RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/the_democrats_embrace_not_making_sense.html

“Stop Making Sense” is a classic 1984 concert film featuring the alt-rock group Talking Heads. The title has a certain punkish frisson, but is also a joke. Not so the modern Democratic party which might as well adopt “Stop Making Sense” as its platform.

Nothing about the competing positions of Democratic candidates makes much sense, and that’s not just from a Republican or conservative perspective. That’s from a position of logic, consistency, and anything resembling sound judgment.

Internally, the positions being advocated by the leading Democratic candidates and the party activists that support them are an incoherent contradictory mishmash of ideas that might sound like the stuff you’d hear at a college campus pot party, with a lot of pot.

It appears the Democrats do not care whether the emerging positions of its candidates and activists make are incoherent, contradictory, thoroughly impractical, and/or unconstitutional as a matter of law.

Three contradictory and irreconcilable planks dominate Democrat politics today and nobody is trying to rationalize them — socialism, identity politics, and

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ilhan-omar-fears-her-jewish-colleagues-are-using-anti-semitism-charge-to-shutdown-debate/

Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) pushed back Wednesday against the rash of anti-Semitism accusations that have been leveled against her since she was elected, suggesting her “Jewish colleagues” and others may use accusations of bigotry to chill debate over U.S. policy toward Israel.

“What I’m fearful of — because Rashida and I are Muslim — that a lot of our Jewish colleagues, a lot of our constituents, a lot of our allies, go to thinking that everything we say about Israel to be anti-Semitic because we are Muslim,” said Omar, who was joined at the “Progressive Townhall” event in Washington, D.C. by fellow freshman representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.).

“To me, it’s something that becomes designed to end the debate because you get in this space of – yes, I know what intolerance looks like and I’m sensitive when someone says, ‘The words you used Ilhan are resemblance of intolerance,’” [sic] Omar continued. “And I am cautious of that and I feel pained by that. But it’s almost as if, every single time we say something regardless of what it is we say . . . we get to be labeled something. And that ends the discussion. Because we end up defending that and nobody ever gets to have the broader debate of what is happening with Palestine.”

https://spectator.us/quick-dirty-chicago-mayoral/

On Tuesday, Chicago voters head to the polls to vote for Rahm Emanuel’s successor as Da Mayor. ‘Why vote in late February?’ you might ask. ‘Didn’t Chicago just vote in November for House members and Governor?’Oh, you naive soul. For decades, Chicago has held its elections in February precisely because it is cold, often snowy, and hard to get to the polls. When you suppress ordinary voters, who is left? For many years, it was reliable voters for the old Chicago Democratic Machine. Some of them drove city busses or garbage trucks; others shuffled papers in city offices. Some filled potholes. Many more watched their co-workers fill potholes while they grabbed a cigarette. What better way to ensure that insiders get reelected?This system is on life-support, mortally wounded by the Federal Courts, which made two crucial rulings in the 1970s and 1980s. Known as the Shakman Decrees, the first said the city could not hire workers based on their politics. The second said it could not fire workers for the same reasons. The courts knew the city would not comply readily, so they appointed monitors, who stayed for decades.

Those decrees drove a stake through the heart of the old system, where alderman and ward committeemen gave out good-paying jobs to city workers who got out the vote. It was a well-organized system. The city employees had to visit homes in their neighborhood, listen to what residents wanted (such as a stop sign or better garbage pickup), and then share that information with their boss, known in Chicago as ‘their Clout.’ The visit concluded by reminding voters who they should vote for. Often the advice was simply ‘vote straight Democratic.’ These political workers were expected to make campaign donations and were held responsible for how many of their voters came to the polls. Fail in these critical tasks and find yourself a new job.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/bernie-sanders-foreign-policy-domestic-enemies-geopolitical-stage/

In the 1980s Bernie Sanders cozied up to dictators from around the world.

In his decades-long career in politics, Bernie Sanders was never more active as a foreign-policy figure than when he was the mayor of Burlington, Vt. He owned it. “Burlington had a foreign policy,” he wrote in his 1997 book, Outsider in the White House. From his mayoral perch he fired off missives to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, demanding better treatment of IRA prisoners held in Northern Ireland. He tried to establish direct relations with the incoming Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, hoping to establish a radio channel that would broadcast the revolution to Vermont. The mayor met with Daniel Ortega to convey that many Americans rejected the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Ortega, in the many years since, has looted his country, installed hideous light fixtures along the major roads to please his wife, suborned much of the Catholic Church to his rule, and blown past his own constitution’s term limits. The country is sliding into unrest, as the aid that used to come in from the Netherlands and Luxembourg has dried up.

As mayor, Sanders cemented a sister-city relationship between Burlington and the Russian city of Yaroslavl (he and his wife spent their honeymoon in the Soviet Union). Sanders was diplomatic during his trip. After a presentation on central planning, Sanders told his Soviet peers that health care and housing were better in the United States, though they cost much more back in America. When he came home, Sanders praised Soviet train stations and “palaces of culture.” His wife was even more effusive, almost describing the theory of New Soviet Man, when she described a cultural life that wasn’t cleaved off from work, as a mere hobby, but fully integrated into an ideal of community service. Burlington’s foreign policy, as it was then, was driven by idealism (some of it misguided), lots of easy talk about imperialism, and dislike of “Ronald Ray-gun.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272992/proud-queen-identity-politics-john-perazzo

During the MSNBC program AM Joy this past Sunday, host Joy Reid asked Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris if, during her campaign, it would “be difficult … to advocate race-based policy” without becoming vulnerable to the charge that she was engaging in identity politics. In her response, Harris said:

“I want to talk about the issue of identity politics, Joy. This term identity politics, people will use that term — it’s like people used to talk about the race card. They bring this term up when you talk about issues that are about race, about sexual orientation, about religion. They’ll bring it up when we are talking about civil rights issues as a way to marginalize the issue, as a way to frankly try to silence you or shut you up. We need to call it what it is, which is to try and divert away from a conversation that needs to happen in America. Why? One, because we must speak truth. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Semitism are all real in this country, so we need to have that conversation and address it. Two, and this is equally important, how America deals with the issues and the disparities, and also the hate that can be — that causes these issues to become lethal in proportion — how America deals with these issues is a matter of American identity. This is not about identity politics, and if it is, it’s about the identity of the United States of America. How we handle the issues will be about our collective identity.”

If we distill Harris’s meandering reply down to its essence, she is saying that there is nothing whatsoever wrong with identity politics, because identity politics is ultimately a vehicle for helping more Americans understand that the very “identity of the United States of America” has always been — and continues to be — thoroughly infested with the ineradicable sins of “racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, [and] anti-Semitism.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272986/radical-redfored-gears-take-trump-2020-matthew-vadum

A 24-year-old Marxist schoolteacher in Arizona has become the public face of a new political movement launched last year that is organizing to defeat President Trump in 2020 and reclaim the U.S. Senate for Democrats.

The teacher’s name is Noah Karvelis and the movement is called #RedForEd, Michael Patrick Leahy reports at Breitbart News.

Karvelis, a Bernie Sanders donor and campaign volunteer, is one leader in a new wave of radical teacher activists.

How radical is he?

Karvelis gave a speech to the Socialism 2018 conference held in Chicago in July 2018. The confab was put on by a Trotskyist group called the International Socialist Organization.

“We’ve created an organization now. We have a network of 2,000 leaders who are experienced. They’ve been out on a job action. They’ve organized their campuses. They’ve collected signatures for a ballot initiative,” Karvelis told 1,800 socialists from across the fruited plain.

“We’ve built a new political power in Arizona and it’s taking control right now of the future of the state,” Karvelis said.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/is_she_running_hillary_and_bernie_now_attacking_each_other.html

What is more entertaining and revealing than a fight between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton over money and the use of private jets? Even better, both will likely run for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president for the chance to be beaten by President Trump.

Bernie Sanders, the socialist who like private jets, and Hillary Clinton, the pretend socialist who is a multi-millionaire, are arguing over Bernie’s use of a private Gulfstream jet that cost Hillary over $100,000 during the 2016 campaign. Hillary is upset about the cost of Bernie’s travels even though Bernie was using the private jet to campaign for Hillary.

Hillary spokesperson Zac Petkanas, in full Hillary mode, said:

I’m not shocked that while thousands of volunteers braved the heat and cold to knock on doors until their fingers bled in a desperate effort to stop Donald Trump, his Royal Majesty King Bernie Sanders would only deign to leave his plush D.C. office or his brand new second home on the lake if he was flown around on a cushy private jet like a billionaire master of the universe.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kamala-harris-calls-trump-racist/

Senator Kamala Harris, one of the top contenders for the Democratic nomination for president, called President Trump a racist in an interview published Tuesday.

“When you talk about him calling African countries sh**hole countries. When you talk about him referring to immigrants as rapists and murderers, I don’t think you can reach any other conclusion,” the California senator told The Root.

Trump reportedly complained about the U.S. accepting immigrants from “s***hole countries,” like Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries in a meeting with lawmakers a year ago. The president later issued a denial, saying he had been “tough, but this was not the language used” in the meeting.

Harris also referenced Trump’s comments on the deadly 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Va., where a white supremacist purposefully drove a car into a crowd of people, killing a woman, amid clashes between white-nationalist activists and counter-protesters.

“I think there is blame on both sides,” Trump said at the time. “What about the ‘alt-left’ that came charging at, as you say, the ‘alt-right.’ Do they have any semblance of guilt?”

The president later condemned the white supremacists and said the driver of the car was a “murderer and what he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing.”

Trump has frequently been panned for comments seen as discriminatory toward immigrants, especially those from Latin American countries, as well.

“I do, yes. Yes,” Harris, who is Indian and Jamaican, responded when pressed afterwards on whether she would “definitely agree that he’s a racist.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ocasio-cortez-is-an-all-american-socialist-11551225829

As much as conservatives are aghast at the over-the-top collectivist ideas of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we cannot ignore the oversize intrigue with this young woman, who has gained instant influence and celebrity. Perhaps it is because people see her as so all-American.

We are fascinated by her personal success—the way she transformed herself almost instantly from a bartender to an international political star. Yes, this self-identified Democratic Socialist is ignorant of the ways of government. She thought she would be headed to Washington in January to get “inaugurated” and that she’d “start signing” bills immediately, in a Congress with three chambers. And her policy proposals are outrageously unrealistic and expensive—$100 trillion at least—and would destroy our economy.

Yet many people see the 29-year-old Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and think: If she can do this, so could I. She doesn’t come from a rich and powerful family. Her degree is from Boston University, not the Ivy League. Her Puerto Rican heritage and Bronx constituency convey cultural diversity.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/democratic-primary-reparations-discussion/

There is a strange political conversation under way as the 2020 Democratic presidential primary gets under way, and it goes like this: One group of Democrats proposes something daffy, vague, and impractical, and another group of Democrats says, “Of course that’s daffy, vague, and impractical — but at least they started a conversation!” This is said in the tone kindergarten teachers use with toddlers who test the maxim that there is no such thing as a dumb question. It’s something to see: a political party condescending to itself.

None of the Democratic 2020 contenders currently talking up reparations for slavery is serious about the project. Those of them who are serious about anything are serious only about winning the party’s nomination and the role that flattering a small but influential congregation of left-wing intellectuals might play in that.

Call it the Ta-Nehisi Coates primary.

It’s an unserious proposal, but we’ll do its authors the courtesy of offering a serious answer, anyway.

Paying reparations for slavery is a terrible idea because there is no one to pay reparations and no one to pay them to. There are not any slave-owners left among us and haven’t been for some time. There aren’t any liberated slaves, either. Slavery was a terrible crime and, like all such enormities, it was carried out by real people who inflicted unconscionable suffering on real people — specific people, individuals.