Political ju–jitsu is a complicated and demoralizing technique that takes something your opponent considers a strength and turns it against him. Sen. Kamala Harris experienced this during her brief presidential campaign.
She considered her stint as California Attorney General an asset because Harris felt it proved her toughness to voters skeptical of a one–term female senator running for the nation’s highest office. She forgot she’s a member of a party that considers obeying the law to be optional for anyone with skin tones darker than Johnny Winter.
Putting people in jail didn’t prove toughness to that electorate, it proved a willingness to oppress minorities. Faster than you can say Harai Goshi a former asset became a liability.
President Trump has also been known to dabble in political ju–jitsu. After New York passed the ‘Green Light Law’ — that gave driver’s licenses to illegals and denied feds access to the driver’s license database lest it be used to find illegals — Trump retaliated by removing New York from the Global Entry and Trusted Traveler programs.
That means about 175,000 New Yorkers will be shuffling barefoot through the TSA’s full–body grope line instead of the expedited shoes–on lane. Think citizen’s caravan.
Suddenly the state’s catering to illegals penalizes citizens. A strength – the future votes of leftists from a variety of failed Latin American states – becomes a negative when affluent members of the Trusted Traveler programs start complaining.
When political ju–jitsu is skillfully executed there’s a certain symmetry to the resulting downfall.
When the attempt is not well planned, the failure is equally spectacular. Just ask mental giant Del. Wendell Walker. The reigning Wile E. Coyote of Virginia Republican politics.
Before Virginia leftists began their wholesale assault on the Constitution, they were already active in statue removal. In Charlottesville they targeted a monument to Gen. Robert E. Lee. The effort was blocked by a state law that prohibited freelance historic desecration.
Now the left controls both houses of the legislature plus the governor’s office. Once the 2nd Amendment is nullified, it’s only a matter of time before statue recycling becomes a pressing issue. So Wile E. Walker decided to block the left with his new Acme Statue–Saver Legislation.
The WoePost reports, Walker’s bill “calls for ridding Richmond’s Capitol Square of a 10-foot statue of Harry Flood Byrd, the former Democratic governor, U.S. senator [and] kingmaker …who dominated Virginia politics for 40 years.”
Walker was quite proud of his strategery. “It’s kind of like playing chess,” said Del. Walker who hoped the bill would make Democrats think twice about removing any statues. “You’re just calling somebody’s bluff.”
In reality, it’s like taking the Napalm Challenge.
Walker’s brainchild is the political ju–jitsu equivalent of grabbing the back of one’s shirt and throwing yourself off the roof.
Harry Byrd was a racist who wasn’t even a Democrat when he died. The Post has a nice summary of Byrd’s legacy, “Byrd engineered the state’s opposition to [school integration] which included denying funding to integrated schools, authorizing the governor to close them and providing tuition grants to students attending segregated private academies.”
The current Virginia Democrat delegation includes a genuine socialist, a male gender–bender, Soros and Bloomberg tools, various America–haters, wild–eyed feminists, minority ethnic supremacists and Reconquista activists.
And genius Walker thinks Democrats will be taken aback by a proposal to remove a statue of Harry Flood Byrd?
Name a white guy whose statue the left doesn’t want to remove! (No fair answering Lenin.)
Del. Jerrauld Jones can hardly wait to fire up the jackhammer, “I would love to see [the Byrd] statue come down. It’s the statue that makes me most upset. You think about being the mastermind of racist policy and segregationist policy in the 20th century. We’re not that far removed.”
Walker was basking in his own glory until feedback started arriving. One Democrat in his district wrote, “this is the best thing I’ve ever heard you say.” Then leftists in the legislature began lining up to ask to join him as co–sponsors of the bill.
That’s when it finally dawned on Walker, “[My bill is] just going to open the door for a lot more [statue removals]. And I hate to be part of something that would be destroying our history and our heritage.”
A panicked Walker asked House Speaker Eileen Hyphen (D–NOW) to put him out of his misery and kill the bill. Democrats were enjoying his discomfiture too much for that. Walker was told to appear before the House Rules Committee and explain why.
Walker didn’t and went home instead. His bill lives on as a monument to Walker’s intellectual laziness and political incompetence. It also serves as a metaphor for why Republicans are now in the minority in Virginia.
