The last thing the Democrats need in a presidential primary candidate: Pete Who?

Comment By Jim Campbell

March 30th, 2019

This guy can’t be certain which way up is.

One this is certain is all his alleged hopes and dreams will be going free fall as in an elevator shaft with its cables severed.

He took 6 months off his duty as mayor to spend six months in Afghanistan.

 

That is someone who had political connections to arrange for such short duty, hey but apparently he needed it for crediblity in his twisted little mind.

Was he in the line of fire? Of course not.

Though billed as an infantry officer, he was anything but.

In his own words, “Intelligence, though, not fire power, is the weapon of choice in his line of work, he told The Tribune by phone this week from Afghanistan.”

He is currently deployed there for six months as part of a special unit of one.

The mayor left for the country in April and is set to return at the end of September.

He’s limited in what he can say about his mission.

“I can tell you that I’m working on the intersection of drugs, finance and terrorism,” Buttigieg said, commenting for the first time in any detail on his work in the country.

“I’m assigned to a counterterrorism organization called the Afghan Threat Finance Cell,” he continued.

“My mission is to protect the homeland and target the most dangerous drug trafficking organizations in Afghanistan.”

A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration-led unit, the cell investigates and disrupts financial networks that fund the insurgency in Afghanistan.

Partner agencies include the Treasury and Department of Defense.

Buttigieg said he could not comment further on his mission, only that he works long hours.

Not even his family know for sure what he was doing. (Source)

For someone who couldn’t say much, he was an open book.

Ask a special operator what they were doing or anything about their mission and you will likely draw a blank stare, then not further contact.

The New Republic

For the unknowing: It’s a bigger leftist purveyor on nonsense a pure partisan progressive politics than it was when it was first published. 

 

 

The New Republic is an American magazine of commentary on politics and the arts, published since 1914, with influence on American political and cultural thinking.

Founded in 1914 by leaders of the progressive movement, it attempted to find a balance between a humanitarian progressivism and an intellectual scientism, ultimately discarding the latter.

The only time they portray a member of the right, in this case, President Donald Trump is in their attempt to eviscerate him.

 

Through the 1980s and ’90s, the magazine incorporated elements of “Third Way” neo-liberalism and conservatism.

In 2014, two years after Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, purchased the magazine, he ousted its editor and attempted to remake its format, operations and partisan stances, provoking the resignation of the majority of its editors and writers.

In early 2016, Hughes announced he was putting the magazine up for sale, indicating the need for “new vision and leadership.”

It was sold in February 2016 to Win McCormack.

The magazine charges twenty dollars per month and it’s a fair bet that those who buy it either don’t understand it or subscribe to impress their friends. 

 

Like the New York Times, it makes a suitable birdcage liner.

Am I suggesting that the New Republic many not be worth reading?

 

 

You vapid over educated fool: Lesson one: The U.S. is not a democracy if it were you would be among the first to be shipped out.

The U.S. is a constitutionally driven Republic, something the leftist Ivy League Universites neglected to teach you, along with those who are being brainwashed as current undergraduate as well gradiate schools.

No, actually I’m being emphatic about it, save the subscription fee, turn on MSNBC and watch Rachel Maddow in stead.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

March 30, 2016

Is he a Political Genius?

Perhaps when compaired with the bottom feeders on the left.

Perhaps only when the rest of the progressive bottom feeders are given serious anal probe

Only those on the left would even consider anointing him as such.

The guy is still fighting real or imagined battles in hid little mind over Chick-fil-A.

 

 

Forget about the fact that he is openly gay, a mayor has never made the jump to the White House in recent history, if ever.

The South Bend mayor is unlike any other Democratic candidate for president, and he’s staked out the middle ground among them all.

Earlier this week, Pete Buttigieg dared to weigh in on one of the great culture-war lightning rods of the past decade: Chick-fil-A.

“I do not approve of their politics, but I kind of approve of their chicken,” the South Bend mayor said, referring to the fast-food chain’s historical support for groups that oppose same-sex marriage. (Loser)

Then, perhaps less seriously, he added, “Maybe if nothing else, I can build that bridge. Maybe I’ll become in a position to broker that peace deal.”

These remarks counted as newsworthy not only because Buttigieg is a Democratic presidential candidate; he first gained national attention in 2015 for coming out as gay amid the fight against Indiana’s anti-LGBTQ “religious freedom” law (signed by then–Governor Mike Pence).

But Buttigieg has an uncanny sense of public opinion—or he’s done his research.

As Slate’s Ruth Graham noted earlier this month, many on the left have “uncanceled” the chain since swearing it off at the height of the controversy in 2012.

“Over the years, the furor has faded, and many progressives have slunk back through the restaurant’s doors,” she wrote, adding that progressives “seem increasingly comfortable eating at Chick-fil-A” because the chain is “not as egregious as it used to be, and the product is irresistible.”

Buttigieg’s remarks, then, may well represent the center of Democratic opinion on this critical issue: It’s OK to eat Chick-fil-A, but not without a little guilt.

It’s this kind of casual political cunning that has propelled Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of a city of just 100,000, to as high as fifth place in the Democratic primary polls.

On the campaign trail and in his recent memoir, Shortest Way Home, Buttigieg studiously avoids taking sides in the political and cultural battles that have defined American politics for the past three decades, instead arguing that he’s the one who can bridge the dive between coastal states and fly-over states, between the party’s left wing and its center, between an anti-LGBT—but delicious—chicken chain and everyone else.

In a Democratic primary still haunted by the ghosts of 2016, Buttigieg stands out in part because he can’t be slotted into the familiar narratives.

His unique profile is unlike any other presidential candidate, ever: He’s a married gay man, a devout Episcopalian, a Harvard graduate, a McKinsey alumnus, a Rhodes Scholar, a skilled pianist, and a Navy veteran who took a six-month leave of absence as mayor to serve in Afghanistan.

He’s also hard to pin down politically. He wants to abolish the Electoral College and is even open to the idea of packing the Supreme Court.

He’s a supporter of Medicare for All, though not for abolishing private insurance.

An advocate of “democratic capitalism” and thoroughly earnest, he sometimes seems like a mix between Elizabeth Warren and former Newark Mayor Cory Booker.

This is not to say that Buttigieg’s politics are revolutionary in any way. More often than not, he splits the difference between the party’s extremes.

In a recent Vox interview about the ongoing Democratic debate over capitalism and socialism, he said,

“You have one generation that grew up associating socialism with communism like they’re the same thing, and therefore also assuming that capitalism and democracy were inseparable.

I’ve grown up in a time when you can pretty much tell that there’s tension between capitalism and democracy, and negotiating that tension is probably the biggest challenge for America right now.”

This answer reflects a sort of third way that Buttigieg is attempting to carve out in the Democratic primary—between Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism and Clintonian neoliberalism.

At the same time, Buttigieg is trying to turn a quality that should be a liability—his age—as an asset.

He’s suggesting that he doesn’t have the baggage of the past; as someone born in the liminal space between Generation X and Millennials,

Buttigieg can see the present with clear eyes.

It’s not, in some ways, much different from the approach of O’Rourke, to whom he is frequently compared.

Buttigieg has tried to turn his other apparent weakness—that his political experience is limited to less than two terms as South Bend’s mayor—into a strength, too.

“Look, you could be a senior senator and have never managed more than a hundred people in your life,” he told voters in New Hampshire last month.

“I not only have more years of government experience than the president of the United States, but I have more years of executive experience than the vice president of the United States, and more wartime experience than anybody who arrived in the office since George H.W. Bush.”

In his memoir, Buttigieg exhaustively walks the reader through what it’s like to be mayor—the ins and outs of dealing with potholes, sewers, and abandoned houses.

At 352 pages, Shortest Way Home is anything but short and one gets the sense that Buttigieg wants to put the criticism that he’s not prepared to lead to bed by listing every single reason why he’s ready for a higher office.

Like O’Rourke, Buttigieg’s appeal rests on his authenticity.

In Shortest Way Home, he casts himself as a regular guy who just happens to be mayor.

He writes about what it’s like to attend festivities that often involve heavy drinking as a politician (“retail politics is never fun among the intoxicated”), an angry and bigoted constituent who happens to be a neighbor, and trying to figure out how “a gay mayor—or any mayor” navigates the dating scene.

His willingness to peel back the curtain has found him a number of admirers already.

“Perhaps his success to date tells us the secret to unifying the country does not rest with fighting Trumpian fire with fire nor in being a celebrity candidate of the left,” wrote Jennifer Rubin, of all people, in The Washington Post.

“The secret to unifying the country, to underscoring Trump’s total unfitness to hold office and to breaking through the media noise is to eschew cynicism and artifice.

Refusing to sound like a politician running for president or to buy into the media narrative makes him unique in a pack of sameness.”

Of course, Buttigieg is very much running for president; he’s just really good at not sounding like he is.

This has been true for years.

In December of 2016, he published an essay on Medium, “A Letter from Flyover Country,” arguing that Democrats have lost touch with voters in red and purple states and are overly focused on national politics.

“When it comes to my part of the country, we will recover our ability to reach people only when we take them seriously, connecting our plans to their actual, personal lived experience rather than focusing on The Show,” Buttigieg wrote.

“We need to invite people to assess how their individual lives changed—how their safety, their income, their access to health care, their gun rights, their marriages—have actually been affected, if at all, by what goes on in Washington.”

This remains Buttigieg’s message through today: that a midwestern Democrat attuned to struggling voters in “flyover” country is best positioned to lead the party post-Trump.

It is Buttigieg’s luck that he happens to be the only such Democrat in the race right now—but his guile got him here.

THE END