El Sayed and the art of conning voters

By telling outright falsehoods or attempting to hide their thoughts rather than speaking them plainly, left-wing Democrats — forgive the tautology — demonstrate what a bad idea it is to vote for them.They treat voters with contempt, and the electorate should repay this feeling in kind. Political candidates who treat elections as con tricks rather than as forums for debate that allow informed voters to choose should not be given the chance to close their fists around any lever of power.Remember Harry Reid, who, as the top Democrat in the Senate in 2012, accused GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney of paying no income taxes for 10 years. When confronted later about this lie — Romney had actually paid millions of dollars in taxes — Reid shrugged and sneered, “Romney didn’t win, did he?” This has been the Democratic Party playbook ever since — say whatever you need to say to win, and let voters repent at their leisure. Reid’s view, put plainly, was that might made right, and victory justified not just petty shading of the truth but egregious dishonesty and defamation.The Left has not become more honest since then, which is why no one should give his or her vote to such a slippery customer as Abdul el Sayed, who is running as a Democrat for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan. But voting has become so tribal that many people see it as more important to stay in lockstep with their favored party than to prevent such a shyster from getting into government.El Sayed very obviously wants to keep voters from knowing who he really is and what he really thinks. There is no way to compare his words to the facts and avoid the conclusion that he’s a liar both by commission and omission. He heard Abraham Lincoln’s maxim — “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time” — and added his own codicil: “Fortunately, you might fool enough of the people in Michigan until after Election Day.”This came to mind during a recent Fox News interview in which, when faced with questions he did not like, el Sayed denied and deflected. He falsely denied, for example, saying “it sucks for them” when dismissing concerns about medical treatment wait times expressed by people who have not experienced medical debt. Fox played the tape.He deflected when it came to his sympathies for extremist Islam and his family connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that does not simply condone terrorism but has deliberately provided explicit intellectual justification for it for generations. In 2011, el Sayed wrote an essay for the Huffington Post supporting an Islamist uprising in Egypt and declaring that a Muslim Brotherhood government would not be dangerous — this despite decades of Muslim Brotherhood antipathy toward America, rejection of Western liberal democracy, and determination to establish and entrench Islamic law. The following year, el Sayed co-signed a letter in support of Egypt’s new revolutionary Muslim Brotherhood leader.Yet, when questioned on this, he refused to answer. Instead, his hackles rose, and he accused his interviewer, Bret Baier, of posing an improper question about dual loyalty to Islamism. This is ironic, of course, for el Sayed repeatedly suggests American Jews are guilty of a treacherous dual loyalty to Israel.El Sayed’s dishonesty and deflection went even further than that. Responding to continued questioning, he countered with irrelevant questions of his own and then answered, “I’m not interested in anything you’re going to pull out of a 2012 statement, a letter, you’re going to pull that out of context…”A reasonable riposte to this might have been, “You may not be interested, Mr. el Sayed, but you surely should be because voters are interested. Shouldn’t you interest yourself in what concerns your voters? So, please answer the question.”The Michigan Democrat’s slippery evasions and smooth-talking deflections have become so notorious that former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer posted on X this week, offering these tips in frustration:“Tips for reporters on how to interview Abdul:1) You ask the Qs. He doesn’t.2) When he asks a Q, ignore him. Ask your Q again.3) When he says, ‘That’s not the Q, the Q is,’ ignore him. Ask your Q again.4) When he doesn’t answer, ask him why he refuses to answer.Do your damn job!”THE FRANCE RIOTS ARE A DANGEROUS INFLECTION POINT FOR THE WESTIn his eagerness to secure victory by chicanery, el Sayed is doing what Democrats increasingly do. Harry Reid led by example, and everyone since has followed. The Biden White House hid the president’s rapid decline into the gray fog of dementia, and the party got rid of him and chose a successor without asking voters. It did the same when its candidate in Maine, Graham Platner, was exposed as a sexual abuser and sympathizer with both Nazism and communism. These are not the actions of a party that is on the square with the country.Its midterm candidates, from el Sayed in Michigan to James Talarico in Texas and a slew of socialists in New York, are trying their damnedest to sneak past voters without speaking plainly about what they believe, what their motives are, and what they would do in government.