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Biden to South Carolina Voters:
“My name is Joe Biden and I’m a candidate for the United States Senate.” 🤣🤣🤣pic.twitter.com/8PYalqtFGc
— CHIZ 🇺🇸 (@CHIZMAGA) February 25, 2020
MATT TAIBBI:
“…The latest act in the comedy began Friday, just before voting opened in the Nevada Democratic caucus. The Washington Post ran a story — sourced, I’m not joking, to “people familiar with the matter” — explaining that Bernie Sanders had been briefed that “Russia is attempting to help his presidential campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest.”
Sanders was quick to see through the gambit. “I’ll let you guess about one day before the Nevada caucus. Why do you think it came out?” He pointed to a Post reporter: “It was The Washington Post? Good friends.” The Post after all has spent years dumping on Sanders, a fervent critic of the paper’s billionaire creep of an owner, Jeff Bezos.
Intelligence officials and pundits have been screeching for years that patriotism demands voters reject the foreign agent Donald Trump and the Russian asset Bernie Sanders, and support a conventional establishment politician. Voters responded by moving toward Trump in national approval surveys and speeding Sanders to the top of the Democratic Party ticket. A more thorough disavowal of official propaganda would be difficult to imagine…
…The extraordinary thing about this campaign to identify basically the entire universe of political thought outside of establishment Democrats in the U.S. as Russian assets has been the obvious projection involved.
The plot running through all of these stories has been the idea that Russia is trying to “undermine our democracy” by “sowing division.” But these charges are coming from the same people who spent the last four years describing Republicans as deplorable fascists, and progressives on the other side as racist, sexist, Nazis, and “digital brownshirts.”
This has resulted in a four-year parade of official cranks muttering about Russian efforts to “divide” us, when their own relentless message has been that America is besieged by a pair of Hitlerian movements on the left and right that must be put down at all costs. The only vision of “unity” they promote is one of obedience to the crackpot anti-utopia of neoliberalism that populations around the world are currently rejecting at the ballot box…”
Byron York:
“…Recently, the Intelligence Community made clear it will be a player in the 2020 presidential election. No one should be surprised.
On Feb. 13, the House Intelligence Committee held a meeting at which intelligence officials briefed lawmakers on foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections. By several accounts, the officials told the committee that Russia is working to reelect President Trump.
A number of Republican committee members were deeply skeptical. What the officials said was classified, so they cannot discuss it publicly, but, in conversations later, GOP lawmakers made it clear that the intelligence officials did not have the evidence to support the assertion.
“How should reporting take place?” one member said later. “You would say, ‘We believe X is true based on A, B, C, and D.’ When that doesn’t happen, it’s very suspect.”
“If you’re going to make an accusation like that, you darn well better be ready to answer questions and have evidence to support it,” said another member. When pressed, the member added that officials gave “very vague and unsatisfying answers.”
The Republicans’ objection was not to the idea that Russia is trying to interfere in a U.S. election. That is an accepted fact. The problem was the assessment that Russia is specifically trying to help reelect Trump. That claim, so incendiary in the 2016 election, was unsupported by the evidence, they said.
As they left the meeting, Republicans agreed that the news would leak soon. It almost seemed to be why Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee chairman and impeachment leader, called the meeting in the first place.
No one was surprised when, a week later, the New York Times published a story, “Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is Meddling to Re-elect Trump.” The news quickly became another one of those bombshell reports that consume hours of talk on cable TV…”
I was a reluctant Trump voter in 2016. I was a hesitant admirer of the president in his first year in office. My admiration and respect for the man have increased with each year of his presidency. Today, I watched the President’s visit to India, his meeting with Prime Minister Modi, and the great rally the Prime Minister organized for the visit. Watching the President and the Prime Minister, I felt the same surge of pride that I last felt when President Reagan met Gorbachev. Today, I fully accepted President Trump. I know that he will achieve an historic reelection in November. I know that Trump’s presidency will be an historic milestone for America and the world. I know that Trump will become a man of the ages.
https://youtu.be/6ixx39wK2Ew
“…House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) warned about Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) being the nominee for the Democratic Party. According to Clyburn, having Sanders at the top of the ticket would make it extremely difficult for the Democrats to keep their majority in the House of Representatives.
“As far as Bernie Sanders goes, he built out that coalition in the state of Nevada, a broader coalition than he had in New Hampshire and in Iowa, but you’re already starting to see these attacks for his background as a democratic socialist,” ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos said. “How deep will that cut in South Carolina and, if he’s the nominee, do you think it could put the House majority in danger?”
“I do think it’ll be an extra burden for us to have to carry,” Clyburn explained. “This is South Carolina and South Carolinians are pretty leery about that title ‘socialist,’ and so I think that would be a real burden for us in these states or congressional districts that we have to do well in.”…”
Kurt Schlichter:
“…The D.C. establishment and their media rump-kissers went into a full-on spazz mode when President Trump continued his unbroken streak of awesomeness by appointing Ric Grenell the acting Director of National Intelligence, thereby threatening the intelligence community’s unbroken streak of failure. None of our media idiot savants – a term which is only half-accurate – thought to ponder the question of exactly how Ric’s appointment could possibly make the IC worse. Its legacy of ashes is a national embarrassment. But then, the purpose of the currently-constituted intelligence community, the foreign policy community, and every wing of our incompetent, inept, and corrupt establishment is not to serve the people of the United States. Its purpose is to serve the personal interests of the currently-constituted intelligence community, the foreign policy community, and every wing of our incompetent, inept, and corrupt establishment. Its denizens fear that this fearless patriot is going to burn down their whole shoddy edifice, and we can only hope they’re right…”
Stephen Kruiser:
“…The Democrats’ descent into leftist madness continued unabated over the weekend, with Bernie Sanders scoring a depressingly resounding victory in the Nevada caucuses on Saturday.
While it is truly disturbing that one of the two major political parties in America has just hit the gas while driving off of the socialist cliff, it’s also delightful political theater for the moment. Put another way: it’s all fun and games until someone gets an eye redistributed…”
Jonathan F. Keiler:
“…The sudden ascent of Bloomberg to the top ranks of Democrat contenders is generating plenty of speculation about machinations within the party to derail Sanders, quash the Democrat far left, or sacrifice the presidency in return for down-ticket success. Such conspiratorial speculation is natural, but it requires assumptions about backroom plotting for which there is little or no evidence. Better to go with what we can see with our own eyes, which suggests that, whether by design or accident, Bloomberg has the capacity to severely damage Sanders and vice versa.
In Nevada, we saw Sanders really attacked for the first time in the campaign, and only by Bloomberg. Why the reticence by the other candidates to go after the demonstrably wacky socialist senator? Because to do so, they have to either call him out as a phony or attack his socialist agenda.
They can’t attack him as a phony because they are all phonier than he is. Sanders’s great strength in this campaign is his relative authenticity compared to his opponents. Sanders may be a kooky “democratic socialist,” but he’s been a consistent kook, and he revels in it. He deliberately displays it, from his loud-mouthed Brooklyn patois to his studiously rumpled appearance. By contrast, his remaining opponents are a bunch of insincere, dishonest Democrat ticket-punchers, and the voters know that.
Secondly, they can’t really attack his socialist agenda, either. They are just a hair or two to his right. And as a practical matter, the Democrat Party has been heading toward outright socialism for two generations.
So they’ve left Sanders alone, and he’s cleaning their clocks. Nobody not named Bloomberg is likely to really take on Sanders in the nomination race.
Bloomberg doesn’t care about authenticity. He’s one of the richest men in the world and didn’t get there by being authentic; he got there beating his rivals, however necessary. He knows there is no road to the nomination unless he breaks Sanders…”
https://twitter.com/gopaulblair/status/1231056946314334208
JED BABBIN:
“…It was inevitable. After the Democrats failed to evict Donald Trump from office through the Mueller investigation and then the ridiculous impeachment over the Zelensky telephone call, they would have to try something else to ruin him before the November election. Rush Limbaugh was the first to predict that they’d go back to the “Russia collusion” narrative, and they have.
It began with a briefing by acting Director of National Intelligence, Joe Maguire and one of his aides, to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). The briefing, given to both Democrats and Republicans, reportedly informed them that the Russians are interfering in the 2020 election to help President Trump get reelected. In reaction, Trump gave Maguire hell and then removed him, naming one of Trump’s staunchest supporters — U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell — to serve as acting Director of National Intelligence while remaining in his ambassadorial post.
Grenell is a bad choice for DNI for reasons we’ll get to in a minute. The important question is what intelligence information and analysis justified this politically explosive and possibly destabilizing briefing?
When some of the HPSCI members pressed the briefers for evidence to support the claim, there was none to be had. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien said he has not been informed of any intelligence that justified the claim.
Stop there for a moment. O’Brien and the HPSCI members are entitled to know what support there is for such a politically destabilizing allegation. If there were no supporting facts, what justified the briefing?
How gullible and, frankly, stupid did the intel crew have to be to represent the supposed plot to interfere as fact?…”
DAVID CATRON:
“…While the race for the Democratic presidential nomination threatens to devolve into an intraparty civil war, President Trump’s campaign is expanding the Republican base by tapping into the vast pool of Americans who are eligible to vote yet exercise the franchise very sporadically. These desultory voters constitute more than 40 percent of the electorate according to a new Knight Foundation poll. Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, is deploying a small army of volunteers at each of the President’s rallies to identify attendees who may belong to this immense reservoir of potential supporters and convert them into 2020 Republican voters who will show up and cast ballots on Election Day.
After each Trump rally Parscale posts the percentage of attendees who didn’t vote in 2016. After last Friday’s Las Vegas event, for example, he tweeted that 32 percent of the eligible voters who came to see Trump had not voted in the last presidential election. Subsequent to the Colorado Springs rally held the day before, Parscale tweeted that 19 percent of the attendees neglected to vote in 2016. Following Wednesday’s Phoenix rally, he tweeted that 26 percent of the eligible voters in attendance skipped the last election. The campaign isn’t merely keeping score and compiling lists for use at some later date. They are reaching out to these disengaged voters then and there…
…Will this have a significant impact next November? Almost certainly. Parscale’s outreach initiative is being launched at a time when the Democrats are already losing the registration advantage they have historically enjoyed among the electorate. According to a new Gallup survey, 30 percent of Americans now identify as Republicans, whereas only 27 percent identify as Democrats. Moreover, the GOP now enjoys a 48-44 percent advantage when Republican-leaning Independents and Democratic-leaning Independents are included in the calculation. In other words, combined with an increasingly fractious nomination race, this outreach program couldn’t come at a worse time for the Democrats…”