RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/08/howard-schultz-needs-issue-run/

Howard Schultz needs an issue. The former Starbucks CEO who spent most of his career amping up Americans on burnt coffee wants to now be their president. But why? In a town hall on Fox News last week, he couldn’t quite answer that question. He takes a “pox on both your houses” approach to the Trumpian GOP and the Democrats he says have wandered too far left. But so far, his candidacy seems to be based on little more than being the other choice.

In some ways, Schultz feels like the missing Democrat. He says, “I’m a centrist, I’ve been a lifelong Democrat, but the Democratic Party left me, I didn’t leave them.” He supports funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement, opposes Medicare for all, and dares to utter the phrase “safe, legal, and rare,” regarding abortion. As the Democratic nominee for president, he would be formidable, but he is not choosing to join that race that resembles nothing so much as a bunch of 1950s teenagers cramming into a telephone booth.

Instead, Schultz is chasing the white whale of American politics: trying to win the presidency as a third-party candidate. This never works, and it’s easy to see why. By granting executive authority to a single person, the Constitution compels the left and the right to form binary parties. This is because to fracture your own party hands enormous power to those you oppose. Schultz likely understands that he is almost certainly not going to win the 2020 election. So what is he doing?

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/08/entirely-relevant-ask-whether-elected-representatives-believe-sharia/

When I was in graduate school many years ago, I dated a Lebanese Muslim who wasn’t particularly devout. However, despite his secular, sophisticated upbringing—he grew up in a pricey neighborhood in Beirut and attended a Swiss boarding high school—he still struggled with my criticisms about Muslim countries’ treatment of women. When I once referred to clitoridectomies as a Muslim practice, he became positively apoplectic that I viewed the procedure as a Muslim norm. After all, no one in his family had undergone such a procedure.

But I persisted. As an earnest young feminist, I couldn’t help but want to have a conversation about the political and personal oppression of women in Muslim countries, an oppression quite often manifested in violence. I needed to know that it mattered to him and that he recognized it as a social ill that needed rectifying.

He would counter these observations by pointing out that his uncle, who was doing his residency at a local Philadelphia hospital, treated battered women all the time. Battered women here, battered women in the Middle East. What was the difference?

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/08/why-are-democrats-kissing-the-ring-of-al-sharpton/

Rev. Al Sharpton’s fortunes have been on the upswing. A few years ago, in a Politico whitewashing of his career, we learned that Sharpton had been transformed into the go-to civil rights guru for the Obama administration. “If anything,” Glenn Thrush noted at the time, “the Ferguson crisis has underscored Sharpton’s role as the national black leader Obama leans on most, a remarkable personal and political transformation for a man once regarded with suspicion and disdain by many in his own party.”

The former president claimed that Sharpton was “the voice of the voiceless and a champion for the downtrodden.” In the real world, of course, the only downtrodden Americans helped by Sharpton’s activities are the ones who find themselves on the payroll benefitting from his numerous corporate shakedowns.

Yet apparently Obama’s resuscitation of Sharpton (who, since 2011, has been at MSNBC, a cable news network that interminably lectures uncouth Americans on proper tone) has worked. Many of the very same Democratic Party hopefuls who boycotted the tepid bipartisanship of an AIPAC conference last month, could be found speaking at Sharpton’s National Action Network Convention in New York this past week, pandering to a charlatan with a history of inciting violence and racism.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke said yesterday that the relationship between Israel and the United States “must transcend” a “prime minister who is racist.”

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is apparently a “racist” because, well, Beto says he is.

The Hill:

“The US-Israel relationship is one of the most important relationships that we have on the planet, and that relationship, if it is successful, must transcend partisanship in the United States, and it must be able to transcend a prime minister who is racist, as he warns against Arabs coming to the polls, who wants to defy any prospect for peace as he threatens to annex the West Bank, and who has sided with a far-right racist party in order to maintain his hold on power,” O’Rourke said, referring to Netanyahu seeking to form a coalition with the Otzma Yehudit party.

Netanyahu, O’Rourke said, does not represent either the best interests of the U.S.-Israel relationship or a path to peace in the region.”We must be able to transcend his current leadership to make sure that the alliance is strong, that we continue to push for and settle for nothing less than a two-state solution, because that is the best opportunity for peace for the people of Israel and the people of Palestine,” O’Rourke said.