Robert Francis O’Rourke Strikes (Out) Again

The Wall Street Journal has noticed the opening shambles of O’l Beto’s campaign for President, summing up his mess with its subheadline:

The identity left is carving him up like a Texas steak before he gets to Donald Trump.

But it’s not just about the identity politics segregationists of the Left. It’s also about Beto himself and his opponents in the current Progressive-Democratic Party primary campaign for the Party nomination.

A joke about a husband’s participation in raising kids is offensive only to those looking for excuses to be offended and to those using manufactured offense for personal gain. It’s the same with the other foolishnesses of a 15-yr-old that Beto seems to have grown up and out of—manufactured offenses by those looking to promote themselves at others’ expense rather than on their own merits. And yet Beto ducks into apology.  At least Howard Dean had a primal scream.  This is a primal squeak.

Beto O’Rourke, gamma male. That’s what we need for President. Yeah.

The other Progressive-Democrat Presidential candidates demonstrate their incapacity for independent thought with their artificial offense-taking from their rival’s childhood activities. We need one of those in the White House, all right.  Sure.

Biden Wants Abrams?

Is Progressive-Democratic Party primary candidate wannabe for President—and the most Progressive candidate in (or almost in) the Party primaries—really thinking about asking Stacey Abrams, ex-Minority Leader of Georgia’s House of Representatives and late of the race for Georgia governor, to be his Vice President candidate in his campaign?

That brings up a question of what he really thinks of Abrams:

I mean, you got the…African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking [woman]. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.

Or is he simply that desperately pandering?

Progressive-Democrats Politicizing Banking?

Who would have thought such a thing?

House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) has decided to use her committee to go after the hated banking industry.  Congresswoman and Committee member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) has announced

We’re going to hold oversight hearings to make these banks accountable for investing in and making money off of the detention of immigrants[.]

Dangerously, and sadly, the overt intimidation seems to be working.

On February 5 JPMorgan Chase announced it will no longer do business with private prisons. In January Wells Fargo said it would no longer market to private prison companies, aiming to achieve the same objective by attrition.

Never mind that the Progressive-Democratic Party—then just the Democratic Party, with 61 Senators and 292 Representatives in that 95th Congress—politicized, and racialized, banking ‘way back in 1977 with their Community Reinvestment Act.

Today’s bankers are bowing and scraping and showing the same abject cowardice that bankers in the late ’70s and ’80s displayed when those Democrats attacked the banks for being banks—and for concerning themselves with their fiduciary duty to their owners and investors regarding loan risk.

It’s going to be a long two years for the American financial industry and so for our economy.

Wages of Bigotry?

It seems that some Americans are waking up to the institutional bigotry of the Progressive-Democratic Party, an awakening triggered by the blatant disregard for Party antisemitism that House Progressive-Democrats proudly displayed in their refusal last month to censure Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D, MN) over her anti-Semitic statements.  In that instance, Party chose, instead, to pass a heavily diluted resolution “disapproving” of bigotry in “all its forms,” but refusing to name the names of bigots in its own house.  Some Americans with Jewish heritage and religion are speaking up with dismay.

Mark Schwartz (D) Deputy Mayor of Teaneck, NJ:

We felt we had a home there [in the Party].  And now we feel like we have to check our passports.

Jordan Manor, a “gay Jewish Israeli-American” of Manhattan:

 The party I thought cared about me seems to disregard me when it comes to my Jewish identity.

Mark Dunec, Livingston, NJ, consultant and 2014 Progressive-Democratic candidate for Congress:

I’m physically afraid for myself and for my family.  I see my own party contributing to the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States.

A teacher in Queens has rejected Omar’s—and by extension, Pelosi’s—defense that Omar just didn’t know any better.

The fake defense she doesn’t know what she’s saying? I don’t believe it.  This is a grown woman and a member of Congress. Trying to excuse this as naivete is inexcusable.

It isn’t just anger, either; many are acting.  The Queens teacher has quit Party and now is registered as an Independent.  Allison Gangi of Manhattan, too:

The watered-down resolution triggered my decision to walk away from the Democratic Party.

That Teaneck Deputy Mayor?

Our only question now is, do we start voting Republican, or do we become Republicans?

And others, like this one, see the danger explicitly:

I’m homeless. I don’t think I can vote for Trump, even though he’s great for Israel.  But as a Jew, I can’t see a way to support the Democratic Party. It’s supporting your own destruction.

Gillibrand Declares

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D, NY) has entered the Progressive-Democratic Party’s primary contest for President.  Her statement of entering can only show her campaign to be satirical rather than serious.

We need a leader who makes big, bold, brave choices. Someone who isn’t afraid of progress. That’s why I’m running for president.

Bold choices.  Like the one she made during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings in which she rejected the American legal position of innocent until proven guilty and replaced it with her own legal theology of guilty by woman’s accusation.

Progress: to boldly run before the wind—wherever it blows.  She was for the 2nd Amendment, even getting an A rating from the National Rifle Association, before she was against it.  Indeed, the political winds changed her course so sharply that an ardent anti-gun Progressive-Democrat, then-Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy (D, NY) advised her

Don’t change your mind so fast—learn the issue first[.]

But Gillibrand had learned the issue quite clearly: the issue that her political fortune depended on her new position, whatever “new” might work out to.

She was against same-sex marriage as a Representative—insisting on having civil unions—before she was for them as a Senator.

On immigration, she was against amnesty for illegal immigrants as a Representative—in any of its many forms—before she was for it—in any of its many forms—as a Senator. As a Representative, she favored deputizing local policemen to act as immigration agents before, as a Senator, she was for abolishing ICE.

She was staunchly pro-Israel, even as a Senator, insisting there should be no daylight between the US and Israel on matters related to Iran, before she moved away from Israel, supporting ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) and Motorboat Skipper and part-time Secretary of State John Kerry’s (D) nuclear weapons deal with Iran.  She’s become an ardent supporter of Tamika Mallory, Bob Bland, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour—all of whom are themselves public and ardent supporters of Louis Farrakhan.

She even took money from the Clintons to support her various campaign expenses—and then she said Bill Clinton should have resigned over his…affair…with Lewinski.

Regardless of one’s own position on any of those questions and others, Gillibrand will take the one that benefits herself politically, and she’ll take it the moment the wind shifts.

Who can trust such a one?