RUTHFULLY YOURS

Loser: Kamala Harris.

Kamala’s bad debate night started when she addressed President Trump right off the cuff. She spoke to Trump “who we all know is watching.” At that very moment, Trump was on stage at the GOP retreat, as Townhall’s Storm Paglia noted. Then Harris tried to say “Yes, we can,” to Biden, who shut her down by referencing the Constitution.

In one of the most memorable moments of the night, moderator Linsey Davis slammed Harris for her flip-flops on criminal justice issues. “When you had the power, why didn’t you try to effect change then?” Davis asked — to loud applause from the audience.

Loser: Pete Buttigieg.

The mayor of South Bend did not stand out at the third Democratic debate. He got in a plug for his Douglas Plan — a kind of nationwide affirmative action scheme — but he did not have a strong moment. Toward the end, he told a sob story about living under Mike Pence when Pence was governor of Indiana. He did emerge as more hopeful on the race issue, stressing the importance of black entrepreneurship.

Loser: Julian Castro.

Castro attempted to reframe the debate around the issue of Joe Biden’s senility, but his attack on Biden did not work. Rather than hitting Biden on the former vice president’s many embarrassing gaffes, Castro attempted to get Biden to admit to a gaffe in the middle of the debate, and it backfired.

Loser: The Protesters.

Right after ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos asked Biden a question about resilience, protesters loudly interrupted. Their uncoordinated shouts became indecipherable. No one could tell why they were interrupting, and Bernie told the vice president to keep speaking and ignore the protesters.

While there were six winners and only four losers, Biden won big. For the first time, I saw a Joe Biden who could actually be president. Naturally, he will likely devolve into his usual gaffetastic self, but for at least this one night he inspired confidence, not mockery. If this debate matters, it largely helps him.

As for the other winners, they had standout moments but were unlikely to join the top three (with the exception of Warren). O’Rourke, Yang, Booker, and Klobuchar may have an outside chance to emerge as a dark horse, but that remains unlikely.

Bernie Sanders really tanked tonight, and Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg also did not have the performances they need to break into the top three.

If this debate were to really make an impact in the race, the 2020 Democratic primary would be shaping up to be a challenge between Biden and Warren

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/winners-and-losers-of-the-third-democratic-debate/

The top ten Democrats faced off for the first time Thursday in the third Democratic debate. Frontrunner and former Vice President Joe Biden faced off with his two closest challengers, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg fought to hold on to their second-tier status, as five other candidates attempted to edge in.

Winner: Joe Biden.

The former vice president decided to go on offense Thursday night, and it worked well. He attacked Sanders and Warren on health care, pointing out the extremely high cost of Medicare for All and the fact that a fully single-payer overhaul would cause Americans to lose their health insurance.

Winner: Elizabeth Warren.

Liz Warren played it safe in this debate. She didn’t go after Biden and she mostly played to her strengths: mentioning her complicated policy plans, pushing for environmentalists and human rights activists to be at the table in trade talks with China, and reminding Americans that she was a schoolteacher.Warren has become a driving force of energy in the Democratic field in recent weeks, but that energy seemed muted this evening. Even so, her policy-heavy campaign seems well-tailored for success, especially if Biden and Bernie falter. She did not advance much tonight, but she didn’t falter, either.

Winner: Beto O’Rourke.

The third Democratic debate took place in Houston, Texas, Beto O’Rourke’s home turf. Debate moderators and candidates mentioned the shooting in El Paso, turning to pay homage to him as the local.

O’Rourke received loud applause for his line about gun confiscation: “Hell yes, we’re gonna take your AR-15, your AK-47!” he declared. Many liberals and journalists suggested this line defeated the argument for the Second Amendment and gun ownership.

Winner: Andrew Yang.

Yang received the lowest amount of time during the debate, but he used his time very well. He made news by announcing that he would give $1,000 per month away to ten families for one year to illustrate his central promise, the “Freedom Dividend,” a Universal Basic Income (UBI) strategy to replace many forms of welfare.

Winner: Cory Booker.

Booker proved well-spoken and surprisingly balanced on a few issues.

At one point, Castro attacked charter schools, declaring, “It is a myth that charter schools are better than public schools. They’re not.” Booker responded by insisting that in Newark he closed poor-performing charter schools but he supported charter schools that did well. (By the way, an exhaustive review of the data on charter schools found that charter elementary schools outperform traditional public schools in reading and math, while the superiority of charter high schools is less certain.)

Winner: Amy Klobuchar.

Klobuchar mostly had a forgettable debate performance, but she enjoyed a standout moment when discussing Bernie’s Medicare for All bill. “While Bernie wrote the bill, I read the bill, and on page 8, on page 8 of the bill, it says that we will no longer have private insurance as we know it. … I don’t think that’s a bold idea. I think it it’s a bad idea,” she declared.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/11/warren-mimics-bernies-promotion-anti-semite-linda-sarsour-campaign-surrogate/

Given Linda Sarsour’s record, her claim that she supports Bernie Sanders because of rising anti-Semitism in America is irony thick enough to cut with a chainsaw.

Personnel is policy, or so the saying goes. So it is troubling that the two leading left-wing presidential candidates—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—are empowering people who at best hate Israel and support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement intended to destroy the Jewish state.

Over the weekend, Sanders tweeted a video identifying Linda Sarsour as a campaign surrogate:

Bernie Sanders

✔ @BernieSanders

“I would be so proud to win, but also to make history and elect the first Jewish American president this country has ever seen and for his name to be Bernard Sanders.” –@lsarsour

Sarsour’s record on Israel and Jews is no secret. She supports a one-state solution to Palestinian attacks on Israel that would effectively destroy the Jewish state. In 2012, she tweeted that “Nothing is creepier than Zionism.” She has claimed Zionists cannot be feminists. Sarsour supports the BDS campaign which, as Anti-Defamation League director Jonathan Greenblatt notes, “encourages and spreads anti-Semitism.”

In 2017, she literally embraced Rasmea Odeh, a convicted terrorist who killed two Hebrew University students in 1969. At last year’s convention of the Islamic Society of North America, she accused the Israeli police and military of training American police to kill blacks, and opposed humanizing Israelis.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/republican-dan-bishop-wins-north-carolina-congressional-seat-with-trumps-support-11568168459?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=contextual&cx_artPos=2#cxrecs_s

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Voters in a conservative congressional district picked President Trump ally Republican Dan Bishop in Tuesday’s special election instead of a Democrat who had promised to seek compromise in Washington.

Mr. Bishop, a 55-year-old state senator who campaigned on a promise to be in lockstep with Mr. Trump, defeated Democrat Dan McCready in the Ninth Congressional District based in the suburbs of Charlotte.

In his victory speech, Mr. Bishop said he would go to Washington to protect the border, fight Democrats in the House and support the Trump agenda. “Under this president, America is great again,” he said.

Mr. McCready, a 36-year-old veteran and entrepreneur, had campaigned as a centrist, emphasizing his service as a Marine in the Iraq war and pledging to put country over party.

Mr. McCready said late Tuesday he was proud that the campaign came so close to carrying a reliably Republican district. “We may not have won this campaign, but that does not mean that we were wrong,” he said. “As long as there are people who thrive off our division, there is still work to be done,” he said.

The GOP victory in the rare do-over election was a boon to Mr. Trump, who tweeted his support repeatedly for Mr. Bishop and campaigned for him Monday in Fayetteville, a military town at the far eastern edges of the district. Vice President Mike Pence came to the state for Mr. Bishop on Monday in Union County, a GOP stronghold. Mr. Trump won the district by 12 percentage points in 2016.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-the-rest-of-democratic-primary-field-has-embraced-open-borders/

Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D., Hawaii) derided her fellow Democratic presidential candidates during a recent interview for embracing permissive immigration policies, accusing them of support for “open borders.”

Asked if she believes “open borders” is a fair descriptor of the positions embraced by her Democratic primary opponents, Gabbard told YouTube host Dave Rubin that it was an accurate label and dismissed the oft-repeated Democratic rejoinder that conservatives use the phrase to tar their political adversaries.

“I don’t support open borders. Without secure borders, we don’t really have a country,” she said. “And while some of the other Democratic candidates will say ‘well, open borders that’s a conservative argument and that’s not really what’s being advocated for’ — if you look at the practical implications of some of the things they’re advocating for, it is essentially open borders.”

Long-shot presidential contender Julian Castro, the former secretary of housing and urban development under President Obama, managed to pull the Democratic primary field leftward on immigration during the campaign’s first debate, by asking those on stage to commit to decriminalizing illegal border crossings. All ten candidates on stage, with the notable exception of Beto O’Rourke, endorsed Castro’s plan, as did eight out of the ten candidates who took the stage the following night.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/mattis-says-hed-wouldnt-have-been-so-critical-of-biden-in-memoir-if-he-knew-hed-run-for-president/

On CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, former Defense Secretary James Mattis said he regrets being so critical of Joe Biden in his memoir since he didn’t know at the time he was writing that Biden would run for president.

In an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Margaret Brennan read him an excerpt from his new book “Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead,” in which he harshly criticizes the former vice president.

“You wrote, ‘He exuded the confidence of a man whose mind was made up, perhaps even indifferent to considering the consequences were he judging the situation incorrectly,’” Ms. Brennan said.

“Well, I was writing a history book at that point, Margaret, because I started writing this book in 2013,” Mr. Mattis replied. “Had I known the former vice president was going to run for office, I assure you I would not have probably been that forthcoming.”

“Are you raising questions about his judgment?” Ms. Brennan asked.

“I think the Obama administration, President Obama’s administration had made the decision to leave Iraq despite what the intelligence community was telling us what would happen,” Mr. Mattis said. “They were very clear that an al Qaeda-associated group would rise, that the Iraqi government, the Iraqi people, the Iraqi nation was in a post-combat, pre-reconciliation phase. We needed to keep our influence there a little longer.”

While many in the media were hoping for a scandalous tell-all about his time in the Trump administration, Mattis’s memoir has instead proven to be very unflattering to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The biggest bombshell so far has been Mattis’s revelation that Obama chose not to respond to an Iranian bomb plot on American soil in order to protect his terrible nuclear deal.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/08/biden-or-bust/

For better or worse, the Democratic establishment apparently has decided it has no choice but to embrace the former vice president. Can he be propped up and pampered for the next 14 months?

Pundits and politicos play the current parlor game of counting Joe Biden’s daily bloopers, signs of debility, or embarrassments.

Unlike former “Apprentice” host Donald Trump’s exaggerations and narcissisms, Biden’s fantasies are not baked into an outsider candidacy that by intent offers as a radical change of policy, a tough presidential tone, and unconventional political tactics. Trump is a renegade. Biden remains what he always was—a deep state fixture. And his brand is mainstream Democrat left-liberal orthodoxy, which supposedly does not include weird and wild La La Land pronouncements.

Also, Trump is hated by a media that is 90 percent negative in its coverage of his every word, deed, and sneeze. In contrast, the media is in the Biden tank.

So the reaction to the respective boilerplate gaffes and untruths of each is quite different: when Trump is caught mythologizing, his supporters blame the “fake news” media for taking things out of context—confusing his jest with seriousness, or conflating normal exaggeration and bombast with mortal-sin lying.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/tulsi-gabbard-disagrees-with-other-democrats-on-impeachment/

Although her fellow Democrats over in the House of Representatives are finally yielding to the fringe mob on the subject of impeaching President Trump, Sen. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) isn’t on board with the idea.

The Hill:

Rep.  Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) said in a new interview that she opposes an effort by dozens of House Democrats for an impeachment inquiry into the president, saying it would cause further divisions within the U.S.

In an interview on “Full Court Press with Greta Van Susteren,” the 2020 candidate for president took a firm stance against impeachment, putting her at odds with other Democratic candidates for president including Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

“I don’t [support impeachment,]” Gabbard said. “You know, I think it’s important for us to think about what is in the best interest of the country and the American people, and continuing to pursue impeachment is something that I think will only further to tear our country apart.”

Gabbard has been one of the more sensible Democratic presidential candidates thus far so, naturally, she’s not getting much traction and didn’t qualify for the next debate.