RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

Right before our eyes, a mega-billionaire is buying the presidential nomination of a political party, and oddly enough, it is the party that decries inequality of wealth and whose leading lights debate taxing billionaires out of existence.

This will not end well for the Democrats.  Bloomberg is luring the party’s elites into visibly betraying the principles most of its rank-and-file hold dear and identifying themselves as sellouts who can be bought by sheer force of lucre. A bitter split will be hard to avoid.

Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal gets right to the point in his headline” “Bloomberg buys the Democratic elite.” It is not the rank and file getting rich off of Bloomberg, but rather the ostensible leadership class, and therein lie the seeds of destruction for the party that purports to be about the common man, woman, and nonbinary individual.

He’s distorting the incentives of activists, officials and campaign fixers who suddenly are thinking less about a presidential victory and more about the Bloomberg gravy train.

Jenkins cites these examples of leaders betraying their people and their principles:

When a recording leaked of Mr. Bloomberg defending stop-and-frisk in New York, Andre Fields of the liberal voting-rights group Fair Fight Action rushed out a tweet hitting him as a “true terrorist” but promptly deleted it. Fair Fight Action had received $5 million in funding from Mr. Bloomberg.

amgreatness.com/2020/02/14/the-fail-of-the-left-idealism-without-realism/

“The ends justify the means” (“TEJTM”) is a platitude that has been used throughout history to rationalize the pursuit of both laudable and iniquitous goals, more often the latter than the former.

The events leading up to “national socialism” in Germany and communism in the Soviet Union, for example, illustrate how utopian visions can give rise to evil empires. An individual’s quest to obtain and retain power can become an end in itself that leads to horrific consequences, as exemplified by such notables as Josef Stalin, Bashar al-Assad, and Mao Zedong. Even in religion-inspired campaigns, such as the Crusades, the Inquisition, and ISIS, original benevolent intentions can become obscured.

Sadly, we are seeing TEJTM appear all too frequently in today’s America. With the presence of social media and a compliant mass media complex, things that may be praiseworthy goals are giving rise to proposed or actual policies that are far from benign or realistic in their application.

This country is being culturally riven from any plausible ideal of “social justice” because, too often, its implementation has become an ideological winners-versus-losers exercise.

A stark example is New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s crusade to balance racial and ethnic representation in the city’s elite special high schools. He proposes to substitute social engineering for what is now a test-based, racially blind merit system. If disavowing merit is the cure, it is far worse than the disease, because America has achieved its preeminence based mainly on rewarding merit.

There are many other examples, which go far beyond New York, of supposed social justice trampling merit in school admissions, including at elite universities. And there are countless examples of the goal of social justice being perverted and used arbitrarily to advantage one group over others—for example, citizens being denied state benefits, or at least being carefully scrutinized, while illegal residents find doors open for them. Another example is proposed reparations that are to be paid to people with little or no connection to slavery by people with no responsibility for that sordid history.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/the-medias-bernie-sanders-makeover-begins/

Left-wing pundits have already started selling moderates on a vision of the radical Democratic presidential front-runner that doesn’t comport with reality.

Just you watch: By the time Election Day rolls around in November, liberal columnists will be telling us that Bernie Sanders is the “real conservative” in the presidential race.

Many among the center–left commentariat are struggling to come to terms with the likelihood that the Democratic Party will nominate an authoritarian leftist for president. A lot of this anxiety is, no doubt, driven by recent polls that find a majority of Americans are more open to voting for a non-binary Martian atheist than for a socialist.

Others, however, have begun reinventing Sanders, who, they now contend, isn’t actually a socialist socialist, because he’ll never send you to die in an icy gulag and few of his policy ideas will ever come to fruition.

Matt Fuller over at Huffington Post posits that moderates shouldn’t be too “scared” of a Sanders presidency “when all Republicans and most Democrats in Congress publicly oppose Medicare for All.” Really? The signature policy idea championed by a major party’s leading presidential contender is so unpopular that the majority of elected officials can’t publicly support it, and that should reassure moderates?

“Vote Bernie: He’s got tremendously unpopular positions that will never pass!”

You’ll notice, no doubt, that Fuller is careful to say elected officials only “publicly oppose” socialistic ideas, which usually intimates that some might personally desire a federally run health-care system. It’s just a matter of time before they evolve to the enlightened position, no doubt. Bernie, whom we must now take seriously but not literally, is just a step in the right direction.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/13/conventional-wisdom-about-the-democrats-primary-is-wrong/

Commentators are scrambling to decide which candidate—Sanders, Buttigieg, or Bloomberg—has the advantage on Super Tuesday. They’re not seeing things clearly.

There are three widely proclaimed verities now bandied about in the aftermath of the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday.

They are that Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is a clear front-runner with a chance for a break-through to a commanding lead in the quest for the nomination. The second is that former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is a serious candidate with a chance for the Democratic nomination, and the third is that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been providentially assisted by the disintegration of the candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden and the bunching together of Sanders, Buttigieg, and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and will seize the leadership of the race when he gets to the ballot in 15 states simultaneously on Super Tuesday, March 3.

I think all three of these deductions are mistaken.

Bernie Sanders won 60 percent of the vote in New Hampshire in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, where he won about 26 percent this week in an eight-candidate race. But five of the candidates collected 30 percent of the vote, and Sanders only got 26 of the remaining 70, about 36 percent. If the competition is whittled down to Sanders and Buttigieg, who is a much less formidable candidate than Clinton was four years ago, Sanders got about 52 percent of the vote. He did not win the nomination last time, though without the vote-rigging of the Obama-Clinton party establishment and their hundreds of unelected superdelegates, he would have made it a very close race. Still, New Hampshire in 2016 produced a much better vote for Sanders than it did this year.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/comedy-on-the-campaign-trail/

As a spectator sport, politics has rarely been more entertaining. Put aside for the moment the stakes involved, with partisans on both sides claiming that the upcoming election is “the most important in history,” (as was the last one, and the one before that, but this time they really mean it), and take the time to enjoy the pure comedy of it all.

We were told by our educated betters in the media that with the installation of Donald Trump as president the country and the world would face certain decline, with unchecked chaos at home and even worse disorder abroad. Now, three years in, one casts an eye for evidence of such turmoil and finds little. Now those same educated betters inform us that their dire predictions did not come to pass because Mr. Trump has kept his totalitarian impulses largely in check under the burden of a reelection campaign and that if we are so foolish as to return him to office in November those impulses will be unleashed to the peril of civilization.

But consider: our friends on the left, having nominated a losing candidate in 2016, have had these intervening years to find a better one … and this is the group they have thus far settled on: an ancient socialist who has already suffered one heart attack, a youthful mayor of a small Midwestern city, a senator and former law professor who owes her early advancement in academia to a false claim of Native American heritage, a heretofore little-known Midwestern senator, and a doddering former vice president who failed spectacularly in two previous presidential campaigns. How can you not laugh?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/kweisi-mfumes-return-congress-discover-networks/

Last week, Kweisi Mfume — who served as a Democratic member of Congress from 1987-96, and as president of the NAACP from 1996-2004 — defeated 23 opponents in a special primary to determine who will represent the Democratic Party in the upcoming general election on April 28, when the voters in Maryland’s Seventh Congressional District will pick someone to serve out the remaining months of the late Elijah Cummings’ uncompleted term in the House of Representatives. In his acceptance speech, Mfume dedicated his victory to the memory of his longtime friend, Mr. Cummings: “This is for him. This is for him!”

In light of the fact that the population of District Seven is overwhelmingly Democratic, Mfume’s victory in the general election is all but assured. And that triumph will represent the closing of a circle: Cummings filled Mfume’s vacated congressional seat when Mfume resigned from the House in 1996, and now Mfume, nearly a quarter-century later, has come back to succeed Mr. Cummings in that very same seat. Embracing a political orientation that he describes as “very, very progressive,” Mfume is prepared to promote the same leftist policies that Rep. Cummings advanced for 23 years – policies that helped turn Maryland’s Seventh District into a high-crime, high-poverty basket case.

During his first go-round in the U.S. House, Mfume was a highly prominent member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), where he served a stint as chairman. A highly noteworthy tidbit about the CBC is the close relationship it has long had with the legendary Jew-hater Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI). In September 1993, Mfume, in his role as CBC chairman, proudly announced that his Caucus was entering into a “sacred covenant” with Farrakhan’s NOI, meaning that the two organizations would consult with one another on legislative issues and political strategies.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/482718-sanders-drags-democrats-to-the-left-will-it-be-1972-all-over-again

Democratic voters enter the core primary season unsettled and uncertain, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) narrowly won the New Hampshire primary — his second very strong performance — a move that could pull the Democratic Party to the far left and prompt a repeat of its 1972 electoral disaster.

But the contest between the left and moderate wings of the Democratic Party is far from over.

Sanders is an avowed democratic socialist whose “free college” mantra has captured the party’s youth vote, despite his having turned 78 years old. For decades he has lectured against the problems of big banks, an economy that works for the few, and the need for revolutionary change. It is odd — in a time of such great prosperity, low unemployment and rising wages — that his message would resonate.

The short answer is that his “socialist” message rings true to about 20 percent to 25 percent of the electorate — they just all happen to be concentrated among Democratic primary voters. The exit polls, for example, put the voters in the New Hampshire primary at 60 percent liberal while the electorate as a whole is no more than about 25 percent liberal. In a nutshell, this is the problem with today’s parties and the primary system: It is too easy for candidates who are out of step with America to gain traction in the Democratic Party, and this distorts all of Democratic politics among those who want to be president and thus pander to those voters.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/02/10/party_leaders_on_edge_after_democrats_ragged_2020_launch_142356.html

For Democrats, this was supposed be a moment to begin easing three years of built-up of anxieties. Instead, the launch of the 2020 presidential primary has left the party deeply unsettled and President Donald Trump gleeful about the chaos.

Party leaders are on edge over embarrassing technical issues that marred this past week’s Iowa caucuses, as well as lower than expected turnout in the leadoff state. Front-runners Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg face questions about their long-term political viability, while some supporters of the two leading women left in the race — Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — are raising alarms about what they view as persistent sexism.

“It’s a hard start,” said Laura Keeler, a 35-year-old from Concord, New Hampshire.

Indeed, it’s far from the 2020 launchpad most Democrats envisioned as they eagerly anticipated their opportunity to take on Trump. The turbulent start to this election year has also crystallized the challenges confronting Democrats in trying to mount a formidable challenge to an incumbent backed by an energized and united Republican Party and fortified by a soaring economy.