RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/beto-orourke-trumps-rhetoric-echoes-the-third-reich/

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke compared President Trump’s rhetoric to that of Nazi Germany Thursday, citing in particular Trump’s controversial comments about illegal immigrants.

At a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa, the former representative from the border town of El Paso, Texas was harshly critical of “the rhetoric of a president who not only describes immigrants as rapists and criminals, but as animals and an infestation.”

“Now, I might expect someone to describe another human being as an infestation in the Third Reich,” O’Rourke remarked to a crowd of students at Morningside College. “I would not expect it in the United States of America.”

Later Thursday, O’Rourke doubled down on his comments, telling reporters, “I compared the rhetoric that the president has employed to rhetoric that you might have heard during the Third Reich.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273361/mayor-buttigieg-runs-president-while-his-city-daniel-greenfield
On March 31, a South Bend grandma brought her grandson to the hospital. The 11-month-old baby boy had been shot. His grandmother’s car had also taken fire. It was another early morning in South Bend.

Around the same time, Mayor Buttigieg, was toting up the $7 million in donations from his charm offensive as his bid for the 2020 Democrat nomination got underway. The national media never bothered reporting the shooting of an 11-year-old boy in the city he was supposed to be running, but instead confined its coverage of South Bend matters to a publicity stunt wedding officiated by Buttigieg.

The horrifying shooting of an 11-month-old boy on the millennial mayor’s watch was not an unusual incident. In the last few days, even the media was gushing over Buttigieg’s presidential ambitions, two Indiana University South Bend players were injured in a shooting on Notre Dame Avenue, a blind date ended in a shooting, and yet another shooting added to the bloody toll in the real South Bend.

Those are quite a few shootings for a city of barely 100,000 people. But South Bend is a violent place.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/beto-orourke-is-fauxbama/

Obama’s platitudes are still platitudes in the mouth of the less-talented O’Rourke.

Only once did I sit in a medium-sized room with Barack Obama. It was May 19, 2006, and the then-senator was speaking at a BookExpo America breakfast to promote his book The Audacity of Hope. He warmed up by noting that some people were cynical about politics. “At best we just hope it does us no harm,” he said, which was true enough. But then he kept going.

There has always been this other idea, and the idea can be described very simply. The notion that we all have a stake in each other, and that my success is directly tied to the success of my neighbors…for all of our much-vaunted individualism, there is also this sense that we are tied up in a mutual destiny, and every once in a while that sense, that interpretation, expresses itself not only in our families, in our churches…but it also expresses itself in our government, in our collective lives. And it’s that sense that propelled me in politics.

Winding down, he deployed Martin Luther King Jr.’s remark about how “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” and said, “I look forward to working with you guys to spread the hope.”

The place went bananas. In a room full of booksellers and librarians, I was the only one not applauding. I was the only one who didn’t leap to my feet as though I had just received a life-altering revelation. As my success is obviously not tied to that of my neighbors, I am obviously not caught up in a mystical mutual-destiny tour with 300 million Americans and never have felt any rhapsodic “collective life” created by the nurturing bonds of government, Obama’s speech struck me as completely false, not to mention vapid, platitudinous and void of all meaningful content. (Tell me, at what capital-gains tax rate does the epiphany of “collective life” kick in?)

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/stacey-abrams-identity-politics-are-the-politics-that-win/

Failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams praised the “identity politics” of the progressive left as both electorally effective and morally right during a speech at Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention in New York on Wednesday.

“Identity politics is nothing more complex than saying, ‘I see you,’” Abrams said. “I lean in to identity politics. I believe in identity politics. And I believe identity politics are the politics that win.”

Abrams went on to fan the speculation surrounding her possible entry into the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential field, telling the audience that she has not yet made a decision.

“No, I don’t know what I’m doing next yet” she said when asked about a possible presidential run.

The comments come after Abrams shot down the suggestion that she might enter the race as Joe Biden’s running mate early in the primary in order to bolster his credibility among racial minorities and younger progressives.

“I think you don’t run for second place,” she said during an appearance on ABC’s The View last week. “If I’m going to enter a primary, then I’m going to enter a primary. And if I don’t enter a primary, my job is to make certain that the best Democrat becomes the nominee and whoever wins the primary that we make sure that person gets elected in 2020.”

http://www.rollcall.com/news/the-green-new-deal-you-cannot-be-serious

In the awkward aftermath of the Green New Deal’s rollout, perhaps the most appropriate question for its supporters, especially the Democratic presidential field, is one often posed by tennis bad boy John McEnroe: “You cannot be serious!”

But, apparently, when New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey introduced their proposal in February, they were deadly serious, and breathless progressives couldn’t wait to hop aboard the climate change express. First in line, the Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate who were eager to offer up their enthusiastic support.

There was just one snag. The Green New Deal, in reality, wasn’t serious. These weren’t well-thought-out ideas or vetted policies. They were far left talking points that couldn’t possibly survive any real scrutiny. And they didn’t.

The blowback was epic. Critics pounced on the resolution’s absurd provisions. America would have to retool every structure in the country to maximize energy efficiency. No cars. No planes. Trains to everywhere. Well, except from L.A. to San Francisco, where fiscal reality has already ended that green dream.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273358/omar-felt-more-accepted-kenyan-refugee-camp-us-joseph-klein Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), the controversial freshman member of the U.S. House of Representatives who has a habit of indulging in anti-Semitic stereotypes, complains about feeling marginalized in a land of white privilege. In an interview with Vogue Arabia, Rep. Omar, a refugee originally from Somalia who became a U.S. citizen nearly 20 years ago, waxed nostalgic about her days in a Kenyan refugee camp. She spent four years there as a child before resettling in the United States. At the refugee camp, Omar said, she could express her full identity. She felt free to be herself, living amongst like-minded people who looked and believed as she did. “When you’re a kid and you’re raised in an all-black, all- Muslim environment, nobody really talks to you about your identity,” Omar said. “You just are. There is freedom in knowing that you are accepted as your full self. So the notion that there is a conflict with your identity in society was hard at the age of 12.”

Omar is a perfect example of the entitled individual always willing to play the victim card. She and her family had been living in what one Somalian inhabitant of a refugee camp in Kenya called an “open prison.” It was too dangerous for Omar and her family to return to war-torn Somalia. At the same time, Kenya, Omar’s host country as a child, had no interest in integrating Somalian refugees like herself into Kenyan society. It was the United States that rescued Omar from the desperate conditions and hopelessness she was facing in her refugee camp. It was the United States that allowed her family to seek asylum to live in the United States. Her family eventually moved to Minneapolis and lived amongst a large Somali-American population.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/04/02/trump_and_conservatives_its_complicated_but_its_working_139929.html

Donald Trump is not a conventional conservative. Far from it. He’s a populist of the right. His strong appeal to conservatives lies in his nationalism, tax cuts, deregulation, and appointment of originalist judges.

Unlike Ronald Reagan, who had well-formed political ideas, Trump’s notions about public policy come from gut instincts, reinforced by cheering crowds. Their common thread is “Don’t tread on me.”

Trump’s disdain for tradition is the opposite of orthodox conservativism. It is most visible in the wrecking ball aimed at NATO and other allies. If you are rich enough and want our military protection, he says, then pay up or forget it. Prove you deserve our protection. Show us the money.

Trump’s threat to walk away is more credible than that of previous presidents because he is instinctively closer to Robert Taft’s isolationism than to Arthur Vandenberg’s internationalism. The Taft-Vandenberg debate in the late 1940s settled Republican foreign policy for the next 60 years. Vandenberg, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led bipartisan support for President Harry Truman’s policies, including the Marshall Plan and forming NATO. The party’s stance was sealed in 1952 when Dwight Eisenhower defeated Taft for the presidential nomination.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/02/sorry-palestine-does-not-exist/

In progressive America, an official elected in a predominantly Jewish district in the country’s largest city can be punished for asserting an indisputable historical fact if it happens to offend the sensibilities of hard-left activists. In this case, Kalman Yeger, a councilman from Brooklyn, in a back-and-forth about Rep. Ilhan Omar, tweeted that, “Palestine does not exist. There, I said it again. Also, Congresswoman Omar is an antisemite. Said that too.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio quickly issued an ultimatum to Yeger demanding he apologize, or else. After refusing, NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson booted Yeger from—what I assume is a wholly useless—city immigration committee. “I found Council Member Yeger’s comments completely unacceptable…” Johnson explained. “They were dehumanizing to Palestinians and divisive, and have no place in New York City.”

Yeger’s statements might be debatable—perhaps some of you don’t find Omar’s numerous attacks on American Jews anti-Semitic—but the other contention is a historical and present-day reality. Despite this, nearly every media story covering the kerfuffle frames the councilman’s contention about the status of the West Bank and Gaza as some kind of appalling attack on decency. What other Howard Zinn-like historical fantasies must we adopt to participate in debate?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/04/02/hispanics_rally_to_trump_boosting_his_2020_chances_139933.html

Get ready for the anti-Trump “resistance” to go truly loco, because new polling data indicates Hispanic support for the president is swelling, a trend that could seal his 2020 re-election victory.

When I helped lead the Trump Hispanic Advisory Council in 2016, our effort was widely derided by skeptics certain that the narrative of Trump as anti-Latino would doom his candidacy, particularly in heavily Hispanic states like Florida. But that November, Hispanics saw through the media smears and Trump massively outperformed dour expectations, actually surpassing Mitt Romney’s 2012 percentage among Latino voters.

Since then, prospects have only improved – most importantly for the overall well-being of America’s Hispanic citizens, but also for the political prognosis of President Trump. So much good news erupted last week for the president with the conclusion of the Mueller inquiry that stunning new polling data was largely glossed over. McLaughlin & Associates revealed that Hispanic approval for Trump in March jumped to 50%. This number matched the January Marist/NPR/PBS survey that shocked cynics with its own 50% approval finding. Even if those polls are too aggressive, February’s Morning Consult/Politico poll showed Trump’s Hispanic approval vaulting to a still-impressive 45%.