RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/02/17/despite-what-youve-heard-bloomberg-is-no-centrist/

Michael Bloomberg has been blanketing the airwaves with ads that tout his up-by-his-bootstraps success, his can-do attitude, his supposed ability to unite the country. “Mike can get it done,” the ads declare, without indicating what “it” is.

Bloomberg’s spending spree has not only been translating into a rise in the polls, it’s cementing his claim to be a centrist, at least among pundits. Even on the right, that’s how he’s being described.

The New York Post’s Michael Goodwin called him “the great centrist hope for Democrats to defeat Trump.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan opined recently that “Biden’s collapse created a vacuum in the center, and the former mayor has the money and will to fill it.”

Has anyone calling Bloomberg a centrist bothered to look at his campaign website, rather than just listen to his campaign ads?

On issue after issue, Bloomberg is as radical, or slightly less so, than socialist Bernie Sanders. In fact, on taxes, health care, the environment, gun control, there is little light between the two.

Here’s a rundown.

https://pjmedia.com/election/klobuchar-tacks-left-on-immigration-in-nevada-looking-for-hispanic-support/

Something almost magical happens when relatively moderate Democrats begin to run for president. They forget how to be moderate and become flaming left-wingers.

“Moderate” Democrat Joe Biden once opposed busing kids halfway across his tiny state of Delaware to go to school. Now, despite almost everyone else opposing busing to achieve racial “equality,” he supports it.

“Moderate” Michael Bloomberg was once a law and order mayor of New York. Now, he’s apologizing for being so effective.

Then there’s “moderate” Senator Amy Klobuchar who once cast a vote to make English the “official” language of the United States. Now, she talks up her love of “diversity.”

In Klobuchar’s case, her maverick campaign has hit the wall. It’s a racial and ethnic wall that she’s never had to deal with as a politician before, being from the mostly white state of Minnesota and achieving some success in mostly white Iowa and New Hampshire.

But this is a whole new ballgame in Nevada, where Hispanics and blacks make up a significant part of the Democratic electorate. So, she has to find a way to bury her past embarrassing votes that weren’t left-wing enough and claim allegiance to the “true faith” of Democratic politics: pandering to voters based on the color of their skin.

Associated Press:

Campaigning in Las Vegas, the three-term Minnesota senator said Friday that she has changed her stance since voting for an English-language amendment in 2007 and has “taken a strong position against” it. She also blasted President Donald Trump for using immigrants as “wedges” and said as president she would work with Republicans to achieve comprehensive immigration reform.

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

For Democrats frightened by either an openly socialist candidate or an untested man whom blacks dislike, the seemingly “reasonable” choices are an ex-Republican, sexist, anti-Second Amendment, micro-managing despot — and Amy Klobuchar, the meanest Senator in Washington. It’s time to remember that Klobuchar has no fixed principles but will, instead, do whatever it takes to advance herself in the Democrat Party.

On Friday, Klobuchar’s latest opportunistic move was to announce at a campaign event in Las Vegas that English should not be America’s official language, even though she voted for a Senate bill that would have made English the official language. She now says that she has “taken a strong position against” the English language in America, although she cannot seem to explain her past vote. One can certainly explain her current turnabout, though, despite her efforts to keep her various immigration positions opaque:

Her policy shift comes a week before the caucuses are set to take place in a state with a large Latino population and an area where Klobuchar has about 10 percent support.

Klobuchar has flip-flopped on immigration policies, once supporting projects like a wall and E-Verify to ban employers from hiring illegal aliens back in 2006.

The Minnesota senator has also been open about supporting amnesty but has hidden her support for exporting college graduate-level jobs overseas.

This conduct is typical Klobuchar. The PowerLine blog, which is headquartered in Minnesota, has been reporting on Klobuchar for years, revealing a calculating progressive who uses “Minnesota nice” as a way to avoid being tagged for the controversial and often inconsistent stands she takes.

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

Although Bloomberg quickly backed away from Hillary, the proposal was worth it just to see the responses people had to the idea.

It was a Drudge Report headline calculated to shock: “Exclusive: Bloomberg Considers Hillary Running Mate. The underlying story, at CNBC, stated that the Drudge Report itself was claiming that a source close to Mike Bloomberg’s campaign had stated that Bloomberg was considering asking Hillary Clinton to serve as his running mate. The reason given was that internal polling said that the two of them together would be a dynamic duo.

The story was met with incredulity and much hilarity (if you’ll pardon the pun). The idea that Hillary Clinton would play second fiddle to anyone was hard to fathom. Moreover, given Hillary’s grating personality, the collapse of all her initiatives during her stint as Secretary of State, her habit of enriching herself at the country’s expense, and her failed candidacy, it was hard to imagine why anyone would want her on the ballot.

Twitter, the repository of clever one-liners, had a wonderful time imagining what a Bloomberg/Hillary pairing would look like and the effect it would have on Trump’s campaign:

Perhaps because of the negative response, the Bloomberg campaign quickly “downplayed,” but did not deny, the idea:

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?