RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/tulsi-gabbard-peace-campaign/

Perpetual war requires perpetual peace candidates

What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding? Elvis Costello’s bitter song by that name was on my mind while I listened to Tulsi Gabbard’s maiden campaign speech for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party over the weekend. The social-democratic space on the left side of the Democratic field has been filling up with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And so it seemed prudent for Gabbard to distinguish herself as the peace candidate, the one woman of the anti-imperialist left. She promised to “end the regime-change wars that have taken far too many lives and undermined our security by strengthening terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.” My first thought: good luck to her.

Close listeners of NR’s Editors podcast will note a developing running joke where Rich Lowry teases me for support of Gabbard. And in fact, I find I do have some reasons to cheer her candidacy.

First, she’s at least interesting. The rest of the Democrats will be accusing each other of deviationism over trivialities. Gabbard’s been accused of being a toady of Bashar al-Assad and a Hindu-nationalist fifth columnist. She also grew up in a socially conservative household and, as a very young woman, she participated in her activist father’s campaigns against the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships as marriage. You can imagine how that’s going over among Democrats. But she’s also young and attractive. She’s a veteran of the Iraq war, and still serves in the Hawaii Army National Guard. And unlike Barack Obama, who basically appropriated his wife’s South-Side Chicago identity, Gabbard fully embraces her Hawaiian roots. If one made a word cloud of her first campaign speech, “Aloha” would outrank “love,” “sacrifice,” and even “neocon.”

https://spectator.org/howard

Last week was a delicious one for observers of the Ragnarok that the politics of the Left has become, particularly as it signaled the difficulties confronting some of the purveyors of the “smart set” PC culture as they attempt to cash in on their contributions to our national status quo.

Starting with Howard Schultz, the billionaire former Starbucks CEO who, having positioned his company as a leftist cultural icon by such actions as publicly backing gay marriage and imploring customers not to carry firearms in Starbucks stores (though stopping short of banning them), announced on 60 Minutes a week ago that he’ll run for president as a centrist independent.

Why an independent? After all, Schultz was a thoroughly reliable Democrat moneybag throughout his professional life. The answer, as he somewhat furtively explained, was that he knows he could never win his party’s nomination.

“It concerns me that so many voices within the Democratic Party are going so far to the left,” he lamented. “If I ran as a Democrat, I would have to say things in my heart I do not believe.”

Schultz went even further in a CNBC Squawk Box interview back in June of 2018 when he was first beginning to think of himself as a potential presidential hopeful, sounding far saner than the typical candidate within the chaotic Democrat field.

“It concerns me that so many voices within the Democratic Party are going so far to the left. I say to myself, ‘How are we going to pay for these things,’ in terms of things like single payer (and) people espousing the fact that the government is going to give everyone a job.”

“I don’t think that’s realistic,” he said. Then he added: “I think we got to get away from these falsehoods and start talking about the truth and not false promises.”

His bid, which apparently includes having hired former Obama political guru Bill Burton and former John McCain consultant Steve Schmidt, fell flat immediately. So much so that by the middle of the week Michael Moore, the supersized Leni Riefenstahl of today’s Democrat Party, was calling for a boycott of Starbucks until Schultz demurred from running.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Newark is the most dangerous city in New Jersey, Tallahassee is the most dangerous city in Florida, and South Bend is the most dangerous city in Indiana. But instead of fixing their failed cities, the current mayor of South Bend, and the former mayors of Newark and Tallahassee want to run for president. Mayor Peter Buttigieg has announced that he’s forming an exploratory committee for a 2020 run. Media reports have focused on the possibility that he might become America’s first gay millennial president, instead of on the fact that he’s headed a city since 2011 which has double the national and statewide violent crime rates. And a city where Hispanic poverty rates are 10% higher than the national average, African-American households have double the poverty rate, and Asian-American incomes are halved.

South Bend was recently rated one of the “worst cities” to live in. The unemployment rates are higher than average, the property values are lower, and even the water quality is below average.

Gushing media reports about the gay millennial mayor, a Harvard grad and a Rhodes scholar, overlook South Bend’s poverty rate of 24.7% and that 45% of households are living near the poverty level.

South Bend has a little over 100,000 residents, but there were over 100 criminal shootings in 2017 in the failed city which hosts murderous gangs such as the Latin Kings and Gangster Disciples.

In January 2019, just as Buttigieg was prepping his presidential run, three shootings in one week killed two teens and left a woman paralyzed from the waist down. In one summer week, the casualties included a 12 and a 13-year-old. In March, 6 people were hurt in one shooting spree.

“It is a season for boldness and it is time to focus on the future,” Mayor Buttigieg declared in his presidential debut video. “Are you ready to walk away from the politics of the past?”