Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

A quick Internet search shows The New York Times, CNN — most of the usual suspects — trumpeting that Democrat and former federal drug prosecutor Conor Lamb (campaigning as a gun-loving conservative) won an “upset victory” (by 627 votes, out of more than 200,000 votes cast) over state legislator Rick Saccone in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District (in the suburbs of Pittsburgh) March 13 – a “stunning upset,” a “Pennsylvania humiliation for Trump” which should have Republicans quaking in their shoes about Democrats running the tables in next fall’s off-year elections.

Anything that promotes a worldview in which Donald Trump is about to be impeached for once ordering a black “Russian” at New York’s “Russian” Tea Room, that the Democrat Party is about to surge back to political dominance on its current platform of open borders, “sanctuary cities” for MS-13 gang killers, and retrofitting every public school with five sets of bathrooms for the five different genders (or is it six, now?) in a year when many more Democrat than Republican senators face tough re-election battles — AND that the presidency will thus fall like a ripe fruit to Kamala Harris, Oprah Winfrey or Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren in 2020 — is all to the good, of course.

We all know what happens to losing parties that gravitate even further to the extreme, rather than realistically diagnosing their losses and changing their platforms to bring them into closer alignment with the popular consensus out there between the Hudson and the Sierra Nevada.

So, at the risk of giving these folks a wake-up call, just thought I’d point out that Politico reports Democrat Lamb — campaigning as a conservative gun-lover who claims to agree with Donald Trump on just about everything — raised more than $3 million for that race, while Saccone -– a nice man, a smart man, but no one’s idea of Mister Charisma -– struggled to raise $1 million (if in fact he ever did.)

The Herd media respond that such GOP “outside PACs” as the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Congressional leadership Fund poured an additional $6 million or so into advertising in the race, meaning “A Saccone vote cost twice as much as a Lamb vote.”

But to draw that conclusion, they have to assume those PACs – controlled by Never-Trumpers including Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell – spent that money to help SACCONE.

Did they?

Well, no. See: “Breaking: Paul Ryan’s PAC Elected Democrat Conor Lamb,” at https://bigleaguepolitics.com/breaking-paul-ryans-pac-elected-democrat-conor-lamb/, … or … https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/03/15/uniparty-at-work-paul-ryan-superpac-campaigned-to-elect-democrat-conor-lamb/.

Just as these Swamp Creatures spent millions to throw one of Alabama’s U.S. Senate seats to the Democrats a few months back – rather than let it go to true Trump conservative Mo Brooks – Ryan and McConnell and company would MUCH rather fund Democrat “Uniparty” victories than see Trump supporters like Saccone, Brooks, and Nevada’s Danny Tarkanian swarm to Washington and vote them out of the leadership positions that allow them to rake in millions by selling out their constituents, day after day.

Meantime, as to Lamb’s “big upset”? Wikipedia informs us (at … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania%27s_18th_congressional_district ), that “There are 70,000 more Democrats in the district than Republicans.”

In other words, for this race to come down to a 600-vote margin — a tiny fraction of 1 percent — TENS OF THOUSANDS OF REGISTERED DEMOCRATS had to “cross over” and vote on March 13 for under-funded, soft-spoken Republican State Rep. Rick Saccone … almost certainly because they knew it was actually Saccone who would be more likely to back plain-talking, gun-toting Donald Trump’s “get tough” policies on trade, crime, immigration, foreign affairs, and hosing out the stables in Washington City.

And that’s assuming Democrats didn’t pull their usual tricks with union stewards ordering up piles of mail-in “absentee ballots” and then calling together their union members to fill out such ballots under close union supervision, busing illegal aliens to the polls (Pennsylvania recently enacted a law requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls — Democrat-appointed judges threw it out), etc.

Without which, Saccone would probably have won outright.

(As others have pointed out, Conor Lamb faced no Democratic primary. Let’s see a would-be Democrat congressional candidate win a Democrat primary in California, Washington state, New York, New England or Chicago by boldly declaring (as Conor Lamb did) “We don’t need any more gun control; I love guns, especially those things you call ‘assault rifles.’ Shoot ’em all the time. I’m also a hundred percent behind Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs; I’m in favor of burning a LOT more coal, and I REALLY love fracking.” … Hello? I’m waiting.)

So let me see if I’ve got this right: The Democratic plan to capture several additional Senate seats and a few DOZEN new seats in the House in order to reclaim the majority (and immediately impeach Donald Trump, without having even ALLEGED any “high crimes and misdemeanors”) eight months from now is as follows:

1) They plan to win all districts where they enjoy at least a 70,000-voter registration edge, and where they can find charismatic young candidates willing to pretend to be pro-gun “Trump conservatives” who support Trump’s tariffs (like Conor Lamb), support fracking (like Conor Lamb), and where they can out-raise their GOP opponents 3-to-1 … and they plan to celebrate if they can win by fewer than 1,000 votes in each of those districts.

2) While meantime, in all congressional districts which show a Republican registration edge, or where the Democratic registration edge is 69,000 or less, and/or where the Democratic candidate admits (or in a practical sense can’t deny) that he or she is for open borders (including for terrorist bombers, MS-13 gang members, Honor Killers, and Female Genital Mutilators), that he or she is in favor of “sanctuary cities” and lots more “gun control,” against the Trump tariffs and tax cuts, and in favor of biological boys being allowed to win “girls’ wrestling championships,” and use the little girls’ bathrooms (including raping any little girls they find there), they plan to, um … lose.

On a day, come November, when hardly anyone is going to be able to concentrate $3 million or $6 million or $12 million from all over the country into any single district, since there’ll be 435 seats all competing for the same donor “pie.”

Have I got that right?

OK …

THE ENDLESS WAR ON SOME DRUGS

Meantime, speaking of Alabama senators, “recused” and thus largely absentee Attorney General Jeff Sessions, addressing California sheriffs and police chiefs a week back (March 7) about his belated, mincing, legalistic, far-from dramatic challenge to California’s thoroughly illegal “sanctuary state” nonsense, mentioned that U.S. physicians “still write too many opioid prescriptions.”

( http://www.ktvu.com/news/ag-jeff-sessions-address-california-peace-officers-in-sacramento-after-sanctuary-state-suit-filed )

Actually, Mr. Sessions, no they don’t. Study after study, stretching back over 30 years, has shown cancer pain is grossly UNDER-MEDICATED in this country, due to physicians being scared to death your DEA is going to “red-flag” them and cost them their careers for writing “too many pain-killer prescriptions.”

See: … https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1229&context=jlh , … or … https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/pain-management … or … https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/pain-underrated-undermedicated.

So oldsters die writhing in pain thanks to your continuing to fight a drug war which CREATES vicious, murderous drug cartels by vainly attempting to prohibit the orderly, low-cost “manufacture” and distribution of plant extracts given to mankind by the Creator, who (we’re told in the book of Genesis) gave mankind “every flower-bearing plant for his use” — when ending the War on Drugs would allow such commerce to be normalized, with far better controls over dosage, purity, and access by children, which is precisely what happened to the trade in alcoholic beverages when THAT counterproductive Prohibition was ended, in 1933.

Sorry, Mr. Sessions. But while you mince around, doing nothing much to get the attention of the kind of people who set illegal aliens free to murder defenseless Americans like Kate Steinle (EITHER Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower would have sent in the National Guard by now. Heck, Ike rounded up and deported illegal aliens by the tens of thousands in “Operation Wetback”) … doing nothing about Uranium-Gate, FISA-Gate, Pay-for-Play, Fast & Furious, Soros-funded “Antifa” communist rioters, people who delete 30,000 emails when they’re under subpoena, the FBI and CIA plotting to overthrow a duly elected President of the United States … you want cancer patients to continue screaming through their final weeks in unnecessary pain? It would be easier to put up with your kind of heartless bastard, Mr. Sessions, if you were at least accomplishing something on all those other fronts.

… Just for the record.

— V.S.