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Democrats running for president who have signed on to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” are taking their own political lives into their hands. Pat Buchanan calls the Green New Deal “the longest suicide note in history.” He writes at The American Conservative (abridged):
After reading an especially radical platform agreed upon by the British Labor Party, one Tory wag described it as “the longest suicide note in history.”
The phrase comes to mind on reading the resolution calling for a Green New Deal, advanced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and endorsed by at least five of the major Democratic candidates for president.
Among the endorsers of this Green New Deal is Senator Cory Booker, who compares the battle to stop climate change to fighting the Nazis in World War II.
Nancy Pelosi has more sense. Interviewed last week, the speaker batted the Green New Deal aside: “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”
With her own agenda and priorities, Pelosi does not want to be dragged into having to defend a document that reads like it was written by a college socialists club.
The question, though, is why Democrats, who, if nominated, are likely to face Donald Trump in 2020, are signing on to so radical a scheme.
In a presidential election, the “out” party candidate usually has an advantage: no record to defend. He or she can choose the terrain on which to attack the incumbent, who has a four-year record to defend.
Rarely does an out party present a fixed and stationary target as exposed as this, as out of the mainstream as this, as vulnerable as this.
The only explanation for the endorsement of the Green New Deal by candidates with a prospect of winning the Democratic nomination is that they are so fearful of Ocasio-Cortez and the left for whom she speaks that they must endorse her plan.
That British Tory got it right. This thing reads like a Democratic Party suicide pact.
Read more here.
