Great question, and it’s worth highlighting for the fact that no one else other than Jake Tapper is pointing it out after Joe Biden’s demagoguery on “extreme MAGA” candidates last night. I originally highlighted this for the headlines today, but it’s worth an extended look at the hypocrisy of the Democrats’ ex officio national leader complaining about political candidates his party funded and promoted during the primaries.

Tapper challenged DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney on the deluge of dollars he and other Democrats poured into GOP primaries in order to set up allegedly extreme opponents for Democrats’ re-election campaigns. Democrats spent $53 million to pick those candidates, Tapper says, so why should people take Biden seriously on his claim that they represent a unique “threat to democracy”?

Maloney takes umbrage at this criticism, but Tapper persists:

TAPPER: “I have to ask you about something you said earlier this week. Let’s roll that soundbite.”

[Clip starts]
MALONEY: “Let’s not pretend for a minute that both sides have the same amount of accountability for the loss of confidence in our elections. One side has been out there for a couple of years now doing everything they can to pretend Joe Biden didn’t win fair and square.”
[Clip ends]

TAPPER: “The thing is, Democrats writ large have spent $53 million supporting far-right candidates, election deniers in the primaries, including the DCCC. By amplifying these election deniers, aren’t you holding responsibility, to a degree, for the undermining of democracy that you’re also warning about?”

MALONEY: “Oh, my God. Jake, let’s be really clear. What that question you just played was about was who’s questioning the outcome of elections. And that started with Donald Trump, and we all know it. Let’s be clear, that $53 million, look, it’s $400,000 at the DCCC in one race, one, where we ran a true general election ad two weeks early, calling John Gibbs an extremist who’s too conservative for Western Michigan — “

TAPPER: “Yeah, it’s a booster.”

MALONEY: “And Hillary Scholten, who is a great candidate — excuse me — beat him like a drum. So if you want to ask people who spent all that other money, that’s great. And let’s be clear. Not one dime was spent from the DCCC supporting any Republican. It was spent criticizing a Republican for being too extreme, and it is going to result in a pro-choice strong candidate named Hillary Scholten winning that race.”

Tapper then zooms in one one particularly hypocritical part of that strategy. Peter Meijer took a big political risk in voting to sustain the impeachment of Donald Trump and supporting Democrats in that effort after the January 6 riot. Supposedly, this is the kind of Republican than Biden wants the GOP to promote, according to his speeches on the topic in late August and last night.

Instead, Democrats and the DCCC stabbed Meijer in the back in order to get a more extreme opponent for the general election:

TAPPER: “Come on. You guys were boosting John Gibbs, an election denier, a MAGA Republican, so that he would beat Congressman Peter Meijer, who voted to impeach Donald Trump after the Capitol attacks. You thought Gibbs would be easier for your Democratic candidate to beat, so you boosted him. That’s — that’s the only reason he won that race.”

MALONEY: “Well, you’re using that word ‘boost’ to be kind of cute. Other people say it’s kind of funding their campaigns. It’s ridiculous. We’re attacking them. But we’re absolutely right, we thought he was an easier candidate, and he has proven to be, because he’s a nut and he’s too conservative for western Michigan and Hillary Scholten is getting ready to beat him. That is my focus, is making sure we bring commonsense Democrats to Congress who are going to move our country forward. And let’s be clear, again, $400,000 out of a $340 million budget. So if you want to warm up these leftovers, we can keep going. But right now we have five or six days until we have an election, and that’s where my focus is. And we’re going to win that seat in Michigan-3.”

TAPPER: “Well, that $400,000 to John Gibbs did boost him and he did beat congressman Peter Meijer, Peter Meijer who did something braver than I’ve seen in terms of most members of Congress, in terms of bucking his party to be one of ten Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump. When people like you say, ‘Where are all the good Republicans?,’ you helped defeat one of them.”

MALONEY: “Jake, let’s be clear, if your point is that I should in some sort of exercise of defeatism stop trying to beat Republicans in vulnerable seats who are going to vote for Kevin McCarthy and put Jim Jordan at the head of the Judiciary Committee where they’re going to take away your reproductive freedom, pass a national ban on abortion, give you two years of Hunter Biden and nothing else, if your point is that I should just roll over and pull a bunch of punches and make somebody in the media feel better because what, because we hope that some of these Democrats will be nice to us? How about we elect some people who are actually good on issues like choice or gun safety or on supporting leaders who won’t support an insurrection? And Peter Meijer was going to vote for the majority that on January 6th voted to set aside the election. That’s a district that Joe Biden won with 56% of the vote, and we’re going to win it. And I have said — and I mean it — there are difficult, moral, and philosophical questions in politics, you better believe it. But let’s be really clear. This is $400,000 in a budget of $300 million, one race, one in the entire cycle, where we ran a general election ad that was perfectly true calling the guy an extremist. And Hillary Scholten is going to win. That’s what we’re talking about.”

Nonsense. Democrats put their money on Gibbs, which means one of two things. Either they don’t really see Gibbs and the other MAGA candidates they promoted as “threats to democracy,” or they don’t care about “threats to democracy” at all. Except, of course, to leverage them to win their own elections, which sounds a bit like a threat to democracy on its own. At the very least, it’s hyperbolic hypocrisy and vicious demagoguery.

Not only was Biden’s speech a warmed-over rehash of his earlier demagoguery, Duane Patterson and I discuss in the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast, it was also useless. Biden talked past voters, and as the New York Times pointed out this morning, scolded voters for not adopting Biden’s priorities over their own. It didn’t move voters in September, and in fact may end up doing more damage than good, in no small part due to its obvious hypocrisies.

Today’s show also features these topics:

• What can we expect from the midterms? Duane Patterson and I unpack all of the polls and trends.
• We also dissect last night’s speech from Joe Biden attempting to scold voters for not caring about his priorities just before Election Day.
• Duane and I also discuss the disturbing exposé from The Intercept about the DHS “disinformation policing” program and its attempts to “shape” debate and incentives to discourage public dissent.
• Intel analyst and pundit John Schindler joins me to say why this, unlike other claims, actually does look like a ‘deep state’ program.

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!