RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-will-democrats-explain-south-bend-11554759834

Some readers thought it unfair last week when this column described potential Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg as “a small-city mayor with a middling record.” This assessment may have been too kind to the media’s favorite millennial. Regardless, it appears that the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is almost ready to announce a 2020 run.

The South Bend Tribune reports today:

Mayor Pete Buttigieg could make his exploratory presidential campaign official sometime after 12 p.m. Sunday outside his campaign headquarters, his campaign announced Monday.

In a one-minute fundraising video he emailed Thursday to prospective donors, Buttigieg said he would make an announcement on Sunday April 14 and invited supporters to attend or watch it via livestream. Campaign officials had not yet announced a specific time and place for the event.

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.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke said yesterday that the relationship between Israel and the United States “must transcend” a “prime minister who is racist.”

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is apparently a “racist” because, well, Beto says he is.

The Hill:

“The US-Israel relationship is one of the most important relationships that we have on the planet, and that relationship, if it is successful, must transcend partisanship in the United States, and it must be able to transcend a prime minister who is racist, as he warns against Arabs coming to the polls, who wants to defy any prospect for peace as he threatens to annex the West Bank, and who has sided with a far-right racist party in order to maintain his hold on power,” O’Rourke said, referring to Netanyahu seeking to form a coalition with the Otzma Yehudit party.

Netanyahu, O’Rourke said, does not represent either the best interests of the U.S.-Israel relationship or a path to peace in the region.”We must be able to transcend his current leadership to make sure that the alliance is strong, that we continue to push for and settle for nothing less than a two-state solution, because that is the best opportunity for peace for the people of Israel and the people of Palestine,” O’Rourke said.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/07/democrats-will-regret-not-walking-away-when-they-could/

One can imagine a future in which Democrats, reflecting on our present, are shouting to their past selves, “Walk away!” As I will show below, the Democrat’s continued obsession with opening the pandora’s box of the Mueller report will only make things worse for the get-Trump crowd as the hoax chickens increasingly come home to roost.

Politico recently reported the Special Counsel’s office rapidly wound down operations after delivering the report to Attorney General Barr. It took most of a weekend for Barr to wade through the report before issuing the summary. Calls for a full, unredacted release of the report could not be immediately accommodated because virtually everything in the report remained a tangled mess of grand jury information, classified information, and innuendo that the DoJ could not ethically release in the absence of an indictment. This, in contrast to the Starr report on then-President Bill Clinton which was drafted in a form ready for public release, the Mueller report inexplicably requires additional work to get the lion share into the public domain. Why, Byron York asked, would the Mueller team not prepare the report for public release? Why force the Attorney General to spend the time to comb through the materials to redact and excerpt the materials which must not be released. Didn’t the attorney with oversight, Rod Rosenstein, publicly warn Americans that uncharged conduct could not be released into the public domain? Isn’t that exactly one of the reasons that Rosenstein supported the dismissal of James Comey? The answer portends disaster for the Trump/Russia hoax truthers.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/obama_shatters_previous_record_mentions_himself_467_times_in_one_speech_in_berlin.html

The post-presidential era of his life seems to be a bit of a challenge to the ego of Barack Hussein Obama. Never shy about referring to himself while president, now that that man in the White House is reversing his policies and spectacularly succeeding it’s got to be hard on his self-esteem. And let’s not forget the psychological pressure that may be building in the wake of the collapse of the Russia Hoax and the possible investigation of its origins.

So, what’s a comparatively young (age 57) man with decades of life ahead to do to compensate? Self-reflection and personal growth are out of the question, of course (this is Barack Obama, after all, the man who claimed to better at everything than his aides charged with speech-writing, economic policy and much more), so it appears that defensive ego boosting is his chosen course.

As it happens, the venue for his speech was Berlin, where in 2008 he addressed the largest crowd of his career. I don’t know the size of his audience yesterday in Berlin, but it had to be a tiny fraction of the 100,000+ he faced back when things were going his way.

https://nypost.com/2019/04/06/one-truthful-democrat-emerges-to-call-out-partys-delusions/

Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator and governor, was always one of my favorite politicians in part because his politics weren’t perfectly polished. Among other free-wheeling moments, he called fellow Democrat Bill Clinton an “uncommonly good liar” and said a requirement for becoming president is that you must “want it more than life itself.”

Kerrey moved on to academia and now to an investment bank, but hasn’t lost the willingness to break ranks with his party. The habit surfaces in a withering criticism of current Democrats, where he says they are suffering from two major “delusions.”

“The first,” he writes in an op-ed in the Omaha World-Herald, “is that Americans long for a president who will ask us to pay more for the pleasure of increasing the role of the federal government in our lives.”