RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Democrats’ impeachment effort was never about removing President Donald Trump from office. If it had been, it would not have been rushed through the House of Representatives without a proper predicate or investigation.

No reasonable person expected the Republican-controlled Senate to remove a sitting president for anything Rep. Adam Schiff repeatedly alleged, no matter how unfairly he characterized Trump’s thoughts, words, or actions.

Impeachment was about satisfying the corporate media and Democratic base that had demanded it for years. And since removal was never a realistic outcome, it was about harming Trump in an election year.

By that standard, it could not have gone worse. Here are three ways that Pelosi’s gambit backfired bigly.

1. Donald Trump’s Numbers Went Up, Not Down

The latest Gallup poll of registered voters shows that Trump’s approval rating is the highest it’s been since his inauguration — 49 percent. That number went up from 39 percent in October, which was during the House’s impeachment process, such as it was.

During that same time, approval of the Democratic Party fell from 48 percent to 45 percent and approval of the Republican Party shot up from 43 percent to 51 percent. That’s the first time the GOP has had majority approval since 2005. The party also has a rare partisan-ID advantage.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/02/05/what_bloombergs_money_can_buy__142322.html

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s big-spending foray into the presidential race is getting noticed by millions of Americans. You can’t miss his seemingly ubiquitous television advertising, especially in states unaccustomed to seeing campaign commercials in primary season.

But a tiny, yet knowing, subsection of the public was captivated for an entirely different reason just days before Bloomberg spent $10 million to advertise during the Super Bowl. His year-end campaign finance report showed a free-spending organization that was met with a mix of disbelief and jealousy by political operatives throughout the country.

Most seasoned campaign workers and consultants can regale you with tales of boot-strapped campaigns, the proverbial uphill-both-ways-to-school story. Tales of campaign workers sleeping in the office and living off donated candy and booze are the stuff of lore.

While it may sound quaint in an era of super PACs and self-funders, the vast majority of campaigns today are still largely run on shoestring budgets. Ten grand for sushi you say? How about 10 bucks for pizza and we all chip in for the beer? An apartment in Midtown? How do you feel about staying in the basement of the candidate’s house? 

Don’t get me wrong — this is not passing judgment on a candidate or anyone working for wealthy candidates willing to spend their own money to get elected. As someone who toiled on several political campaigns, I’ve had the good fortune of experiencing both the well-funded and the not-so-well-funded.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/the-art-of-warping-elections/

N o sooner were Democrats’ Trump-Russia collusion charges debunked than they began to claim that Trump will do again in 2020 what Robert Mueller found he did not do in 2016: rig the election.

After 22 months, nearly 500 subpoenas, and somewhere around $35 million in costs, special counsel Robert Mueller’s much praised progressive “all-star” team of lawyers and investigators found no evidence that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians. Trump did not warp the 2016 election, and so he had not unfairly defeated the supposed sure-winner Hillary Clinton. But again those who have investigated and attacked Trump nonstop probably are seeking to do in 2020 what they falsely accused Trump of doing in 2016.

Mueller’s failure to find any collusion evidence was not for want of the dream team’s “bombshell” and “walls are closing in” leaks to CNN and MSNBC talking heads, over the course of 88 weeks. Almost daily we heard ad nauseam that Trump was soon to be indicted, convicted, removed, or summarily dispatched.

If anyone should have found “collusion,” it was certainly the Mueller zealots, then de facto ramrodded by current MSNBC partisan “legal” analyst Andrew Weissmann. (How odd that John Brennan, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and Andrew Weissmann leak to MSNBC and CNN and then, in the out-phase of their perpetually revolving-door careers, end up rewarded by their receptacles as paid TV analysts).

In the end, the “hunter-killer team” imploded.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/democracy-works-dems-vote-for-none-of-the-above-in-iowa/#comments

Terry Jones of Monty Python passed on last month, but his spirit was present at the Iowa Caucuses last night as “none of the above” emerged as the apparent winner. The combined efforts of the comedy writers of Tinseltown couldn’t have produced a sillier outcome. A technical glitch delayed the delegate count, but the contingent in this case reveals the necessary: The Democrats don’t have a clue whom they want as a presidential candidate, because the Democratic Party has become a suppurating stew of contending resentments. Do they want a recycled Communist to soak the successful and distribute the spoils to self-defined losers in the form of student-loan forgiveness or subsidized health care or a job-killing minimum wage? Do they want an eco-gender icon who flatters the faddish predilections of young urban professionals? Do they want a feminist standard-bearer with an aggressive redistributionist agenda? Do they want an African-American candidate to embody the rejection of “white privilege” and correct the supposed original sin of slavery? Or do they want an aged, empty vessel whose only qualifiication is a past association with a Democratic Party that once upon a time won elections?

Democratic voters don’t want any of these. No doubt the Iowa Democrats will release results eventually, although challenges and recriminations may persist for a while. But the actual vote, whatever it is, will show a degree of fragmentation among Democratic voters never seen since the party’s founding. The radical vote is big enough to block Biden, a shadow of the crafty, nasty politician who crushed Paul Ryan in the 2012 vice-presidential debates, a pathetic figure who says what his handlers made him memorize when you pull the string at the back of his neck. Bernie Sanders, the one candidate who came into the primaries with a national reputation and a field organization, lacks the credibility to unite the radicals, and Elizabeth Warren is too shrill, too extreme and too crazy to do anything but siphon votes away from Sanders. The black candidates have withdrawn from the race. Pete Buttigieg may emerge in front of the pack because he’s everyone’s second choice.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/elitist-bill-kristol-becomes-democrat-rabbi-aryeh-spero/

Here is the announcement that so-called neo-con Bill Kristol has just found solace in the arms of the saintly Democrats: Bill Kristol @Bill Kristol: “Not presumably forever, not perhaps for a day after Nov. 3, 2020…. But for the time being one has to say: We are all Democrats now.”

So, Bill Kristol is now identifying with and preferring the Democrat Party, which promotes the dangerous socialist dystopia; has 120 congressional members endorsing CAIR; is trending in an anti-Israel trajectory; refuses to condemn anti-Semitism in and of itself; accepts ANTIFA; attacks the traditional family and race-baits constantly; condemned our take-out of the foremost jihadist terrorist Soleimani; supports the Iran Deal and the $billions funding the mullahs; pushes for open and unprotected borders; and violated all the bedrock laws of due process in order to nullify the will of the electorate and destroy a President.

Someone lamented that Kristol has a good mind. So, what!; he seems to lack character and has used his mind for the last three years to severely damage our institutions, America itself, and has been a major engine in putting this country through Hell. Good minds are a dime a dozen, but are frightening when used to scheme and plot destruction. Kristol never knew when to stop the destruction he was causing this country.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-02-04/clinton-campaign-vets-behind-2020-iowa-caucus-app-snafu

On a tense, chaotic night, with the eyes of the nation trained on the Iowa caucuses, that state’s Democratic Party was counting on a slick new smartphone app to make everything go smoothly.

The app was coded by a tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, one of them a former Google engineer. It was designed to meet new requirements instituted after that year’s contentious Iowa caucuses, in which Clinton narrowly edged out Bernie Sanders. To provide more transparency this time around, the state party promised to report not just the final results but voters’ initial and second choices as well.

With so much more data to tabulate than in previous years, party leaders feared that the established system of reporting numbers by phone would be too slow. A proposal for a “tele-caucus” system enabling virtual voting was rejected as too vulnerable to hacking. An app that could instantaneously relay the numbers as soon as precinct chairs input them, developed by Democratic Party loyalists, looked like the perfect solution.

It turned out to be a crushing failure.

Throughout the long, long night, precinct chairs found themselves unable to make the app work properly. Some never figured out how to download or install it in the first place. Those who tried to report their results via a backup phone line found themselves on hold, sometimes for more than an hour.

Results from Monday’s caucuses could not be transmitted to Iowa party headquarters, and state Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price blamed the problem on a coding error. “While our plan is to release results as soon as possible today, our ultimate goal is to ensure that the integrity and accuracy of the process continues to be upheld,” he said in a statement Tuesday morning.

https://www.investigativeproject.org/8287/the-anti-islamist-muslim-challenging-ilhan-omar

All that journalist Dalia al-Aqidi was asking for was a brief interview, one-on-one, to air on a TV station in the Middle East. She was, after all, one of the region’s best-known and most accomplished international reporters. But then-newly-elected Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar refused even to respond to her request.

Now al-Aqidi, an Iraqi refugee who has lived in the United States since 1988, is challenging Omar to represent Minnesota’s 5th Congressional district.

The decision to run for office didn’t come easily to the 51-year-old al-Aqidi. But “after Omar was elected, her activities and her statements – it offended me as an American, as a Muslim, and it offended me as an immigrant, and that made me concentrate on her activities,” she explained in a recent Skype interview. Omar’s non-response to her interview request, though, was what ultimately set her on her current path. “After that I said, ‘I don’t want to interview her. I’m going to talk to her district, and talk to her people.'”

In the process, she found that although Omar is herself a Somali refugee, many of her constituents, and particularly those in the Somali community, felt much the way al-Aqidi did. “Ilhan Omar is trying to give a false picture of what immigrants want,” al-Aqidi says. “People now think Somalis come to the U.S. to sit and get handouts, and come for free this and free that – it’s not true at all. [So] now a large percentage of her own Somali community can’t stand her anymore, because they see the damage she is doing to them.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/elizabeth_warren_is_a_climate_hypocrite_and_so_is_bernie.html

Elizabeth Warren has always been a phony. Her most obvious phony moment was claiming to be a Native American so that she could make the leap from state schools into the Ivy Leagues. Without that fake resume enhancer, she was merely a mediocre teacher; with it, she was a sop to the diversity gods.

She’s told other lies to burnish her records: she lied about her parents’ marriage, she lied about her father’s job, and she lied about her job prospects when she was first pregnant. Now, another lie has come to light: She’s been lying about being green.

Legal Insurrection puts the pieces together to explain that Elizabeth Warren never really divested herself of valuable oil-and-gas leases. Instead, she transferred them to her children so that they wouldn’t show up in her portfolio while she was enthusiastically supporting the Green New Deal:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) campaigns as an environmental activist, supporting the completely insane Green New Deal and stating that she will ban fracking on her first day in office.

As is often the case with Warren, what she says and what she does are very different things. The Wall Street Journal reports that Warren received income from oil and gas royalties in Oklahoma and that she transferred her holdings to her children before announcing her run for the Senate.

Warren latched on to the Green New Deal almost immediately.  She did not care that it was concocted originally as a means of restructuring “the entire economy,” with its socialist Justice Democrats creators only later slapping the green wash of “climate change” on it to make it more appealing to the left.

Back in August of 2018, investigative journalist Andrew Kerr reported that “Elizabeth Warren Earned Royalties From Natural Gas Producer With Long Rap Sheet Of Environmental Violations, Tax Returns Reveal.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/iowa_caucuses_legitimate_disaster_or_cover_for_a_more_nefarious_plan.html

This year’s Iowa caucus ought to have gone more smoothly than any caucus ever before in Iowa history. Then, a gremlin threw the whole caucus into utter chaos. Or was it just a gremlin? At this point, inquiring minds are getting paranoid about whether the DNC is desperately trying to run away from Bernie’s apparent momentum.

The problems started with that elusive Des Moines Register poll. Keep in mind that the Des Moines Register already brought shame on itself late last year when one of its reporters doxed a 24-year-old sports fan did a cute tweet, got lots of beer money, and then generously donated it to a local children’s hospital. Anheuser-Busch joined into the donation.

That was when one of the Register’s reporters decided to troll through the man’s tweets, going back 7 years to his teens, and finding two racist tweets. If that wasn’t sleazy enough, it turned out the reporter had his own history of nasty tweets. The Register fired the reporter, but by then the whole episode had become irrecoverably ugly.

That was bad. This weekend, though, the Register went one worse. Working with CNN, the Des Moines Register commissioned a poll in the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses. However, owing to some confusion about whether Pete Buttigieg was among the candidate choices offered to those taking the poll, CNN and the Register decided to pull the poll. That’s the official story.

https://spectator.us/why-the-iowa-voting-fiasco-matters/

The Monday night caucuses were the biggest moment in four years for Iowa Democratic Party. They screwed it up beyond belief. They had one task: to produce timely, accurate, and reliable vote totals, and they failed completely. TV anchors sat around filling time, waiting for Godot to show up with election returns. None appeared. The candidates themselves began flying off to New Hampshire for next week’s primary.

It was a fiasco, a huge embarrassment not only for state officials but for the national party. It denied the winners their big moment before the TV cameras on election night—and the fundraising bonus that goes with it. It left the losers wondering if they’ve been robbed. It left Iowans questioning whether they will ever hold caucuses again or keep their prime spot as first-in-the-nation. The bitterness over this mess will linger, and the Republicans will exploit it.

To begin with, this failure makes the Democratic Party look ridiculous. The damage is compounded because they are the “party of government.” That’s their brand, and it been since Franklin Roosevelt proposed the New Deal. Democratic policies almost always call for more government, run from Washington. When people point to social or economic problems, Democrats reflexively respond with laws, regulations, and bureaucracies to tackle them (and taxes to pay for them). That prospect looks a lot less appealing when you can’t count the votes in a high school gym. It doesn’t encourage people to say, “These are just the people to handle my healthcare.”