Clown Car Politics:

I thought Pete Buttigieg was aiming for the moderate lane. Whether he's showing his true colors or just trying to up his stakes in the "which Democrat can sound like the biggest lunatic" sweepstakes, returning campaign donations to two professional women for the grave crime of providing legal counsel to a client is a terrible decision for someone who would be president:

1.    Everyone in this country deserves legal defense, a tradition going back at least as far as John Adams defending the soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. Defense counsel and a fair trial are a core bulwark of American liberty. Whether you’re OJ Simpson, Jerry Sandusky or Hillary Clinton: you are entitled to counsel. How can we take Buttigieg seriously if he isn’t going to push back against the media mob when it comes to due process? It isn't even as if a racist like Richard Spencer or an anti-Semite like Linda Sarsour was behind these donations. These are professional lawyers who are performing a vital funciton to our democracy. If the president can't make this distinction and would use his office to weaken this critical mechanism, he shouldn't be in the White House.

2.   Speaking of those extremists, people who donate money to you do not have to reflect your politics and accepting their money does not equal an endorsement of their views. Candidates should be rejecting this imbecilic convetional wisdom every chance they get. More importantly, the alleged evildoers who donated the dollars in question are that much poorer as a result. Why give the money back to them? We need a president who can make this argument and put a stop to all this apologizing for views they don't hold and returning funds to people who certainly don't need them back.

3.     Buttigieg is campaigning to be President of the United States. If he can’t stand up to the Sandinistas over at the Guardian and the woke Twitterati waving verbs around like torches and pitchforks, why should we expect him to be able to handle Recep Erdogan or Xi Jinping? If your argument is that Trump is doing a terrible job of handling dictators, I fully concede. Trump is quite bad enough with his tough guy act draped in fawning deference and weak submission. The last thing we need is yet another president with no backbone sitting in the White House.