UNC prof, NC drivebys: North Carolina = Cuba

For decades, leftists mocked those of us on the right for our “unnatural fear” of the Soviet Union.  Now, the lefties and their driveby media lapdogs are blasting us for being too *soft* on Russia.

For years, we were told we were overreacting with the whole Cuba embargo thing.  (Never mind all of those nuclear missiles 90 miles from our shores. Never mind the coddling of the drug cartels and the sponsorship of terrorism.)  NOW, we’re told it’s bad to be comparable with Cuba: 

George Orwell said, probably apocryphally, that some ideas are so absurd that only intellectuals believe them, and maybe there’s a 2016 election corollary. Witness the uncritical ovation for a new study that claims elections in North Carolina are less free and fair than the likes of Cuba.

Progressives are enraged that the Republican-controlled Tar Heel legislature recently transferred some powers to the legislature from the Governor, who will be a Democrat come January. We thought the move was politically dumb, though debates about university trustee appointments and Senate confirmation for executive branch positions aren’t close to a democratic “crisis.” But don’t tell the academics who run the Electoral Integrity Project, a joint venture of Harvard and the University of Sydney.

“Our state government can no longer be classified as a full democracy,” announced the Chapel Hill political scientist Andrew Reynolds in the Charlotte News & Observer last week. The professor helped design the Electoral Integrity Project’s index, which ranks state and international elections on measures like the rule of law, voter registration and honest counting of the ballots. For 2016 North Carolina scored 58 on a 100-point scale, which Mr. Reynolds says “places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone.”

[…] If the readout of your model is that North Carolina is as repressive as Cuba, maybe the problem is your model rather than North Carolina. The state is peacefully transferring power to a Democratic attorney general from a former Republican mayor of Charlotte, not deputizing the secret police. Cuba, which jails political dissidents, hasn’t transferred power since 1959, unless the 2008 presidential handoff to Raúl Castro from Fidel Castro counts. Yet Cuba rates a 56.

And this Reynolds crapweasel is drawing six figures worth of salary and benefits from the “repressive” North Carolina state government to peddle this nonsense.  In Cuba, a government employee would not dare to criticize the regime footing the bill for his salary.

[…] More remarkable still is that North Carolina isn’t the worst preforming state on the Electoral Integrity Project’s scoring system. Some 11 states are allegedly less free. Democracy in New York (which scored a 61) and Virginia (60) is supposedly more imperiled than in Rwanda (64), though Rwanda is controlled by an autocrat. The worst-performing state, Arizona (53), is outranked by Kuwait (55), Ivory Coast (59) and Kyrgyzstan (54).

That so many progressives are taking such results as academic gospel shows that the real crisis isn’t democracy but common sense.

All of that Saul Alinsky stuff we were warned about in 2008?  We’re seeing it in action — from gobbling up a bunch of private land, and picking fights with Israel and Russia, at the federal level, to burning the bridges AND the entire house at the state level.   The left will rip this place to shreds in order to get exactly what they want.  North Carolina will be portrayed as hell on Earth until there’s a government check in every mailbox and a dude in every ladies restroom.  

Who needs free and fair elections when you’ve got rioting, intimidating mobs in the streets and political hacks in black robes ready to make law from the bench?  Are we going to keep sitting back and taking this, or are we going to push back?