RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/some_thoughts_all_cynical_and_sour_about_the_republican_debate.html

So, I sat through all two hours of the debate amongst the Republican primary candidates, although I was very irked by Larry Elder’s absence. Having said that, he didn’t miss much. It was like watching a junior high school debate, complete with the cool kids asking stupid questions and the geeks fighting on the stage. I hated every minute of it, thought it was embarrassing for all involved, and found it insulting to the American voters.

If you want details about questions and answers, you’ll find them elsewhere. These are just my impressions.

As is the case every election cycle, the format is appalling. It caters to the media’s assumption that voters cannot hold anything in their brains for more than a minute or two. They think we’re stupid, and the format is set up to cater to that. It’s cruel to legitimate candidates to force them to address complex issues in one-minute soundbites, and it deprives the American people of important information. It’s such a degradation of real political debate.

Within that appalling format, I couldn’t be less impressed with Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum. Their questions were shallow and, considering that it was their format, they had no control over the candidates. I also disliked that they thought it was smart to open with a question that saw them playing Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Yes, I understand that the song has resonated with Americans. However, if each candidate gets only one minute, don’t waste time on a song.

Regarding the candidates, I came away thinking that Vivek, DeSantis, and what’s-his-name from North Dakota managed to look the same or better by evening’s end. The fact that I can’t remember what’s-his-name’s name, though, is a reminder that, while he had a couple of good answers, he’s fundamentally a nonentity who just looked better in comparison to some of the others on the stage.

Nikki Haley is a shrill, establishment harridan who kept playing the woman card. Speaking as a woman, I was not impressed. When she ridiculed Vivek Ramaswamy’s lack of foreign policy chops, all I could think of was that she’s someone who supports Biden’s foreign policy. What’s that say about her chops?

I also disagreed profoundly when she said that Ukraine is our friend. As far as I’m concerned, Ukraine, one of the most corrupt nations in the world, is a friend only to politicians and defense contractors (a point Vivek made). And when Pence went on a rant about Putin entering NATO countries, I wanted to yell at him that it’s America that ignored a promise never to push NATO right up to Putin’s doorstep. I’m not defending Putin or Russia. This is a war that would be best ended if both countries lost. What I don’t want to see is America get sucked in.

A Vietnamese immigrant who spent 25 years in the Navy, including service in combat zones around the world, Cao pledged to be a “fighter” at a time when he said the country had taken a “dark turn.”

“We are losing our country. You know it. But you also know you can’t say it. We’re forced to say that wrong is right,” he said in a video announcement that took aim at President Joe Biden.

Cao will join an increasingly crowded field of Republican contenders — at least eight other candidates have filed paperwork — aiming to run next year against Kaine, who so far faces no primary opponent. See this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBUE5uft_9k&t=201s

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/vivek-ramaswamy-surprise-everyone-first-republican-debate

Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley is going after Vivek Ramaswamy. She’ll have plenty of company Wednesday night; Ramaswamy is surging in the polls making him, like Ron DeSantis, an obvious target at the GOP debate. 

My guess: Ramaswamy will hold his own and then some. Why? Because Ramaswamy is super smart and is talking common sense. Boy does this country need a big dose of common sense!

Haley pillories Ramaswamy for pledging to cut off aid to Israel in 2028, saying he’s “walking away from America’s special alliance with Israel” – a headline-grabbing accusation. But Vivek would only do so, he explained in an interview, if his plan to negotiate peace between Israel and other Middle East nations is successful. If he fails, then Vivek would continue to support Israel’s defense. Common sense.

The political novice, who was virtually unknown six months ago, traffics in controversial statements (Haley also jumps on him for saying he would defund the FBI, for instance) but seems to say what a lot of Americans are thinking.  As he recently told Fox Business’ Neil Cavuto: “I’d rather lose this race and speak truth at every step than to win by saying what I’m ‘supposed to.’”

An Emerson poll shows Ramaswamy at 10 percent of the vote, tied with DeSantis for second place. Five months ago he did not even register on the Real Clear Politics average of polls. Vivek is still miles away from catching up to Donald Trump, who in that poll has 56 percent of the vote.   

Asked a few months ago how he might secure the nomination, the long-shot candidate said winning in Iowa and New Hampshire would be key. Currently, he is trailing far behind in both states.

But, like Bernie Sanders and other improbable political stars, Ramaswamy has authenticity – a vital attribute that money cannot buy. (Just ask Hillary Clinton.) Also, he is carrying zero political baggage and owes no one, having mostly financed his own campaign.

Ramaswamy recently introduced these ten bold “truths,” as he calls them:

“1. God is real. 2. There are two genders. 3. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels. 4. Reverse racism is racism. 5. An open border is no border. 6. Parents determine the education of their children. 7. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind. 8. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty. 9. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four. 10. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.”

Liberals hate these opinions, because they shred the progressive double-think that is destroying our country. The kind of idiocy that says letting criminals go free will reduce crime. Or that an open border which allows deadly drugs to flood our nation is “humanitarian.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/21/ii-tipp-poll/

Congressional investigators claim to have strong evidence that President Joe Biden and his family received a staggering $20 million or more in payments from foreign sources while he served as vice president under Barack Obama. If proven true, two-thirds of Americans say that Biden should either resign or be impeached, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll indicates.

The accusation of possible bribery is serious. And a key House investigative panel says it has evidence, mostly bank statements, to back up claims that Biden took money from oligarchs in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

“The tally of foreign money to the Biden family has hit at least $20 million, based on the third round of bank records the House Oversight and Accountability Committee released Wednesday — pointing to millions from oligarchs from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine,” reported the Daily Signal.

In its latest monthly sounding of public opinion, the national online I&I//TIPP Poll of 1,369 voters, taken Aug. 2-4, asked Americans, what should be done if the allegations prove true?

A significant 67% majority responded that Biden should either “resign immediately” (24%) or “be impeached and removed from office” (43%). Those supporting more lenient treatment totaled just 23%, with 15% saying Biden should “be allowed to finish his term in office, but not run again,” and 8% supporting “run again in 2024, regardless of the findings.”

Another 10% responded “not sure.” The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-ducks-the-gop-debate-candidate-politics-gop-nominee-race-election-2024-polls-indictment-c838c967?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Donald Trump’s decision to skip Wednesday’s presidential debate shows that he wants to avoid having to tussle with competitors who might criticize him. The more interesting question is how Republican voters will respond to the former President’s evident presumption that he owns their allegiance.

Instead of debating, Mr. Trump says he will commune somewhere with Tucker Carlson. The former Fox News host will be on hand less as an interviewer than to endorse the former President’s claims that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is America’s fault and that the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot was merely a case of exuberant supporters getting slightly carried away.

Mr. Trump clearly think he has the nomination all but wrapped up, and judging by the current polls he has reason to think so. But what a message he is sending about the loyalty he thinks GOP voters owe him.

It would mean the Grand Old Party is going to nominate, for the third time, a man who has been indicted four times on 91 felony counts. We don’t mean despite being indicted. We mean because he’s been indicted.

In order to spite the Democrats for their partisan prosecutions, GOP voters would be doing exactly what Democrats and the press corps want them to do. Democrats want Republicans to nominate the man who has shown over the last three national elections that he is the greatest voter turnout machine for the Democratic Party since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/chris-queen/2023/08/19/vivek-ramaswamy-speaks-about-an-american-revival-n1720536

The last 2024 GOP presidential hopeful to speak at Erick Erickson’s Gathering in Atlanta on Saturday was Vivek Ramaswamy. I’ll confess that he’s the top-tier candidate I knew the least about, but he sat with Erickson for a fascinating conversation.

Before introducing Ramaswamy, Erickson joked that he didn’t like the idea of a presidential candidate who is younger than he is — Ramaswamy just turned 38 — but the candidate spoke with polish and wisdom beyond his years. Erickson led off by asking Ramaswamy about the tragic fires in Maui, which PJ Media’s own Lincoln Brown reported were at least partially the result of government mismanagement.

“If we don’t learn from our mistakes, we’re destined to make them again,” Ramaswamy stated. “There was an Obama appointee, a climate change activist who also believes as part of this broader Gaia-centric world view of the earth that water rights are to be protected, which led to a five-to-six-hour delay in the critical window of getting waters to put out those fires, and we will never know, although certain signs point to the fact that we very well could have avoided those catastrophic deaths, many of them if water had made it to the site of the fires on top.”

Ramaswamy transitioned to talking about the invasion of wokeness into every part of our culture, including education and the military. He pointed to patriotism and faith as the way to make our way out of the cultural fights that rage in America today. The phrase that he returned to time and time again was “American revival.”

The candidate said that Americans are missing that combination of faith and patriotism, and he asserted that “we have to fill that vacuum with our vision of what it means to be a citizen of this nation, do it without apology, and that is how we will dilute these woke agendas to irrelevance.”

The candidate stated that the key to “American revival” was to replace the focus on race, gender, class, and identity with the individual, family, country, and God.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/18/nikki-haley-is-hillary-2-0/

Nikki Haley has microwaved Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and made her own all about being a woman, as if Republicans care.

Of all the terrible things about Nikki Haley — her enthusiasm for more foreign war funding, her deference to corporate cultural assault — the cringe-worthy attempts to hype her status as a woman (A mom! A wife!) and Indian (“I’m a minority first!,” “I’m as diverse as it gets!”) are the least offensive. But it’s still really, really bad.

Her whole campaign is Hillary 2.0.

Haley currently polls nationally at less than 5 percent, and it’s the same in early Republican primary states Iowa and New Hampshire, so there aren’t a ton of reasons to spend time thinking about her. But it’s truly awe-inspiring that there exist Republicans who still believe there’s anything to gain from the party’s voters by rubbing their faces in identity politics rot.

When have Republicans ever showed any appetite for it? They haven’t. They don’t care. It’s only interesting to the extent that ethnic minorities and women who run for office as Republicans are contrary to the racist media’s preferred narrative. Outside of that, it’s meaningless and has no bearing on a voter’s decision to trust any given candidate with power.

Haley has already disqualified herself for the nomination by cheering on more war between Ukraine and Russia, stupidly undermining the only Republican senator trying to uphold the law that abortions not be funded with taxpayer money, and ceding authority to corporations that promote gross left-wing social causes.

https://themessenger.com/politics/trump-to-skip-first-gop-debate-will-do-interview-with-tucker-carlson-report

Former President Donald Trump plans to skip the first GOP debate next Wednesay in Milwaukee and will instead do an online interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, according to a report in the New York Times.

Sources close to the former president told The Times he has told those close to him he will skip the debate and do the sit down with the former top-rated Fox News host.

The news comes less than 24 hours after Trump wrote on Truth Social that he is polling well ahead of the other candidates, adding, “Reagan didn’t do it, and neither did others. People know my Record, one of the BEST EVER, so why would I Debate?”

The Trump campaign refused to confirm or deny the report to The Messenger. 

“Tucker has been the plan for some time. But Georgia might change that. Don’t be surprised if he shows up in Atlanta on debate night,” said a Trump adviser who recently spoke with him about the options of his debate night whereabouts.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/18/the-gop-primary-obviously-isnt-over-but-the-first-debate-is-crucial/

If one is to believe the prevailing narrative from Donald Trump’s current campaign to retake the White House, the 2024 Republican presidential primary might as well be over. The former president has been consistently dominating the top-line horse race polling for months now, the argument goes, despite (or perhaps because of?) the fact he has now been criminally indicted four separate times, by three different prosecutors, in four different jurisdictions. Therefore, the Trump triumphalists shout from their rooftops, the other candidates should just drop out right now. “Spare your dignity and coronate Trump today!!!”

This argument is absurd for approximately a million different reasons.

First, and perhaps most important, the last time I checked the calendar, it still said, “August 2023.” While commentators, campaign operatives and political junkies with apparently nothing else better to do in their free time are already intensely following the Republican presidential primary, the same is simply not true for the vast majority of Americans who largely tune out the news during the dog days of summer. A political party’s first televised presidential primary debate marks the unofficial beginning of its normal, non-activist voter base paying attention in earnest. Yes, Trump has maintained a stubborn lead in the national horse race polls for months now. But it is still ridiculously early.

Second, and perhaps next important, it is totally unclear what shape Trump might find himself in six months from now, to say nothing of one year from now. Many of the former president’s “coronate him today!”-style enthusiasts tend to suppose, because of the thoroughly unjust nature of the ruling class’s sprawling multistate legal persecution of Trump, that he will be inevitably exonerated from all charges and acquitted of all legal woes.

Trump’s supporters are right on the unjustness of the Regime’s jihad against Trump – though the former president’s often-myopic conduct, from his ignoring a grand jury subpoena in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents retention case to the outlandish, infamous Jan. 2, 2021, phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the Fulton County, Georgia case, makes it all-too easy for his foes. But Trump’s supporters are wrong about the very nature of these four indictments, each one of which necessarily involves a different judge and a different juror pool, and all of which present differing likelihoods of guilt, acquittal or some sort of ultimate plea deal. In the interim, furthermore, Trump will be strapped for time as he is forced to physically jet off to courtrooms in four jurisdictions, and his campaign and supporting super PAC will continue to have their coffers bled dry with ever-mounting legal bills.