RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274242/qatar-supporter-advising-kamala-harris-daniel-greenfield

The biggest split in foreign policy circles isn’t over Iran or Israel. Virtually all foreign policy professionals oppose Israel and support some sort of arrangement with Iran. The real split is over Qatar.

The tiny Islamist country is both a major state sponsor of terrorist groups, especially those aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, and has wormed its way deep into the political establishment in this country. Qatar’s dark side aligns it with Hamas, Iran and Al Qaeda on one side, and the Brookings Institute, the Washington Post, and D.C. lobbyists on the other. Its hackers target political opponents in the United States and feed the results to major media outlets. Al Jazeera, its propaganda outlet, spans the two worlds, that of the Islamists working to seize power and of Democrat activists in the United States.

Qatar enjoyed unprecedented access and influence in the Obama era. The Arab Spring brought many of its Brotherhood allies to power across the region before Saudi countercoups helped topple them. The struggle between Qatar, Turkey and Iran, and the Saudi-UAE coalition, has rippled through the media and the D.C. political establishment with flash points such as Yemen, Iran, and Jamal Khashoggi.

While the Senate, including much of the GOP, is Qatari territory, President Trump has been skeptical of the Islamic terror state. But the White House is up for grabs in 2020. Last month, Biden refunded a donation from a Qatari lobbyist. The Dem front runner though has been critical of Qatar (along with Turkey, the Saudis and the UAE) for funding Islamic terrorists and may not be a good bet.

Senator Kamala Harris, the politician breathing down Biden’s neck, is a very different story. One of her foreign policy advisors is Dana Shell Smith (pictured above), who had served as Obama’s ambassador to Qatar.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-house-discipline-11562886550

Having spent so long defaming conservatives as racists, progressives can’t stop turning the accusation on each other. Two weeks ago Democratic presidential contenders all but called Joe Biden a segregationist. This week Nancy Pelosi got a taste of her party’s poison.

The House Speaker has lately criticized some of the most extreme progressives in her caucus for cultivating their own celebrity status at the expense of the party. Mrs. Pelosi had four of her caucus’s freshmen especially in mind: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

The four—in addition to trumpeting socialist measures, flirting with anti-Semitism and using Twitter to criticize moderates in their own party—voted against last month’s emergency spending bill for the southern border. They did so even though three of them have compared what’s happening at the border to the Holocaust. Mrs. Pelosi told the New York Times that these Members “have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”

That inspired a few testy remarks from the four. “The public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez explained in a tweet. Which in turn prompted a rebuke from the Speaker: “You got a complaint?” she reportedly said to Democratic colleagues in a closed-door meeting on Wednesday. “You come and talk to me about it. But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just OK.”

With that, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez decided to resort to her default defense. This “persistent singling out,” she told the Washington Post, has reached “a point where it was just outright disrespectful . . . the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/11/the-aoc-pelosi-war-was-inevitable/

For months now, almost since the opening of Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been at odds with each other. It started with gentle gibes, Pelosi talking euphemistically about AOC’s “enthusiasm,” for example. But over time it has grown more contentious, and now AOC is fighting back.

AOC says that “The persistent singling out . . . it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful . . . the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.” She has even gone so far to somewhat bizarrely claim that she was loaded with excellent committee assignments just to keep her busy. Too busy to perform some other function, one surmises, but its not clear what that other function is.

It was always going to come to this, for a couple of reasons. One is the threat Pelosi believes AOC represents to moderate Democrats in Congress. Another is their relative ages and investment horizon in the House. And finally, there is a sharp ideological difference between how these two powerful women view America, its institutions, and its moral authority.

The threat that AOC and her Justice Democrat colleagues, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and others from deep blue districts pose to moderate Democrats is two-fold and very serious. The first aspect is straight-up primary challenges, such as AOC’s, which defeated moderate House powerhouse Joe Crowley in 2018. Already, Rep. Henry Cuellar from Texas is in the crosshairs for a Justice Democrats primary, and he isn’t the only one.

These primary challenges are a headache for a House leadership that is trying to hold together a fractured caucus while preparing for a presidential year election far less friendly to their cause than a midterm. They have attempted to enact rules to limit how firms that work with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) may also work with insurgent candidates, though this move in and of itself has brought fire from Justice Democrats calling it unfair.