toxic, and dreaded, fearfully embarrassing figures in the party have been cordoned off as if they are carriers of Political Bubonic Plague.

All of them were set to speak on Monday night, giving the party faithful across America three more nights of uplifting visions towards the future, once the Frightful Four – Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Hillary Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – were safely out of the way.

On Monday night, the Democrats therefore will be washing out of their mouths the fearful, rotting tastes of failed 2016 candidate Mrs. Clinton, sitting Zombie President Biden – his creaking 1950s-technology servo-motors wheeled out to semi-animate his waxwork dummy one last time and supposed Party Radical Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez – her supposedly fearsome “Pack” now halved as two of three supporters lost even their own party’s primary votes.

Finally, the last of the four also spoke, “President” Biden’s true controller and puppeteer over the past four years, his wife, First Lady Jill Biden, the enormously powerful, socially insecure, socially climbing, status-obsessed puppet-mistress pulling her husband’s entirely witless strings.

Jill Biden pretended, of course, to be graceful and happy that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi – a crazed 84-year-old herself – pulled the plug on the Biden Clan’s Mad Dream of another four years of incompetent emptiness and catastrophe in the White House.

Most of all, Mrs. Clinton, the worst of actresses, laughably tried to feign admiration and enthusiasm for Harris, the nonentity who seems fated to break the Glass Ceiling at last and be the first woman president in US history – a goal for which La Hillary quite literally sacrificed her soul for decade after decade. If only Giacomo Puccini was still alive today to do full operatic justice to the heartbreaking scene!

Clinton joylessly and ploddingly racked up the bullet points on her resume or CV to “qualify” for the Presidency. She was First Lady, Senator from New York (a state she had never lived in during her entire life) and secretary of state in which office she ordered and had carried out the literal destruction of such nations as Libya, Syria, Yemen and the suspicious toppling of an entire generation of center-left presidents and national leaders across Latin America.

But then Mrs. Clinton lost even the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2008 to a young Illinois Senator Barack Obama who had not even completed his first term in the Senate. In 2016, it took the most base and desperate of manipulations to make the Democratic primaries churn out a technical victory for her as the presidential nominee only to then lose to a man she never dreamed could win: Donald Trump.

Even in 2016, many reports suggested that Clinton was already a drunken, physical wreck. Now the Democrats are wheeling her out one last time at the presumed coronation of Queen Kamala. And all of them will be praying the ludicrous old horror’s ghost will be exorcised at last.

The week may indeed proceed smoothly and without any embarrassing incident as the Democratic Faithful so fervently pray.

Having learned some things at least from the Horrors of Chicago in 1968, it is a safe bet that the no longer so great national television networks this year will refrain from covering any embarrassing popular protests against Biden’s fraudulent, catastrophic or just plain useless policies from the humiliating US expulsion from Afghanistan in August 2021 to the endless bombing of Gaza by Israel today.

It is also ludicrous to imagine that Biden and his Gallant Knights have the faintest idea how to restrain let alone destroy the Houthis in Yemen or Hamas and Hezbollah either.

But none of that matters to the Democratic Party’s leaders who laughably still imagine themselves to be “political strategists.”

All they care about is that a week of Hosannas to Crown Queen Kamala proceed in an uninterrupted flow and that they then gain at least a temporary one and a half percent boost in the opinion polls against Trump and his allegedly “weird” (he isn’t) vice-presidential running mate J.D. Vance.

The Olympics Are Over. Let the True Games in Chicago Begin!