RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274383/chancellor-merkel-supports-radical-squad-joseph-klein

The so-called “squad” – Democrat Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) – received strong support from German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She blasted President Trump’s tweets attacking the radicals, following in the footsteps of the highly partisan resolution passed by the Democrat-controlled House that condemned President Trump’s tweets as “racist.”

“I distance myself from this decidedly and stand in solidarity with the women who were attacked,” Chancellor Merkel said. “Those [Trump’s statements] are sentiments which are very much in opposition to my impressions [about the U.S.], which I strongly believe in, and it is something that undermines America’s strength,” Chancellor Merkel added.

Evidently, what disturbed the German chancellor the most was President Trump’s suggestion in one of his tweets that the squad members should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” All four squad members are U.S. citizens. Only one of them, Rep. Omar, was born outside the United States in Somalia and came to this country from a Kenyan refugee camp as a child.  Trump supporters at a campaign rally last Wednesday chanted “send her back,” referring to Omar after the president had singled her out for sharp criticism. Chancellor Merkel, along with much of the mainstream media and other Trump critics, have dwelt on this one Trump tweet, and on the rallygoers’ “send her back” chant that President Trump subsequently criticized. They chose to largely ignore or downplay the factual substance of the president’s critique.

President Trump’s beef with the squad is not grounded in their color, race, or sex. If it were, he also would be singling out other women of color in Congress, including presidential candidate Kamala Harris, with racist and sexist attacks. The president, at times with inartful rhetoric to be sure, has tried principally to focus on the anti-American, anti-Semitic rhetoric delivered by members of the squad. He singled out Omar in particular for her anti-Semitism and hatred of the Jewish State of Israel. There is plenty of evidence to support the president’s accusations.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274389/trump-rally-triggers-republican-parsons-bruce-thornton

Immediately following last week’s “go home’ presidential tweet, a chant erupted at a Trump rally in North Carolina that suggested, “Send her back,” referring of course to Rep. Ilhan Omar. Trump himself a day later sort of walked back the chant, supposedly under pressure from the Party establishment and his wife and daughter. Would that instead he had used the opportunity for a lesson in the First Amendment, which protects both the chanters and Omar’s vile anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, which are much more dangerous and consequential than a hyperbolic chant typical of such rallies events.

There’s no need to dwell on the hysterical response of the left. After three years of question-begging epithets like “racist,” such reactions have become political white noise for all but the cult faithful. It’s the Republican NeverTrumpers who need, once again, to be exposed for their virtue-signaling dudgeon that is music to the Dems’ ears. A catalogue of tweets put together by the Intelligencer provides some examples.

Most of the twitter responses typically come from a belief that transient words that do not lead to actions have some occult power to determine future behavior. Yet many commentators use hyperbolic epithets that, given the long history of much nastier political speech in America, drain the words of any specific meaning. If Ben Shapiro is going to call the chant “vile” and “disgusting,” then what does he call Omar’s anti-Semitic slurs? “Vile double-plus”? It’s the same indiscriminate use of words that has made “racism” into the go-to slur for the left, having been emptied of any precision and accuracy, and now nothing other than a bundle of nasty connotations suitable for any occasion.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/congresswoman-ayanna-pressley-explains-why-she-refuses-to-call-donald-trump-president/

Although lesser known that her three colleagues, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) is counted among “The Squad,” one of the four congresswomen that President Trump suggested should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” During an interview on CBS This Morning, Pressley responded to Trump’s attacks, explaining to Gayle King why she refers to the president as the “occupant” of the White House instead of by his official title.

The congresswoman huffily told King that President Trump “is only occupying the space. He does not embody the principles, the responsibility, the grace, the integrity of a true president… I’m not dishonoring the office. He does every day.”

Rep. Pressley wasn’t alone in the interview, being joined by the other three members of “The Squad” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn). Tlaib felt the need to insert into the conversation that President Trump is “the biggest bully” she’s ever encountered.

Pressley’s comments to CBS This Morning were a doubling down on the statement she made during the congresswomen’s joint press conference on Tuesday. Riling up the sympathetic crowd, she said that she will only refer to Donald Trump as the occupant of the White House and not the president. She added, “We are grateful for your solidarity, your encouragement, and your support, in the face of the most recent xenophobic, bigoted remarks from the occupant of our White House.”

Democrats, of course, are laying aside their differences at the moment as they rally around Pressley and her better-known colleagues. From Nancy Pelosi condemning Trump from the House floor to the myriad of articles in the MSM calling anyone even remotely associated with Donald Trump a racist, the left appears more galvanized than usual. However, what matters come November 2020 is how the voters respond.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/omar-to-introduce-resolution-declaring-support-for-anti-israel-bds-movement/

Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) will introduce a resolution this week declaring support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to elevate the Palestinian negotiating position vis-a-vis Israel through an international pressure campaign.

“We are introducing a resolution . . . to really speak about the American values that support and believe in our ability to exercise our first amendment rights in regard to boycotting,” Omar told Al-Monitor. “And it is an opportunity for us to explain why it is we support a nonviolent movement, which is the BDS movement.”

The announcement comes on the same day that the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on which Omar sits, plans to vote on another non-binding resolution explicitly condemning the BDS movement as an attempt to “undermine the two state solution” by demanding “concessions of one party alone and encourag[ing] Palestinians to reject negotiations in favor of international pressure.”

The anti-BDS resolution further notes that the movement’s founder, Omar Bharghouti, has openly dismissed the possibility of reaching any settlement that allows the state of Israel to retain its sovereignty.

Omar is expected to cast the lone vote against the anti-BDS resolution, further highlighting the divide between herself and the panel’s older, more-established lawmakers, who have condemned her comments about Israel in the past.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/aoc-draws-a-challenger-a-black-female-jamaican-republican-challenger/

Most racist, woman-hating, immigrant-fearing party ever, amirite?

The not-so-inside talk has been whether Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s four-woman war against Nancy Pelosi would earn her a Democratic primary challenger next year, but her high-profile antics have drawn another Republican into the race to represent heavily Democratic NY14.

Fox News reports that Scherie Murray, a 38-year-old New York businesswoman and Jamaica native (she emigrated as a child), has launched a campaign to unseat AOC next year. She told Fox, “There is a crisis in Queens, and it’s called AOC.” Murray went on to say, “Instead of focusing on us, she’s focusing on being famous. Mainly rolling back progress and authoring the job-killing Green New Deal and killing the Amazon-New York deal.”

The polls might just bear out Murray’s complaint against Ocasio-Cortez. The first-term congresscritter was put on the defensive earlier this week, blasting a negative new poll — conducted by her own party — as a “mass distortion of reality.” In a nationwide survey, it was revealed that 74% of people recognized AOC by name, but only 22% viewed her favorably. The poll was conducted by Democrats hoping to identify potential swing voters for 2020. Instead what they found was that the party’s oh-so-public up-and-comers are almost universally loathed. Ellie Bufkin reported for the Washington Examiner:

Fellow “squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar was recognized by 53% of participants and viewed favorably by only 9%. Other questions on the poll included approval of socialist policies, which showed only 18% of participants viewed favorably. Democrats looking ahead to the 2020 election characterized the results as, “Socialism is toxic to these voters.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/07/17/kamala_harris_trump_lighting_a_fire_around_race_he_needs_to_go_back_where_he_came_from.html

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) sits down with CNN’s Kyung Lah and gives her response to President Donald Trump’s controversial tweets attacking four Democratic congresswomen.

“It is irresponsible. It is hateful. It is hurtful. And he has taken the presidency to a new low,” Harris said of the tweets.”He wants to distract by… lighting fires around the issue of race and ethnicity. It’s disgusting,” Harris said on CNN. “He needs to go back where he came from and leave that office. And so that’s why I’m running with the intention of making sure there will not be four more years.”

Watch the full interview below.

KYUNG LAH, CNN: How do you not get distracted? How do you not fall into his trap where he controls the narrative with a tweet like this?

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS (D-CA): I’ve said it many times. This president purposely, I believe, distracts and attempts to distract by flame-throwing, because the reality of it is that he has done nothing to help working families in America…