RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/leading_democrat_presidential_contenders_struggle_with_being_white_and_boring.html

With another Democrat debate coming next week, it’s impossible for a conservative not to enjoy watching Democrats agonize over their candidates’ whiteness, ignore their affluence, and pretend that there’s a groundswell of support for any of them. The excitement surrounding Trump is completely absent.

At the Washington Post, Annie Linskey, shares Democrat worries that their primary debate next week will have only white faces on the stage:

Only white candidates have qualified for next week’s Democratic presidential debate, the first time in this election cycle that no minority contender will make the stage. It’s a dynamic that critics say threatens to undercut the party’s rhetoric of inclusivity.

The race for the 2020 Democratic nomination kicked off last year with a historically diverse pool of candidates, including two black senators, a black mayor, a Hispanic former Cabinet secretary and an Asian businessman. Since then, all have either dropped out or failed to qualify for a spot on the stage, determined by poll numbers and donations.

Now the specter of an all-white debate in the mostly white state of Iowa is prompting concern among party activists.

 Live by identity politics, die by identity politics. The irony, of course, is that the politically incorrect people who refuse to give their votes to minority candidates are Democrats.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-deterrence-policy-stop-trump-11578528412?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Aside from the stunning photograph of Qasem Soleimani’s mangled car outside Baghdad airport, the most astonishing sight after the attack was the universal ambivalence, at best, from Democrats.

Not long ago—before Donald Trump—any president’s use of force against an overseas enemy would get at least 24 hours of partisan restraint. No more. The Democrats’ jack-in-the-box talking point was that Mr. Trump had brought us to “the brink of war.

Startled by this reaction, former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman wrote in these pages: “It may be that today’s Democratic Party simply doesn’t believe in the use of force against America’s enemies in the world. I don’t believe that is true, but episodes like this one may lead many Americans to wonder.”

If the party’s presidential front-runner is any barometer, the use of credible force is off the table. In a foreign-policy speech Tuesday, Joe Biden said, “The only way out of this crisis is through diplomacy—clear-eyed, hard-nosed diplomacy grounded in strategy.”

There you have it: In the mind of Joe Biden—former vice president, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his party’s most notable “moderate”—the only two policy paths available are “war with Iran” (his words) and diplomacy. When did national strategy get so simple, or simplistic?

A byproduct of Mr. Trump’s maddening persona is that it causes his opponents to lose their ability to think straight—about anything. Mr. Trump has been president for more than 1,000 days, but you would think from the commentary and coverage that every moment has been an exercise in moronic idiocy, without exception—including killing the head of Iran’s Quds Force.

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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/reaganmccarthy/2020/01/07/john-james-outraises-gary-peters-for-the-second-quarter-in-a-row-in-michigan-senate-race-n2559087
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It is now officially an election year, and although President Trump will be at the top of the ballot, the fight for control of the Senate may be even more contentious. Democrats have their eyes on a few GOP swing states, including Arizona, Colorado, Iowa and Maine; the GOP also has its sights set on flipping a few blue states, including Michigan. The seat at play is currently held by Gary Peters (D-MI), who was elected to the seat in 2014. Peters is a relatively low-profile senator and has little real name recognition among his constituents.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/01/bernie-sanders-killing-terrorist-putting-muslims-daniel-greenfield/

With Beto O’Rourke out of the race, it’s up to Bernie Sanders to come up with the best hot take on the killing of Soleimani. And he delivers exactly the sort of rambling senile socialist rant you would expect from Jeremy Corbyn. All he leaves out is throwing around “empire”, “endless war”, and “neo-liberalism”. And then blaming the whole thing on corporations. But at least he manages to compare Trump to Putin and Xi.

SANDERS: No, I think it was an assassination. I think it was in violation of international law. This guy was (INAUDIBLE) — was a bad news guy, but he was a ranking official of the Iranian government.

And Baghdadi was the ranking head of the Islamic State.

So what?

If a foreign government official decides to engage in terrorist operations, he’s a terrorist. The silly argument that Soleimani can’t be killed because he has an official title is nonsense. Terrorists don’t stop being terrorists because they have titles.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/07/democratic-primary-2020-095090

DAVENPORT, Iowa — The new year is taking the presidential primary to a dark place in the nation’s first caucus state.

President Donald Trump’s impending impeachment trial and fear of war with Iran — as well as the Australia wildfires and their implications for climate change — quickly cast a pall over a contest in which Democrats are already wracked with uncertainty about which candidate has the best chance of defeating Trump.

All across Iowa hangs an air of heightened distress, which the candidates are readily leaning into.

“I tell you all these things not to get you nervous, but to get you depressed,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, speaking about climate change, said at a town hall meeting in Grundy Center, Iowa, over the weekend.

Hours later in Des Moines, it was Joe Biden describing the state of Trump’s presidency more broadly as “extremely, extremely worrisome.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren admonished supporters in Davenport that “this is a time of crisis in this country.”

Democrats have fretted for more than a year about how to choose a nominee. And for those who loathe Trump, the imperative to remove him from office has remained high since the minute he won election in 2016.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/bernie_compares_soleimani_to_a_russian_dissident.html

One of the things that became very obvious about the Left beginning with 9/11 is that Leftists consider anyone who hates America to be virtuous in some way. It’s irrelevant to them that some America-haters are, within their own countries, people who are legitimately fighting for freedom, while others are actively seeking to impose totalitarianism wherever they can. To a Leftist, America hating is the beginning and the end. Actors’ ideologies and motives are irrelevant.

This world view is how Leftists can come out with statments that are morally blind. Many of us remember that Michael Moore compared the 9/11 killers, who dreamed of a world subordinate to sharia’s brutalities, to America’s Minutemen, who dreamed of a world of small government, individual liberty, and religious freedom. 

We also see this moral blindness Bernie Sanders, one of the Democrat frontrunners. In an interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN about Trump’s decision to terminate Soleimani, Bernie Sanders likened Soleimani, with the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hand, to a dissident in a totalitarian country fighting against his or her own repressive government:

. . . but this guy is, you know, was as bad as he was, an official of the Iranian government. And you unleash . . . then, if China does that, you know, if Russia does that. You know, Russia has been implicated under Putin with assassinating dissidents.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/aoc-takes-aim-at-party-leadership-for-tolerating-moderates-democrats-can-be-too-big-of-a-tent/

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) criticized the Democratic party for its tolerance of relative moderates, saying her own party has become “too big of a tent” in an interview published Monday.

“For so long, when I first got in, people were like, ‘Oh, are you going to basically be a tea party of the left?’ And what people don’t realize is that there is a tea party of the left, but it’s on the right edges, the most conservative parts of the Democratic Party,” Ocasio-Cortez told New York Magazine. “So the Democratic Party has a role to play in this problem, and it’s like we’re not allowed to talk about it.”

The freshman lawmaker also lashed out at party leadership for their intolerance of internal criticism, saying “we’re not allowed to talk about anything wrong the Democratic Party does.”

Ocasio-Cortez pointed to the reaction elicited by her 2018 election as proof that Democrats cater too often to conservative interests, and that the party’s progressive shift was helping Democrats learn “to stretch our wings a little bit on the left.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/buttigiegs-war-and-the-shortest-way-home-11578355312

“Seriously? This failed small town mayor who trades off of essentially non-existent military experience has people who want him to be President?” D.P.S.

When Mayor Pete Buttigieg talks about his military service, his opponents fall silent, the media fall in love, and his political prospects soar. Veterans roll their eyes.

CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Mr. Buttigieg Sunday if President Trump “deserves some credit” for the strike that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. “No,” the candidate replied, “not until we know whether this was a good decision and how this decision was made.” He questioned whether “it was the right strategic move” and said his own judgment “is informed by the experience of having been on one of those planes headed into a war zone.”

But Mr. Buttigieg’s stint in the Navy isn’t as impressive as he makes it out to be. His 2019 memoir is called “Shortest Way Home,” an apt description of his military service. He entered the military through a little-used shortcut: direct commission in the reserves. The usual route to an officer’s commission includes four years at Annapolis or another military academy or months of intense training at Officer Candidate School. ROTC programs send prospective officers to far-flung summer training programs and require military drills during the academic year. Mr. Buttigieg skipped all that—no obstacle courses, no weapons training, no evaluation of his ability or willingness to lead. Paperwork, a health exam and a background check were all it took to make him a naval officer.

He writes that his reserve service “will always be one of the highlights of my life, but the price of admission was an ongoing flow of administrativia.” That’s not how it’s supposed to work. The paperwork isn’t the price of admission but the start of a long, grueling test.