Some good reasons to chuckle

Published 12:48 am Wednesday, February 13, 2019

By Michael Reagan

It’s not often you get to really laugh at politics.

But thanks to a bunch of self-exploding Democrats in Virginia and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Republicans had some good chuckles this week.

Since the midterm elections last fall, Republicans have been down in the dumps and Democrats have been riding high and mighty.

Democrat leaders spent January gloating about retaking control of the House of Representatives, coming up with 152 ways to impeach President Trump and voicing support for the dumb legislative ideas of their star rookie socialist, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of NYC.

Rep. Adam Schiff, my Southern California congressman, has promised every camera he’s looked into since last November that his House committee was going to spend the next two years investigating several decades of Donald Trump’s business records, tax returns and, if necessary, his golf scores.

But this week, as President Trump delivered a great State of the Union speech, the Democrats got knocked down off their high moral horse by a series of scandals involving the personal and moral failings of their guys running the state of Virginia.

First to topple was Gov. Ralph Northam, a pediatrician who had already recently shocked much of the country by advocating the abortion of a full-term infant with deformities after it was born.

That Dr. Mengele-like position brought calls from the pro-life community for him to resign, but he didn’t, and he got a predictable free pass from pro-abortion Democrats and the liberal media.

What really got Gov. Northam in deep trouble with his own party happened a few days later, when unflattering pictures of him surfaced from a 1984 medical school year book.

Gov. Northam was seen either in blackface or wearing a KKK hood. No one — including him — was sure which person he was.

He ended up denying it was him in either racist costume, but then confessed at a bizarre press conference that he once wore blackface as part of a Michael Jackson impersonation — and even offered to perform a “moonwalk” for reporters to prove it.

While Republicans chuckled at the antics of the Democrats of Virginia, and almost everyone in his own party clamored for Gov. Northam to resign, we learned that Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, the next in succession, was in even more serious trouble.

A professor from Southern California had publicly, graphically and credibly alleged that Lt. Gov. Fairfax violently sexually assaulted her at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004.

Whoops. A liberal chicken had come home to roost in the new Democrat Party.

In the post-Judge Kavanaugh era, where liberals have declared that sexual assault victims are always to be believed, that means Fairfax is almost certainly a goner, no matter how strongly he denies the woman’s allegation.

That leaves Democrat Attorney General Mark Herring next in line to become Virginia’s governor, but Herring is also in trouble with his party because he too has admitted that he put on blackface to impersonate a rapper while at the University of Virginia in 1980.

We don’t know yet if one or all of the tarnished Democrats will be forced to resign.

It’s not something their party wants to see happen, no matter how guilty they all may be, because if they all go, a Republican — state House Speaker Kirk Cox — would become governor of Virginia.

It’s no joke, but it’d be really funny if it came true.

Cox is fourth in the line of succession only because a name was drawn out of a bowl to settle a tied state House race last fall, and that’s what gave Republicans control of Virginia’s House.

As if the Virginians didn’t do enough damage to the Democrat Party this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren also did her part.

The fake Native American who wants to become president had to apologize because she was caught lying about her heritage — again — after The Washington Post published a copy of a registration card she signed in 1986 for admittance to the Texas bar on which she identified her race as “American Indian.”

As I said, it was a great week to just sit back and laugh.

MICHAEL REAGAN is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.