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I wonder if he read Ruy Teixeira’s piece about this last month (“The Democrats’ Common Sense Problem”) or simply arrived at the same conclusion independently.

Probably the latter. It’s not as if thinking Democrats have gotten too bogged down in woke esoterica is an obscure belief shared only by political junkies.

This entire clip is worth your time (language warning, though) as Maher and Joe Rogan compare notes on the stultifying ideological conformity in entertainment but the point about lacking common sense comes right up front in the first few minutes. Watch, then read on.

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Even the Dems themselves acknowledge the problem — to a point. “Defund the police” has become such an infamous electoral albatross for the party after it nearly fumbled away the House in 2020 that only the progressive vanguard in Congress, like Cori Bush, still chatters about it. Almost to a man or woman, other Democrats are running away from it at high speed, especially as rates of violent crime remain stubbornly high in many major cities. In fact, Politico has a worthy round-up today of the many efforts underway in blue citadels to *re-fund* the police, sometimes even above their funding levels prior to the death of George Floyd and the BLM protests in 2020.

“Undoubtedly, there’s been a backlash,” said Maurice Mitchell, a leader in the Movement for Black Lives coalition and national director of the left-wing group Working Families Party. “Historically, whenever there’s been large social movements, at some point after that you experience some form of backlash. And we’re in the midst of that.”…

“As dumb as we are, we do listen to the base. The base has been giving it to us left and right: ‘What do you mean, cutting police?’” said former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who served two terms as Philadelphia mayor. “Go into North Philadelphia, where 99 percent of the people are African American, and ask them what they think of defunding the police. You wouldn’t find 10 people who are in favor.”…

In an NBC News poll last month, fully 73 percent of voters said they’d be less likely to vote for a candidate who supports defunding the police, while Democrats’ House campaign arm, raising alarms about the “defund” label in its own research earlier this year, urged Democrats to reiterate their support for police.

One Democratic strategist in Seattle fears the damage is done and worries about the consequences: “I’m terrified this stuff is going to reelect Trump in ’24. Forget about the midterms. I’m terrified this stuff is going to take down Biden if he runs for president again.” Biden is sufficiently worried about the same thing that he held a “re-fund the police” event with former cop turned New York City mayor Eric Adams in February. Maybe, with enough political elbow grease, Dems can scrub away some of the soft-on-crime stain they’ve inflicted on themselves.

If “defund the police” were their only deficiency in common sense, they might be okay. But it isn’t, as Maher says in the clip, and the Democratic establishment is less eager to acknowledge those other deficiencies. Maher complains about the inanity of “pregnant men” and making excuses for looting in the summer of 2020. I’d add the Lia Thomas debacle, in which average joes are told not to believe the evidence provided by their lying eyes that growing up male provides a physiological advantage in sports, plus the party’s … ambivalence, shall we say, about whether the southern border truly needs to be controlled or not. The left’s radical commitment to a border that’s fully open to the world’s dispossessed has influenced even “centrist” establishmentarians like Biden, to the point where he seems fully prepared to let Title 42 lapse as scheduled and cause a stampede from Mexico into Texas and Arizona.

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That’s another topic on which Democrats whose names will be on the ballot this fall have suddenly been forced to appreciate the concerns of “common sense” voters. Even … Beto O’Rourke:

“It does not make sense to end this until there is a real plan and the capacity in place to handle those and address those that come over,” O’Rourke said in an interview with The Texas Tribune on Tuesday. “I have yet to hear a plan from the Biden administration to address the dynamic we will have on the border once Title 42 ends.”…

“What it has done is produced a situation where the same person is crossing multiple times a week, and under Title 42 that Border Patrol agent simply turns that person back around and then that person tries to cross the next day,” he said. “They’re not arrested, not detained, there are no consequences for someone who is not following our laws when they try to come into this country, and it means that this country is not following its laws when it comes to those who are trying to make a legitimate claim for asylum.”…

“Everyone is legitimately concerned about the lack of a plan,” he said. “We should hold the federal government accountable for doing its job, and they’re not doing that.”

Beto O’Rourke, border hawk. There sure is a lot of elbow grease suddenly being applied to obvious political problems that could have been addressed months or years ago.

Via the Blaze, here’s a little more from Maher’s interview with Rogan. Neither of these guys are conservative but I think it’d be fair to call them anti-anti-conservative at this point.

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