RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/tulsi-gabbard-peace-campaign/

Perpetual war requires perpetual peace candidates

What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding? Elvis Costello’s bitter song by that name was on my mind while I listened to Tulsi Gabbard’s maiden campaign speech for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party over the weekend. The social-democratic space on the left side of the Democratic field has been filling up with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And so it seemed prudent for Gabbard to distinguish herself as the peace candidate, the one woman of the anti-imperialist left. She promised to “end the regime-change wars that have taken far too many lives and undermined our security by strengthening terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.” My first thought: good luck to her.

Close listeners of NR’s Editors podcast will note a developing running joke where Rich Lowry teases me for support of Gabbard. And in fact, I find I do have some reasons to cheer her candidacy.

First, she’s at least interesting. The rest of the Democrats will be accusing each other of deviationism over trivialities. Gabbard’s been accused of being a toady of Bashar al-Assad and a Hindu-nationalist fifth columnist. She also grew up in a socially conservative household and, as a very young woman, she participated in her activist father’s campaigns against the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships as marriage. You can imagine how that’s going over among Democrats. But she’s also young and attractive. She’s a veteran of the Iraq war, and still serves in the Hawaii Army National Guard. And unlike Barack Obama, who basically appropriated his wife’s South-Side Chicago identity, Gabbard fully embraces her Hawaiian roots. If one made a word cloud of her first campaign speech, “Aloha” would outrank “love,” “sacrifice,” and even “neocon.”

https://spectator.org/howard

Last week was a delicious one for observers of the Ragnarok that the politics of the Left has become, particularly as it signaled the difficulties confronting some of the purveyors of the “smart set” PC culture as they attempt to cash in on their contributions to our national status quo.

Starting with Howard Schultz, the billionaire former Starbucks CEO who, having positioned his company as a leftist cultural icon by such actions as publicly backing gay marriage and imploring customers not to carry firearms in Starbucks stores (though stopping short of banning them), announced on 60 Minutes a week ago that he’ll run for president as a centrist independent.

Why an independent? After all, Schultz was a thoroughly reliable Democrat moneybag throughout his professional life. The answer, as he somewhat furtively explained, was that he knows he could never win his party’s nomination.

“It concerns me that so many voices within the Democratic Party are going so far to the left,” he lamented. “If I ran as a Democrat, I would have to say things in my heart I do not believe.”

Schultz went even further in a CNBC Squawk Box interview back in June of 2018 when he was first beginning to think of himself as a potential presidential hopeful, sounding far saner than the typical candidate within the chaotic Democrat field.

“It concerns me that so many voices within the Democratic Party are going so far to the left. I say to myself, ‘How are we going to pay for these things,’ in terms of things like single payer (and) people espousing the fact that the government is going to give everyone a job.”

“I don’t think that’s realistic,” he said. Then he added: “I think we got to get away from these falsehoods and start talking about the truth and not false promises.”

His bid, which apparently includes having hired former Obama political guru Bill Burton and former John McCain consultant Steve Schmidt, fell flat immediately. So much so that by the middle of the week Michael Moore, the supersized Leni Riefenstahl of today’s Democrat Party, was calling for a boycott of Starbucks until Schultz demurred from running.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Newark is the most dangerous city in New Jersey, Tallahassee is the most dangerous city in Florida, and South Bend is the most dangerous city in Indiana. But instead of fixing their failed cities, the current mayor of South Bend, and the former mayors of Newark and Tallahassee want to run for president. Mayor Peter Buttigieg has announced that he’s forming an exploratory committee for a 2020 run. Media reports have focused on the possibility that he might become America’s first gay millennial president, instead of on the fact that he’s headed a city since 2011 which has double the national and statewide violent crime rates. And a city where Hispanic poverty rates are 10% higher than the national average, African-American households have double the poverty rate, and Asian-American incomes are halved.

South Bend was recently rated one of the “worst cities” to live in. The unemployment rates are higher than average, the property values are lower, and even the water quality is below average.

Gushing media reports about the gay millennial mayor, a Harvard grad and a Rhodes scholar, overlook South Bend’s poverty rate of 24.7% and that 45% of households are living near the poverty level.

South Bend has a little over 100,000 residents, but there were over 100 criminal shootings in 2017 in the failed city which hosts murderous gangs such as the Latin Kings and Gangster Disciples.

In January 2019, just as Buttigieg was prepping his presidential run, three shootings in one week killed two teens and left a woman paralyzed from the waist down. In one summer week, the casualties included a 12 and a 13-year-old. In March, 6 people were hurt in one shooting spree.

“It is a season for boldness and it is time to focus on the future,” Mayor Buttigieg declared in his presidential debut video. “Are you ready to walk away from the politics of the past?”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/democrats_are_the_party_of_destruction.html

The first image that came to mind after viewing the 2019 expression of exultant joy by New York Democrat representatives when Governor Cuomo called for a constitutional amendment to shore up abortion for New Yorkers was the 1939 jubilation by the German Reichstag when Hitler asserted that the end of world Jewry was his ultimate goal.

In both cases, the elation was about death. It is not really surprising, since it is becoming patent that the “D” in Democrat stands also for “destruction.” Democrats may couch their destructive tendencies in euphemisms like “social justice” and “women’s rights,” but one thing is clear: there is no objection from any Democrats as the party embraces the most radical left-wing ideology, meant to result in the demise of America. Success is to be destroyed; advancement is to be suppressed. Babies are expendable. Hubris under the cloak of social justice slogans runs amok.

It extends to each issue the Democrats embrace. Every city that has come under Democrat control is proof positive that instead of raising the standard of living for the occupants, the city falls to crime, gangs, and drugs. In fact, “America is awash with troubled, dysfunctional cities that have been electing Democratic mayors for decades.”

Their restrictive economic policies combined with outright corruption result in the death of the middle class. Once that is gone, the city is done for. Yet the Democrat slate of socialist-loving candidates continues to opt for this destruction as its members tout the 70% tax, which would turn America into Venezuela. Concomitant with this assault is the death of outrage as “diversions, half-truths, equivocations and sophistry” now describe the Democratic Party.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/next-obama-14181.html

The 2016 race to replace four-term U.S. senator Barbara Boxer of California, one of Congress’s most liberal politicians, appears likely to result in the election of an even more liberal successor: state attorney general Kamala Harris. In an increasingly polyglot state that exalts appearance and symbolism over substance, the ever-stylish and multiracial Harris—she is the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican-American father—finds herself in the right place at the right time. She’s enjoyed a meteoric rise in California politics—the first woman, African-American, or Asian-American elected as the state’s top law-enforcement officer. Whether the Senate will be a political stepping-stone for Harris or a final destination depends on how credibly she portrays herself as a politician with national stature. Her fans compare her with President Barack Obama; her detractors do the same.

Now 51, Harris cruised to reelection as attorney general in 2014, after eking out a close victory over Los Angeles County district attorney Steve Cooley in 2010. (Before becoming attorney general, she served two terms as district attorney of San Francisco, where she unseated popular incumbent Terence Hallinan.) The outcome of the 2010 contest, which took nearly a month to resolve, was decided by just 74,000 out of 8.8 million votes, or a margin of 0.8 percent—one of the closest statewide elections in California history. Cooley, a moderate Republican, had been the front-runner in most preelection polls, and he even declared victory on election night. But the results proved too close to call, and Harris eventually prevailed when all provisional and mail-in ballots were counted. And so a position formerly held by Republican law-and-order stalwarts such as George Deukmejian and Dan Lungren, as well as a relatively tough-on-crime liberal like Jerry Brown, fell into the hands of an outspoken opponent of capital punishment whose campaign drew almost no law-enforcement support.

Belying the “aspiring governor” nickname for state attorneys general, Harris set her sights on the Senate early in 2015, when the 75-year-old Boxer announced that she would retire rather than seek a fifth term in office.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/03/a-republic-not-a-

How dumb is the 2020 presidential election campaign going to be? Unfathomably dumb. Breathtakingly dumb. Seriously; pretty dumb.

And that’s just among the mainstream candidates. Just wait and see what happens if an independent billionaire jumps in the race.

Exhibit A this week: Howard Schultz, the former chief executive officer of Starbucks, is reportedly mulling a third-party or independent run for president. Schultz, a longtime Democrat, says both parties are hopelessly dysfunctional. (Which is undeniably true.) Neither political party, for example, is lifting a finger to address the $21.9 trillion national debt.

Exhibit A-1: Schultz appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on Wednesday, where he was interrogated about, wait for it, the price of a box of Cheerios.

Schultz was shocked to learn that Cheerios cost around four bucks — or less than a triple grande mocha. (But not nearly as delicious.) It also has nothing to do with the national debt, or immigration, or foreign policy, or anything else worth discussing.

Does it matter that a billionaire ex-CEO doesn’t know how much a box of cereal costs? Only if you’re in the business of asking stupid gotcha questions on television. I don’t know how much Cheerios cost, either. I don’t even eat cereal. Do you?

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/03/the

This column makes excellent points but I am opposed to Nazi metaphors….The Nazis exterminated millions including one of every three Jews in the world….It is wrong when the Democrats do it and equally wrong when conservatives do it….rsk

In America’s current political climate, Democrats are making frequent use of terms they understand poorly at best. To silence debate and criticism, Democrats routinely employ labels such as “Fascist,” “Nazi,” or “racist” to shut down and intimidate their political targets. Ironically, however, as Democrats engage this way they are quickly adopting the very characteristics of those groups they supposedly despise.

Most notably, the Democrats increasingly display anti-Semitism along with their hostility to Christianity, traditional American values, and individual liberty. The recent revelation that Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) tweeted in 2012 that Israel had “hypnotized the world” is a clear indication of where the Democratic Party is headed—and why Americans should worry.

Beginning with Omar’s tweet about Israel “hypnotizing” the world, the congresswoman’s sentiment is a common theme in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In the 1925 screed that became the centerpiece of Nazi thought, Hitler routinely accuses Jews of undertaking a “campaign of lies” while lamenting the supposed “ignorance of the broad masses” and “narrow-mindedness of the upper classes” about Jews . While Democrats and the Left routinely attempt to distance their hatred of Israel from anti-Semitism, their opprobrium of the Jewish state similarly parallels that of the late Nazi führer. In Mein Kampf, Hitler accuses Zionists of wanting a Jewish state in order to have a “central organization for their international world swindle.” Omar sounds exactly like a real Nazi.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/3/a-growing-record-of-insanity/

To say the left in America has gone off the rails is like saying the Super Bowl is a fairly popular football game.

It’s hard to keep up with the tsunami of cultural and economic insanity thundering through a thousand outlets every day, but here’s a try. You thought Vermont’s Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders was radical? Current Democratic leaders start with his views and go further left.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi mocks the idea of securing America’s southern border as something only a bigot like President Trump would want. Hence, she and her party oppose even a dime for any more physical barriers that would help the border patrol stem the ongoing invasion of illegal immigrants. Three more caravans on the way? Ho hum.

Openly socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, wants not only open borders but to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is charged with keeping us safe from drug dealers and violent criminals. She also backs a confiscatory tax scheme with rates as high as 70 percent, free college tuition and a “Green New Deal” mandate that would strangle industry, cause energy costs to skyrocket and make blackouts common. She’s a huge hit wherever she speaks.

New York State’s Democrats last week legalized late-term abortion right up to a baby’s due date. Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam endorsed what amounts to infanticide after birth while defending a proposed law that would allow abortion of a baby even during a woman’s labor. Commentator Larry O’Connor has dubbed Dr. Northam, who is a pediatric neurologist, “Governor Gosnell,” after the infamous Philadelphia baby butcher recently depicted in the Dean Cain film “Gosnell.”

Sen. Kamala Harris, California Democrat, wants to end all private