Displaying posts published in

November 2021

2021’s Big Election Lesson: ‘It’s The Culture, Stupid’

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/04/2021s-big-election-lesson-its-the-culture-stupid/

By any reasonable measure, Tuesday’s off-year elections around the country were a sweeping repudiation of the Democratic Party, as the defeat of Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe by virtually unknown Republican Glenn Youngkin shows. The donkey party’s extreme-left vision for America has suffered what could be a fatal blow, but only if the GOP is smart enough to take advantage of this great opportunity.

A quick look around the country on Wednesday morning led to an inescapable conclusion: Average Americans are fed up with the Democrats’ woke agenda and are eager to escape it.

After four years of Donald Trump, Americans in 2020 handed the reins of national government over to the Joe Biden Democrats. And what do they have to show for it?

Rising inflation, an unprecedented flood of 1.5 million illegal immigrants, radically politicized public education, soaring crime rates, the loss of our hard-won national energy independence, totalitarian federal government targeting concerned parents as possible “domestic terrorists,” the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan that left hundreds of Americans stranded, among many other things.

Wednesday’s headlines from the elections around the nation show just how badly the Dems fared:

Glenn Youngkin’s Win Officially Ends the Clinton Era in American Politics

Slate of conservative candidates declare victory in hotly contested Denver suburb school board race

Another Shocking Victory Happened in Texas Last Night and Suggests 2022 Doom for Democrats

Republicans made incredible gains in yesterday’s elections

Note to Dems: it’s not 2020 anymore

Incumbent Brown declares Buffalo mayor write-in win over socialist India Walton

Backfire: Minneapolis voters slam abolish-the-police proposal – and city council

Election day chaos: N.J. waits to see who will be governor while major upsets loom in Legislature

NY state ballot proposals demonstrate how badly Dems have misjudged public sentiments

We could go on, but you get the idea. Democrats did worse than expected across the country, while Republicans did better.

Halloween comes late for Democrats The results not just in Virginia but New Jersey will haunt them for the next year By Charles Lipson

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/halloween-comes-late-democrats-mcauliffe/

When a Republican wins in a reliably Democratic state, it’s big news. That’s exactly what happened in Virginia on Tuesday, where newcomer Glenn Youngkin defeated former governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin won even though McAuliffe had a well-oiled political machine and high name recognition, and was campaigning in a state Joe Biden won by 10 points only a year ago.

Yet all those advantages were for naught. The Commonwealth will have a Republican governor for the first time in over a decade. It is likely Republicans will win the other two statewide races as well, for lieutenant governor and attorney general. They could even win the House of Delegates, which had been under firm Democratic control.

For Democrats, fright night stretched beyond Virginia into New Jersey, where as of press time the incumbent Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, is struggling to keep his position. The race is still too close to call.

Since Democrats easily carried both states in the last presidential and gubernatorial races, these results must send a shiver through the party. The Virginia race was particularly important. To understand its implications for 2022, we need to understand how Youngkin won.

The key was independent voters, especially the suburban voters who rejected Trump in 2020. Youngkin persuaded many of them, as Trump could not. The vote also demonstrates that Virginians are none too pleased with the performance of Democrats, who control both the state and national governments.

McAuliffe’s loss shows his party cannot recapture those disaffected voters by constantly asserting that their every opponent is a Trump wannabe or white supremacist. Instead, what they should do is to break free of their far left and put forward a moderate agenda. And they have to deliver effective results on the ground. Yet so far, national Democrats have delivered only failure: inflation, onerous mandates, empty store shelves, racially divisive school lessons, and a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. Those are fierce headwinds for local candidates.

Reconsidering Colin Powell’s record on Israel and Iran Moshe Phillips

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/316151

“Colin Powell was at times accused of being less than sympathetic to Israel, [but] that was not at all the case,” former Defense Department official Dov Zakheim recently claimed in the Washington Jewish Week newspaper. But a careful examination of Powell’s record shows that friends of Israel in the U.S. had legitimate concerns.

The well-known anecdotes about Powell speaking some Yiddish and serving as a “Shabbos goy” as a teenager are heartwarming. It’s too bad that this seems unrelated to interactions with Israel.

It was Powell who pressured Israel not to respond to Saddam Hussein’s Scud missile attacks during the Gulf War. As missile after missile struck the heart of Israel, as more than 4,000 buildings were damaged and 74 Israelis were killed, Israel’s hands were tied by Powell’s pressure.

In April 2001, Palestinian Arab terrorists in Gaza fired hundreds of rockets at Israeli kindergartens and kibbutzim. Israel hit back at the terrorists. Powell’s response? He publicly denounced Israel’s response as “excessive and disproportionate.”

Abraham Foxman, the longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Powell’s harsh criticism of Israel was an “overreaction” and “an erroneous judgment about the Israeli action.” Malcolm Hoenlein, executive Vice President of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said Powell’s language “was inappropriate and subject to distortion by the media.”