RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274003/how-buttigieg-entered-anti-israel-echo-chamber-daniel-greenfield

Last year, Pete Buttigieg, then the mayor of a failing Indiana city with a small Jewish community, and with unlikely aspirations for higher office, visited Israel. He suggested that Israel’s approach to security offered “a very important lesson in that that hopefully Americans can look to”.

Buttigieg had joined an American Jewish Committee delegation of mayors and came back with a seeming understanding of Israel’s precarious security situation and the danger of simplistic solutions.

 “One of the first things that was very clear to us is that there is not a unified or single voice for the Palestinian people. Most people aren’t aware of the difference between what’s happening in Gaza, run by Hamas in a way that is contributing to a lot of misery there, but also totally different than an environment where you would have a negotiating partner across the table,” he observed.

Fast forward a year and Buttigieg is running for president and threatening to cut aid to Israel.

In his foreign policy address, he falsely claimed that “the Netanyahu government is turning away from peace” and warned Israel, while, referring to himself in the third person, that “President Buttigieg would take steps to ensure that American taxpayers won’t help foot the bill.”

What happened? There are two answers.

When Buttigieg was running a conservative city with an active Jewish and Christian community, where it’s not unusual to see churches flying the Israeli flag, it was safe for him to be more pro-Israel. On the campaign trail of a radical primary, where anti-Israel protesters dogged his steps, things changed.

But the bigger answer goes inside the foreign policy factory to see how the sausage gets made.

Buttigieg’s foreign policy team is headed by Doug Wilson. Wilson, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and the highest-ranking gay Pentagon official, is an obvious choice. Wilson chairs the Board of Advisors at the Truman National Security Project making him the guy to talk to for 2020 Democrats like Buttigieg interested in developing a foreign policy position at the national level.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273997/will-dems-presidential-fate-repeat-past-wins-or-bruce-thornton

Many Republicans are feeling optimistic about Trump’s reelection in 2020. The Mueller investigation, on which Democrats’ pinned their hopes for mortally wounding the president, has crumbled like a bride’s first pie crust. AG Barr, unlike the lollygagging Jeff Sessions, is vigorously investigating the corruption in the FBI and DOJ that led to government agencies’ interference in an election in favor of Hillary Clinton, and then their attempts to engineer a bloodless coup to remove a legally elected president. The economy is roaring, with numbers on growth, employment, and productivity not seen in decades. And international rivals like Iran and China are now being confronted rather than coddled.

Meanwhile, the Democrats appear to have lost their political minds. They have sunk deeper into the swamps of zombie socialism, illiberal identity politics, 1984-style censorship, legalized infanticide, climate-change apocalypse, and proposals to dismantle the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For Republicans, these excesses portend a variation on their party’s victories in 1972 or 1980. But Dems apparently believe they can reprise Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s triumphs in 1992 and 2008. Each of these elections recalls the circumstances and issues that so far are shaping 2020.

Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972 over George McGovern, who won only one state and lost his home state, was a decisive rejection of the Sixties on behalf of the “Silent Majority” angered over this attempted fundamental transformation of America. The sneering assault on traditional religion, customs, mores, and morals, one abetted by the media, popular culture, and universities, aroused a sleeping electoral giant. Nixon’s deft handling of the Vietnam War during his first term, which lead to a draw-down of U.S. forces––from over half a million in 1968 to a mere 50 in 1973–– and the end of the draft, took the war off the table despite the antiwar media’s earlier attempts to spin North Vietnam’s 1968 Tet Offensive, a disaster for the North, into an omen of American military defeat.