RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/democrats-no-longer-dismiss-bernie-sanderss-odds/

If he won Iowa, the party might unite behind an Anybody But Bernie candidate.

In 2016, insurgent candidates roiled the nomination process of both major parties. Donald Trump, running as a populist, won 44 percent of the primary vote against a divided field and won the GOP nomination. Bernie Sanders, running as an unabashed socialist, also won 44 percent in the Democratic race against Hillary Clinton, despite her success in using the Democratic National Committee to kneecap Sanders. But because Sanders faced only one opponent, he lost.

This year, Sanders is back, and the old saw that one way to win your party’s nomination is to have run for it before may apply. (See Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Hillary Clinton).

In 2019, Sanders raised an eye-popping $100 million. The grassroots he cultivated in Iowa and New Hampshire four years ago have vaulted him into first place in both states in the RealClearPolitics average of all polls.

Sanders also has the backing of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and is the only candidate offering a full-throated defense of Medicare for All, now that Elizabeth Warren has admitted she wouldn’t push for it during the first two years of her presidency. For a 78-year-old who suffered a heart attack last fall and has always insisted on serving in Congress as an independent, he displays an astounding resilience that rivals that of Trump.

Sanders supporters insist that the only way to beat someone like Trump is with someone who shares with him his authenticity, his disdain for protocol, and, like him, offers a radical break from past policies. Only that will energize a disillusioned, nonvoting army of left-wingers that mirrors the blue-collar voters in the Midwest who turned out for Trump and delivered him the presidency.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/bernie_sanders_soars_over_iowa__and_democrats_cringe_below.html

Democrats are shuddering at a new poll showing that Bernie Sanders is soaring over Iowa.

According to the Des Moines Register:

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders leads the Democratic field three weeks ahead of Caucus Day in Iowa — narrowly overtaking his closest competitors, who remain locked in a tight contest just behind him.

A new Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows 20% of likely Democratic caucusgoers name Sanders as their first choice for president.

After a surge of enthusiasm that pushed Pete Buttigieg to the top of the field in November, the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor has faded, falling 9 percentage points to land behind both Sanders and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Warren is at 17%; Buttigieg, 16%; and former Vice President Joe Biden, 15%.

 After all that hard slogging over the last 12 months, from Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro and the rest of the Democrat clown car to win the state, it looks like Bernie of all people, is going to walk away with it.

Which is bad news for Democrats.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/leading_democrat_presidential_contenders_struggle_with_being_white_and_boring.html

With another Democrat debate coming next week, it’s impossible for a conservative not to enjoy watching Democrats agonize over their candidates’ whiteness, ignore their affluence, and pretend that there’s a groundswell of support for any of them. The excitement surrounding Trump is completely absent.

At the Washington Post, Annie Linskey, shares Democrat worries that their primary debate next week will have only white faces on the stage:

Only white candidates have qualified for next week’s Democratic presidential debate, the first time in this election cycle that no minority contender will make the stage. It’s a dynamic that critics say threatens to undercut the party’s rhetoric of inclusivity.

The race for the 2020 Democratic nomination kicked off last year with a historically diverse pool of candidates, including two black senators, a black mayor, a Hispanic former Cabinet secretary and an Asian businessman. Since then, all have either dropped out or failed to qualify for a spot on the stage, determined by poll numbers and donations.

Now the specter of an all-white debate in the mostly white state of Iowa is prompting concern among party activists.

 Live by identity politics, die by identity politics. The irony, of course, is that the politically incorrect people who refuse to give their votes to minority candidates are Democrats.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-deterrence-policy-stop-trump-11578528412?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Aside from the stunning photograph of Qasem Soleimani’s mangled car outside Baghdad airport, the most astonishing sight after the attack was the universal ambivalence, at best, from Democrats.

Not long ago—before Donald Trump—any president’s use of force against an overseas enemy would get at least 24 hours of partisan restraint. No more. The Democrats’ jack-in-the-box talking point was that Mr. Trump had brought us to “the brink of war.

Startled by this reaction, former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman wrote in these pages: “It may be that today’s Democratic Party simply doesn’t believe in the use of force against America’s enemies in the world. I don’t believe that is true, but episodes like this one may lead many Americans to wonder.”

If the party’s presidential front-runner is any barometer, the use of credible force is off the table. In a foreign-policy speech Tuesday, Joe Biden said, “The only way out of this crisis is through diplomacy—clear-eyed, hard-nosed diplomacy grounded in strategy.”

There you have it: In the mind of Joe Biden—former vice president, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his party’s most notable “moderate”—the only two policy paths available are “war with Iran” (his words) and diplomacy. When did national strategy get so simple, or simplistic?

A byproduct of Mr. Trump’s maddening persona is that it causes his opponents to lose their ability to think straight—about anything. Mr. Trump has been president for more than 1,000 days, but you would think from the commentary and coverage that every moment has been an exercise in moronic idiocy, without exception—including killing the head of Iran’s Quds Force.

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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/reaganmccarthy/2020/01/07/john-james-outraises-gary-peters-for-the-second-quarter-in-a-row-in-michigan-senate-race-n2559087
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It is now officially an election year, and although President Trump will be at the top of the ballot, the fight for control of the Senate may be even more contentious. Democrats have their eyes on a few GOP swing states, including Arizona, Colorado, Iowa and Maine; the GOP also has its sights set on flipping a few blue states, including Michigan. The seat at play is currently held by Gary Peters (D-MI), who was elected to the seat in 2014. Peters is a relatively low-profile senator and has little real name recognition among his constituents.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/01/bernie-sanders-killing-terrorist-putting-muslims-daniel-greenfield/

With Beto O’Rourke out of the race, it’s up to Bernie Sanders to come up with the best hot take on the killing of Soleimani. And he delivers exactly the sort of rambling senile socialist rant you would expect from Jeremy Corbyn. All he leaves out is throwing around “empire”, “endless war”, and “neo-liberalism”. And then blaming the whole thing on corporations. But at least he manages to compare Trump to Putin and Xi.

SANDERS: No, I think it was an assassination. I think it was in violation of international law. This guy was (INAUDIBLE) — was a bad news guy, but he was a ranking official of the Iranian government.

And Baghdadi was the ranking head of the Islamic State.

So what?

If a foreign government official decides to engage in terrorist operations, he’s a terrorist. The silly argument that Soleimani can’t be killed because he has an official title is nonsense. Terrorists don’t stop being terrorists because they have titles.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/07/democratic-primary-2020-095090

DAVENPORT, Iowa — The new year is taking the presidential primary to a dark place in the nation’s first caucus state.

President Donald Trump’s impending impeachment trial and fear of war with Iran — as well as the Australia wildfires and their implications for climate change — quickly cast a pall over a contest in which Democrats are already wracked with uncertainty about which candidate has the best chance of defeating Trump.

All across Iowa hangs an air of heightened distress, which the candidates are readily leaning into.

“I tell you all these things not to get you nervous, but to get you depressed,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, speaking about climate change, said at a town hall meeting in Grundy Center, Iowa, over the weekend.

Hours later in Des Moines, it was Joe Biden describing the state of Trump’s presidency more broadly as “extremely, extremely worrisome.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren admonished supporters in Davenport that “this is a time of crisis in this country.”

Democrats have fretted for more than a year about how to choose a nominee. And for those who loathe Trump, the imperative to remove him from office has remained high since the minute he won election in 2016.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/bernie_compares_soleimani_to_a_russian_dissident.html

One of the things that became very obvious about the Left beginning with 9/11 is that Leftists consider anyone who hates America to be virtuous in some way. It’s irrelevant to them that some America-haters are, within their own countries, people who are legitimately fighting for freedom, while others are actively seeking to impose totalitarianism wherever they can. To a Leftist, America hating is the beginning and the end. Actors’ ideologies and motives are irrelevant.

This world view is how Leftists can come out with statments that are morally blind. Many of us remember that Michael Moore compared the 9/11 killers, who dreamed of a world subordinate to sharia’s brutalities, to America’s Minutemen, who dreamed of a world of small government, individual liberty, and religious freedom. 

We also see this moral blindness Bernie Sanders, one of the Democrat frontrunners. In an interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN about Trump’s decision to terminate Soleimani, Bernie Sanders likened Soleimani, with the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hand, to a dissident in a totalitarian country fighting against his or her own repressive government:

. . . but this guy is, you know, was as bad as he was, an official of the Iranian government. And you unleash . . . then, if China does that, you know, if Russia does that. You know, Russia has been implicated under Putin with assassinating dissidents.