It is terrible to see our president, his wife and
America so unloved.
This from a dear friend of our's and also a fellow memo reader: "Dick..in my humble opinion..you are brilliant! I am grateful you take the time to analyze and pontificate..it helps concretize my own thoughts into a more logical and meaningful grasp of the reality of the world we are inhabiting...and it also helps to know there are a " few good jews" left who have the sense to lean right in these particularly threatening and trying times.
Cudos..please keep on keeping on providing a frequent tonic for hope
L----"
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Clarence Thomas' wife among conservative activists leading Trump efforts to compile ‘deep state’ hit list http://a.msn.com/01/en-us/And:
https://www.dailywire.com/
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The Best is Yet to Come
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Are Israelis coming to their senses?
A Likud party election campaign billboard depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seen above a billboard depicting Benny Gantz, leader of Blue and White party, in Petah Tikva, Israel (photo credit: NIR ELIAS / REUTERS)
Political analysts who introduced the polls said Blue and White had fallen due to a week of negative reports regarding probes of party leader Benny Gantz’s bankrupt company The Fifth Dimension.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received good news from two polls on Sunday that indicated that his Likud party had passed up its rival Blue and White for the first time in this election campaign.
Channel 12’s survey, conducted by pollster Mano Geva, predicted a Likud victory of 34 seats over 33 for Blue and White, which beat Likud by two seats, 35 to 33, in Geva’s last poll on February 19.
The new Channel 12 poll predicted 13 seats for the Joint List, 10 for Labor-Gesher-Meretz, eight each for Shas and United Torah Judaism and seven each for Yamina and Yisrael Beytenu.
A Kantar Institute poll taken for KAN 11 found that Likud is leading Blue and White 35 to 34. The poll gave the Joint List 14 seats, Labor-Gesher Meretz nine, Shas eight, UTJ and Yisrael Beytenu seven and Yamina six.
Political analysts who introduced the polls said Blue and White had fallen due to a week of negative reports regarding probes of party leader Benny Gantz’s bankrupt company The Fifth Dimension and a controversial forged document when Blue and White MK Gabi Ashkenazi was IDF chief of staff.
The announcement of a March 17 trial date for Netanyahu apparently did not harm the Likud in the polls.
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I would rather slay the red dragon now. Why defer?
Never Sanders?
By Victor Davis Hanson
In 2020 if Sanders is the Democratic nominee, the NeverSanders movement will be far larger, far wealthier, far more influential—even as it is likely far quieter—than were the vociferous but anemic NeverTrumpers of 2016.
Almost everything the Democratic Left said about Donald Trump causing a Republican Party implosion proved untrue—and yet is proving true this year of the Democrats.
Trump’s agenda, for the most part, was Reaganesque, with a few important exceptions—closing the border and enforcing immigration law, getting tough with China’s unfair trade policies, restoring assembly and manufacturing jobs to the hollowed-out interior, avoiding optional wars abroad, and trying to drain the proverbial federal swamp of its careerist bureaucrats and revolving-door apparatchiks.
Those wrinkles from the Republican agenda, in fact, were consistent with traditional conservative values, and thus even among establishment and mainstream Republicans still polled well enough. That reality later was empowered by Trump’s effort to keep his campaign promises, by an economy at near-record employment, and by foreign policy recalibrations that are starting to win grudging, if unspoken, bipartisan support on China, given news coverage of the Hong Kong crackdown, the reeducation camps, the coronavirus debacle, and the Orwellian surveillance state apparat.
Even before Trump’s governance, the NeverTrump Right was emasculated, largely because its pundits and politicians could offer no alternative party agenda superior to Trump’s. Moreover, they had spent much of their lives advocating most of the very policies Trump was advancing, and increasingly was getting results. Nor before or after the election could they ever convince Republicans that Trump’s crassness and uncouth tweets were quite unlike the White House crudity of past presidents (e.g., Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton) rather than in part attributable to the Internet/social media age and the new tabloid media.
All those facts explain why Trump in 2016 received nearly 90 percent of the Republican vote, at par with, or better than, previous Republican nominees. Polling suggests that in 2020 Trump will do as well with Republican voters, or even better than four years ago. Certainly, the current NeverTrumpers, for all the “character is king” lectures, remain inert, and without influence. Again, they have never squared the circle of opposing the implementation of agendas they spent their careers promoting.
Instead, the rump that is left of the NeverTrump Right, more and more, is sustained by the Left, which finds them either useful idiot panelists on cable news, or eager website panhandlers of left wing tech largess—always on the condition they write ever more contorted anti-Trump tirades.
In sum, for all the talk in 2016 of Trump destroying the Republican Party, he has learned how to unite it in a way unfathomable to his critics. Politicos concede that calling China to account, working to revitalize the industrial heartland, ending illegal immigration, and curbing the administrative state are becoming mainstream Republican tenets.
2020 is Not Quite 2016
In the frenzy to abort the Trump presidency, the Left advanced the construct that the Republican Party was fragmented, self-destructive, and soon to disappear as a serious political force. All those prognoses better characterized the current state of the Democratic Party.
2020 Sanders is their presumed 2016 Trump, at least as mainstream Democrats see it. Bernie is a supposed destructive outsider who loathes the party establishment and has a fervent base that is oblivious to their candidate’s inconsistencies and prior embarrassing associations and rhetoric—and doesn’t give a damn whether he takes down the party in the 2020 election on his singular, narcissistic crusade to become president.
Yet unlike Sanders’ radical redistributionism, Trump’s tweaking of the Republican agenda eventually achieved unity, and brought Reagan Democrats, Perot voters, Tea-party activists, and blue-collar voter drop-outs back into the party without losing the Republican mainstream.
In contrast, Sanders’s promises to end fracking, implement the radical Green New Deal, institute a 70-90 percent top income tax rate along with a wealth tax, reparations, an open border and blanket amnesties, Medicare for all, and radical loosening of voter eligibility seem unlikely to unite Democrats in quite the same way. Little of that appeals to suburban voters and independents, and will not win them into the Democratic Party—but it will lose Sanders 10-20 percent of registered Democrats who will stay home or furtively vote Trump.
Top of the Ticket Sanders?
Sanders scares liberal Wall Street, and to some extent even the Silicon Valley progressive technocracy. Keeping one’s fortune cuts a lot of ideological ties. He has none of the appeal of Hillary Clinton to the deep state, or to party governors, senators, and House members. If in 2016 loyal Democrat office-holders and candidates at the state and federal level felt that Hillary on the ticket would empower them, they now fear Sanders could lose them the House and win Trump a super majority in the Senate along with two more picks on the Supreme Court.
Oddly, Sanders’s rivals on the debate stage never really hit the presumptive leader where he is most vulnerable: his reprehensible past empathy for the genocidal Soviet Union, and his praise of communist dictatorships such as those in Nicaragua and Cuba. Then there remains the embarrassing paradox of a die-hard socialist redistributionist eager to cash in on his political career—to the extent of setting up his wife as an in-house, well-paid consultant (with her past failed career as wheeler-dealer small college president who bankrupted her institution and for a while won the attention of the FBI), while becoming a millionaire with three homes. Mention that, as Bloomberg did in the recent debate, and Bernie becomes livid, in a fashion that appears dangerous for a septuagenarian who recently survived a heart attack.
Will there arise a Democratic NeverSanders movement if Bernie wins the nomination? It depends. The Democratic fear and loathing of Sanders exceed that of Republicans for Trump in 2016.
But whereas the alternative four years ago for NeverTrump Republicans was Hillary Clinton—with all the orthodox respectability and bipartisan bureaucratic schmoozing that Clinton sought to convey—would-be NeverSanders Democrats either would be actively or implicitly helping Donald J. Trump.
Would a Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, or Joe Manchin prefer the hated Donald Trump or good ol’ radical socialist Bernie Sanders with his calls for wealth taxes, 90 percent tax rates, wars against billionaires, a foreign policy far to the left of Barack Obama’s and socialization of the medical system?
We can see glimpses of the NeverSanders Left dilemma in the confusion of the current NeverTrump right. For most of the primary season, they more or less praised Joe Biden, the front-runner and assumed likely nominee who ultimately supposedly would govern in the fashion of Bill Clinton, and thus was clearly preferable to the despised Trump.
But now?
Most are going silent on the question of 2016, given the embarrassment that the logical dividend of hating Trump in 2020 is the election of America’s first socialist, whose agenda makes his spiritual predecessors Eugene Debs and Huey Long seem tame in comparison. Will NeverTrumpers resurrect the third-party wannabe Evan McMullen or finally convince David French to run? Will they sit out the election? Any NeverTrump “conservative” who voted for Sanders would be revealed as a rank opportunist or an unhinged obsessive-compulsive Trump hater, given the strange odyssey from establishment Beltway conservative to socialist nihilist.
So Sanders as the nominee has the unique ability of destroying the Democratic Party. In 1964, Rockefeller Republicans jumped to LBJ, after the tumultuous Goldwater takeover of the party. George McGovern in 1972 helped accelerate the neoconservative transformation of Democrats into Republicans. Reagan Democrats abandoned Mondale in 1984. For a half-century until the election of Barack Obama in 2008—a result of the anemic McCain campaign, the 2008 financial meltdown, the incumbent Bush’s sub-30 percent popularity, the unpopular Iraq War, and the idea of America’s first African-American president—Democrats did not win the popular vote in presidential elections unless their nominees had a southern accent—LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore—and, with it, reassuring proof of centrism. Northern losing liberals like Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry apparently confirmed a too leftward drift of the party.
In sum, if Sanders wins, the silent NeverSanders Democrats will become more numerous than were the loud impotent NeverTrump Republicans. And they need not vote Trump, but instead simply stay home or find a third-party or renegade Democrat to rally around to ensure Trump’s reelection.
Note that Trump was not only more consistent with his party’s values than Sanders, but more representative of the views of American voters in general. One might object that Trump is crude and off-putting and thus cancels out the appeal of his record. But is Bernie pleasant and measured?
His policy nostrums are frightening. He cannot take criticism, but becomes gruff and animated. And he is a different sort of septuagenarian than is Trump, who has a sense of humor and can be self-deprecating. Get-off-my-grass Bernie, like most true-believers and fellow travelers of mandated government redistribution, is serious 24/7. He never really addresses criticism, and his fallback position on any issue is always another predictable socialist bromide, a frown and two frail arms flailing in the air.
Again, Sanders the person gives the Sanders agenda no boost. All that can be said of Sanders is that he is authentically socialist in a way that candidates like Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren are only so occasionally and opportunistically.
In 2020 if Sanders is the Democratic nominee, the NeverSanders movement will be far larger, far wealthier, far more influential—even as it is likely far quieter—than were the vociferous but anemic NeverTrumpers of 2016.
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Does this mean anything?
IRAN
Unpopular Vote
Iran said Sunday that voter turnout in last week’s parliamentary elections was the lowest since the 1979 revolution that brought in the Shiite theocratic government, the Associated Press reported.
The interior ministry said that the turnout out was 42.57 percent – the first time it dipped below the 50 percent mark.
The low turnout is seen as a sign of possible dissatisfaction with Iran’s religious rulers and the system they govern. Voters had limited choices in Friday’s polls, after thousands of reformist and moderate candidates were disqualified prior to the elections.
State media reported that hardliners won all 30 parliamentary seats in the capital, Tehran.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei blamed the low turnout on enemy “propaganda” that discouraged people from voting by raising fears about the coronavirus.
Currently, Iran has more than 40 cases and eight people have died due to the virus – the highest death toll outside of China.
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SOROS spells tsuris! http://www.jewishworldreview.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ When you associate Bernie with the phrase "the burn" you might be talking about how he will burn the entire Democrat Party's house down as he alienates almost every co-alition they took decades to build.
Will Bernie turn Jews into Trump supporters?
Not even the victory of a Socialist backed by a coalition of Israel haters will persuade liberal Jews to abandon their party, let alone vote for a president they hate.
This is a scary moment for centrist and pro-Israel Democrats. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s overwhelming victory in the Nevada caucuses, coupled with the disastrous debut of Michael Bloomberg in last week’s Las Vegas debate, has forced the party’s establishment to confront reality.
It’s true that the Democratic race is still in the early stages. But the momentum Sanders has established and the inability of moderate Democrats to settle on a single alternative set up a dynamic that makes the septuagenarian Socialist not merely the current front runner, but the most likely winner of the party’s presidential nomination.
Despite match up polls that show him leading the president, the conventional wisdom holds that Sanders is a certain loser against Trump in a general election. Even if the Vermont senator is riding a left-wing version of the populist wave that lifted Trump to the presidency four years ago, that still makes sense. But leaving the question of who would ultimately win a Trump-Sanders contest aside, another issue of interest is whether Sanders’s nomination would have a major impact on the Jewish vote.
No doubt, Republicans believe that it will. The party has been competing hard for Jewish votes for the last 40 years largely on the basis of the GOP’s solid support for Israel with little success. The only time it actually succeeded in making the contest competitive was in 1980, when widespread antipathy for President Jimmy Carter allowed Ronald Reagan to come as close to winning the Jewish vote as any Republican modern polling was created. But even then, Carter still won a 45-39 percent plurality.
Since then, Republicans have chased the phantom of following up on Reagan’s success with little luck. The best showing in recent years was when Mitt Romney held President Barack Obama to a 69-30 landslide. After that slight improvement in their fortunes, they lost ground again four years later as Hillary Clinton beat Trump 71-24 percent among Jewish voters.
If Sanders becomes the first Jew to be a major party nominee for president, it will encourage Republicans to believe that a fundamental shift in the Jewish vote is at hand. Yet even though Sanders will probably not do as well as Obama or Clinton, anyone who thinks he won’t win a majority of the Jewish vote doesn’t understand a thing about American Jews.
After treating it as unimportant throughout his political career, Sanders has spoken publicly this year about being proud of his Jewish identity.
Yet of all the serious candidates running for president this year, he is the most critical of Israel. Though he has said that he supports the nation’s right to exist and referenced the few weeks he spent on a kibbutz in his youth, Sanders has demonstrated little sympathy for the Jewish state’s right to defend itself while consistently speaking of his equal devotion to Palestinian rights. He’s demonized Israeli efforts to stop Hamas terrorism and gone so far as to declare his intention to divert some of the aid Israel gets from the United States to Hamas-ruled Gaza.
Even worse, he has embraced anti-Zionists and anti-Semites. While loudly denouncing Trump as responsible for the actions of far-right extremists, he ignores the hate against Jews and Israel emanating from the left, and backers like Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). He is using Jew-haters like Palestinian-American activists Linda Sarsour and Amer Zahr as official surrogates. In that respect, his campaign is reminiscent of British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s efforts to transform one of that country’s major party into a safe place for Jew-hatred.
In theory, that ought to be enough to drive Jewish Democrats to refuse to vote for Sanders. But there’s little indication that will happen.
The first reason stems from the support Sanders is getting from young voters, including Jews who have embraced his Socialist message, as well as his lack of enthusiasm for Zionism. In that sense, Sanders is the perfect candidate for post-Zionist left-wing Jews with little sense of Jewish peoplehood.
By the same token, Sanders will benefit from the hyper-partisan nature of American politics. In a society where politics has largely replaced religion and the majority of Americans would be more offended by their children marrying someone of another political party than of a different faith or race, it will take more than radical economic views or hostility to Israel to scare off most Jewish Democrats from voting for him.
Then there is the Trump factor.
A minority of Jews who are either politically conservative or are basically one-issue voters when it comes to Israel (something that is true of many, though not all, Orthodox Jews) are inclined to support Republicans and view Trump with special affection because of his unprecedented backing for the Jewish state.
But in a country where views about this president have polarized Americans, the majority of Jews who are loyal Democrats wouldn’t vote for Trump—or fail to vote for his opponent—under any circumstances. Nothing Sanders has said or done could persuade most Democrats not to pull the lever for him (though to be fair the same could be said for most Republicans about Trump).
Still others will be persuaded to back Sanders out of misplaced pride in his milestone achievement or as an answer to stray anti-Semitic remarks about him emanating from the far-right all the while shutting their eyes to the anti-Semites on the left, who not unreasonably anticipate that a Sanders’s administration will effectively destroy the U.S.-Israel alliance.
So while there may be some erosion of Jewish support for the Democratic ticket if it’s led by Bernie Sanders, don’t expect the drop-off to come close to approaching the levels of the Reagan-Carter race. Jewish Democrats, including many who consider themselves ardent friends of the Jewish state, will hold their noses and complain, but in the end, they’ll vote for a presidential candidate who is openly hostile to Israel and supportive of its foes. And no one, either in Israel or the United States, should be shocked when this happens.
‘There goes Florida’: Bernie Sanders praises murderous dictator Fidel Castro on ’60 Minutes’
By Tom Tillison
Well, there went Florida.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-avowed socialist and now Democratic front runner, saw fit to praise the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro on national television.
Appearing on “60 Minutes,” Sanders pointed to literacy programs by the murderous tyrant to say that “it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad.”
In the segment, anchor Anderson Cooper runs a clip from the 1980s, saying Sanders “is explaining why the Cuban people didn’t rise up and help the US overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro.”
“He educated their kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society, you know?” Sanders is heard saying in the clip.
“We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad,” the Vermont senator told Cooper. “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
Almost surprisingly, Cooper noted that there were “a lot of dissidents imprisoned in Cuba.”
“That’s right, and we condemn that,” Sanders replied, before pivoting away from the issue to launch an attack on President Trump.
The fallout from the remarks was immediate and came from all sides.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., whose parents were born in Cuba and fled their homeland ahead of Castro’s bloody reign, set the record straight on why the Cuban people didn’t help the US.
Taking to Twitter, Rubio said Sanders was “wrong about why people didn’t overthrow Castro. It’s not because ‘he educated their kids, gave them health care’ it‘s because his opponents were jailed, murdered or exiled.”
Rubio also exposed the tactics employed by communists to get people on board.
“The central promise every Marxist makes is that if we give up some of our individual freedom, the state will provide us more ‘security’ like free health care & education. But ultimately Marxism fails to deliver ‘security’ & you don’t have the freedom to do anything about it.” he tweeted.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, whose father was born in Cuba, sarcastically said: “It really makes a difference when those you murder by the firing squad can read & write.”
Even Democrats like Rep. Donna Shalala, D-Fla., who represents Miami, tore into Sanders.
The former Clinton administration Health and Human Services secretary said in a tweet: “I’m hoping that in the future, Senator Sanders will take time to speak to some of my constituents before he decides to sing the praises of a murderous tyrant like Fidel Castro.”
But former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino may have provided the most telling commentary on Sanders.
“This fraud, phony, snake 
oil salesman doesn’t belong within 1,000 miles of any position of power. He’s dangerous. You’ve been warned,” Bongino tweeted.
In the end, it was the impact Sanders words will likely have in the critical swing state of Florida that took precedence. Far and wide, the response was that if Sanders is the Democrat nominee, the party just lost Florida
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