RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/03/dont-buy-the-myth-of-the-moderate-democrat/

Watching a passel of Democrats in the Motor City struggle to differentiate themselves recalled my move years ago from politics to New York PR.

I was a bit confused about nomenclature in my new profession and turned to a grizzled veteran. What, I asked him, is the difference among public relations, marketing communications, advertising and the then-hot new concept of strategic communications?

“Not a (expletive deleted) thing,” he grunted. “It’s all selling soap.”

Putting aside the theatrics of Biden Bashfest II Wednesday, the faux showdowns on the first night opened a new going-forward narrative of differences among the “moderates” and “progressives.” The Wall Street Journal opined on “the sharpest ideological differences in decades.”

Don’t buy it.

Every Democrat on the stage was selling the same thing: Bigger Government. 

Let’s zero in on key domestic issues covered in the three-hour midsummer night’s nightmare, shall we?

Health care was supposedly a differentiator, with alleged middle-of-the-roaders fixing to pour cold water on Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’ $32 trillion Medicare for All dream.

Former Maryland Congressman John Delaney managed to squeeze in his money line — “real solutions, not impossible promises” — on four separate occasions, and called Medicare for All “extreme.” But he also shoehorned in the phrase “universal” in conjunction with health care four times, proposing “a universal health care system to give everyone basic health care for free.” That’s telling ‘em, congressman.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-8-2-are-any-of-the-democratic-can

Perhaps President Trump is not particularly your cup of tea, and you are thinking that you might consider as an alternative supporting one or another of the Democratic contenders for the presidency. If so, here is an important question to consider: Is any one of these people not completely crazy?

To start with, I’m willing to grant that the bar for selecting a candidate to support for President is of necessity a low one. A person matching your idea of the perfect candidate simply does not exist in the real world; and even if such a person did exist, he or she would not make it past the first week of the campaign. Working strongly against the potential for even any half-way decent candidate is the fact that everybody who throws a hat into this ring is almost by definition a self-centered ego-maniac. Plus, every one of them deeply believes that each word they utter, no matter how ridiculous, is a pearl of God’s wisdom. And then, by the time you get to the general election, you will only have two options left to choose from. It goes without saying that both will be very deeply flawed.

But “deeply flawed” is not nearly the same as “completely crazy.” Surely, we can find some among the Democratic candidates who can pass the “not completely crazy” test.

Well, good luck trying. To evaluate the question of whether any of these people are not completely crazy, I’m going to look today at what they have said recently — mostly in the debates — about the federal government’s appropriate role with respect to “climate.”

As background, readers here know that I do not think much of what passes for the “science” of human-caused climate change, including such obvious flaws as the refusal of advocates to articulate their contentions in the form of a falsifiable hypothesis, the failure to attempt to articulate and refute appropriate null hypotheses, and also the alteration of data by advocates in order to create an apparently strong warming trend that did not exist in the data as originally officially reported. (See, for example: as to lack of a falsifiable hypothesis, “Things Keep Getting Worse For The Fake ‘Science’ Of Human-Caused Global Warming,” July 12; as to failure to articulate or refute appropriate null hypotheses, “You Don’t Need To Be A Scientist To Know That The Global Warming Alarm ‘Science’ Is Fake,” July 15; and as to alteration of data to try to make it fit the narrative, my now-23-part series “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.”)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-left-vs-the-crazy-left-11564701434

The nation has struggled to categorize the Democratic presidential candidates. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is some days a “populist,” others a “liberal.” Sen. Bernie Sanders is at pains to define “democratic socialism” as apart from plain, old “socialism.” The media describes Sen. Amy Klobuchar as a “centrist” or “moderate,” even as she insists on “proven progressive.”

There’s an easier taxonomy: Lefties vs. Crazy Lefties. That’s the choice Democrats have in the primaries, and the two pools from which Donald Trump’s opponent will come.

This summer’s debates have been primarily useful for highlighting how radically the Democratic Party has shifted. Barack Obama can fairly be described as the most liberal president in American history—from his command-and-control regulatory regime to the Affordable Care Act, from his tax hikes to his activist judges. Yet the entire Democratic primary field is now rebuking his agenda as small and weak, if not proto-Trumpian.

Mr. Obama avoided campaigning in 2008 on a public option, and the White House willingly jettisoned that demand in the final ObamaCare negotiations. He knew that at best it would muster 43 Senate votes, while senators like Joe Lieberman had vowed to filibuster a government “takeover” of health insurance that would balloon the national debt. House Blue Dogs similarly rejected it. Yet all 20 of the candidates on this week’s debate stage backed Medicare for any American, if not all of them.

Mr. Obama touted natural gas as a bridge fuel to a future lower-carbon environment. He kept his economy afloat by winking at the state-led fracking revolution, and since retirement he’s even (misleadingly) bragged that he was responsible for record new U.S. oil production.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/01/no-republican-talking-points-is-the-new-democrat-talking-point/

It was 10:46 p.m. when Joe Biden finished his closing statement Wednesday night. At 10:50 p.m. the former Vice President was at the edge of the stage with his arm around the Rev. Al Sharpton, the professional demagogue who with his hoaxes and hatemongering has stirred up more racial discord in America than anyone.

And Biden is the “centrist” candidate.

Government dependency, the cause of so much misery, is the air that politicians of the left breathe. Ever-increasing government control is their perennial objective, promising it will solve big problems (often of government making). But it never does.

Democrats talk about “endless wars,” but the problems of poverty and crime President Trump showcased in his explosive tweets about Baltimore must never be solved, so that the left’s war against them never ends.

Despite strides against racism and against lack of economic opportunities for the underclass that were unimaginable in the 1960s, the Democrats running for president in 2020 are more intent on expanding government and worming it into Americans’ lives than some of the most power-hungry tyrants of the past, doing so purportedly to combat the phantom of “systemic racism.”

And so, actual solutions must never be given voice. Which is why during the last two nights we witnessed the bizarre new phenomenon of the Democrats again and again accusing each other of borrowing “Republican talking points” — apparently the worst sin that can be committed.

Policing Your Fellow Democrats’ Speech