I hate to spend much more time on Jennifer Palmieri’s ungracious behavior since the election, but I can’t let her op ed last Wednesday in the Washington Post go without a few observations. The editorial was a rehash of her December 1 outburst, at a Harvard election review forum, which I discussed in my preceding post, with some additional wrinkles that didn’t appear in the coverage of the Harvard incident, and are the subject of this post.
Her editorial justified her conduct by saying that Hillary Clinton, in her concession speech, had challenged her supporters to “defend our rights and principles under the Constitution — rights and principles that she and many of the people who voted for her feared could be under threat in a Trump presidency.” That’s what Palmieri claimed to be doing at Harvard. Funny, I don’t remember her writing editorials about Obama’s violation of constitutional principles when he unilaterally changed provisions of Congressional mandates, including welfare reform, immigration, and even the Affordable Care Act, not to mention his attempt to bypass the Senate’s Advise and Consent role.
She also reiterated her charge that the Trump campaign had given a platform to white supremacists. in part by Trump’s “retweeting white nationalists”. If you look at the retweets in question, they’re not white nationalist, nor white supremacist rhetoric, they’re comments like: “Your policies will make this state and country great again!”, and “Ivanka said it and you said it too, you’ll be great for women”. I seriously doubt Trump considered vetting the authors, or if he even looked at their names. Besides, this issue came up at least as early as January of this year. It’s not like voters didn’t have a chance to assess the validity of the Left’s criticism.
Most importantly, who actually gave the white nationalists and/or supremacists a platform? The Democrats and the media are the ones who directed all the attention toward them by attempting to associate Trump with their movements, a goal which they themselves had sought.(See my previous post.)
Finally, like Harry Reid and many others, Palmieri talks about people living in fear of how Trump’s presidency will impact their lives and well-being. Of course there is anxiety among some groups in this country, but I’ve heard Liberals bring up fear so many times recently, it’s obvious their motive is to create, cultivate, and intensify that fear, make it a fait accompli. That’s one more way they can continue the work they’ve been doing the last eight years, dividing this country and pitting people against one another.