RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/congressional-democrats-moderates-are-being-played/

They’re starting to realize it, too.

F or the last two months, a ragtag group of parvenue political extremists has somehow managed to convince the leadership of the Democratic Party that what the swiftly ailing Biden presidency really needs at this moment is an acrimonious standoff over spending. More impressive yet, these radicals have managed to make it seem as if the blame for the standoff lies not at their own gormandizing feet, but with those whom they have routinely harassed. If, as they must, the Democrats wish to avoid a further collapse in their fortunes, they must snap out of this reverie and call their browbeaters’ bluff.

The progressives’ ploy rests upon their claim that the Democratic Party has just two political options before it: To go big, or to go home. More specifically, it rests upon their declaration that Bernie Sanders’s gargantuan, nation-changing reconciliation bill is nonnegotiable, and that, as a result, everything else that Congress does must be contingent upon its passage. Summing up this position last night, Representative Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) confirmed that she and her like-minded colleagues intend to kill even the colossal infrastructure legislation that has passed the Senate if they don’t get what they want. “Try us,” Jayapal told reporters who questioned how serious she could possibly be.

Underpinning Jayapal’s strategy is the asseveration that the Democrats will lose badly in next year’s midterm elections if they do not pass something enormous. But this, of course, is nonsense. Certainly, there are some political risks associated with President Biden’s achieving nothing at all this year. But there is an extraordinary amount of space between doing nothing at all and engaging in the largest spending binge since the New Deal on a panicked, party-line vote. It is, of course, to be expected that the progressives in the party will try to spend as much money as possible; that is what progressives do. But, by pretending that the whole party is doomed if they don’t get their own way, they are doing the rest of their colleagues no favors at all. There is political hardball, and then there is assisted suicide, and the Jayapal plan is beginning to resemble the latter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/opinion/Ritchie-Torres-AOC.html

Ritchie Torres, a congressman from America’s poorest district — New York’s 15th, in the Bronx — quietly bristles at the A.O.C. comparison.

“There’s a sense in which the media narrative diminishes me,” he tells me over plates of pasta at a restaurant in the Bronx’s Little Italy when I raise the subject of his notorious fellow Democrat from an adjoining district, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I resist the temptation to fit into a preconceived narrative. My career in politics long predates the Squad.”

No need to explain who and what is meant by the Squad — the House members seen by some as the bright dawning of a new Democratic Party and by others as the Four Horsewomen of the Wokepocalypse. Not long after our lunch, A.O.C. once again became Topic A of national conversation for posturing politically while posing pictorially at the Met Gala.

The bigger mystery is why Torres (who was emphatically not at the gala) hasn’t yet become a household name in the United States. On the identity-and-background scorecard, he checks every progressive box. Afro-Latino, the son of a single mom who raised three children working as a mechanic’s assistant on a minimum-wage salary of $4.25 an hour, a product of public housing and public schools, a half brother of two former prison inmates, an N.Y.U. dropout, the Bronx’s first openly gay elected official when he won a seat on the City Council in 2013 at the age of 25 and the victor over a gay-bashing Christian minister when he won his House seat last year.

He’s dazzlingly smart. He sees himself “on a mission to radically reduce racially concentrated poverty in the Bronx and elsewhere in America.”

In other words, Torres is everything a modern-day progressive is supposed to look and be like, except in one respect: Unlike so much of the modern left (including A.O.C., who grew up as an architect’s daughter in the middle-class Westchester town of Yorktown Heights), he really is a child of the working class. He understands what working-class people want, as opposed to what so many of its self-appointed champions claim they want.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/american-politics-reaches-its-worse-than-trump-phase/

After four years spent painting Trump as a unique threat to the nation, progressive pundits have begun moving on to new villains.

D elivering into the political ether a line that had hitherto been reserved to satirists, MSNBC’s Dean Obeidallah proposed on Tuesday that Florida governor Ron DeSantis is “more dangerous than Trump.” “Former President Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to our nation, at least, if you support our democratic republic,” Obeidallah wrote. “But DeSantis is more dangerous.”

That was quick.

The proximate cause of Dean Obeidallah’s ire is that Ron DeSantis isn’t setting the same masking rules for children as Dean Obeidallah would if Dean Obeidallah were the governor of Florida. Given that the CDC lists a national child-hospitalization rate of 0.5 per million — which, as the Wall Street Journal notes, “would amount to roughly 25 patients,” not all of whom are even “in the hospital for Covid” — I strongly disagree with Obeidallah’s assessment. But I’m aware that the details aren’t really the point here: This is simply how Democrats begin to talk about Republican candidates whom they believe are capable of winning a national election. When such candidates reach office, they’re Hitler. When they’ve left office, they’re bad, but not as bad as the ones in office. And when they’re dead, they’re the sort of Republicans whom the living ones should be more like — yes, even if, when they were alive, they, too, were deemed to be Hitler. The assertion that “DeSantis is worse than Trump” was inevitable from the moment Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.

One of the main reasons it proved so difficult to convince primary voters that Trump was bad news in 2015 was that those voters had been told the same scary things about almost every Republican candidate since Eisenhower. Barry Goldwater was an extremist who was going to kill us all. Ronald Reagan was an extremist who was going to kill us all. So was George W. Bush. So were John McCain and Mitt Romney. So, even, were the host of primary opponents Trump faced in 2015 — many of whom were cast by mainstream writers such as Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, Eugene Robinson, and Paul Krugman as being less desirable candidates than Trump himself. As it turned out, many of the criticisms that the American Left leveled against Trump were correct. In the vast majority of cases, however, that’s not why they were leveled; they were leveled because they’re always leveled, irrespective of the justification for leveling them.

This being so, it should not be a great surprise that progressives are busy trying to cast DeSantis as “Trump 2.0” — nor, indeed, that they hope to cast anyone who has ever interacted with the 45th president as a troglodyte insurrectionist. But there is no reason for the rest of us to fall for it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/good-omens-2022-now-bruce-thornton/

The midterms are over a year-and-a-half away, which is a life-time in politics. But the Biden administration’s egregious incompetence and political tin ear are good omens for Republican chances of taking back the House and even the Senate.

Let’s start with the chaos at the border, and out-of-control and illegal immigration, one of the issues that helped Donald Trump win in 2016. The progressives want us to believe that the xenophobia and racism of the “deplorables” and “bitter clingers” accounted for Trump’s success. But quasi-open borders and sanctuary cities that protect felons and gangster are unpopular with most voters, including Latinos and blacks who bear the lethal cost of policies promoted by tony cognitive elites who don’t have to pay for their juvenile idealism.

Once the crisis exploded, Kamala Harris––or “Que mala” as she was called in El Paso––worsened the optics of the disorder: coyotes and cartel human traffickers getting rich; children penned up in “cages,” to use the Dems’ hyperbole; endless throngs in the hundreds of thousands streaming over the Rio Grande in broad delight, and being welcomed ashore by border agents. And her uncontrollable cackle and obvious lack of preparation reinforced the administration’s fecklessness.

And who can forget Kamala’s lame “root causes” rationalizations for conditions created by Biden’s reversal of all Trump’s policies that had the border under control? Guatemala’s president set the record straight when he fingered Biden’s irresponsible statement that the U.S. would “reunite families,” and his virtue-signaling rhetoric that accompanied his repudiation of Trump’s policies like the “Remain in Mexico” protocol for asylum seekers. If the Republicans are smart, the copious dramatic videos from this disaster will be broadcast 24/7.

Next, the Dems and the politicized DOJ have attacked states like Arizona and Georgia that are cleaning up their election laws to restore electoral integrity. Arizona’s reforms have been vindicated by the Supreme Court, which makes AG Merritt Garland’s witch-hunt pretty much DOA. The dishonest “voter suppression” rationale, one predicated on the insulting claim that blacks are too incompetence to secure photo I.D.s or find a polling place, is not convincing anybody beyond the hard-core Democrat constiuency of race-hustlers and electoral fraudsters. Most ordinary citizens outside the blue-state progressive silos want their votes to count, instead of being cancelled by fake ballots.

No more convincing are the desperate rationales for the steep increases in violent crime ever since George Floyd’s death while in police custody last May rationalized big-city mayors’ pull-back of their police forces, allowing BLM and their Antifa black-shirts to run wild for months. Worse, many Democrat mayors and politicians endorsed BLM’s “defund the police” demands, which created the Ferguson Effect on steroids. No surprise that cops have been retiring in droves, and gun-thugs are taking over public spaces. Finally, not content with their policy blunders, the Dems are trying to sell voters on the idea that Republicans’ have been defunding the police because they’re resisting Biden’s print-tax-and-spend bills. Voters aren’t going to fall for the old Marxist (Groucho and Karl) principle, “Who are you gonna believe, me or your own lying eyes?”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/will_american_jews_follow_their_british_cousins_in_repudiating_jewhatred.html

There was an editorial last week in The Free Beacon positing that due to anti-Semitism within its ranks, the Democrat party will mimic the electoral defeat of England’s Labor Party, which is similarly plagued by anti-Semitism.  The Ilhan Omar–Ocasio-Cortez–Tlaib trio, as well as many members of various Democrat congressional caucuses, are open enemies of Israel’s existence and redolent with anti-Semitic pejoratives.  The Beacon’s theory is that just as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor Party was shunned by Jews and many in the public, thereby losing the last election to the Tories, so will Democrats lose to Republicans in 2022.  Nancy Pelosi in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate, though themselves not anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, continue to allow this anti-Semitism in their party, and Pelosi goes farther by publicly and proudly embracing the Squad and especially Omar.

The Beacon should have given its supposition a bit more scrutiny, for there is a big difference between the repudiation of the Labor Party in England and the situation here with the Democrat party.  In Britain, virtually every Jew, Jewish organization, and Jewish politician spoke against the anti-Semitism and severe anti-Israelism happening within the Labor Party.  Their disgust was across the board, and many Jewish Laborites spoke of leaving the Labor Party…and did.  The entire Jewish community was alarmed by what was happening and growing within Labor’s ranks and leadership, spotlighted it as the anti-Semitic party, and worked hard for Labor’s defeat.

In contrast, here in America, we do not hear or see the majority of Jews repudiating the Democrat party.  Not at all!  The Democrats have lost basically none of their previous 70% Jewish support.  If one removes the Orthodox support for Republicans, the Jewish Democrat support is as high as 80%.  Nor has any of the Jewish politicians threatened to leave the Democrat party.  In fact, a dozen or so Jewish congressmen have joined and led others to further tighten Joe Biden’s grip over Israel, and many Jewish Democrat politicians continue to defend Ilhan Omar and whitewash everything she says, calling her critics Islamophobes.  And while some Jewish organizations have criticized Omar herself, none of the major establishment organizations has made any condemnation of the Democrat party per se, as was done against Labor by England’s Jewish organizations.  Dismayingly, non-Orthodox American Jews continue to stand solidly behind the Democrat party today, just as they did last Nov. 3 and many years previous.