RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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

On Sunday, six days after the Iowa Caucuses took place, the Iowa Democrat Party finally released the 2020 Results. Based upon the complicated, vaguely parliamentary-style algorithm that Iowa uses, Buttigieg won 14 delegates, and Bernie trailed him with 12 delegates. Warren eked out 8 delegates, former frontrunner Biden got 6, and Klobuchar got 1 delegate. None of the candidates got anything out of their Iowa efforts:

With 38-year-old Buttigieg having leaped to prominence in Iowa, it’s time to remind everyone of a few pertinent facts:

1. Between 1972 and 2010, nine of the Iowa Democrat caucus winners secured their parties’ nomination (although both Clinton and Obama were unopposed during their second-term runs). However, of those nine, only three – Carter, Clinton, and Obama – won the presidency. Buttigieg now has the potential to win the primaries.

2. Buttigieg was raised in an extremely Marxist home:

The father of Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin.

[snip]

He supported an updated version of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel’s more doctrinaire theories, though he was undoubtedly Marxist.

[snip]

Paul Kengor, a professor at Grove City College and an expert in communism and progressivism, said Buttigieg was among a group of leftist professors who focused on injecting Marxism into the wider culture.

In sum, just as was the case with Barack Obama and his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, Buttigieg grew up steeped in Marxism.

3. Although Buttigieg is now challenging Bernie, when Buttigieg was a high school senior, he thought Sanders the most admirable politician in America:

One outstanding and inspiring example of such integrity is the country’s only Independent Congressman, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders.