RUTHFULLY YOURS

After taking white working-class voters for granted in November, the Democratic Party seems poised to do the same for Jews – and that could have important implications for the already troubled U.S.-Israeli relationship.

Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who lead the party’s progressive wing, are backing Rep. Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim with a long history of anti-Semitic leanings and anti-Israeli positions, as the party’s next chairman. So too is the incoming Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, who is considered one of Israel’s strongest Democratic backers.

Ellison’s bid and high-level backing reflect the party’s increasing leftward drift on Israel-related issues, in which one-sided views about the Jewish state – particularly related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – are far more acceptable as mainstream Democratic positions than a decade ago.That raises two major questions for the U.S.-Israeli relationship:

First, will a future Democratic president and Congress provide the party’s traditional support for Israel that dates to President Harry Truman’s recognition of the Jewish state just 11 minutes after it was created – support that now includes America’s generous military aid, its intelligence sharing and its protection from anti-Israel resolutions at the morally challenged United Nations?

Second, will U.S. support for Israel remain a bipartisan issue, or will it increasingly fall victim to partisan politics – with Republicans aligning themselves forcefully with Jerusalem while Democrats take a balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and broader Arab-Israeli relations?

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/442535/print

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After the Democratic equality-of-opportunity agenda was largely realized (Social Security, Medicare, overtime, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, civil rights, etc.), the next-generation equality-of-result effort has largely failed.

What is left of Democratic ideology is identity politics and assorted dead-end green movements as conservation has become radical environmentalism and fairness under the law is now unapologetic redistributionism. The 2016 campaign and the frenzied reaction to the result are reminders that the Left is no longer serious about formulating and advancing a practical agenda. In sum, for now it is reduced to a party of gatecrashers.

The Podesta archive, when coupled with the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation, summed up the liberal ideology: progressive platitudes as cover for an elite’s pursuit of power and influence. Examine a coastal Democratic establishmentarian, and there is little discernable difference in his lifestyle, income, or material tastes from those conservatives (usually poorer) whom he accuses of all sorts of politically incorrect behaviors. Self-righteous outrage is a Democratic selling point and a wise career move for journalists, academics, bureaucrats, and politicians.

Without an ideology that even remotely matched the life she led, Hillary Clinton could only run a campaign without consistent positions. She flipped on the Keystone pipeline and trade agreements. She refuted the entire 1990s Clinton economic and social agenda. Indeed, her positions of 2008 — anti–gay marriage, border enforcement, and rural populism — were the very positions that she smeared others for embracing in 2016. In 2008, Clinton damned Obama for his “clingers” speech; in 2016, she trumped him with her deplorables and irredeemables.

She both derided Wall Street and was enriched by it. Her 2008 brief flirtation with the white working classes as a modern Annie Oakley came full circle in 2016, with exultant promises to put coal miners out of work. In the end, Hillary had no ideology other than getting even richer by leveraging the office of secretary of state and pandering to identity politics in hopes that record numbers of women and minorities would vote for a 68-year-old white multimillionaire, much as they had voted for Barack Obama. The more she talked of the LGBT or Latino communities, apparently the more we were to think that the Clintons had subverted their offices and reputations to grift a $150 million personal fortune for the underprivileged.

One of the reasons Trump won without commensurate money, organization, ground game, big-name endorsements, establishment unity, conservative media encouragement, and despite a campaign of gaffes and opposition-planted IEDS, was that half the country felt it would not have survived four more years of the cynicism of left-wing politics. In other words, voters got tired of being accused of thought crimes from a party led by wealthy people who made them poorer while adding insult to injury.

Dr. Price, a fierce ObamaCare opponent, has his own plan to replace it ….
According to the Washington Post, President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Georgia Rep. Tom Price, a former orthopedic surgeon and staunch ObamaCare opponent to serve as the secretary of health and human services in his administration.

An insider from within the transition team told the Post that the public announcement of Trump’s selection of Price, could come as early as Tuesday.

As HHS secretary, Price would become the Trump administration’s point person on dismantling and replacing the Affordable Care Act, one of Trump’s major campaign promises.

Price, 62, who represents a suburban Atlanta district, has played a leading role in the Republican opposition to the law known as Obamacare and has helped draft several comprehensive bills to replace it.

During the campaign, Trump railed against the Affordable Care Act and vowed to repeal and replace it. But after meeting with Obama in the Oval Office shortly following the election, he was convinced to perhaps keep some of the more popular elements of the law intact and amend the law rather than repeal it.

Trump has said he would favor keeping the provision preventing insurers from refusing coverage for preexisting conditions as well as the one permitting children to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26.

Price is a six-term congressman who chairs the House Budget Committee and is said to be close to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to use “some old fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming” against those whose exercise of free speech “we abhor.”

At the time, she had in mind specifically perpetrators of what the OIC, the Muslim Brotherhood, other Islamic supremacists and their enablers on the Left call “defamation of Islam.” But the same playbook – in the tradition of Mrs. Clinton’s mentor, Saul Alinsky – is now being followed with a vengeance against what is abhorred by the cabal best described as the Red-Green Axis.

Much in evidence among such “old-fashioned techniques” now being employed is what’s known as “the Big Lie.” It entails the endless repetition of outrageous falsehoods to defame, and ultimately silence, one’s political opponents.

Three good men Donald Trump has selected for key strategic and national security positions are currently getting the Big Lie treatment: his White House Counsel Steve Bannon, Attorney General-designate Senator Jeff Sessions, and incoming National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. They are being relentlessly vilified as “racists,” “bigots” and “haters.”

I feel these able public servants’ pain. Indeed, I know what it’s like to be subjected to the Big Lie. For years, the Islamists and their allies on the hard Left – notably, the discredited (for example, here and here) Southern Poverty Law Center – have used character assassination and vitriol against me (for example, here, here and here) to protect what they otherwise cannot defend: the totalitarian program its adherents call Sharia. The false assertion last week that I had been asked to serve on the Trump transition team sent these rogues into fresh paroxysms of hateful denunciation, repeated like a mantra by their media echo chamber (for example, here, here, here and here).

I am hardly alone in being diagnosed by such charlatans with the made-up condition of “Islamophobia.” Indeed, I am proud to be included in the company of men and women being pilloried for what Islamic supremacists and their enablers would have us believe is “defamation of Islam.” In fact, it is simply informed, astute and courageous truth-telling about the global jihad movement and threat it poses. Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn are under assault for doing the same in this and other contexts.

It seems that critics are particularly unhinged by the clarity of these three men and the president they will serve about the fact that Islamic supremacism is not simply a menace overseas. The Red-Green types are determined to prevent Donald Trump from operationalizing the plan of action he described in a major address on the topic on August 15, 2016. Among its highlights are the following:

Our new approach, which must be shared by both parties in America, by our allies overseas, and by our friends in the Middle East, must be to halt the spread of Radical Islam. All actions should be oriented around this goal….Just as we won the Cold War, in part, by exposing the evils of communism and the virtues of free markets, so too must we take on the ideology of Radical Islam….