RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-love-diversity-except

The Democratic Party’s list of 2020 contenders grew by two last week when Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker made their White House ambitions official. Liberals and the media are celebrating the “diversity” of the candidates thus far—which I suppose is something to cheer if your measure of diversity is skin deep.

Ms. Harris and Mr. Booker “identify as black,” to use the popular locution, and join a presidential field that already features candidates who identify as female, Hispanic and gay. Liberals tell us that they pine for the “postracial” society of Dr. King’s dreams, but their relentless focus on identity politics belies that claim. Sen. Elizabeth Warren took a blood test to try to prove Native American ancestry to advance her political career. She has finally apologized to tribal leaders, but the fact that other liberals are openly debating whether a candidate’s race or sex ought to be disqualifying goes a long way toward explaining Ms. Warren’s behavior.

Ms. Harris is the product of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, and her exotic heritage has become a point of fascination for the political press. On CNN the other night, Don Lemon explained to Chris Cuomo that Ms. Harris’s prospects might hinge on “the whole idea of how does she identify.” Mr. Lemon kindly educated viewers on the proper use of terms like “African-American,” “black” and “person of color,” and how certain Democratic voting blocs could be put off if Ms. Harris chooses one label instead of another. “Remember that whole thing with Obama, is he black enough?”

What’s really off-putting is a discussion focused on Ms. Harris’s biracial background instead of on her views, but there’s the rub. In 2019, the only things that truly distinguish the Democratic candidates are superficial characteristics. On any number of issues—single-payer health care, guaranteed jobs, free college—Ms. Harris and Mr. Booker dutifully toe the progressive line. The irony is that there was a time not too long ago when they weren’t afraid to express sensible opinions that were unpopular among fellow Democrats.

When Mr. Booker was elected mayor of Newark, N.J., in 2006, his defining issues were public safety and education. Mr. Booker “brought Giuliani-style ‘broken windows’ policing to New Jersey’s largest city,” wrote Steven Malanga in City Journal. The new mayor’s police director was a New York City Police Department veteran known for pursuing drug dealers. “I will be relentless in the enforcement of the law,” Mr. Booker said at the time. “My residents shouldn’t have to deal with drug dealing on their corners punctuated by violence.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272781/demskkkcon-lloyd-billingsley

Virginia governor Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, had barely finished publicly touting infanticide last week when a page from his 1984 medical school yearbook suddenly went viral. The page showed a photo of a man in blackface standing beside a man in a Ku Klux Klan robe. The Virginia Democrat acknowledged he was one of the men but didn’t say which. Northam then denied that he was in the photo but acknowledged he once darkened his face to look like Michael Jackson. Northam apologized for his actions and Democrats were divided about how to respond.

As CNN reported, “Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner refrained from calling on him to resign,” but freshman Virginia Democrat Rep. Elaine Luria called for Northam to step down. Sen. Kamala Harris, a candidate for president, declare “the stain of racism should have no place in the halls of government” and called for Northam to step aside. So did former vice president Joe Biden, who said “Northam has lost all moral authority.” As the career of another prominent Democrat shows, this type of outrage is a new development.

West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, a mentor to Hillary Clinton, served in the U.S. Senate for a record 51 years, and as Senate majority leader from 1977-1981 and 1987-1989. Before election to the Senate in 1958, Byrd served six years in Congress. And before that, he served as a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1942, Byrd formed a new Klan chapter in Sophia, West Virginia, and in 1944 wrote to segregationist Senator Theodore Bilbo, Mississippi Democrat, “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.” Byrd rose to the rank of Exalted Cyclops and in 1946, wrote to the Klan’s Grand Wizard, “The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state in the nation.”

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?”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/democrats_are_the_party_of_destruction.html

The first image that came to mind after viewing the 2019 expression of exultant joy by New York Democrat representatives when Governor Cuomo called for a constitutional amendment to shore up abortion for New Yorkers was the 1939 jubilation by the German Reichstag when Hitler asserted that the end of world Jewry was his ultimate goal.

In both cases, the elation was about death. It is not really surprising, since it is becoming patent that the “D” in Democrat stands also for “destruction.” Democrats may couch their destructive tendencies in euphemisms like “social justice” and “women’s rights,” but one thing is clear: there is no objection from any Democrats as the party embraces the most radical left-wing ideology, meant to result in the demise of America. Success is to be destroyed; advancement is to be suppressed. Babies are expendable. Hubris under the cloak of social justice slogans runs amok.

It extends to each issue the Democrats embrace. Every city that has come under Democrat control is proof positive that instead of raising the standard of living for the occupants, the city falls to crime, gangs, and drugs. In fact, “America is awash with troubled, dysfunctional cities that have been electing Democratic mayors for decades.”

Their restrictive economic policies combined with outright corruption result in the death of the middle class. Once that is gone, the city is done for. Yet the Democrat slate of socialist-loving candidates continues to opt for this destruction as its members tout the 70% tax, which would turn America into Venezuela. Concomitant with this assault is the death of outrage as “diversions, half-truths, equivocations and sophistry” now describe the Democratic Party.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/next-obama-14181.html

The 2016 race to replace four-term U.S. senator Barbara Boxer of California, one of Congress’s most liberal politicians, appears likely to result in the election of an even more liberal successor: state attorney general Kamala Harris. In an increasingly polyglot state that exalts appearance and symbolism over substance, the ever-stylish and multiracial Harris—she is the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican-American father—finds herself in the right place at the right time. She’s enjoyed a meteoric rise in California politics—the first woman, African-American, or Asian-American elected as the state’s top law-enforcement officer. Whether the Senate will be a political stepping-stone for Harris or a final destination depends on how credibly she portrays herself as a politician with national stature. Her fans compare her with President Barack Obama; her detractors do the same.

Now 51, Harris cruised to reelection as attorney general in 2014, after eking out a close victory over Los Angeles County district attorney Steve Cooley in 2010. (Before becoming attorney general, she served two terms as district attorney of San Francisco, where she unseated popular incumbent Terence Hallinan.) The outcome of the 2010 contest, which took nearly a month to resolve, was decided by just 74,000 out of 8.8 million votes, or a margin of 0.8 percent—one of the closest statewide elections in California history. Cooley, a moderate Republican, had been the front-runner in most preelection polls, and he even declared victory on election night. But the results proved too close to call, and Harris eventually prevailed when all provisional and mail-in ballots were counted. And so a position formerly held by Republican law-and-order stalwarts such as George Deukmejian and Dan Lungren, as well as a relatively tough-on-crime liberal like Jerry Brown, fell into the hands of an outspoken opponent of capital punishment whose campaign drew almost no law-enforcement support.

Belying the “aspiring governor” nickname for state attorneys general, Harris set her sights on the Senate early in 2015, when the 75-year-old Boxer announced that she would retire rather than seek a fifth term in office.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/03/a-republic-not-a-

How dumb is the 2020 presidential election campaign going to be? Unfathomably dumb. Breathtakingly dumb. Seriously; pretty dumb.

And that’s just among the mainstream candidates. Just wait and see what happens if an independent billionaire jumps in the race.

Exhibit A this week: Howard Schultz, the former chief executive officer of Starbucks, is reportedly mulling a third-party or independent run for president. Schultz, a longtime Democrat, says both parties are hopelessly dysfunctional. (Which is undeniably true.) Neither political party, for example, is lifting a finger to address the $21.9 trillion national debt.

Exhibit A-1: Schultz appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on Wednesday, where he was interrogated about, wait for it, the price of a box of Cheerios.

Schultz was shocked to learn that Cheerios cost around four bucks — or less than a triple grande mocha. (But not nearly as delicious.) It also has nothing to do with the national debt, or immigration, or foreign policy, or anything else worth discussing.

Does it matter that a billionaire ex-CEO doesn’t know how much a box of cereal costs? Only if you’re in the business of asking stupid gotcha questions on television. I don’t know how much Cheerios cost, either. I don’t even eat cereal. Do you?