RUTHFULLY YOURS

Otto von Bismarck reputedly said: “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” Never having gone hunting or been in combat, I assume that the “Iron Chancellor” was correct about those events. However, having watched elections for seventy years, I know he is right about politicians who give speeches that exaggerate past accomplishments, denigrate opponents, and fabricate plans for the future. But, as the author-poet Benét is quoted in the rubric above, doing so is “an American custom, like eating corn on the cob.” The difference today, though, is that elections don’t end on election day: witness Hillary Clinton in 2016, Stacy Abrams in 2018, and Donald Trump in 2020. 

While there are issues that concern us all, we have politicians today, as one pundit put it, who have even bigger issues – ones of excessive egos and acute sensitivity to criticism. Nevertheless, issues are plentiful: abortion and a woman’s right to choose; inflation, which is hitting the pocket books of everyone; the economy – while third quarter preliminary GDP (+2.6%) was a welcome relief after two quarters of negative growth, rapid inflation and escalating interest rates portend stagflation; a surfeit of jobs and a decline in labor participation rates suggest a dearth of willing workers; education, where the drop in test scores accelerated during Covid, but the decline began earlier; immigration, where a needed increase in legal immigration is being held hostage to a flood of illegal immigrants; crime, which has increased across the country, but disproportionately in inner cities; discrimination against Asians and Jews, reminiscent of the anti-Semitism of the 1920s, scare mongering over climate change by radicals with little understanding of history and climatology; and the teaching of a false narrative regarding the founding of the United States, along with the cancellation of ideas that do not conform to progressive ideology.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/the_hands_off_our_kids_election.html

It is often said that good political campaigns are forward-looking.  Obama sold “hope and change.”  Trump promised to “Make America Great Again.”  With control of Congress and the presidency heading into the 2022 midterm elections, what future are Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats offering to lure voters toward their side?  It appears to be one in which boys are celebrated as girls, education is reduced to political indoctrination, and Green New Deal policies continue to exacerbate food and fuel costs.

What is the Democrats’ argument for re-election?  Despite staggering inflation, crime, and illegal immigration, things could be much worse?  If you loved masks and lockdowns, get ready for more?  You’ll forget about the pain at the pump once war with Russia officially begins?  Celebrate the future by mutilating and aborting the children of today?  Whatever future Democrats are selling voters, it is bereft of hope, is riddled with pain, steals from Americans’ depleted savings, and leaves those growing up today with little but spare change.

Should the midterm vote end up going decidedly in Republicans’ favor, perhaps it will be remembered as the “Save Our Kids” election.  More than any other issues, Democrats are enthusiastically vocal about their support for unrestricted abortion and gender reassignment surgeries for confused children.  Their rallying cry could be, “Vote for us, and we’ll help you dispose of unwanted children or at least redesign them according to taste.”  Those might feel like winning issues to a gaggle of champagne socialists imbibing w(h)ine spritzers over brunch, but to Americans who cherish marriage and family life, they seem downright ghoulish.  Once you throw in video footage of Creepy Joe Biden, whose senility remains unobservable only to the White House press corps, regularly invading the personal space of young girls squirming in distress, the Democrats’ midterm message looks like little more than a grim promise to sniff, maim, and murder America’s children on demand.  If you hate children, that’s some future!

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/01/the-democrats-deserve-a-drubbing-in-the-midterms/

With about a week to go until the US Midterms on 8 November, pundits are predicting a ‘red tsunami’ – that is, huge Republican gains across the country. Democrats know it and are ‘[bracing] for a red wave in the House’, according to the New York Times. They are even having to spend resources defending formerly safe seats.

So, in a sign of things to come, Democrats have already begun the blame game. As a sorry Politico headline has it: ‘Democrats debate themselves: why do we suck?’ Some Democrats say it is their messaging. For others, it is a lack of focus on jobs and inflation. Barack Obama believes the Democrats’ problem is that they have become too woke. The former president warns the Democrats not to be ‘buzzkills’, saying that political correctness makes people ‘feel as if they are walking on eggshells’. Everyone is looking to blame something.

Whatever the cause, the Democrats are right to be worried. At stake in the Midterms is control of Congress, as well as many state governorships and legislatures. Right now, the Democrats have effective control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate (the latter is split 50-50, but vice president Kamala Harris casts tie-breaking votes). The Republicans need to flip only five Democratic seats to retake a House majority, and polls indicate they will do so handily. In the Senate, the Republicans need only one seat from the Democrats, and their chances look promising in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. Controlling both the House and Senate would be a huge win for the Republicans, meaning they could block president Joe Biden’s agenda for the remaining two years of his term.

It is true that, in terms of the election cycle, the Democrats are swimming against the tide. Since the Second World War, the party holding the White House has lost an average of 28 House seats in the first Midterms of a new presidency, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/ballothavesting_operation_busted_in_orlando_florida.html

Ballot harvesting, according to the California Democrats who’d like to take it national, is an innocent practice where union members and activists, some of them illegally present in the country, do voters the favor, see, of helping voters fill out their ballots and then collecting those ballots for them so that they need never go to the polls. They call it “a new service.” It’s part of their “make every vote count” agenda, and who could be against that?

But out in Florida, where there’s still some semblance of objectivity, investigators found another story.

According to the Washington Times:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Florida’s newly created Office of Election Crimes and Security is requesting a criminal investigation into charges of ballot harvesting in Orlando, a Democratic stronghold in the critical swing state.

Cynthia Harris, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for District 6 commissioner in Orange County, which includes Orlando, provided a sworn complaint to the election crimes office, alleging left-leaning organizations have been perpetrating a scheme to encourage residents in black neighborhoods to apply for mail-in ballots and to fill out those ballots, which she said have been collected by paid canvassers, and sometimes altered, all in violation of state law.

In an interview with The Washington Times, Ms. Harris said she has video evidence of paid ballot harvesters operating in Orlando neighborhoods in both 2014 and 2017, and that the scheme has been going on for decades, continuing through the 2020 election and the 2022 primary.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/brewing-election-integrity-storm-pa-over-250k-ballots-sent-voters
More than 250,000 ballots have been mailed to Pennsylvania voters without their identities being verified, according to state data collected by election integrity group Verity Vote.

On Tuesday, 15 Pennsylvania state legislators sent a letter to acting Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Leigh Chapman regarding unverified ballots sent to voters. As of Thursday, state data show that more than 250,000 ballots have been mailed to voters without verifying their identification.

The legislators noted that during a state House of Representatives committee meeting in September, Deputy Secretary for Elections and Commissions Jonathan Marks testified that there is no identification requirement for voter registration in the state but that it is required for mail-in ballots.

Marks was asked by state Rep. Francis Ryan about “the large number of requests submitted to the Social Security Administration Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) system.” Marks explained that the HAVV systems were being used to verify Social Security numbers for mail ballot applications.

However, the deputy secretary added that if someone submits an invalid Pennsylvania Department of Transportation ID number or if the last four digits of their Social Security number cannot be verified for a mail ballot application, then the counties must still send the ballot to the voter without the ID verification. Marks also said that “the ballot doesn’t count unless the voter provides a valid form of ID.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/27/fetterman-debate-disaster-reveals-both-democrat-hypocrisy-and-medias-shame/

It is difficult to describe just how disastrous Tuesday evening’s Pennsylvania Senate debate performance was for Democratic candidate (and current Keystone State Lt. Gov.) John Fetterman. In the course of one incredibly revealing and frankly painful hourlong debate, Fetterman—the victim of a stroke from May 13, just four days before his primary win over U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.)—was exposed as still struggling mightily to regain his full cognitive abilities, and thus wholly unfit to serve Pennsylvanians in what was once considered “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

It should go without saying that, like every decent American, I wish Fetterman the swiftest convalescence possible under his difficult circumstances. But it is also true that Fetterman’s stroke befell him before the primary—just a few days before, but before the primary date nonetheless. Fetterman’s inner circle, including his ambitious social activist wife, thus had a few days to consult trusted—that is, not Democratic Party donor—doctors to soberly gauge his continued candidate viability. While we should all feel bad for Fetterman, then, it must be said that a more altruistic and less cynical political candidate would have likely dropped out after a debilitating stroke such as that which Fetterman suffered. Democrats had a reasonable alternative ready to go, in  Lamb.

But now, the Pennsylvania Senate race, which was already a nail-biter, is Dr. Mehmet Oz’s race to lose. And in addition to Fetterman’s glaring cognitive deficiencies, two other things were also exposed for the whole nation to see in the course of that cringeworthy hour of television Tuesday night: the Democrats’ hypocrisy on how mental and cognitive fitness concerns ought to impact the viability of a U.S. Senate candidacy, and how shameful and loathsome the mainstream media’s monthslong cover-up of Fetterman’s health woes is. In fact, the two aspects of this scandalous story fit together quite neatly.

The Democrats’ stances on the Pennsylvania and Georgia Senate races are impossible to reconcile with each other. In Georgia, Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, a former football star who has a checkered personal past, has been very open about his past struggles with mental illness. In fact, Walker literally wrote a book about it over a decade ago, titled Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Walker’s past struggles, about which he has been fully transparent, have often come up during the course of his close race against incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.). The Democrats’ basic stance on Walker—which, notably, runs entirely contrary to their general pro-“forgiveness” stance on “criminal justice reform”—is not to forgive, not to show grace and to tarnish him as an irredeemable candidate.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3707603-democrats-democracy-alarmism-flops-with-voters/

Several months ago, Democrats rolled the dice. They chose the issues they thought would help them prevail in the midterm elections, and they chose badly. Some of their decisions were, to be fair, inescapable. When the Supreme Court handed down its startling decision on Roe v. Wade, Democrats grasped the opportunity to burrow in on a social issue they hoped would energize their base, and especially young women.

But their other picks were entirely voluntary and, ultimately, wrong-headed. They decided to continue hammering former President Trump for every conceivable misstep, and to prolong the Jan. 6 hearings to remind voters not only that Trump was a menace but that his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election proved our very democracy is in peril.

This proved a bust. Most voters made up their minds about the riots at the Capitol months ago; the endless partisan congressional hearings into the matter have attracted a dwindling audience. Millions of Americans considered the hearings a political show trial, with no due process and no balance. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) departed from 200 years of precedence by not allowing the minority party to choose its own panel members. That was a mistake.

Meanwhile, the Biden White House delivered such a disastrous performance on the economy, the border, crime and inflation that Trump, despite his misdeeds, began to look better in hindsight. Ironically, he looked especially appealing because his social media presence was severely curtailed. Many voters began to forget why they rejected him in 2020.

Approval of the former president has actually increased while Speaker Pelosi’s chosen few rail on about the “insurrection” on Jan. 6. In a recent New York Times/Siena poll, Trump beats Joe Biden. Oops.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2022/10/us-midterms-here-come-the-republicans/

Not long before I made the mistake last week of entrusting life and baggage to Philippine Airlines’ midweek flight from Melbourne to New York, a leftoid friend, one who pays far too much heed to the ABC, warned me that conservatives’ hope of the GOP sweeping both the House and Senate was likely to be dashed.

‘Well, yes, there’s always the possibility of massive electoral fraud, like in 2020,” I replied, all the while anticipating a heaved sigh of exasperation at my refusal to accept the absurdity of more Americans having voted for a dim and declining dodderer, a nailed plagiarist and serial fabulist, than for any other presidential candidate in American history. But that wasn’t what he meant.

“Abortion,” he said, “that will be the decider.”

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as they say, and skerricks of alleged insight gained from the mainstream media’s narratives can only further cloud the perceptions of those whose left eye is pressed to a faulty telescope on the wrong side of the Pacific. Still, as one of those folks who rate the ABC Australia’s “most trusted” news source, you can understand why my friend labours under the abortion misconception.

Thing is, the ABC seems only ever to seek the perspectives of donors to the Democratic Party. Take this report, for example, selected at random from the national broadcaster’s archives after a site search on ‘Trump’. Both of the quoted people, documentarian Nick Quested and Stephen Vladeck, are donors, as can be easily easily established by consulting the OpenSecrets.org website, which catalogues who gives what to whom and how much.

Likewise with this report, in which a certain Mark Graber, a Maryland law professor, has this to say of Trump and Republicans: “[It] may be that the Trump wing of the Republican party is starting to lose some steam … This will help a whole lot in removing Donald Trump from the American political scene. But it’s likely to be a very slow removal.”

Professor Graber — surprise! surprise! — is yet another leftist who puts his money where his heart is.