RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democratic-debate-highest-stakes-moment-brings-worst-debate/#slide-1

Tonight’s debate would have been only marginally less incoherent, noisy, and grating to the ears if CBS had broadcast two hours of static.

The last debate before the South Carolina primary featured so much shouting, you would think that the candidates had just been told their microphones weren’t working. This could well be the last debate for some of these candidates, and Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren have rapidly shrinking paths to the nomination. Every candidate was itching to interject, interrupt, shout over, and have a dramatic moment.

If the polls are accurate, South Carolina will end with a Joe Biden win or a Biden tie with Bernie Sanders, and Sanders set to do well in most or all of the Super Tuesday states. Last week’s debate was Get Shorty. The mission of everybody on that stage tonight who wasn’t named Bernie Sanders was to go on stage and beat the tar out of Bernie Sanders. Bloomberg is not on the ballot in South Carolina, and he’s won no delegates so far.

Most of them didn’t do that. Elizabeth Warren spent her first comments discussing her differences with Sanders, but then settled into a campaign to be Sanders’s running mate, using every opportunity she could find to steer the conversation back towards attacks on Bloomberg’s record. Tom Steyer just took up space and called up racial preferences again.

Amy Klobuchar has hit her ceiling. She’s personable enough, she likes to position herself as the sensible pragmatist . . . but it’s hard to see how much of her performance broke through in the chaotic shout-fest.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bloomberg-the-nanny/

Good for Mike Bloomberg.

During his first debate, he slammed Bernie Sanders by saying: “We’re not going to throw out capitalism. We tried that. Other countries tried that. It was called communism, and it just didn’t work!” Exactly right. It’s safe to say Bloomberg is not a communist. I wonder if that means there’s still room for him in the Democratic Party.

Unfortunately, Bloomberg is no principled, limited-government capitalist, either.

Like his fellow New York billionaire Donald Trump, he’s used to getting his own way at his own company.

Unfortunately, he assumes government should function in a similar fashion.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/25/democratic-debate-recap-highlights-from-south-carolina.html

In the first Democratic presidential debate since Sen. Bernie Sanders earned a big target on his back, Democratic candidates jumped into an often chaotic and uncomfortable fray.
The candidates on stage included Sanders, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Mike Bloomberg, Tom Steyer and Pete Buttigieg.
None of the seven candidates emerged from the debate, at times a choppy affair as White House hopefuls interrupted each other and talked over the CBS News moderators, untouched by opponents’ venom.

ttps://pjmedia.com/trending/stunner-watch-side-by-side-vide

Pete Buttigieg is Barack Obama’s Mini Me, or, as one Twitter user put it, “Fauxbama.”

Buttigieg’s speech cadence, his shirt sleeves and even the knot of his tie are the same as President Obama’s.

And now a political Twitter account called “The Recount” has found that former Mayor Buttigieg’s words are exactly the same as Obama’s.

For years Barack Obama reused and recycled Deval Patrick’s old “no red America, no blue America, just the United States of America” speech written by their mutual political spirit animal David Axelrod. Obama, ahem, borrowed Elizabeth Warren’s “you didn’t build that” trope to denigrate initiatives by business owners to support the idea that government help was really responsible for your success.

But now the former president knows what it’s like when someone plagiarizes him.

Watch this video and marvel at the chutzpah of Buttigieg. It’s not as funny “bad lip reading” but it is amazing to behold:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/aipac-responds-after-bernie-sanders-said-hes-skipping-pro-israel-event_3248456.html

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) launched “an odious attack” against the group’s upcoming event after Sanders said he wouldn’t attend the conference.

“Senator Sanders has never attended our conference and that is evident from his outrageous comment,” AIPAC, which says it is America’s pro-Israel lobby, said in a statement on Sunday.

The annual conference features over 18,000 Americans from a wide variety of backgrounds and includes both Senate and House Democratic speakers.

“By engaging in such an odious attack on this mainstream, bipartisan American political event, Senator Sanders is insulting his very own colleagues and the millions of Americans who stand with Israel. Truly shameful,” AIPAC added.

The statement was in response to Sanders’s announcement over the weekend that he wouldn’t attend AIPAC’s conference, which is being held on March 1 and March 2 in Washington.

“The Israeli people have the right to live in peace and security. So do the Palestinian people. I remain concerned about the platform AIPAC provides for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights,” he told supporters in a statement.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-house-divided-cannot-stand-11582563522?

For constitutional democracies to thrive—or even muddle through—voters and candidates have to respect their political opponents. Parties must see the competition as legitimate even amid vigorous disagreement on ideas. This shared sense is a load-bearing wall for democracy.

Over the past decade, the U.S. has become much more divided, sawing holes in this wall and hoping to miss the support beams. Progressives and conservatives agree on one thing: It’s the other guys with the chain saws. A 2018 Axios poll summed up the sentiment: Some 61% of Democrats thought of Republicans as racist, bigoted or sexist. About half of Republicans described Democrats as ignorant or spiteful.

Why do so many Americans see their political opponents in such stark terms? One reason is that many on both sides think the future of American democracy hangs in the balance, that a victory for their opponents could ruin the republic. Conservatives fear the growth of the administrative state—powerful bureaucrats who rule by fiat and undermine elected leaders. For progressives, the perceived danger is Donald Trump. The left sees him as an aspiring dictator who is willing to shred constitutional norms.

The two sides might seem diametrically opposed, but they aren’t. Both could be true and form a vicious circle. If “the swamp” and the “deep state” bureaucracy are out to sink President Trump, he can stay afloat only by fighting them ferociously. The harder he fights, the more progressives double down to defend the administrative state, which their policies have built.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/even_anderson_coopers_polite_interview_with_bernie_reveals_bernies_extremism.html

Anderson Cooper did a decent-ish job challenging some of Bernie’s more extreme positions on Sunday’s 60 Minutes. Despite Cooper’s delicacy, Bernie gave away the fact that he dislikes America and dreams of Marxist socialism.

With Bernie now the frontrunner in the Democrat Party, it was natural that 60 Minutes would interview him. In terms of real journalism, the interview is inadequate. You’ll get more information about Bernie’s lifelong Marxism and love for dictators from the videos at the bottom of this post. Still, there were illuminating moments.

Cooper’s narrative reiterates that Sanders is now claiming Denmark, not Cuba or Venezuela, as his model. It doesn’t matter. Denmark’s reality is strikingly different from the myth.

Sanders, without evidence, calls Trump is a “pathological liar.” Untrue. Trump is an exaggerator; Biden is a fabulist; and Bernie is the pathological liar. Anyone who sells communism, as he has for decades, despite the 100 million dead bodies left behind in the 20th century alone, is lying at an almost incomprehensible scale.

Cooper did note that, in the 1980s, Sanders was a fan of the Soviet Union and the Sandinistas. A brief video from the 1980s, interrupted by Cooper’s voiceovers, has Bernie decrying the “authoritarian nature of Cuba” while lauding its “massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?” Only a Marxist could value literacy over food and freedom.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/philip_haney_a_genuine_obama_whistleblower_found_dead_at_age_66.html

Philip Haney, an expert on Islamic extremism who was a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and who became a prominent critic of President Obama’s questionable management of the agency after he retired in 2015, died from a single gunshot wound on February 21. Haney’s body was found lying on the ground outside his car in the small California town of Plymouth, east of Sacramento.

On Saturday afternoon, as the news of Haney’s death began to be reported, initially in social media and the new media and then more widely, the local Sheriff’s Office of Amador County issued a statement based on the local “Coroner’s Investigation:”

On February 21, 2020 at approximately 1012 hours, deputies and detectives responded to the area of Highway 124 and Highway 16 in Plymouth to the report of a male subject on the ground with a gunshot wound.

Upon their arrival, they located and identified 66-year-old Philip Haney, who was deceased and appeared to have suffered a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound.

A firearm was located next to Haney and his vehicle. This investigation is active and ongoing. No further details will be released at this time.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/can_bloomberg_ever_recover_from_his_disastrous_debate_debut.html

Michael Bloomberg is at the crux of a battle of clichés. America may be the land of second chances, but you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

The level of saturation of Bloomberg’s television advertising actually is working against him now. Few are potential voters who have not been bombarded with the theme that “Mike can get it done,” featuring a candidate who appears strong yet accessible, powerful but caring. However in Las Vegas, Bloomberg pulled back his own curtain, having bribed the DNC to change its rules and allow him onstage, and Americans saw an uncertain-yet-imperious, cold, little man being bullied and out-talked by Elizabeth Warren, mumbling excuses for non-disclosure agreements that lasted just a few days until the mighty oligarch capitulated to the fake Native American.

The stark contrast between what the ads promised and what the reality delivered will take roughly forever to fade from memory. Bloomberg provided his own gotcha, debunking his marketing thrust as a strong man of action.  

Americans instinctively distrust politicians, and they instinctively distrust manipulative advertising.  We love to scorn the pretentious, the high and mighty brought down from their lofty perches.

Even worse for Bloomberg, television advertising is not a welcome interruption of the programming that attracted the eyeballs in the first place. Why do you suppose so many ads these days use humor? It’s as if insurance companies are in the comedy business, not selling a product whose necessity is unpleasant to contemplate. They will happily settle for a  vague association with a cute talking animal or a working class heroine, sold with a sugar coating of humor.

When those television interruptions are all for the same product – a politician – and come with stirring music and visuals, but no humor, resentment starts to kick in, and more ads produce more resentment. The only humor related to Bloomberg ads now is scornful laughter directed at him.