RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274242/qatar-supporter-advising-kamala-harris-daniel-greenfield

The biggest split in foreign policy circles isn’t over Iran or Israel. Virtually all foreign policy professionals oppose Israel and support some sort of arrangement with Iran. The real split is over Qatar.

The tiny Islamist country is both a major state sponsor of terrorist groups, especially those aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, and has wormed its way deep into the political establishment in this country. Qatar’s dark side aligns it with Hamas, Iran and Al Qaeda on one side, and the Brookings Institute, the Washington Post, and D.C. lobbyists on the other. Its hackers target political opponents in the United States and feed the results to major media outlets. Al Jazeera, its propaganda outlet, spans the two worlds, that of the Islamists working to seize power and of Democrat activists in the United States.

Qatar enjoyed unprecedented access and influence in the Obama era. The Arab Spring brought many of its Brotherhood allies to power across the region before Saudi countercoups helped topple them. The struggle between Qatar, Turkey and Iran, and the Saudi-UAE coalition, has rippled through the media and the D.C. political establishment with flash points such as Yemen, Iran, and Jamal Khashoggi.

While the Senate, including much of the GOP, is Qatari territory, President Trump has been skeptical of the Islamic terror state. But the White House is up for grabs in 2020. Last month, Biden refunded a donation from a Qatari lobbyist. The Dem front runner though has been critical of Qatar (along with Turkey, the Saudis and the UAE) for funding Islamic terrorists and may not be a good bet.

Senator Kamala Harris, the politician breathing down Biden’s neck, is a very different story. One of her foreign policy advisors is Dana Shell Smith (pictured above), who had served as Obama’s ambassador to Qatar.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-house-discipline-11562886550

Having spent so long defaming conservatives as racists, progressives can’t stop turning the accusation on each other. Two weeks ago Democratic presidential contenders all but called Joe Biden a segregationist. This week Nancy Pelosi got a taste of her party’s poison.

The House Speaker has lately criticized some of the most extreme progressives in her caucus for cultivating their own celebrity status at the expense of the party. Mrs. Pelosi had four of her caucus’s freshmen especially in mind: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

The four—in addition to trumpeting socialist measures, flirting with anti-Semitism and using Twitter to criticize moderates in their own party—voted against last month’s emergency spending bill for the southern border. They did so even though three of them have compared what’s happening at the border to the Holocaust. Mrs. Pelosi told the New York Times that these Members “have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”

That inspired a few testy remarks from the four. “The public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez explained in a tweet. Which in turn prompted a rebuke from the Speaker: “You got a complaint?” she reportedly said to Democratic colleagues in a closed-door meeting on Wednesday. “You come and talk to me about it. But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just OK.”

With that, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez decided to resort to her default defense. This “persistent singling out,” she told the Washington Post, has reached “a point where it was just outright disrespectful . . . the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/11/the-aoc-pelosi-war-was-inevitable/

For months now, almost since the opening of Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been at odds with each other. It started with gentle gibes, Pelosi talking euphemistically about AOC’s “enthusiasm,” for example. But over time it has grown more contentious, and now AOC is fighting back.

AOC says that “The persistent singling out . . . it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful . . . the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.” She has even gone so far to somewhat bizarrely claim that she was loaded with excellent committee assignments just to keep her busy. Too busy to perform some other function, one surmises, but its not clear what that other function is.

It was always going to come to this, for a couple of reasons. One is the threat Pelosi believes AOC represents to moderate Democrats in Congress. Another is their relative ages and investment horizon in the House. And finally, there is a sharp ideological difference between how these two powerful women view America, its institutions, and its moral authority.

The threat that AOC and her Justice Democrat colleagues, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and others from deep blue districts pose to moderate Democrats is two-fold and very serious. The first aspect is straight-up primary challenges, such as AOC’s, which defeated moderate House powerhouse Joe Crowley in 2018. Already, Rep. Henry Cuellar from Texas is in the crosshairs for a Justice Democrats primary, and he isn’t the only one.

These primary challenges are a headache for a House leadership that is trying to hold together a fractured caucus while preparing for a presidential year election far less friendly to their cause than a midterm. They have attempted to enact rules to limit how firms that work with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) may also work with insurgent candidates, though this move in and of itself has brought fire from Justice Democrats calling it unfair.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/alexandria-ocasio-cortexz-nancy-pelosi-singling-out-progressive-women-of-color-disrespectful/

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) accused House speaker Nancy Pelosi of “singling out” progressive women of color Wednesday, deepening the rift that has emerged between the caucus’s young firebrands and leadership.

“When these comments first started, I kind of thought that she was keeping the progressive flank at more of an arm’s distance in order to protect more moderate members, which I understood,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Washington Post in an interview published Wednesday. “But the persistent singling out . . . it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful . . . the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”

The comments came after Pelosi, during a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, urged her caucus to project unity and stop airing internal divisions in public.

Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday that she doesn’t believe Pelosi harbors any racial animus but argued that the speaker has established a pattern of attacking young women of color.

“It’s really just pointing out the pattern, right? We’re not talking about just progressives, it’s signaling out four individuals,” Ocasio-Cortez told CNN. “And knowing the media environment that we’re operating in, knowing the amount of death threats that we get, knowing the amount of concentrated attention, I think it’s just worth asking why.”

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

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must be rueing the day she handed freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all those prestigious committee assignments, and posed with her and a couple of like-minded coevals for lovey-dovey pictures on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Here’s what she gets for her trouble, according to the Washington Examiner:

“So, again, you got a complaint? You come and talk to me about it,” the speaker reportedly told Democrats. “But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just OK.”

This is basic party discipline, but Ocasio-Cortez’s takeaway from this closed-door meeting was not, “be a team player and expect a ruckus if you besmirch your fellow Democrats in public.” Rather, the message that the freshman congresswoman came away with is this: Nancy Pelosi is a racist.

“When these comments first started, I kind of thought that she was keeping the progressive flank at more of an arm’s distance in order to protect more moderate members, which I understood,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Washington Post, referring to not just the closed-door meeting but other critical remarks that the speaker has had for herself and the other freshman progressives.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/10/democratic-candidates-are-running-a-race-of-inauthenticity/

An epidemic of false identities, massaged resumes and warped ancestries has broken out among the current Democratic presidential primary candidates.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for years claimed Native American ancestry. An embattled Warren ironically took a DNA test that only proved her critics’ contention that she was no more of Native American heritage than the vast majority of Americans.

Another Democratic candidate, Robert Francis O’Rourke, is a rich white male who grew up in affluence. O’Rourke some time ago adopted the name “Beto,” an abbreviation for the Spanish “Roberto.” The Spanish-speaking, Irish-American O’Rourke, with a wink and nod, has assumed a useful near-Latino identity.

That ruse became a caricature in O’Rourke’s 2018 race for the U.S. Senate in Texas. The second-generation Cuban-American incumbent, Senator Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz, was portrayed by the media as the non-Spanish-speaking “white guy” pitted against the more authentic Irish-American Latino “Beto.”

Few would know that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was actually born with the alliterative European name Warren Wilhelm Jr. With today’s politically correct calibrations of avoiding Northern European nomenclature, the Latinate “de Blasio” apparently ranks higher than the overtly German “Wilhelm.”

It has long been a populist tradition that presidential candidates downplay their financial success or even fabricate a “born in a log cabin” myth of early poverty and adversity. But recently, Democratic candidates have taken that trope to identity-politics extremes.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kamala-harriss-debate-victory-proves-pyrrhic-11562799747

Memories of the first Democratic debates recede, though echoes remain of one bizarrely magnified event—Sen. Kamala Harris’s sustained assault on front-runner Joe Biden. Over the weekend Mr. Biden issued an apology to those who had been pained when he recalled his amicable relations with archsegregationists early in his Senate days. Ms. Harris’s response made it clear that she had no intention of allowing that night of glory on the debate stage to fade—a moment that changed the world and her place in it, according to a fevered commentariat.

It was good that Mr. Biden recognized the impact of his words, she said. But “we cannot rewrite history.”

Neither can she undo the impact of her own comments during the debate—a histrionic performance likely to cost her more than the donations and improved poll numbers that she gained. She had mounted her offensive against Mr. Biden days after Sen. Cory Booker delivered a lengthy harangue focused on his pain at hearing the former vice president speak of his ability to get on with the likes of Mississippi Sen. James Eastland, who retired in 1978.

No reasonable person could have doubted Mr. Biden’s meaning—that he had in mind a time when politicians understood the value of working with everyone to achieve results. That idea Lyndon B. Johnson understood so well—that had enabled him, as Senate majority leader and president, to flatter, arm-twist and otherwise seduce opponents of civil-rights legislation into allowing it to pass.

No one considering Mr. Booker’s abysmal standing in the polls would have much doubt, either, about the impetus that had driven his operatic display, which became increasingly vague even as the senator added detail. It wasn’t that Mr. Biden was a racist. Mr. Booker hadn’t meant that at all, he insisted. He merely wanted an apology for all the pain Mr. Biden had caused.

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

The most important thing to understand about socialism is not its offers of free stuff, but its coerciveness.  Toe the party line.  Or else.

Enter Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, up until now, has sugarcoated her socialism in a miasma of lipstick, tweets, dancing in college, fancy fashion choices, and stylish apartments.  We know all about that crap.

Here’s her real story:

The left-wing activist group that spearheaded the political rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now working to take down several incumbent Democrats who have defied the party’s freshman progressive wing, leaving some of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s loyalists on Capitol Hill anxiously wondering if they might soon fall in the crosshairs themselves.

Justice Democrats, which was co-founded by Ocasio-Cortez chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti, has already announced it is looking to unseat seven-term pro-life Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, who represents a conservative district and has boasted about his endorsement from the National Rifle Association. Also on the list: New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman who’s currently in his 16th term.

Really — Eliot Engel?  The House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman who let Ocasio-Cortez’s top ally, Rep. Ilhan Omar, off easy in the House on the anti-Semitism rap?  As thanks for that, he’s now getting primaried.

Some of these moderate Democrats must now realize that they no longer have Republican rivals to worry about; they’ve got the socialist crazies after them, vindictively pushing them left, forcing them to spend money to fight off their challenges, looking to take them down.

Their own side.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/beto-orourke-explains-why-you-shouldnt-vote-for-him/

Remember when Beto O’Rourke ran for president? Here’s something you might not know: He still is! But nobody cares about him anymore because he isn’t running against Ted Cruz. Pete Buttigieg has taken his place because he’s younger, smarter, and gayer. These days Beto is polling slightly better than Cory Booker, and good luck finding anybody who’s excited about Cory Booker. So at this point, what does Beto have to lose? He might as well explain to America why we shouldn’t vote for him.

He makes a compelling case:

“Democrat presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke: “This country was founded on white supremacy and every single institution and structure that we have in this country still reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression even in our democracy”

Now there’s a winning campaign message: “White people are evil. America is the worst place ever. Vote for the white guy!” No wonder he adopted a Hispanic nickname. Robert O’Rourke wouldn’t have gotten even this far.

If America is so racist, if we were “founded on white supremacy,” why doesn’t Beto stop wasting everyone’s time with his futile efforts to lead us? Why doesn’t he drop out and endorse Kamala Harris, a woman of color who actually has a chance of winning? Does he think that the more he flagellates himself for his privilege, the more likable he’ll become? The only thing that makes people like Beto is not seeing or hearing Beto.

I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but this guy is even more useless than Biden. If even Beto doesn’t know why he should be president, why should anybody else care?

https://pjmedia.com/trending/americas-first-black-billionaire-gives-trump-an-a-says-dems-are-moving-too-far-left/

Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) and America’s first black billionaire, praised President Donald Trump for the roaring economy and criticized Democrats for moving “too far left.”

“The party in my opinion, for me personally, has moved too far to the left,” Johnson told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble. “And for that reason, I don’t have a particular candidate (I’m supporting) in the party at this time. I think at the end of the day, if a Democrat is going to beat Trump, then that person, he or she, will have to move to the center and you can’t wait too long to do that.”

A self-described centrist and Democrat, Johnson supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, but he has expressed admiration for many of Trump’s policies after that election.

“I think the economy is doing great, and it’s reaching populations that heretofore had very bad problems in terms of jobs and employments and the opportunities that come with employment … so African-American unemployment is at its lowest level,” Johnson explained.

In June, the black unemployment rate stood at 6.0 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, merely 0.1 percent above its lowest point last year. Sadly, Democrats refused to applaud for the historic lows in black unemployment during Trump’s State of the Union speech in February.

“I give the president a lot of credit for moving the economy in a positive direction that’s benefiting a large amount of Americans,” Johnson added. “I think the tax cuts clearly helped stimulate the economy. I think business people have more confidence in the way the economy is going.”

“Overall, if you look at the U.S. economy … you got to give the president an A+ for that.”

Last December, Johnson joined Trump for a ceremony involving the signing of an executive order establishing the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council.

Johnson also warned that America’s increasingly bitter political partisanship is bad for business.