RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/01/joe_bidens_three_risky_choices__144106.html

Joe Biden’s quick trip to Pittsburgh and his speech there Monday condemning urban violence show Democrats now recognize they made a major mistake in ignoring the problem at their convention. They’ve read the polls and finally realize voters care about the arson, shootings, and looting — and their own safety. That’s a problem for the Biden campaign, which had almost nothing to say about the violence all summer. Now, they are doing “cleanup on Aisle 6” and there’s a lot of broken glass around.

“Rioting is not protesting,” the Democrats’ presidential nominee told the Carnegie-Mellon University audience. “Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. … It’s lawlessness, plain and simple.” That’s true, but it was no less true two weeks or two months ago. Even now, Biden’s main thrust is less against the violence than against President Trump for “fomenting it” and “sowing chaos.” As Biden put it, “The simple truth is Donald Trump failed to protect America. So now he’s trying to scare America.”

That Biden was willing to leave home on short notice, fly to a swing state, and speak out about the rioting is the clearest indication yet that the election is tightening. Discussing the violence is one of three big, difficult decisions Biden faces as the campaign heats up. Each entails significant risks for a candidate who must hold together a fractious coalition and avoid major gaffes.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/01/its_trump_vs_biden_in_the_age_of_mob_politics__144110.html

They are the constituency no one wants, the crowd of “peaceful protesters” who aren’t all that peaceful. The one that does more to hurt than help even as both major political parties worry incessantly about how they can turn out voters ahead of an election billed, yet again, as “the most important in U.S. history.”

Maybe it is because they have a bad habit of looting liquor stores, torching businesses, and throwing rocks at cops. They are the mob, an amorphous rabble that has destroyed blocks’ worth of buildings from Minneapolis to Portland this summer, rioting and looting and turning November into a referendum on mob politics.

This disturbing factor in an already complex election environment has Joe Biden exasperated. The Democrats’ presidential  nominee has denounced violence in assorted statements and speeches, always defending the right to peacefully protest while also condemning the destruction of property and attacks on the police. His campaign still worried that the message wasn’t sticking, especially as Republicans ratcheted up their criticism, so on Monday the former vice president gave a full-throated rebuttal.

“You know me, you know my heart, you know my story, my family story,” Biden said from the floor of a Pittsburgh steel mill. “Ask yourself, do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really?  I want a safe America, safe from COVID, safe from crime and looting, safe from racially motivated violence, safe from bad cops. Let me be crystal clear, safe from four more years of Donald Trump.”

He views the violence as wanton destruction, Biden insisted, and worse — a wasted opportunity for reform. Trump, he argued, looks at the exact same carnage “and he sees a political lifeline.” Four hours later, the president responded.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/rasmussen_reports_noticed_something_very_fishy_about_polling.html

One of the most famous clues in a Sherlock Holmes mystery is what’s commonly referred to as “the dog that didn’t bark” or, as Holmes actually said, “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” Rasmussen Reports, which puts out a Daily Presidential Tracking Poll like clockwork, noticed that its competitors ceased barking (or, if you prefer, polling) after the two parties held their conventions. According to Rasmussen, which would know, this silence was unprecedented.

Rasmussen published a series of tweets on Monday openly snarking at its competitors for their silence. Moreover, whoever is writing Rasmussen’s tweets was not shy about identifying a reason for the other polling outfits’ unusual reticence: The narrative up until the conventions was that Biden was unstoppable; it’s now quite possible that he’s been stopped.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/09/01/joe-bidens-craven-exercise-in-blame-shifting/

After a thug shot and killed a Trump supporter Saturday night in Portland, Democratic nominee Joe Biden suddenly got religion when it comes to leftist riots in our nation’s streets. The former vice president “challenged” President Donald Trump to “condemn violence,” then blamed Trump for “encouraging” it. Say what?

It goes beyond hypocrisy when Biden for months sat in his basement in near-total silence as his far-left supporters rioted, looted and burned U.S. cities, and his own party egged them on.

This same man chose as his vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who warned us all with a smile on her face during a television appearance that the protesting and rioting is “not gonna stop,” not even after the election.

Funny what a bit of bad polling will do.

For months, the 77-year-old Biden said and did nothing as Democrat-supported Antifa and Black Lives Matter followers violently protested across the country.

Said nothing, that is, until polls showed him losing major ground among voters after the hugely successful Republican National Convention, which focused on patriotic themes and roundly condemned the national violence.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-awakens-to-the-threat-of-urban-riots-11598894969?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

In a moment surely worthy of inclusion in some future edition of “Profiles in Courage,” Democrats seem to have decided it’s time to take a stand against the violence in American cities.

It has been a while coming. It’s true that Joe Biden has issued the occasional gentle bromide about the importance of nonviolent expression, but the louder message from him and Democratic leaders throughout the summer has been vocal support for the protests, even as they rained mayhem on America’s cities.

Following the latest escalations in Kenosha, Wis., and Portland, Ore., in the past week, Mr. Biden has called on all sides to desist—though it’s notable that he has decided that blame lies with President Trump and not the Democratic officials who have connived at the lawlessness in their cities.

The reason for this sudden assertion of the moral law seems not to be the casualty count or the misery into which so many lives have been plunged, but the verdict from opinion polls and focus groups. The lives of police officers and the hopes and dreams of small-business proprietors are a small matter to the ambitious pol, but nothing pierces his conscience more sharply than an unsettling conversation with a pollster.

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!”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/08/30/incredible-dem-operative-reveals-how-he-fixed-mail-in-ballots-over-decades-n865350

A man described by the New York Post as “a top Democratic operative” and a “Bernie Sanders supporter” told the newspaper he had been submitting thousands of fraudulent mail-in ballots over the last several decades. The anonymous operative was checked out by the Post and is a real person who has worked on many campaigns in the northeast.

It’s not impossible that this “Democratic operative” is simply trolling his political opponents and may be a real operative but is trying to make a point about the gullibility of the opposition. But Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation who manages the foundation’s election law reform initiative, says, “There is nothing new about these techniques. Everything he’s talking about is perfectly possible.“

The man requested anonymity out of fear of being prosecuted.

His dirty work has taken him through the weeds of municipal and federal elections in Paterson, Atlantic City, Camden, Newark, Hoboken and Hudson County and his fingerprints can be found in local legislative, mayoral and congressional races across the Garden State. Some of the biggest names and highest office holders in New Jersey have benefited from his tricks, according to campaign records The Post reviewed.

“An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1,000 votes — it can make a difference,” the tipster said. “It could be enough to flip states.”