RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.us/after-trump-reckoning/

As voters prepare to pass judgment on Donald Trump’s presidency in November, they might want to entertain a few counterfactuals. Imagine that Russia had annexed Crimea during the Trump years rather than while Obama was president. MSNBC and other left-wing media would have hawked claims that Trump actively conspired with Putin to let the Russian president dismember Ukraine. More sober outlets, some of them ‘conservative’, would have chalked up the loss of Crimea to President Trump’s basic incompetence and reckless defiance of the foreign-policy establishment.

Much the same narrative web would have been spun if, say, Otto Warmbier had been imprisoned by Kim Jong-un’s regime this year rather than in the last year of the Obama administration. The story would have been all about Trump and his characteristic faults, though we know from the way that history really did happen that these things were the fault of Obama and the foreign-policy establishment — the very entities the media holds up as paragons of excellence in contrast to Trump.

Now try an opposite counterfactual: suppose the coronavirus had arrived in 2012 as Obama was up for reelection. The media would have given his handling of the crisis every benefit of the doubt, even with death tolls in the hundreds of thousands. The virus and the measures taken to arrest it would nonetheless have put Obama’s reelection in greater jeopardy. Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans might deny this and insist that Obama’s response to the coronavirus could have made him more popular, by showcasing his ability to handle an emergency. With COVID-12 (as it would have been), it’s more likely the coronavirus would have dented Obama’s popularity and narrowed his margin of victory over Mitt Romney, even possibly tipped the 2012 election completely.

https://townhall.com/columnists/bradslager/2020/08/31/the-laughable-attempt-by-the-harrisbiden-ticket-to-oppose-riots-is-months-too-late-n2575386

It was with no shortage of mirth that many witnessed the whiplash change in position from Don Lemon last week. After ponderous weeks of Democrat support and warm media coverage of the protests and riots across the country CNN’s star pundit suddenly was very dire in his call for the Democrats to speak out against the violence. The craven position now revealed is that months of destruction of property and lives was acceptable for their cause. Only after Dems began seeing their support burning down was it a problem to condemn.

Lemon even cited what had him so spooked – “It’s showing up in the polling. It’s showing up in focus groups.’’ What caught his eye were a couple of the polling results that had recently come out. One national poll showed support of the protests underwater, with 50 percent showing support for the police. Another by Marquette Law School showed in Wisconsin prior support for the protests fell by 25 percent over a two-month period. It was a clear sign the riots were having a negative impact, and making this all the more jarring for Lemon and the left, that poll result was just before the Kenosha riots.

The result of this has seen both Kamala Harris, and her running mate Joe Biden, coming out this weekend with speeches calling for peace and pledging for an end of violence. They presented this newly-discovered policy as if it were a novel idea no one had previously considered. Their past positions, however, are not suddenly wiped clear from a dry-erase board, such as Kamala backing the funding of bail money accounts to free the rioters and looters who had been detained.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/31/the-face-of-the-democratic-party-isnt-joe-biden-its-the-raging-mob/

The unfolding disaster for Democrats right now, with just 63 days until the election, is that their party’s brand is not Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, it’s the violent mob in the streets.

Democrats have only themselves to blame. Too many months of inaction and equivocation about “mostly peaceful protests” have branded them as the party that’s okay with street violence and mob action, as long as it’s in the name of racial justice.

It doesn’t matter what Biden says now. His earlier caveated condemnations of rioting and looting, and his weak statement on the shooting in Portland that blamed the violence on Trump, are too little, too late. And anyway, no one believes him. Instead, the images coming out of Kenosha and Portland and Washington, D.C., have spoken for him. What these images say, loud and clear, is that Democrats think rioting and looting and violence are okay, under the circumstances.

No wonder the Democratic National Convention was conspicuously silent about the riots earlier this month. They know — as we all do — that many of those rioting are part of the Democratic Party’s left-wing base. Biden isn’t about to denounce them. He needs all those suburban white women we’ve seen screaming in the face of cops to show up big on election day.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/protests-riots-threaten-democrat-election-prospects/

 C all me crazy, but I don’t think Joe Biden’s best response to the news of a leftist protestor shooting a peaceful Donald Trump supporter in the head execution-style is to run in front of the cameras and say, “This is Donald Trump’s America.” Or repeating the close of his news release the other day, “How safe do you feel in Donald Trump’s America?”

When you put it that way, it sounds like a threat.

Maybe that’s why he’s calling off his planned visit to Kenosha.

The theory behind Democrats saying over and over again “This is Donald Trump’s America” is that, unlike in 1968, the Republican candidate talking about law and order in 2020 is an incumbent. So it’s all on him.

I don’t think it works that way. Maybe in 1968 people not only noticed who the incumbent was, but what side the unrest was on. Our “uprisings” are led by people who hate Trump. They are happening under Democratic governors, and in cities with Democratic mayors and city counsels. Those elected officials have turned down multiple offers of help. It was a Democrat mayor who called the Seattle Autonomous Zone a “summer of love” as its residents violently extorted local business. She closed it down only after the second child was murdered in it.

“This is Donald Trump’s America.” I just don’t know. When I was a dumb teenager, I once used an aerosol spray can and a lighter in the kitchen to make a minor flame thrower. I burned a curtain. I wasn’t clever enough to turn to my mother and excuse myself by protesting, “At the end of the day, this is your house!”