Thanks to California’s so-called jungle primary system, the race for the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat is now for second place.
Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, he of the Russiagate hoax, is seen as having a comfortable lead in first place, according to CBS News.
The question is whether another Democrat will join him on the ballot in November — liberal-but-not-crazy Rep. Katie Porter and progressive-crazy-as-all-heck Rep. Barbara Lee are vying for that position — or whether the lone Republican with a chance, former baseball star Steve Garvey, will end up facing Schiff.
Polling shows Garvey and Porter in a neck-and-neck fight for second — and, in the first debate for the hotly contested seat on Monday night at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, the Democrats turned their fire on Garvey.
However, in what may have been the moment of the night, the Republican reminded all of California why Schiff shouldn’t be on the ballot at all.
In a testy exchange regarding the congressman’s censure for fibbing about Russian collusion, Garvey noted that Schiff, long the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee before he was booted off by Republican leadership last year, consistently lied to America about chimerical collusion between Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 campaign.
“I think you’ve been censured for lying,” he said to Schiff in the midst of an exchange about the Democratic agenda and the fact the left’s candidates often have “prearranged words to say.”
After the answer, an incensed Schiff demanded to answer being “called a liar by Mr. Garvey.” This probably wasn’t the best move.
“Mr. Garvey, I was censured for standing up to a corrupt president,” he said, in full standing-on-soapbox mode.
Should Adam Schiff have been censured?
“And do you know something? I would do it all over again. Because that corrupt president, that president who’s been indicted with … 91 felony counts, that president that you won’t refuse to support — yeah, he’s a danger, and I will stand up to him and Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan and any of those MAGA enablers of his in the Congress,” Schiff said, referring to the former House speaker and the Judiciary Committee chairman.
“The reason why our democracy is in trouble is because folks don’t have the courage to stand up when they need to,” he concluded.
Garvey, however, got in the last word and reminded America why Schiff was really censured.
“Sir, you lied to 300 million people,” he said. “You can’t take that back.”
Keep in mind that Garvey is no “MAGA enabler,” as Schiff likes to call them. In fact, much of the debate centered on the fact that the former Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres first baseman has refused to say whether he would support Trump if he were the nominee.
But he was deadly accurate: Schiff’s censure was the result of a profile in cowardice, not courage.
Schiff, as you may recall, was one of the biggest peddlers of the Russiagate hoax from his congressional soapbox on the House Intelligence Committee. Specifically, he was censured for a March 20, 2017, hearing involving then-FBI Director James Comey.
As The New York Times described it contemporaneously, Schiff “carefully laid out the history of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russian officials. It was a performance that showed how an avalanche of information can leverage the limited power of the minority party to damage a president.”
It was also all complete hokum, considering it was well-known in intelligence circles at the time that the information in the Steele dossier — which the Russiagate hoax was based on — was false, unverified or unverifiable.
“On March 20, 2017, Representative Schiff perpetuated false allegations from the Steele Dossier accusing numerous Trump associates of colluding with Russia into the Congressional Record,” read the censure resolution, introduced last June by Florida GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna.
“As ranking minority member and Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Representative Schiff behaved dishonestly and dishonorably on many other occasions, including by publicly, falsely denying that his staff communicated with a whistleblower to launch the first impeachment of President Trump,” the resolution continued.
Thus, Schiff became the third representative in the 21st century — Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona and former Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel of New York being the others — to be censured by the House of Representatives.
However, the Democrats pitched a mighty fit over this — and it’s worth pointing out, too, that both of the other challengers on stage Monday night, Porter and Lee, defended Schiff’s lies as well.
Now, liars get elected all the time. It’s rare, in fact, when someone who isn’t a fibber makes it into high office.
However, there’s a mighty difference between fibbing about budgetary numbers or what you can get done while in office, say, and lying about links between the president of the United States and the Kremlin that don’t exist.
That was a poisonous lie that Schiff loosed upon 300 million Americans, many of whom still believe it. It was divisive, destabilizing and designed to be that way. And not only did Schiff utter it, but Porter and Lee supported it.
Even in lefty California, you’d hope that kind of mendacity would count for something. We’ll see if it does when voters go to the polls in March.
