RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/ilhan_omar_calls_still_calls_somalia_her_country.html

Does Ilhan Omar represent the Fifth Congressional District of Minnesota? That’s her official job. But buried in the back of her mind, ready to spring out in unguarded or stressful moments, seems to be the notion that her real country is Somalia.

Streiff of Red State notes that there is a pattern of her speaking of Somalia, which she left at about the age of 8, as her country, not the nation from which she draws a substantial salary ad whose Constitution she is sworn to protect.

Chris Berg on Twitter spotted a Freudian slip which Omar quickly caught, when she returned to MSP Airport last week, to be greeted by 100 or so cheering supporters. The fact that she corrected herself is significant, indicating that she realizes that she must present a false front to her ostensible constituents in Minnesota.

And Streiff posts another example from 2015 in which, speaking to the “Revolution Somali Youth League, she called Somalia “our nation.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thelma-and-louise-go-to-israel-11563835181

The Democratic Party’s Thelma and Louise—Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar—are taking their act to Israel. In a great gift to Donald Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going to let them in.

In Hollywood’s feminist buddy flick, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon hit the road in a 1966 Ford Thunderbird convertible. They make bad choice after bad choice, defying authority and turning the tables on men who abuse or annoy them. They thoroughly enjoy every minute.

In the real-life Beltway version, the Michigander (Ms. Tlaib) and the Minnesotan (Ms. Omar) constitute half of “The Squad”—the four female House progressives who are defying the convention that freshman members of Congress are to be seen and not heard. Ms. Tlaib is the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress and speaks often of her grandmother in the West Bank. She has endorsed a “one state” solution under which Israel would cease to exist.

Ms. Omar came to America after fleeing Somalia. Her election marked several congressional firsts: the first Somali-American, the first naturalized citizen from Africa, the first nonwhite woman from Minnesota, and one of the first two Muslim women (along with Ms. Tlaib).

Part of their notoriety comes from their willingness to match President Trump’s outrages and raise them. More comes from their willingness to clap back at their own leaders, even if that means accusing Speaker Nancy Pelosi of racism. They remain largely unrepentant—and energized.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/23/tulsi-gabbard-breaks-candidates-says-decriminalizing-border-crossings-lead-open-borders/

2020 presidential candidate U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) said she is “looking at” supporting other candidates in their calls to decriminalize illegal U.S. border crossings but that she is concerned such a policy would lead to open borders.

“That’s something that I’m looking at,” Gabbard told the hosts on ABC’s “The View” on whether she supports the policy. “I think decriminalizing could lead to open borders. We need safe, secure borders in this country.”

Rival 2020 candidate and former secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro was the first to advocate for the policy that the other Democratic presidential candidates rapidly adopted.

During the second night of last month’s presidential primary debates in Miami, nearly every candidate raised his or her hand when asked if they supported eliminating legal penalties for those who ignore U.S. immigration laws. The only candidates who did not raise their hand were U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and former Vice President Joe Biden, who raised his hand half-way in a gesture to the moderators to explain his stance on the issue.

Other prominent Democrats have come out to criticize the proposal. Former U.S. secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, who served under President Barack Obama, blasted the idea in the Washington Post as “tantamount to open borders.”

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/23/politics/beto-orourke-trump-rally/index.html

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke said in an interview Monday that a campaign event held by President Donald Trump last week “was almost an impromptu Nuremberg rally,” implicating Trump supporters with an invocation of Nazism.

“Yes, President Trump is a racist. What we saw in North Carolina last week was almost an impromptu Nuremberg rally, inciting hatred and ultimately, I think implicit in that, is violence against people based on the color of their skin, based on their religion, based on their difference from the majority of Americans,” O’Rourke told ABC News. “And it is in keeping the President who describes Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, who describes asylum seekers as animals or an infestation, who says that Klansmen are ‘very fine people.’ It’s very clear the path that he is taking us on.”
O’Rourke was referring to a campaign event held in Greenville, North Carolina, in which the President doubled down on his racist rhetoric against progressive minority members of Congress — including Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia but has since become a naturalized US citizen — which was met with chants from a crowd yelling “send her back.” Trump stood there at length as the crowd chanted, though he later claimed he disapproved of their chant.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jul/23/tulsi-gabbard-kamala-harris-not-qualified-serve-co/

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday said Sen. Kamala D. Harris is not qualified to be president because she lacks the foreign policy credentials and temperament to lead the nation on the global stage.

“I think one of the things that I am most concerned with is Kamala Harris is not qualified to serve as commander-in-chief,” the Hawaii Democrat said on Outkick the Coverage with Clay Travis. “I can say this from a personal perspective as a soldier. She has no background or experience in foreign policy and she lacks the temperament that is necessary for a commander-in-chief.”

Ms. Gabbard, who served in Iraq as a member of the Hawaii National Guard, said she has seen firsthand what it is like to have presidents who lack foreign policy experience fall under the influence of the “foreign policy establishment” and the “military industrial complex.”

Lily Adams, spokesperson for the Harris campaign, dismissed Ms. Gabbard’s comments, suggesting she has blemishes on her record.

“Definite hard pass on taking national security advice from Assad’s cheerleader,” Ms. Adams said on Twitter.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/22/republicans-dont-screw-up-the-mueller-hearing/

Republicans will have a chance to redeem themselves this week after the farce they helped create: The special counsel investigation into alleged “collusion” between Russia and the Trump campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Robert Mueller is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee in a public hearing for a total of five hours on Wednesday—not nearly enough time to plumb the depths of his 448-page report or to grill Mueller about his tactics and partisan team of investigators. Republicans will need to make the most of the limited time they have.

So, this seems like an appropriate time to remind Republicans that they are as much to blame as Democrats for foisting this costly, useless and destructive travesty on the American people.

With few exceptions, Republicans capitulated to every single Democratic demand and the ongoing media-manufactured hysteria about the urgency required to investigate so-called “election collusion.”

“Some of us very early on saw enormous conflicts [with Mueller], even conflicted as being a witness. We knew there was something wrong,” U.S. Representative Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), one of the few Republicans skeptical of the Mueller probe from the beginning, told me on Monday. “But once the inspector general report came out and revealed the bias and corruption at the top of DOJ and FBI, we started getting help.”

But Republicans should have been wary before Michael Horowitz released his report in June 2018. By the time Robert Mueller was appointed in May 2017, Republicans on Capitol Hill knew that the collusion accusation had been concocted by Obama loyalists in the government and Democratic political operatives.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/23/no-raising-hands

For all of Donald Trump’s moral flaws – the women, the profanities, the routine personal insults, the continual unpresidential conduct – he has raised the moral bar in one all-important area: This president has kept a great many of his promises (even if that wall is nowhere near to being built). And this outsized fact will be a huge advantage next year against whichever conventional politician wins the Democratic nomination.

CNN’s decision not to allow any “raise your hand” questions in the Democrat candidates’ next round of debates, which the cable news channel will telecast on July 30 and 31 from Detroit, is first and foremost an example of pure media bias. Thanks to those no-escape-hatch questions in NBC’s first round of debates last month, we learned that virtually all of the candidates would extend taxpayer-funded healthcare to illegal aliens; most would downgrade illegal entry into the United States to a mere civil offense; plus a number of them, when asked in such direct terms, could not hide from the fact that they would scrap all availability of private health coverage. Trump wasted no time gloating the next day that it meant he had already won his 2020 re-election.

Like George H.W. Bush’s breaking of his “read my lips: no new taxes” 1988 campaign pledge, and Barack Obama’s “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” falsehood, the forced raising of politicians’ hands last month was the victory of clarity over these elected officials’ practiced craft of obfuscation and euphemism. When there’s viral video of you holding high your hand for paying illegals’ medical bills, it makes it quite a challenge to slide toward the center after securing the nomination next spring or summer.

And juxtaposed with that is Trump holding to his 2016 campaign list of Supreme Court nominees. Also among his promises kept are tax cuts, deregulation, removal of the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, and relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Plus a greatly improved U.S. economy, with new records in employment levels and the markets, indicating the success of Trump’s promised policies.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-approval-rating-hits-record-high-in-new-poll/

Well into his third year in office, President Trump’s approval rating has reached a record high, according to a poll released Monday.

Trump’s approval rating hit 44 percent in the new NPR/NewsHour/Marist poll, the highest level at which it’s been recorded in any mainstream opinion poll with the exception of a a July 7 Washington Post poll that recorded 47 percent approval.

Respondents were surveyed from July 15 to July 17, in the days following the president’s tweet instructing four freshman congresswoman of color to “go back” to their home countries.

Since taking office Trump’s approval rating has hovered between 35 and 43 percent in the Marist poll.

The poll, which included responses from 1,336 adults, also found that Trump has won over a small but significant group of independents in the last month. His approval rating among independents increased from 35 percent last month to 42 percent in the latest poll. Meanwhile, the percentage of respondents who said they will definitely vote against Trump remained unchanged from last month at 53 percent.

While Trump gained ground among independents, Democrats remain unpopular with the group: 43 percent of respondents in the poll said they believed Democrats would take the country in a positive direction if given the opportunity, compared with 46 percent who said the party would lead the country in a negative direction.

“Independents are on the fence overall,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College. “They’re not willing to grant President Trump reelection, and yet they’re not persuaded by Democrats at this point.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/no-one-really-wants-to-send-her-back/

Don’t exaggerate the significance of raucous chants.

The president can be very entertaining, but I don’t pay much attention to political rallies, including his famously raucous ones.

For the faithful, the rallies are fun spectacles, like rock concerts or ball games. I don’t think they can be taken too seriously, except perhaps as a gauge of the president’s support. Not in lieu of polls, but in conjunction. And with healthy skepticism: The polls have a history of undercounting Trump supporters, but the ardor of the Trump base on display at the rallies should not be confounded with national enthusiasm for the Trump presidency — though it may signal more openness to it, especially in light of the increasingly radical alternative.

Which brings us to Wednesday night’s Trump rally in Greenville, N.C., and the ginned-up crowd of Trump fans chanting “Send her back!” That was in reference to Ilhan Omar, who is a naturalized American from Somalia, a radical at the crowded junction between Islamists and leftists, and a member of Congress from Minnesota’s fifth district — the deep-blue Twin Cities area that teems with Millennials and Somali immigrants.

All good populist demagoguery needs a villain. President Trump hardly has the market cornered on this. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton studied Alinskyite community organizing. The organizer, a self-styled renegade against The Establishment, is instructed to avoid abstractions when picking an opposition target. You’ve got to make it personal, to polarize the adversary in stark terms. Trump’s persona is to hit back harder than he is hit. No surprise, then, that he is a practitioner of this demagogic art, since he is also the Left’s No. 1 target.

Most Republican villains the Left selects (the Bushes, Mitt Romney . . .) respond by trying to prove they’re not really villains. This is a futile strategy. The demagogues making the accusation already know it’s not true. They do it because it always works. Or at least it used to. It’s different with the president, who is from the Leo Durocher School: “I come to play. I come to beat you. I come to kill you!” Trump vexes the Left because he revels in the mud wrestle. Sure, he craves admiration, but he wants to win more, and he doesn’t in the slightest mind winning ugly. In that the Left must see a lot of itself, but that doesn’t mean it has figured out an effective response.