RUTHFULLY YOURS

White supremacist David Duke told his listeners the day after the Nevada caucuses that it was a “historic day… maybe the day that turned the tide” not only for the the GOP nomination as “things are more and more encouraging that Donald Trump could be the president.”

The onetime grand wizard of Louisiana’s Ku Klux Klan — who served in Louisiana’s legislature and mounted unsuccessful campaigns for other offices including Congress and the governor’s mansion — lauded Trump’s front-runner status as the “most insurgent campaign in recent history.”

“He’s gotten the same kind of votes that I’ve gotten… he’s gotten the same kind of votes as George Wallace,” Duke said in the audio first reported by Buzzfeed.

“When he takes on immigration, the open borders, he’s really taking on the Jewish establishment.”

Railing against “Jewish control of America,” Duke said Trump “doesn’t take this on straight, anyway,” but “he definitely came out” on related issues such as fair trade and “stop the immigration.”

“I was the first Republican to make an issue against affirmative action… that was one of my planks and platforms. Donald Trump hasn’t taken that on straightforwardly, but he’s done it peripherally by showing that Black Lives Matter is really about racism against whites. That’s the message that he’s saying,” he added.

Voting for Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) or Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and “voting against Donald Trump at this point is really treason to your heritage,” Duke told his listeners. “Now, I’m not saying I endorse everything about Trump, in fact I haven’t formally endorsed him, but I do support his candidacy and I support voting for him as a strategic action. I hope he does everything we hope he will do.”

“I don’t know if he will or not, but we know his candidacy is an insurgency that is waking up millions of Americans and I’m telling you it’s your job now to get active. Get off your duff, get off your rear end that’s getting fatter and fatter for many of you every day … call Donald Trump’s headquarters, volunteer… you’re going to meet people there who have the same kind of mindset.”

Duke encouraged Trump volunteers to “educate” others, particularly telling evangelicals that supporting Jews is “absolutely like supporting the enemies of Jesus Christ.”

…..As I consider the rise of Donald Trump, and how he has sucked most of the air out of the constitutionalist movement, I can’t stop thinking about it. Trump’s supporters remind me of my eleven-year-old self, so excited about their incredible triumph that they have blinded themselves to the obvious. However, as the circumstances of their delusion are much more serious and less benign than my childhood touchdown, there is nothing kind about refraining from asking them an awkward question or three.

So today, addressing myself to any Trump supporters who are not already lost to the irrational anger he feeds on — please don’t scream about “righteous anger,” as if I don’t know the difference between justice and wrath — I pose three simple questions:

(1) Don’t you get the strange feeling that this has all been suspiciously easy?

Consider the fates of all previous GOP candidates to run against the party elite. Remember Herman Cain the creepy philanderer? Michele Bachmann the hysterical religious fanatic? Rick Santorum the Catholic extremist who was going to outlaw birth control and lock all women in the kitchen? And of course Ronald Reagan, the rare success story who taught the insiders a lesson they have never forgotten about the need for a unified strategy to nip all serious challenges in the bud?

But forget about the past; today we have Ted Cruz, the maniacal government-hating crusader and despicable liar whom everybody hates, who is owned by Goldman Sachs, and who may not even be an American!

In light of this consistent pattern of preemptive assault from the “left” and “right” against all anti-establishment GOP candidates, isn’t it odd that Trump, who has been the obvious frontrunner in the primaries since last summer, and who presents as inviting a target for a media takedown effort as any candidate has ever presented, has been given a pass? In fact, he’s been given much better than a pass. Aside from the nonstop free advertising he is getting as celebrity of the year, the most overtly leftist news network, MSNBC, has actively helped to create an aura of inevitability around him, and to demean his opponents. Meanwhile, has there been even one serious attempt on any twenty-four hour news network to dredge up and pursue any kind of scandal, ugly rumor, old girlfriends, shady business associates, anything at all that might undermine his campaign?

As for the “conservative media,” in the fall of 2011, Matt Drudge and Ann Coulter put all their weight behind the establishment’s preferred candidate, Mitt Romney. And over the past several months, those same two bigwigs have invested all their savings in Trump stock. Four years ago, Rush Limbaugh pussy-footed (that means walking like a kitten, by the way) around Romney throughout the primaries; this time he seems to be walking even more gingerly around his golf buddy Trump, defending him as an anti-establishment champion, and even half-excusing his “Bush allowed 9/11 to happen” bluster in South Carolina as “strategy.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-circus-inside-the-greatest-political-show-on-earth-review-winning-is-what-matters-1456439178

Rarely does a grandiose claim feel as apt as the one in the subtitle of this series. Undeniably, the current primaries and virtually everything else connected with the American presidential election of 2016 have made for the most riveting, not to mention embittering, political spectacle in memory, and we’re still only at the beginning stages. All the more reason to treasure an enterprise that preserves the small details as “The Circus” does—brief moments that capture the flavor of this race, the light as well as the dark, the faces of Americans rapturous with enthusiasm or etched with doubt as they listen to candidates come to ask for their vote in the crucial primaries.
The creators of “Circus”—veteran political strategist Mark McKinnon and Bloomberg Politics managing editors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann—focus their documentary efforts on what goes on backstage during the arduous primaries battles, but there’s no stinting on the extravaganzas taking place on the public stages themselves. At a Pensacola, Fla., rally packed with Donald Trump fans, where the candidate takes a shot at Ted Cruz—“You can’t win if you’re born in Canada’’—and alludes to “Crazy Bernie,” then predicts “I think I’m gonna win in Iowa” (he didn’t), the crowd roars its ecstasy, a tremendous din. The filmmakers, who deliver snippets of commentary, note Mr. Trump’s obvious rock-star appeal—a power, one says, that you can’t buy.

But there’s another rock star of sorts on the campaign trail: Bernie Sanders, whose wife, Jane, is a constant presence at his side and far more talkative than her husband, who isn’t prone to sharing much beyond his political message. He’s shown a noteworthy fastidiousness when questioned, for instance, about his religious heritage: American Jews whose parents emigrated from Poland don’t usually describe their parents, as Mr. Sanders tellingly does, as “Polish immigrants.” READ MORE AT SITE

http://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-and-clintons-email-probe-1456448102

Attorney General Loretta Lynch this week tried to assure House Republicans about the impartiality of her department’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails by noting that it would be handled by career government officials. This claim could stand a little parsing.

The probe into her possible mishandling of classified information “is being handled by career independent law enforcement agents—FBI agents—as well as the career independent attorneys in the Department of Justice,” Ms. Lynch said Wednesday. “They follow the evidence, they look at the law and they’ll make a recommendation to me when the time is appropriate,” adding that the probe is being “conducted as every other case.”

That’s what they always say, and it is nice to think so. But there’s reason to doubt given the example of Justice’s investigation into the IRS targeting of conservative groups before the 2012 election. To lead that probe, then Attorney General Eric Holder appointed Barbara Bosserman, a trial attorney in the department’s Civil Rights Division.

Ms. Bosserman’s appointment was curious given that her area of expertise is civil rights, not tax law. She had also donated $6,100 to President Obama’s campaigns and the Obama Victory Fund in 2008 and 2012. That’s no small donation on a career employee’s salary and suggests some serious political loyalty. READ MORE AT SITE