Ready The Clown Car: The First Batch of Democrats Are Ready To Announce Their 2020 Bids

Dude your embarrassing yourself.

almost as bad as when you thought people would believe you where a moderate Democrat.

Can you link to any sites that are not partison.

 

Understand?

Understand that I had no idea that the right was trying to label Maddow as a conspiracy theorists.

Thanks for that at least.

 

I play a little game where I go to the Google news aggregator and try and pick out the Fox News headlines without looking. Occasionally I'll mistake avWashington Examiner headline, but mostly it's fairly easy.

And sometimes it's too easy.


Ted Cruz says 'brakes' on 2020 Democratic 'clown car' have broken: 'It only steers left'

 

Bret Stephens' column in the NYT this morning:

A Wretched Start for Democrats
The party seems interested in helping everyone except the voters it needs.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
June 28, 2019

Amigos demócratas,

Si ustedes siguen así, van a perder las elecciones. Y lo merecerán.

Translation for the linguistically benighted: “Democratic friends, if you go on like this, you’re going to lose the elections. And you’ll deserve it.”

In this week’s Democratic debates, it wasn’t just individual candidates who presented themselves to the public. It was also the party itself. What conclusions should ordinary people draw about what Democrats stand for, other than a thunderous repudiation of Donald Trump, and how they see America, other than as a land of unscrupulous profiteers and hapless victims?

Here’s what: a party that makes too many Americans feel like strangers in their own country. A party that puts more of its faith, and invests most of its efforts, in them instead of us.

They speak Spanish. We don’t. They are not U.S. citizens or legal residents. We are. They broke the rules to get into this country. We didn’t. They pay few or no taxes. We already pay most of those taxes. They willingly got themselves into debt. We’re asked to write it off. They don’t pay the premiums for private health insurance. We’re supposed to give up ours in exchange for some V.A.-type nightmare. They didn’t start enterprises that create employment and drive innovation. We’re expected to join the candidates in demonizing the job-creators, breaking up their businesses and taxing them to the hilt.

That was the broad gist of the Democratic message, in which the only honorable exceptions, like Maryland’s John Delaney and Colorado’s John Hickenlooper, came across as square dancers at a rave.

On closer inspection, the message got even worse.

Promising access to health insurance for north of 11 million undocumented immigrants at a time when there’s a migration crisis at the southern border? Every candidate at Thursday’s debate raised a hand for that one, in what was surely the evening’s best moment for the Trump campaign.

Calling for the decriminalization of border crossings (while opposing a wall)? That was a major theme of Wednesday’s debate, underlining the Republican contention that Democrats are a party of open borders, limitless amnesty and, in time, the Third World-ization of America.

Switching to Spanish? Memo to Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker: If you can’t speak the language without a heavy American accent, don’t bother. It just reminds those of us who can that the only thing worse than an obnoxious gringo is a pandering one.

Eliminating private health insurance, an industry that employs more than 500,000 workers and insures 150 million? Elizabeth Warren, Bill de Blasio, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris support it (though the California senator later recanted the position). Since Democrats are already committed to destroying the coal industry and seem inclined to turn Silicon Valley into a regulated utility, it’s worth asking: Just how much of the private economy are they even willing to keep?

And then there are the costs that Democrats want to impose on the country. Warren, for instance, favors universal child care (estimated cost, $70 billion a year), Medicare-For-All ($2.8 trillion to $3.2 trillion annually), student-debt cancellation and universal free college ($125 billion annually), and a comprehensive climate action plan ($2 trillion, including $100 billion in aid to poor countries), along with a raft of smaller giveaways, like debt relief for Puerto Rico.

As Everett Dirksen might have said: A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. Someone will have to pay for all this, and it won’t just be the very rich making between seven and 10 figures a year. It will be you.

Throughout the debates, I kept wondering if any of the leading candidates would speak to Americans beyond the Democratic base. But Joe Biden seemed too feeble, oratorically and intellectually, to buck the self-defeating trend. Pete Buttigieg was, as always, fluent, knowledgeable and sincere. But his big moment — a mea culpa for a racially charged policing incident in South Bend — felt like another well-mannered white guy desperate to put his wokeness on display.

Harris, meanwhile, came across as Barack Obama in reverse, especially with her scurrilous attack on Biden for the sin of having had a functional political relationship with two former segregationist senators in the 1970s. This was portrayed as a clever debate move but it will come to haunt her.

Obama’s political genius was to emphasize what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, authors of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind,” have called “common-humanity identity politics”— he made you feel comfortable no matter the color of your skin. Harris’s approach, by contrast, is “common-enemy identity politics.” Making white Americans feel racially on trial for views they may have held in the past on crime, busing and similar subjects is not going to help the Democrats.

None of this means that Democrats can’t win in 2020. The economy could take a bad turn. Or Trump could outdo himself in loathsomeness. But the Democratic Party we saw this week did even less to appeal beyond its base than the president. And at least his message is that he’s on their — make that our — side.

Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post.
A version of this article appears in print on June 29, 2019, on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: A Wretched Start for Democrats.
​

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/...ule=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Contributors

 

WSJ Editorial Board this morning:

Bernie Sanders Won the Debate
He may not be the nominee, but he has set the Democratic agenda.
By
The Editorial Board
June 28, 2019 7:13 pm ET

President Trump is a lucky man. Typically a re-election campaign is a referendum on the incumbent, and Mr. Trump is losing that race. But the Democrats are moving left so rapidly that they may let him turn 2020 into a choice between his policy record and the most extreme liberal agenda since 1972 (which may be unfair to George McGovern).

That’s the most significant political message from two nights of debate in Miami this week among 20 Democratic presidential candidates. The party hasn’t merely moved to the left of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats of the 1990s. Democrats have moved to the left of where they were in 2010 when they last ran the government. Bernie Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016, but he has won the ideological debate.

***
Start with the Democrats’ description of America in 2019 as a bleak house for everyone but the very rich. The economy is “doing great for people who want to invest in private prisons, just not for the African-Americans and Latinx whose families are torn apart, whose lives are destroyed, and whose communities are ruined,” said Elizabeth Warren, in a dirge typical of the two debates. “It’s doing great for giant oil companies that want to drill everywhere, just not for the rest of us who are watching climate change bear down upon us.”

This is Mr. Sanders’ vision of America relentlessly divided by class, race and gender. Women live in “The Handmaid’s Tale” and minorities in the pre-Civil Rights Act South. Do they think Americans don’t remember that an African-American was President and so were his two attorneys general?

Perhaps their image of America as an Argentina of inequality might sell in a recession year like 2008. But Americans give Mr. Trump high marks on the economy, and consumer confidence is high despite a recent dip. Incomes are finally rising faster for the lower-skilled than for managers. The jobless rate is the lowest in two generations, and notably low for blacks and Hispanics.

Or take health care, as nearly all of the candidates now consider ObamaCare to be inadequate. Ms. Warren has endorsed Bernie’s Medicare for All bill, which would abolish private insurance for 177 million Americans. So has Kamala Harris, though she now seems to be hedging and says she’d allow private insurance for “supplemental” coverage. But she isn’t clear if that’s for optional procedures like cosmetic surgery or regular health coverage.

Most of the other candidates favor expanding the Affordable Care Act with a “public option,” or government-run plan, that would compete with private insurance. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said this would “move us to single-payer more quickly.” She may be right, which is one reason the public option couldn’t pass even the Democratic House in 2010. Yet now this is the “moderate” party position.

The same leftward lurch is apparent on issue after issue.

• Climate change is now an urgent crisis that demands eliminating not merely the coal industry but all fossil fuels.

• Enforcing immigration laws that were once passed by bipartisan majorities in Congress is now inhumane. Joe Biden is attacked because the Obama Administration deported millions of undocumented migrants.

• Free health care for Americans isn’t enough; now it must also be an entitlement for any foreign migrant who enters the U.S.

• College loans must be forgiven in part or whole, and tuition now must be free.

• Taxes must be raised to rates unheard of since the 1960s because, as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio put it, money is “just in the wrong hands.”

• The Electoral College must be killed to save American democracy, and the Supreme Court must be packed with more Justices because the left now sometimes loses decisions.

Not all of the candidates on stage in Miami endorse all of these positions, but most do favor most of them. The two candidates who dared to warn that some of this might go too far—former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper and former Maryland Congressman John Delaney—are being dismissed as irrelevant in the post-debate coverage. They are said to have no chance at the nomination.

It isn’t clear why the Democrats have moved so far left so fast. Perhaps it is changing demographics led by the millennial socialists scarred by the Great Recession. Perhaps Mr. Trump’s conservative populism has inspired its counterpart on the left.

Whatever the cause, this Bernie Sanders triumph is the single most important development in the 2020 campaign. Mr. Trump should be grateful. If this is the opposition agenda next year, he might win a second term.
​

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-sanders-won-the-debate-11561763598?mod=hp_opin_pos3

 

Republicans should not have any moral ground to talk about the federal deficit (lol), improving the lives of ordinary Americans (minimal or no tax benefit, except for the fat cats) or even an opinion regarding these political debates (have you forgotten the chitshow that was Trump debates against his felow candidates?

 

While Trump is in Japan joking around with Putin, lying about a Saudi murder, and showing a complete misunderstanding of what a liberal Democracy entails, the Trump lap dogs are ova hea with their cartoons and editorials, holding all candidates to a higher standard than their schmuck President. Kudos.