RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/05/id-love-to-meet-bernie-in-budapest/

Bernie Sanders very nearly won the US Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016, only losing due to Hillary Clinton jiggery-pokery of the party’s rules around ex officio voting entitlements.  But here’s the thing.  What does it tell you about core Democrat voters that so many, probably more than half, would support a self-proclaimed ‘socialist’? Look at young Democrat activists and it was a lot more than half  who supported the long-time socialist Senator from Vermont.

What’s the big deal, you might ask?  Well, I think it boils down to the man’s moral antennae vibrating at such a shocking and illiberal frequency.  Sanders is the man who, in 1988, took his honeymoon in the then USSR. Some footage of the happy couple is below.  Just to remind you, that was before the Berlin Wall came down, the collapse of all of the satellite Soviet regimes and, indeed, of Soviet Russia itself.  New footage of that Sanders’ honeymoon trip has recently come to light, with Bernie sitting near or under portraits of Lenin (a mass-murderer himself, though not in the same league as Stalin, I concede) while praising the virtues of Soviet life.  Was the man completely unaware of the activities of the secret police?  Or did he just think a few eggs have to be broken to make an omelette?

And did you know Sanders was at that time already into his second term as mayor of Vermont’s biggest city, Burlington? Later, he would go on to support the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; to favour a massive warming of relations with Cuba; and to support the revolutionary policies in Venezuela, at least early on.  Let’s put it no more harshly than this: Mr. Sanders is blinded by his own ideology and seems to think that life in a non-Western, non-capitalist country is better than it is in the US.  I believe the scientific word for such beliefs is ‘bonkers’, but correct me if I’m wrong.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-worst-cover-up-of-all-time/

Pelosi, not the president, is ‘obstructing’ an impeachment inquiry in the literal sense of not letting one go forward.

President Donald Trump may be guilty of many things, but a cover-up in the Mueller probe isn’t one of them.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, attempting to appease forces in the Democratic party eager for impeachment, is accusing him of one, with all the familiar Watergate connotations.

The charge is strange, not to say incomprehensible, in light of the fact that Congress is in possession of a 448-page report produced by the Trump Department of Justice cataloguing the alleged obstruction that Congress now wants to investigate. The report is so exhaustive that many members of Congress haven’t had the time to read it.

If this is a White House cover-up, it’s too late. It’s a cover-up of an alleged crime that has already been extensively exposed, not by whistleblowers, not by Jerry Nadler, not by hostile journalists, but by a DOJ prosecutor who worked under the supervision of Trump’s handpicked deputy attorney general.

Pelosi has rehearsed the cliche, “As they say, the cover-up is frequently worse than the crime.” Or in this case, a substitute for the crime.

Mueller found no Russia collusion or coordination and didn’t even accuse the president of obstruction, instead bizarrely pronouncing him “not exonerated.”

Pelosi hasn’t deemed the alleged obstruction detailed in the Mueller report worthy of impeachment but now insists that Trump’s resistance to congressional probes is itself obstruction and “could be impeachable.”

This is an alleged process crime on top of an alleged process crime, all stemming from an investigation that Trump had the power to stop but never did (even as he openly hated it and came up with various schemes, never effected, to crimp it).

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/24/damned-if

Nancy Pelosi is between impeach and a hard place.

“You want to believe that there’s all this unease in our caucus,” an irritated House Speaker told the press on Thursday, a day when the barbs were flying between herself and President Trump, and when many House Democrats expressed impatience or even dissatisfaction with her leadership to her face.

“That simply isn’t the truth … and I say to the caucus, ‘our diversity is our strength. Our unity is our power,’” she said, adding an assurance that House Democrats were “not on a path to impeachment.”

The claimed co-existence of unity and diversity is a tad removed from Ben Franklin’s call to all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. At any rate, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) wasn’t buying it. “She’s either delusional or misrepresenting where her caucus really is,” he told reporters. “Speaker Pelosi is trying to hide what I think is obvious: that the Democratic Party is hellbent on impeaching President Trump no matter what the evidence is and no matter what he does.”

This week opened a new chapter in relations between the White House and Pelosi and the Democrats’ Senate leader Chuck Schumer — with the eyes of all three on November 2020 before the arrival of even Memorial Day 2019.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/445402-senate-dems-to-house-tamp-down-the-impeachment-talk

Senate Democrats want the House to cool it on impeachment. 

They see an impeachment drive as hurting more than helping their efforts to win back the Senate majority and generally back Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) efforts to keep a lid on the issue.

Even Senate Democrats running for president who back impeachment aren’t pressing Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) to take a more aggressive approach to the issue.

Democratic senators say the subject of impeachment rarely even comes up in caucus-wide meetings and that it distracts from issues like health care they see as more important to voters.

“I don’t think we should go there now,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I was here for the Clinton impeachment, and after it was over I wished it never had happened. I think we ought to be very, very cautious with that kind of thing.”

“Everybody does what they do based on their own desires, but I don’t find it helpful,” she said of fellow Democrats who are pushing for the beginning of an impeachment inquiry.

Schumer, who is not shy about criticizing Trump, has stuck with Pelosi’s line that more investigation needs to be done.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/mark-penn-dem-calls-to-impeach-trump-echo-partisan-impeachment-of-president-andrew-johnson-in-1868

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/mark-penn-dem-calls-to-impeach-trump-echo-partisan-impeachment-of-president-andrew-johnson-in-1868

Impeach him! He has disobeyed Congress!

Those words rang out both this week and in 1868. While the themes then and now are the same, hopefully the outcome will be different.

The impeachment of President Andrew Johnson is widely recognized as one of the most embarrassing moments in American history, in which unrestrained partisanship almost won the day. But it was also a day in which one senator, as recounted by President John F. Kennedy in his book “Profiles in Courage,” stopped us from becoming just another banana republic.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., missed her “Profiles in Courage” moment Thursday, adding “villainous” to her laundry list of accusations against President Trump. Rather than stand firm against her caucus and move the country forward, she caved and started to call the assertion of executive privilege a “cover-up.”

Pelosi might oppose it and might fight it in the courts, but it’s no cover-up. It’s a clear and legally appropriate message that enough is enough.

Remember that there were already multiple all-out congressional investigations over the last two years in addition to Special Counsel Robert Mueller issuing 2,800 subpoenas, interviewing 500 witnesses and ordering 280 interceptions of communications while employing 40 FBI agents and 19 lawyers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-impeachment-dilemma-11558651938

It wasn’t with a heavy heart that Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer on Tuesday endorsed initiating formal impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. And it was with unvoiced alarm that his fellow Virginia Democrat Rep. Abigail Spanberger ran from the impeachment question the same day.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a wicked impeachment dilemma, and Virginia captures it perfectly. It’s been one month since Congress got its hands on the Mueller report, and Mrs. Pelosi has spent that time scrambling to balance competing demands in her caucus. Her approach—call it pseudo-impeachment—has involved accusing the president of all things impeachable (to appease the left) while not engaging in a real impeachment process (to appease moderates). That strategy is now hitting a wall.

The progressives in her party are lining up to demand an impeachment spectacle. They hail from uber-liberal districts, their constituents want Trump’s scalp, and they fear inaction will earn them a primary challenge. Even Mrs. Pelosi’s wingmen—those who’ve had her fake-impeachment back—are starting to break. The Washington Post reports that Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler is arguing for a formal impeachment inquiry, as are “five members of Pelosi’s leadership team.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.theepochtimes.com/democratic-rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-tackles-cauliflower-in-green-new-deal_2932099.html

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has accused the humble cauliflower of representing “colonial” views and said she believes it should stop being planted in community gardens as part of her Green New Deal proposal to prevent what she calls “environmental catastrophe and [to] heal systemic inequality.”

“When someone says it is ‘too hard’ to do a green space that grows yucca instead of, I don’t know, maybe cauliflower or something, what you are doing is taking a colonial approach to environmentalism,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram video that has since been removed.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-joins-the-war-on-cauliflower/

A few weeks ago, I noted that Louisiana’s state legislature is contemplating legislation that would bar makers of cauliflower rice from labeling their product “rice,” contending that consumers will get confused. Instead, the rice growers want the product to be labeled . . . “riced cauliflower.”

But Louisiana isn’t the only spot where cauliflower is under fire. In a stream-of-consciousness discussion of composting, the Green New Deal, and community gardens, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lamented cauliflower as symbol of colonialism.

“Looks like they’ve got composting going on, which is so awesome, too, because composting is really hard to do in a neighborhood like this. We just don’t have the pick ups and the ease of it that a lot of other communities have. So that’s really how you do it, right, that is such a core component of the Green New Deal, is having all of these projects make sense in a cultural context. And it’s an area that I — we get the most pushback on, because people say, like, why do you need to do that? That’s too hard. But when you really think about it, when someone says that it’s too hard to do a green space that grows yucca instead of, I don’t know, cauliflower or something, what you’re doing is that you’re taking a colonial approach to environmentalism, and that is why a lot of communities of color get resistant to certain environmentalist movements, because they come with the colonial lens on them. And it should be no surprise that sometimes a lot of these projects don’t work out occasionally because our communities are naturally attuned to live in an environmentally conscious way.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/stacey-abrams-identity-politics-is-exactly-who-we-are-and-exactly-how-we-won/

“For those of us who still reside on planet Earth, this sort of delusional nonsense is bewildering. We can’t figure out what this loon is babbling about. She insists she won an election, despite all evidence to the contrary. ”

Here’s a rule of thumb I stumbled upon years ago, and it remains true more often than not: Liberals want conservatives to shut up, and conservatives want liberals to keep talking. There are exceptions, of course — the Trumpkin wing of the GOP would like nothing more than to silence anyone, liberal or not, who criticizes their liege — but it tends to be the case. The more libs talk, the better it is for the rest of us. And if you want to know why, just listen to the Democratic Party’s latest superheroine, Stacey Abrams.

Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on Wednesday urged Democrats to embrace identity politics, at a time when the issue has become a source of debate within the party…
“The notion of identity politics has been peddled for the past 10 years and it’s been used as a dog whistle to say we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the voices coming into progress,” Abrams said. “I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are and exactly how we won.”

If you don’t believe her, just look at the results. She’s the rightful governor of Georgia, there’s a unicorn in every garage and free candy in every tummy, and the Democrats are doing just great.