Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but what to do with Democrats is a conundrum. They’re definitely not friends, and they’re worse than your run-of-the-mill political enemies. Democrats will stab their mothers in the back—or even their fronts—and dine on their their still warm bodies if it means keeping power. Don’t believe me? Look at what they’re doing to New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Liel Leibovitz, editor-at-large at Tablet Magazine, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and columnist at First Things Magazine, has written a piquant piece titled “The Jews Should Stand with Eric Adams” about the Democrat abuse of the law to target Eric Adams for coloring slightly outside the rigid lines Democrats have, with brass knuckles, drawn.
While acknowledging that, at the time of this writing, the public does not know the charges leveled against Adams, the evidence for those charges, or whether Adams is guilty, Leibovitz establishes the political context in which Adams works:
[B]eing the mayor of a city as big and wealthy and fractious as New York City … requires that you have working connections to the city’s neighborhoods. The city’s neighborhoods are run by people who get stuff done, which means that being mayor requires at least the pretense of doing favors for the people who do favors for you. The mayor of New York may be a flamboyant bon vivant like Jimmy Walker in the 1920s, or a tool of the city’s crime syndicates, like William O’Dwyer, or a monk like Ed Koch, who never took a dime from anyone. But even if the mayor himself is a monastic innocent, you can bet that at least some of the people around him are not—and better not be, or else the city would cease to function. The alternative to this crude political math is to elect billionaires like Michael Bloomberg who are rich enough to bribe the city’s clashing interest groups into submission with their own personal funds. (Bloomberg is estimated to have donated over one billion personal philanthropic dollars to city interest groups during his mayoralty.) The problem there is that you wind up with a city that is built to please billionaires, and which the common folk can’t afford to live in.
Prosecuting New York City mayors for their proximity to one form or another of local corruption is like prosecuting bartenders for their proximity to gin.
Leibovitz waggishly mocks Dems for their scrupulous but erratic concern about potential abuses of power:
Of course, for all I know, Eric Adams has actually done something seriously criminal to deserve the public spectacle of a federal indictment complete with armed SWAT teams. Perhaps Adams has been using his public office to solicit multi-million-dollar bribes from Ukrainian gas magnates and Chinese spies, or has been making millions by regularly trading on insider information gleaned from his legislative activities, or has been building a billion-dollar fortune through sweetheart contracts with America’s enemies while employing foreign spies in his office. If he has done any of these things, he surely deserves to be locked away.
For the obtuse among us, Leibovitz clarifies:
I know that Hunter Biden’s laptop—the one 51 intelligence officials, including several former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, argued was a fictitious story that “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”—turned out to be very true, and that though it raised very real allegations about the then-vice president’s involvement in his son’s lucrative business dealings with Ukrainian oligarchs, no serious investigation ever targeted Joe Biden.
I know that earlier this year Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, sold 2,000 shares of Visa, worth between $500,000 and $1 million, just weeks before the credit card behemoth was hit with federal antitrust charges. Paul seems to be a very lucky guy, because last November, he purchased call options in Nvidia and made a cool $4 million in one transaction, or about 20 times his wife’s annual salary as a public servant.
I know that Dianne Feinstein was an avid defender of the Chinese Communist Party; as mayor of San Francisco, she became the first sitting American mayor to visit China. She also enthusiastically supported granting China a most favored nation trading status in 2000, significantly relaxing trade limitations and benefiting the government in Beijing. And while the senator was busy saying that the Communist Party had the right to commit flagrant human rights violations—she even downplayed the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown by comparing it to the 1993 shootout in Waco, Texas—her husband, Richard Blum, made a killing by dealing with the Chinese. When Feinstein entered the Senate, in 1992, Blum’s financial interests in China, according to the senator’s own filings, amounted to one project worth less than $500,000. That soon changed, with a $23 million investment in a steel company owned by the Chinese government, the acquisition of a major Chinese manufacturer of soybean milk and candy, and other projects. Which made it sort of awkward when the senator’s chauffeur turned out to be a bona fide Chinese spy, an unfortunate event that was quickly silenced without much consequence.
… Bill and Hillary Clinton became wildly wealthy by offering high level access to the U.S. government to every corrupt uranium trader on the planet. Barack Obama, the most politically active retired president in U.S. history is the proud owner of a stately portfolio of uber-luxury properties around the country. Who knows what a raid on those properties might turn up? The iron-clad ties between the NGO-industrial complex and the Democratic Party are why, just earlier this week, we saw Democratic vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz huddling with Alex Soros, the son of billionaire George Soros, whose extensive philanthropy has been instrumental in electing radically progressive law enforcement officials across the nation. Yet no one ever investigates how these links allow both radical billionaires and the Democratic Party to gut limits on political expenditures.
Political naifs may wonder why Dems would unsheathe their knives against a Dem. New Yorker Leibovitz has some ideas on whose political agenda Adams may have disrupted:
And whose political agenda would that be? Well, the same people who see Eric Adams’ refusal to welcome unlimited numbers of migrants to New York at the cost of collapsing city services as a moral and political embarrassment, rather than as basic common sense. The same people who can’t stand the sight of a Black ex-cop who knows that the police protect the people far more often than they abuse their powers. The same people who think that preventing “Zionist Jews” from walking across campus or using the library at publicly funded universities like Columbia and NYU is a form of social justice work.
…
He criticized the Biden White House for secretly flying tens of thousands of illegal migrants to New York City, a move that has cost the city upward of $5 billion to date and threatens to smother an already overtaxed system of social services like shelters and schools. “We need to mobilize,” the mayor stated … urging New Yorkers to march on Washington, D.C., and tell the president that they’ll have none of his insane and reckless opening of our borders and flooding our cities with people we can neither vet nor support.
Adams also struggled to fight crime as his party increasingly deemed the very act of policing inherently racist, and he stood for New York’s Jews as his party increasingly snuggled up to their pogromists. The federal government, which has the power to uphold laws and deport foreign students who support terrorism, say, or withdraw funding for universities that coddle antisemitic mobs, many of which appear to have direct links to the foreign terrorist organizations they support, did nothing. Mayor Adams, on the other hand, sprung to action as soon as he could, breaking down the Tentifada encampment at Columbia and repeatedly advocating a zero-tolerance approach to the Hamasniks in our streets.
Dems have learned that knives are oh so messy, what with all that blood and guts. Lawfare is definitely the way to go for the party that claims they fear our democracy is on the eve of destruction. Lawfare provides at least the appearance of commitment to the rule of law. Dems could teach Macbeth and his Lady a thing or two about how to dispense of political enemies.
