Month: March 2020

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On Warren

Warren’s chances of winning the nomination are down to 1/1024.

Stephen Kruiser:

“…The litany of excuses for Warren’s failure will be tedious, of course. We will be lectured for weeks, if not months, that America still isn’t ready for a woman president, blah, blah, blah. Warren is so prone to lying that she may even come up with a few that Hillary Clinton never thought of.

I will be very glad, however, that I soon won’t have to listen to Warren’s psychotic tales of a dark America that doesn’t exist.

I like it here…”

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On Bloomberg

JIM GERAGHTY:

“…For the past few months, Americans have been living in a fascinating political-science experiment: how far could a campaign carry an uninspiring candidate with essentially unlimited spending and TV ads? Tonight, we got the answer: not very far at all! Bloomberg spent a half-billion dollars to win American Samoa and a handful of delegates here and there across 15 states. It is the most expensive failure in American political history. The 2020 Bloomberg campaign makes the past efforts of H. Ross Perot, Steve Forbes, Michael Huffington, and Jon Corzine look tightfisted…

…For Biden, this night is near-miraculous. Democrats may well end up with some buyer’s remorse; Biden is the same guy who unnerved so many Democrats with his aging appearance, forgetfulness, and gaffes. But the party establishment has put its doubts aside and decided to ride or die with him. After a long, cacophonous noise, the Democratic primary is down to two extremely different candidates…”

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Victor Davis Hanson on the Democrat field

“…What they do care about is they want to control the House, they want to win back the Senate and they want Supreme Court picks because they are interested in power,” Hanson said. “They’re not interested necessarily in diversity or people of color being the new face of the Democratic party or any of that. They are interested in power. They think they can’t get it with Bernie Sanders and they are absolutely right. He will be a disaster.”

“This is the worst field we’ve seen since Walter Mondale lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan,” Hanson said. “If they go the Bernie route, they are going to lose big and they are desperate. They are down to the 11th hour. The only candidates they have they think they can save the House and maybe win back the Senate are Bloomberg and Biden and they are pathetic candidates.

“It’s kind of a tragedy to watch this thing unfold. It really is…”

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A snapshot on Biden

Stephen Kruiser:

“…The prevailing wisdom of the past few months is that this hot mess of a Democratic primary would finally start to clear up a lot after Super Tuesday. With Bernie Sanders stealing almost all of the thunder for weeks as votes finally began to be cast, it looks like the higher-ups in the party decided to get some contingency plans rolling a bit early.

Hot on the heels of Mayor Pete exiting the race, Amy Klobuchar bailed as well, and immediately threw her endorsement to der Bidengaffer.

Both candidates saw the writing on the wall after Biden’s overwhelmingly decisive victory in South Carolina last Saturday. His thumping of Sanders proved that the battle for the soul of the Democratic party was well and truly on.

Rumors began spreading late yesterday that Biden would receive Beto O’Rourke’s endorsement at a rally in Texas. Just as he did in the primaries, Mayor Pete decided to steal Beto’s spotlight and throw his nod to Biden as well.

It no doubt took several hours for his handlers to explain to Biden who Beto O’Rourke was, but it all ended up being a big group hug kind of night.

The message is clear: establishment Democrats are still buying the “Biden electability” argument, despite his increasingly erratic and mistake-prone behavior on the campaign trail. That they’re willing to throw in with a candidate who can’t go an hour without making an incredibly stupid mistake rather than rally behind Bernie indicates that they think socialism is a losing issue.

At least it is if the candidate admits that he’s a socialist. Biden, of course, will be promoting the stealthier socialism that the Democratic party prefers in order to stay on brand.

At the rate Biden has been declining, the Democrats’ best hope may be to just have him stand in the background at campaign events, drooling on a bib and smiling that “Mommy that man scares me!” smile of his while his former rivals speak for him.

Getting help from the vanquished can bring some baggage along with it, however.

Bringing that unabashed gun-grabbing attitude back front and center could be the kind of thing that drives away the very heartland voters the Dems lost in 2016 and desperately need to win back this year.

Anyway, it’s obviously “Biden or Bust” for the Democratic old money, which could turn out even better for the Republicans. The Bernie Bros will not take the Biden nomination well. The party will hemorrhage younger voters who feel that the fix was in again to get an “electable” candidate nominated over Sanders…”

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On Democrat/media hysteria over Coronavirus

Brian C. Joondeph:

“…the American Left is pushing fear as hard as they have ever pushed anything. We have had plenty of scares since the days of FDR, including the overpopulation, acid rain, and Y2K. Some scares have changed names, from global cooling in the 1970s, only to be replaced by global warming, climate change, and now extreme weather.

Infectious diseases invoke fear as they are a frequent movie theme, from Andromeda Strain to Contagion. We were told to fear the bird flu, SARS, MERS, and Ebola. Now we are to fear Coronavirus.

Every election year seems to have a disease outbreak, as this tweet chronicles. Academic researchers study how these disease outbreaks influence federal elections. Is the Coronavirus outbreak on the eve of an election just a random coincidence?

One useful rule of thumb in assessing fear and crisis is to look at those screaming loudest. When the elites who are telling us it’s a crisis actually act like it’s a crisis, then it may be worth listening to them.

Progressive climate warriors tell us the world will end in (fill in the blank) years, yet they go merrily about their ways, flying in their high carbon footprint private jets, sailing yachts measured in the hundreds of feet, and purchasing multi-million-dollar homes along the ocean coasts. These are the same coasts they say will be under water in (fill in the blank) years due to global warming, polar melting, and rising sea levels.

Faced with a virus threat from foreign countries, Democrats still oppose a border wall or a travel ban. Democrats are happy for people to poop in the streets of the cities they run, adding used injection needles to the toxic mess, yet they are worried about an aggressive cold virus. Is the Left fearful over public health or simply pushing fear for political gain?

Watch what they do, not what they say. And always follow the money…”

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On the Turkey/Syria front

William R. Hawkins:

“…The outbreak of direct combat between Turkey and the Syrian regime of Basher al-Assad has shown the wisdom of President Donald Trump’s strategy in the area. He took considerable flak for pulling American troops out of northern Syria last October. It was argued that the withdrawal in the face of a Turkish advance would threaten the Kurds, a longtime U.S. ally, and could even revive ISIS! In response, President Trump tweeted “As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I… consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey.” U.S. troops redeployed to protect oil fields in Syria to keep them out of the hands of the regime and to protect the Kurds in the area, but a military confrontation with Turkey was avoided. The White House understood the strategic benefits from stronger Turkish-Sunni forces being brought into territory liberated from Assad; a calculation made on a level beyond what critics could grasp.

Ankara has taken control of the Free Syrian Army, the Sunni rebel force that the U.S. had only half-heartedly backed during the Obama administration. Turkey and Syria have long-standing disputes over territory, water rights, and other antagonisms which have only been heightened by Iran’s large-scale intervention in the civil war to prop up Assad. A majority of Syrians and Turks are Sunni whereas Assad is an Alawite which is associated with Iran’s Shia faith. It is this schism in Islam that is the driving force of conflict in the Middle East today. The U.S. and Israel are aligned with the Sunnis because Iran is the expansionist power. Tehran wants to wipe Israel off the map, overthrow the Jordanian government, seize control of Iraq and drive the U.S. out of the region. Russia, and to a lesser extent China, is aligned with Iran. Just days before a U.S. drone strike killed Iran’s Quds force commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, who was plotting with pro-Tehran militia groups in Iraq, China and Russia held joint naval exercises with Iran.

Turkey needs to be supported in an alignment against Iran. Turkey has the largest army in the region, indeed the largest army in NATO, and a level of proficiency that gives it superiority over the Iran-Syria-militia forces…

…While events with substantial strategic impact are taking place in the real world of warring states, fanciful elements in Congress are giving clear proof why national security policy has naturally evolved into the hands of the Executive branch. On February 12, a coalition of Democrats and libertarian Republicans voted “to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces to engage in hostilities in or against Iran.” Less than a week later, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) a co-sponsor of the measure, met in secret with Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Munich. The impropriety of such a meeting (which involved other senators who are still hiding their participation) is off the charts. Murphy tweeted that “I cannot conduct diplomacy on behalf of the whole of the U.S. government,” but he did inform Iran’s top diplomat “Congress is a co-equal branch of government, responsible along with the Executive for setting foreign policy.” And to the extent this holds, Zarif feels assured by Murphy that Iran has nothing to worry about.

For the good of America, such attempted interference in military operations by Congress should be dismissed as incompetent and defeatist. President Trump’s policy in Syria is working on a scale his critics never imagined and should be supported…”

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Doug Santo