RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://freebeacon.com/columns/pelosis-house-of-pain/

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turns the 116th Congress into Thunderdome

Not so long ago — as recently as the cover of the March 2019 Rolling Stone, in fact — they seemed like the best of friends. I’m referring to Nancy Pelosi and the members of “The Squad”: Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and (not pictured) Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. They shared some good times.

It was the dawn of a new era. House Democrats had returned to power after eight years. And these Democrats were remarkably diverse in age, ethnicity, race, and gender. Ideology, too: Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib belong to the Democratic Socialists of America. “Our nation is at an historic moment,” Pelosi said in January. “Two months ago, the American people spoke, and demanded a new dawn.”

Well, the sun has set. And fast. Whatever Pelosi’s plans might have been, they’ve been lost in a fog of anti-Semitism and left-wing radicalism. If Ilhan Omar isn’t causing Pelosi trouble, Ocasio-Cortez is. And vice versa. One day the speaker has to respond to the charge that Jewish money controls American foreign policy. The next she has to downplay flatulent cows. It’s enough to make one pity her. Almost.

Pelosi’s bind began on election night. As Republicans learned from 2011-2015, holding one chamber of Congress isn’t worth that much. The president and the upper chamber block legislation. Frustrated by inaction, the majority turns inward. Divisions grow. The more extreme members target leadership. The speaker spends more time negotiating with her own party than with the president and Senate majority leader.

Recently it seemed as though the major divide would be over impeachment. Pelosi’s terrified by the prospect. The idea isn’t popular, especially with voters in battleground districts. And Mueller’s report didn’t give her much to work with. She would have been in a better position had the special counsel actually said that he thought President Trump obstructed justice. But he copped out, leaving people confused and Pelosi forlorn. She’s let Nadler, Schiff, and Cummings fire their subpoena cannons at will. But this war of attrition favors the president. And deepens the frustration of Democrats who wish Trump had been impeached on inauguration day.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/kamala-harris-crossing-border-illegally-shouldnt-be-a-crime/

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) argued that crossing the border illegally shouldn’t be considered a “criminal enforcement issue.”

Harris said she would treat illegally entry into the U.S. as a civil offense. Her comments were made during a segment on The View .

https://pjmedia.com/trending/democrat-congressman-blasts-aoc-says-her-ignorance-is-beyond-belief/

On Thursday, Congressman William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) blasted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for starting a civil war in her party over identity politics after suggesting that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was singling out her and her “squad” of fellow freshman because of their race. “It was such a weak argument to say she was being picked on and that four women of color were being picked on by the speaker,” Clay told Fox News on Thursday. “It tells you the level of ignorance to American history on their part as to what we are as the Democratic Caucus.”

For what it’s worth, a poll from earlier this year found that nearly three-quarters of Democrats would vote for AOC for president if she were old enough.

Clay also took another swipe at Ocasio-Cortez and fellow freshman Congresswomen Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)., Rashida Tlaib, (D-Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley, (D-Mass.) over their inexperience. “It’s going to take a process of maturing for those freshman members. They will have to learn to be effective legislators,” he said. “It shows their lack of sensitivity to racism. To fall back on that (trope) is a weak argument. It has no place in a civil discussion.”

I wonder how he feels about Democrats haphazardly calling every Republican by default racist?

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.