RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-bernies-socialists-11554763031

Socialism is cool again, and Bernie Sanders wants to reassure voters that there’s nothing to worry about. “I think what we have to do, and I will be doing it, is to do a better job maybe in explaining what we mean by socialism—democratic socialism,” Mr. Sanders said last month. He has also said that conservatives portray his brand of socialism “as authoritarianism and communism and Venezuela, and that’s nonsense.”
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We wish that were true. But we’ve been reading the work of Bernie’s senior political advisers, and their words deserve more attention. Take speechwriter David Sirota, who joined the Sanders campaign in March, though he had been attacking the Vermont Senator’s Democratic opponents on Twitter for months.

Mr. Sirota wrote an op-ed for Salon in 2013 titled “Hugo Chávez’s Economic Miracle.” Mr. Sirota conceded, Chávez “was no saint” and “amassed a troubling record when it came to protecting human rights and basic democratic freedoms.” Those pesky disclaimers aside, Mr. Sirota suggested that there’s plenty to learn from Chávez.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/08/howard-schultz-needs-issue-run/

Howard Schultz needs an issue. The former Starbucks CEO who spent most of his career amping up Americans on burnt coffee wants to now be their president. But why? In a town hall on Fox News last week, he couldn’t quite answer that question. He takes a “pox on both your houses” approach to the Trumpian GOP and the Democrats he says have wandered too far left. But so far, his candidacy seems to be based on little more than being the other choice.

In some ways, Schultz feels like the missing Democrat. He says, “I’m a centrist, I’ve been a lifelong Democrat, but the Democratic Party left me, I didn’t leave them.” He supports funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement, opposes Medicare for all, and dares to utter the phrase “safe, legal, and rare,” regarding abortion. As the Democratic nominee for president, he would be formidable, but he is not choosing to join that race that resembles nothing so much as a bunch of 1950s teenagers cramming into a telephone booth.

Instead, Schultz is chasing the white whale of American politics: trying to win the presidency as a third-party candidate. This never works, and it’s easy to see why. By granting executive authority to a single person, the Constitution compels the left and the right to form binary parties. This is because to fracture your own party hands enormous power to those you oppose. Schultz likely understands that he is almost certainly not going to win the 2020 election. So what is he doing?

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/08/entirely-relevant-ask-whether-elected-representatives-believe-sharia/

When I was in graduate school many years ago, I dated a Lebanese Muslim who wasn’t particularly devout. However, despite his secular, sophisticated upbringing—he grew up in a pricey neighborhood in Beirut and attended a Swiss boarding high school—he still struggled with my criticisms about Muslim countries’ treatment of women. When I once referred to clitoridectomies as a Muslim practice, he became positively apoplectic that I viewed the procedure as a Muslim norm. After all, no one in his family had undergone such a procedure.

But I persisted. As an earnest young feminist, I couldn’t help but want to have a conversation about the political and personal oppression of women in Muslim countries, an oppression quite often manifested in violence. I needed to know that it mattered to him and that he recognized it as a social ill that needed rectifying.

He would counter these observations by pointing out that his uncle, who was doing his residency at a local Philadelphia hospital, treated battered women all the time. Battered women here, battered women in the Middle East. What was the difference?

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/08/why-are-democrats-kissing-the-ring-of-al-sharpton/

Rev. Al Sharpton’s fortunes have been on the upswing. A few years ago, in a Politico whitewashing of his career, we learned that Sharpton had been transformed into the go-to civil rights guru for the Obama administration. “If anything,” Glenn Thrush noted at the time, “the Ferguson crisis has underscored Sharpton’s role as the national black leader Obama leans on most, a remarkable personal and political transformation for a man once regarded with suspicion and disdain by many in his own party.”

The former president claimed that Sharpton was “the voice of the voiceless and a champion for the downtrodden.” In the real world, of course, the only downtrodden Americans helped by Sharpton’s activities are the ones who find themselves on the payroll benefitting from his numerous corporate shakedowns.

Yet apparently Obama’s resuscitation of Sharpton (who, since 2011, has been at MSNBC, a cable news network that interminably lectures uncouth Americans on proper tone) has worked. Many of the very same Democratic Party hopefuls who boycotted the tepid bipartisanship of an AIPAC conference last month, could be found speaking at Sharpton’s National Action Network Convention in New York this past week, pandering to a charlatan with a history of inciting violence and racism.