When the next session of Congress begins, Beto O’Rourke will officially be an outsider. He will no longer be part of the swamp. He’ll be a private citizen because he lost his election bid to replace Ted Cruz as Senator in Texas. This loss will prove to be the best thing that could have happened to his political career.

Beto O’Rourke is on track to be one of the frontrunners for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

It seems like everybody on the left loves this guy. Despite his destructive far-left ideology, he was able to get closer than anyone would have expected to unseating a Tea Party Republican in deep-red Texas. He was also able to raise more money than anyone else in the midterm elections, raking in more money than the #3 and #4 on the money list combined.

Had O’Rourke won his race, he would have been held to his promise of not running in 2020. Even though his promise was stretched to include winning or losing in 2018, the narrative is quickly changing. With no campaign promise that could come back to haunt him in 2024 had he won his Senate race, backtracking on his no-run 2020 promise is easy.

A recent MoveOn poll actually has him ahead of the competition for the first time, edging out Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. He even got more votes than Senators Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Amy Klobuchar, and Cory Booker combined.

His popularity with the progressive far-left is evident, but he also has some mainstream Democrats turning to him as the best person to go up against President Trump in 2020. Now that he’s going to have free time on his hands, let’s look at three reasons why he should be considered the early frontrunner:

1. Nationwide Appeal: He may be from Texas, but Democrats won’t hold that against him. If anything, it will have the opposite effect by giving him credibility for doing so well in a red state. It helps that he was in a punk rock band and brandishes a style that’s not stereotypical of any place in America. You won’t see him wearing a cowboy hat any time soon.
2. Fundraising Prowess: Ted Cruz was the best GOP fundraiser during the 2016 primaries and Beto O’Rourke dominated him in 2018. The only person who could be considered in the same sentence with O’Rourke on the money side is President Obama. If they teamed up (and they will if he gets the nomination), they could draw some serious cash that will dwarf Hillary Clinton’s impressive 2016 haul.
3. Time and Energy: No need to rush back to Washington for an important vote like the half-dozen Senators who are probably running for president. He also won’t be hampered by 70=year-old legs like Biden and Michael Bloomberg. O’Rourke, is young, energetic, and has nothing better to do than prepare his 2020 bid.

It’s discouraging to know this far-left, gun-grabbing progressive has an inside track to the Democratic nomination. The thought that he could be President should terrify every right-thinking American.

When my friend and fellow talk-show host Shannon Joy refers to the Republican and Democrat duopoly in Washington as the #UNIBROW, she does so to show how there is no difference between the two parties when it comes to their agendas.

Another trait they have in common is their obvious display of hypocrisy when it comes to manipulating the rule of law to protect political parties for partisan purposes, especially if you’re a member of the party that was soundly defeated recently, placing you in the minority.

The latest example of what this looks like comes to us courtesy of the new GOP leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), in his latest defense of Donald Trump. In a recent interview with Trump Pravda (FOX News), McCarthy mentioned that he thinks it’s time for the Democrats to surrender their subpoena power to investigate the president.

GOP leader who gloated about Benghazi probe wants Dems to refrain from investigating Trump https://t.co/pnrCIEtWJ1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 10, 2018

“It looks like what [Democrats will] focus on is just more investigations. I think America is too great a nation to have such a small agenda.

“I think there are other problems out there that we really should be focused on. And my belief is, let’s see where we can work together. Let’s move America forward.”

Ironically, as Obama’s re-election got underway after the Democrats lost the House in the 2010 midterms, Pelosi sounded a lot like McCarthy concerning the need to work together. Funny how the losing party interprets their defeat as a call for “bipartisanship,” isn’t it?

It’s also ironic how the losing party in these two midterm elections, in large part, lost due to the unpopularity of their representative in the White House after two years of broken promises.

McCarthy’s disingenuous plea for bipartisanship is a different tune than the one he was singing in 2015 during the Benghazi hearings. Not only did he support never-ending investigations of Obama and Hillary, he openly admitted in an interview with Sean Hannity that his primary motivation was finding ways to take down the Democrat nominee.

“What you’re going to see is a conservative speaker, that takes a conservative Congress, that puts a strategy to fight and win. And let me give you one example. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?

“But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known that any of that had happened had we not fought to make that happen.”

I wonder whatever happened to that “conservative speaker” and that “conservative Congress.”

In the end, McCarthy is playing the same role in 2018 that Pelosi played in 2010: protect the president and the party instead of America while making partisan demands to serve as fodder for the next election.

Hopefully, true conservatives will see through this masquerade of self-centered scoundrels and reject the reprobate “representatives” dwelling in D.C. from both parties.

And yes … that includes the Democrat with an “R” after his name currently occupying the White House.

Originally posted on StridentConservative.com.

David Leach is the owner of The Strident Conservative. His daily radio commentary is distributed by the Salem Radio Network and is heard on stations across America.

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The congresswoman’s Jewish possible ancestors shouldn’t be a problem for anyone. But the idea that her leftist stands are somehow authentically Jewish is troubling.

(December 11, 2018 / JNS) At a time when DNA tests are a national craze, as well as source of political controversy, we shouldn’t be surprised about claims of Jewish identity from anyone. But when they come from someone as controversial as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the expressions of joy and dismay about her possible connection to the tribe were predictably partisan and downright foolish.

The incoming member of Congress from Queens, N.Y., made headlines when she told those in attendance at a synagogue Hanukkah party in her district over the weekend that “a very, very long time ago, generations and generations ago, my family consisted of Sephardic Jews.”

As she explained, the people of her native Puerto Rico are descendants of many different strains of immigrants, including those Jews who fled Spain in the 15th century. Within her family’s collective memory is some sense of having been descended at least partly from such Jews.

Those who already liked the young Democratic Socialist, who has become the rock star of her party, were thrilled that she could be claimed as part of the family. On the other hand, Jews who dislike her leftist politics were disgusted. It was a rerun of what happened when House Speaker Paul Ryan found out that his DNA was 3 percent Ashkenazi Jewish during historian Henry Louis Gates’s “Finding Your Roots” PBS TV program. Liberal Jews responded to that item with nasty partisan abuse, as well as declarations that he wasn’t wanted. Ocasio-Cortez’s detractors were quick to use the same sort of invective.

But those who accused her of attempting to steal Jewish identity weren’t being fair. This is unlike the antics of fellow Democrat Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who attempted to back up her claims of Native American identity with a DNA test that showed that, at best, she was 1/64th descended from either the Cherokee or Delaware tribes. Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t pretending to be Jewish or trying to show that DNA was identity, let alone to justify using it for personal advancement as the senator allegedly did when she claimed to be the first “woman of color” to be named a professor at Harvard Law School.

Attacks on her for mentioning her Catholic family’s memories of their partial Jewish past were inappropriate. We know that 20 centuries of post-exile persecution has resulted in many branches falling away from the Jewish ancestral tree, so her story is hardly uncommon. It is also a heartening sign of the times that prominent non-Jews are proud about their Jewish roots, rather than—as would have been the case in the not-so-distant past—feel shame about it.

The tenuous connections between her family, or that of Ryan and any long-lost Jewish ancestors, are merely intellectual curiosities. Still, two aspects of the issue are worth some comment.

One is the danger that someone with some claims to Jewish identity will use it selectively in order to justify taking a stand against Israel. Over the decades, we’ve seen that happen with a number of writers or politicians who have few ties to their Jewish heritage, yet trot it out as a credential that enables them to express anger, embarrassment or outrage about the conflict in the Middle East. The “not in my name” meme in which Jews who know next to nothing about Israel and its geopolitical dilemmas seek to disassociate themselves from Israelis fighting for their lives is despicable. If Ocasio-Cortez were ever to use such a rhetorical device to justify siding with her close allies—incoming House Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib—who are supporters of the anti-Semitic BDS movement that seeks Israel’s destruction, that would be outrageous.

Yet there’s another more serious argument to be addressed. It’s the theme sounded in the Forward after the latest Ocasio-Cortez story broke—that the Socialist politician is actually more authentically Jewish because of her politics than conservative or Zionist Jews.

Part of this mindset is the notion that modern American political liberalism and Judaism are interchangeable. It’s more than just an old joke to say that many American Jews conceive of their faith as more or less the Democratic Party platform with holidays thrown in. While it’s an insult to Judaism to conceive of it as nothing more than an elaborate theological justification for partisan politics, it’s also true that many American Jews see their faith as determining their votes. In that sense, there are Jews who see American Jewish conservatives or supporters of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as representing a point of view that is alien to their conception of what it means to be Jewish.

More troubling is the idea that a loose sense of identity in which a multicultural frame of reference about the world—as opposed to a strictly Jewish one—is more representative of the way young Jews think today. Given the demographic implosion of non-Orthodox Jews in the United States, it is hardly surprising that some Jews think this way, but the consequences in terms of a decline in a sense of Jewish peoplehood are obvious and serious. If we begin to worship inclusion and diversity to the point where Jewish parochialism and nationalism, even in its most benign forms, are rejected as illiberal, then we will be part of a community that stands for nothing and is incapable of sustaining itself.

The real tragedy is that too many young Jews see Jewish observance or Zionism as antithetical to their progressive political views. If we get to the point where Ocasio-Cortez’s sensibilities about Israel or those of others on the left who might falsely regard Zionism as a form of racism because it contradicts their intersectional beliefs are accepted as legitimate Jewish perspectives, that will be a disaster. If such views are seen as more authentically Jewish than that of a typical Israeli or an affiliated Jew, then we will have arrived at a point where Jewish identity in this country for all too many of us will be nothing more than a meaningless percentage on a DNA test.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS — Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.