Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a leader of the Romantic Movement in English poetry, defined the term “willing suspension of disbelief” in his “Biographia Literaria” (1817) as the reader’s suppression of critical analysis and realism for the sake of literary enjoyment. In other words, a reader should not let facts or logic get in the way of a good story, no matter how implausible.

So it is with the latest insanity emanating from California, specifically from Libby Schaaf, Mayor of Oakland, and U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, an oft-mentioned potential candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 2020.

Mayor Schaaf gave a heads up to all criminal illegal aliens—not Dreamers, not otherwise law-abiding undocumented residents—that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was about to round up CRIMINAL illegals for deportation, thwarting ICE’s sweep in Oakland to such an extent that only one-sixth of the wanted criminals were apprehended.

U.S. Senator Kamala Harris congratulated and supported Schaaf, saying she was proud of the Mayor’s courage.

It’s important to stress that the ICE raid specifically targeted CRIMINALS who were in the country illegally and had either been convicted of crimes or charged with serious crimes.

So, in the opinion of Mayor Schaaf and Senator Kamala Harris, the protection of approximately 800 CONVICTED OR WANTED CRIMINALS in the U.S. illegally was more important than the protection of the citizens they purport to represent.

Mayor Schaaf said she did it for the “safety of the community,” apparently an unstated plea to the citizenry to willingly “suspend their disbelief.” She actually wants her constituents to believe that aiding and abetting convicted or wanted criminals is good for Oakland, or California, or other states to which these criminals might flee.

Coleridge’s mystical “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”(1798), convoluted and fantastical as it is, cannot hold a candle to Mayor Schaaf’s and Senator Harris’s contributions to the Department of Suspended Beliefs.

Mayor Schaaf should call across the bay and ask Kate Steinle’s parents if allowing five-time deportee and criminal Garcia Zarate to remain free to roam about Pier 14 in the Embarcadero District with a stolen .40 caliber Sig Sauer P239 was good for the safety of their late daughter Kate and the other potential victims enjoying the evening on Pier 14.

Suspending disbelief is required these days for just about anything coming from the Democrat Party.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, in between brain freezes, asks the American public to believe that tax cuts are bad, that taxpayers having more money (which she calls “crumbs”) to spend on their families rather than send it to the black hole D.C. has become is a truly awful thing.

In a March 5, 2018 article in The Daily Caller, reporter Peter Hasson writes that at least seven House Democrats have direct ties to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, “a notorious anti-Semite and racist who has called Jews ‘satanic’ and said ‘white people deserve to die’.” The group includes California Congresswomen Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee, Texas representative Al Green and Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, currently the Deputy-Chairman of the Democrat National Committee.

Hasson writes that these representatives gladly met and with Farrakhan while in Congress. So has former President Barack Obama. In January of this year, a former photographer who worked for the Nation of Islam released a 2005 photo of a grinning Senator Barack Obama with Farrakhan. The photographer said he suppressed the photograph for 13 years at the request of Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus.

Former President Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus apparently want Americans to “suspend their disbelief” in order to accept the proposition that their cozy relationship with a notorious anti-Semite and hater of white people is benign.

Michael Henry writes in Oxford and can be reached at mhenryauthor@gmail.com.