RUTHFULLY YOURS

Is it a case of ordained fate we cannot escape or is it that “We the People” are too dense to learn from our mistakes? Paging through humanity’s history, time and again we find numerous instances of costly historical errors where people ignore facts and reason by entrusting their lives to a “savior.” And time and again, we have ended up paying the price for our folly. If we are not genetically doomed to make these ruinous mistakes –which I am certain we are not — then do we commit them out of wishful thinking, laziness, desperation, or some combination of the three?

History has warned us of three kinds of people: charlatans, demagogues, and politicians. And more often than not, someone will rise up who is all three of these characters wrapped into one. Our liberty is our most precious possession. Many will aim to rob us of it and, by so doing, add to their own power, while trying to force us to become robots.

Desperate situations spawn desperate measures. Not having learned the lessons of history, many people will turn to charlatans, demagogues, and politicians with dire consequences. Just a few old and recent cases of this tragic misstep should warn us not to be victimized in the future by frauds.

From the primitive land of the Arabian Peninsula of over 14 centuries ago arose Muhammad, an illiterate hired hand of a rich widow Khadija, claiming that he was the bearer of a perfect life prescription from God — the Quran. He claimed humanity could do no better than to follow its precepts as well as to emulate Muhammad’s own life example for a guarantee of bliss and salvation. In exchange for this, people must embrace Islam — surrender — by surrendering their liberty to Muhammad.

To this day, in places where Islam rules, many books are banned, newspapers and magazines are systematically either censored or shut down, and other non-print media are methodically blocked. Liberty, deeply cherished by democracies, is replaced by submission — unquestioning obedience and adherence to the dictates and precepts of the all-knowing and all-wise Allah.

In no time at all, the savages of Arabia, won over by the allure of the win-win promise of Muhammad — you kill and you get the booty from your victims in this world; you get killed and your abode will be the unimaginably glorious sensuous paradise of Allah — sword-in-hand, sallied forth to lands near and far.

From the “civilized” land of Germany arose a syphilitic lout who called on the German people to surrender their liberty to him in exchange for a surefire solution to all their economic and social ills. He successfully portrayed the Jews as the main cause of the nation’s suffering. Before long, the masses of gullible easy-solution seekers formed long lines in towns and villages of the land, tripping over each other in their eagerness to surrender their liberty to the savior Führer.

What are political conventions for?

If you’ve ever been to one, you might think the purpose is for attendees to schmooze, drink, and drink some more. That holds true both for the delegates and for the journalists, who usually outnumber them by at least three to one.

But that’s not actually why political conventions exist. They’re sort of like volunteer fire departments that almost never get a call. It’s not that the firefighters don’t want to put out fires, but until they’re needed, they’re pretty happy to play cards, watch movies, and eat chili. They understand that when the call actually comes, the game ends, the TV goes off, and the boots go on.

Originally, conventions were partly a technological solution to a real problem. Phones didn’t exist and mail was too slow to coordinate the desires of the party faithful across a whole nation. (Also, few negotiators want to put all of their bargaining positions in writing.) You needed lots of face-to-face meetings.

By the 1960s, the telephone started to erode this function of conventions, as my American Enterprise Institute colleague Michael Barone has written.

Barone also notes that the media took one of the key jobs away from party bosses: counting delegates. The first media delegate count wasn’t until 1968, by CBS News.

Not long thereafter, conventions started to resemble infomercials. A political party throws a surprise party for the nominee that isn’t a surprise, because the nominee was determined well before the convention. In fact, the nominee is actually the party-planner-in-chief, choosing who sings his praises and when. The ending is no more in doubt than the question of whether the Ginsu knife in the TV ad will really be able to cut through the can.

But the core purpose of conventions never disappeared. It just got buried under all of the bunting and balloons. Even the communication function of the convention was a means to an end, not the end itself.

The real goal was to pick a nominee who could unify the party. That’s it. It wasn’t to pick a nominee who could win in November. That’s a huge consideration, but it was only one (very important) factor in deliberations over who should get the nomination.

Trust can be a double-edged sword when it is not founded on insight. In politics as in personal relations, one can trust the wrong person or distrust the right one — with unfortunate consequences. Political candidates almost universally craft their public image to play to the voter’s perception of their character — the “kissing babies” syndrome. They know that their audience is susceptible to emotional manipulation and so present themselves as deeply concerned with the public welfare, as scrupulously honest and, most importantly, as likeable and trustworthy.

But let the candidate refuse to play by the rules of the electoral game, to cast politically-correct caution to the wind, and to say directly what is on his mind without hedging or skirting contentious issues, and he will immediately be trashed as a moral pariah or an unsophisticated pleb. Establishment politicians will turn against him in an orgy of vilification and horror, and a partisan media will launch incessant volleys of contempt, vituperation and slander against both his character and his candidacy, dismissing him as a demagogue-in-the-making, a Republican version of Bernie Sanders, a social barbarian, a ruthless capitalist, and so on. In an access of unconscionable blindness, even so generally astute a commentator as Carolyn Glick has fallen for this canard, erroneously claiming that Trump offers no solutions to America’s problems, merely focuses on blaming others while channeling hate. The disreputable tactic of blaming Trump for the programmatic violence of the Left — a disingenuous maneuver of which even Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz (aka TrusTed) were not innocent — is another instance of such malfeasance.

On January, 20, 2017, President Hillary Clinton might just become a reality. With her face set in the tight unpleasant grimace that is the closest she can come to smiling, she will take the oath of office on a bible, her Alinsky thesis or an Eleanor Roosevelt Ouija board vowing to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

If the bible doesn’t burst into flames on the spot, she will take office with one more lie on her stained conscience after a long career of them.

And the United States will enter the longest period of uninterrupted Democrat rule since FDR. It will be the single greatest opportunity for the left to transform America since the days of the New Deal.

Think of America before the New Deal. And then think of how much America changed after it.

It might behoove Republicans to stop accusing each other of having short fingers or 600 mistresses and start making the case against Hillary Clinton if they want to win anything worth winning. In the midst of all the exciting debates about establishment conspiracies and shoving video forensics, too many have forgotten what is really at stake here and what they ought to really be talking about.

The national debt will go up. So will your taxes. Hillary Clinton is promising a trillion dollar tax hike. And that’s during her campaign. Imagine how much she will really raise taxes once she’s actually in office.

Two Supreme Court justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy will likely leave office on her watch. That’s in addition to Scalia’s empty seat which she will fill resulting in an ideological switch for the court. Additionally, Kennedy, for all his flaws, was a swing vote. Hillary’s appointee won’t be swinging anywhere. The Supreme Court will once again become a reliable left-wing bastion.

Even if the Democrats never manage to retake Congress, they will control two out of three branches of government. And with an activist Supreme Court and the White House, the left will have near absolute power to redefine every aspect of society on their own terms without facing any real challenges.

And they will use it. Your life changed fundamentally under Obama. The process will only accelerate.

You will have less free speech. You will pay more for everything. Your children and grandchildren will be taught to hate you twice as hard. Local democracy will continue being eroded. Your community, your school, your town, your city and your state will be run out of D.C. You will live under the shadow of being arrested for violating some regulation that you never even heard of before.

Odd news that maybe isn’t so odd: A presidential straw poll conducted by a libertarian student group found that the most popular candidate among its members was Donald Trump. Second place: Bernie Sanders.

Young libertarians for elderly socialists: Not as strange as it sounds, or unprecedented.

Fifty years ago, the libertarian (he’d have said “anarcho-capitalist”) economist and political analyst Murray Rothbard dreamt of a grand coalition between far Left and far Right, whose members and interests, he believed, might be unified momentarily and perhaps more than momentarily by opposition to the Vietnam War. This was an error and led him to some ghastly places (thrilling to the stirrings of David Duke and culpable indulgence of Holocaust deniers) and into associations from which the liberty movement has never recovered.

What might drive a young libertarian into the “revolution” that Sanders proclaims? One thing is the ongoing Rothbardian bent in libertarian foreign-policy thinking, and Sanders is the only candidate in the race who isn’t entirely hostile to non-interventionism on the Ron Paul model. On lifestyle-libertarian issues — marijuana, stance toward religious traditionalists and their institutions — Sanders is the libertarians’ man, in practice. Sanders is energetically anti-libertarian on questions of trade and immigration, but a nontrivial number of self-professed libertarians have abandoned those issues or reversed themselves on them, “libertarian” now being used with unfortunate looseness to mean “right-wing populist who does not wish to be identified with Mitch McConnell’s party.”

We also are seeing the poison dividend of the bank bailouts.

Free-marketeers and free-traders must of course be realists about big business and its interests to the extent that we live in the real world, but for a generation, the working assumption was that the party of capitalism and the party of capitalists were if not the same party then largely on the same side, give or take an ethanol subsidy or in-house fight about intellectual property. The bailouts changed that.

The sort of libertarians who might have followed Rothbard into the sweaty precincts of David Duke’s political thinking have always had some uneasiness about the (Jewish) international bankers who terrified Henry Ford, and you’ll generally find them in possession of a copy of The Creature from Jekyll Island, the ur-text of Federal Reserve conspiracy theory. The spectacle of a small number of financial institutions throwing the world into an economic crisis through their fecklessness and rapacity and then demanding sweetheart loans amounting to trillions of dollars to see them through — a drama in which the banks were both the hostages and the hostage-takers — brought new life to the dry bones of 1930s conspiracy theories.

With Hillary Clinton and the party machinery back on track to a now-tarnished coronation, it’s worth assessing what Bernie Sanders’s campaign accomplished. I still can’t take the Vermont Socialist himself seriously, not with Larry David as his doppelgänger. But the Sanders phenomenon—embraced by a strong majority of liberals between the ages of 17 and 50—deserves attention.

Reporters have exhaustively plumbed the habitats and mental states of “the Trump voter.” Sen. Sanders’s supporters, by contrast, have floated through the primaries in a mist of keywords—millennials, college students, young professionals, actresses, “white people.”

One has to ask: Are they all actually socialists? I doubt it.

It’s no surprise Donald Trump in his New York victory speech about the “corrupt” Republican Party called Sen. Sanders a fellow “outsider.” The two great disrupters are remarkably similar, a kind of Tweedledon and Tweedleburn on trade and a “system” that’s “broken” and “failing” their supporters.

If one word attaches to the Sanders camp, it is “change.” But change what?

This isn’t meant to deride their desire for change, which is undoubtedly authentic, but only to ask how it’s possible that so many under-50 liberals have settled on Bernie Sanders as a change agent after living daily through more than 87 straight months of a Democratic president elected on a platform of “Hope and Change”?

As to Mrs. Clinton, President Obama’s presumed heir, The Wall Street Journal poll this week finds “just 22% of registered voters give her high marks for being able to bring real change to the country.”

What, exactly, is Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or even Bernie Sanders supposed to deliver that an infinity of politicians and public officials before them haven’t already delivered?

If change has any concrete meaning for Sen. Sanders’s supporters, it must have something to do with what the government or public sector does. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton won New York’s primary Tuesday, which means that barring an act of God or FBI director Jim Comey—they aren’t the same—she will be the Democratic nominee for President. So Democrats should be alarmed by the former first lady’s rising unpopularity.

The latest evidence comes in the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll taken April 10-14. A regular feature of this survey asks voters about their “feelings toward” certain individuals or institutions—whether they are very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative or very negative. In April the poll found Mrs. Clinton hitting a dubious new record of 56% who have somewhat or very negative feelings toward her. Only 32% have a positive view.
ENLARGE

Opinion Journal Video

Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot analyzes the latest WSJ / NBC News Poll on the New York state presidential primary. Photo credit: Getty Images.

As striking is the negative trend over the last three years. In Jan. 2013, not long after she left President Obama’s cabinet, her net negative was 25%. As the nearby chart shows, her unpopularity has since climbed with only occasional exceptions. She broke through negative 40% in the middle of last year, and she hit negative 50% in February. In April a remarkable 42% had a very negative view of the woman Democrats are counting on to hold the White House. CONTINUE AT SITE

#MakeAmericaGRATEAgain.

Donald Trump’s victory speech lacked a popular fixture of most of his boisterous campaign rallies–pejorative nicknames for his rivals.

The GOP front-runner, fresh off a victory in New York’s primary, traded in “Lyin’ Ted” for the more cordial “Senator Cruz.” He also referred to John Kasich with his “governor” honorific, despite having repeatedly chiding him in the campaign for sticking around in the race while he’s mathematically eliminated from winning the nomination before a contested convention.

But he still trumpeted his huge victory over both rivals.

“As you know, we’ve won millions of more votes than Sen. Cruz, millions and millions of more votes than Gov. Kasich,” Trump said at his victory rally at his Trump Tower in New York.

“We expect we are going to have an amazing number of weeks because these are places [with future primaries], they are in trouble.”

In his 1944 opus “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” the philosopher Johnny Mercer provided some bracing imperatives that, rightly understood, explain why I am supporting Ted Cruz for the presidency of the United States.

“You’ve got to accentuate the positive,” Mercer argued.

Eliminate the negative

Latch on to the affirmative

Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.

Quite right. These imperatives, while not quite categorical, are sufficiently compelling to command our attention. Ted Cruz is the only candidate who accentuates the positive, who latches on to the affirmative.

1. Executive power. Even many ardent supporters of President Obama have been taken aback by his style of governance, which has increasingly relied on two extra-constitutional expedients: a) executive diktat and b) regulatory hypertrophy.

Regarding the first: Every president, on taking the oath of office, promises to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution and “faithfully execute” the laws. But Barack Obama has conspicuously failed to do this. Item: When enacting some provisions of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) turned out to be politically inexpedient, Obama simply declined to enforce them, “legislating,” as one report put it, “from the White House.” Item: When the state of Arizona sought to enforce immigration laws that were on the books but that Obama did not like, he ordered Border Patrol agents to ignore the law. This is just the beginning of a very long list.

Regarding the second: the Obama administration has vastly expanded the prerogatives of such agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency (just one example), which presides over a budget in excess of $8 billion and a workforce of more than 15,000. Increasingly, this alphabet soup of regulatory agencies, whose minions are unelected and essentially unaccountable to the public, impedes economic growth and harasses citizens with a burdensome regimen of bureaucratic paperwork and often pointless oversight. As Hayek noted in The Road to Serfdom, a low-level government bureaucrat wields much more power over our lives than a billionaire who might happen to be our neighbor or even our employer, for he comes bearing the coercive power of the state.

Ted Cruz is the only candidate, Democrat or Republican, who understands and is prepared to address the twin dangers of executive overreach and the stealth statism of regulatory bloat.

You are always hearing, even from those who do not support him, that Ted Cruz is “a constitutionalist.” In other words, he believes that the governance of this country should be guided by that amazing, 8000-word document the Constitution of the United States. At the center of the Constitution are two ideas: 1) that power should be dispersed and decentralized and 2) the People are sovereign. It is sometimes forgotten that the Constitution is essentially a prophylactic instrument, designed to protect the people from the state. The Founders were careful to frame a government in which the executive exists to execute, not to make the laws. That is why the first thing you come upon, in Article I, is a discussion of Congress, into whose hands the Founders intended to invest the essential law-making power of the government. There is some irony, perhaps, that Ted Cruz wishes to assume the office of the president in order to circumscribe the power of that office. But the fact that something is ironical need not detract from its truth. Barack Obama is the fulfillment of a long process of power consolidation in the hands of the president. He has not governed so much as he has ruled, partly by fiat, partly by intimidation. I believe that Ted Cruz would reverse that decades-long process whereby the president of the Untied States mutated into a sort of imperial bureaucrat. His ambition to limit the scope of presidential ambition would alone be sufficient reason to support Ted Cruz.

Donald Trump says he wants to unite the Republican Party, but he keeps acting as if he’s mounting a hostile takeover. He’s now threatening to blow up the party’s July convention because he and his campaign were too lazy or inept to understand the 50 state nomination rules.

That’s the story behind Mr. Trump’s complaints that the party’s nominating rules are “rigged” against him. “It’s a crooked system. It’s 100% corrupt,” the front-runner howled on Sunday following a Friday op-ed on these pages making the same claims. He added on Sunday that he hopes a contested GOP convention in July “doesn’t involve violence.” Thanks for the warning.

Mr. Trump is upset that he’s being outhustled in winning delegates, and that he may fall short of the 1,237 he needs to win a majority in July. His latest embarrassment came at the Wyoming state convention on Saturday as Ted Cruz won the 14 delegates up for grabs. Mr. Cruz was the only candidate to show up in Casper, where he added to the nine (of 12 available) delegates awarded last month at county meetings. Mr. Trump, who said he didn’t want to “waste money going to Wyoming,” now claims Mr. Cruz won thanks to “party bosses.”

This is the same line the New Yorker leveled at the Colorado GOP, which also uses county and state conventions (rather than a popular vote) to elect delegates, and which recently awarded Mr. Cruz a delegate sweep. Yet both state processes were transparent and well known to all campaigns since last year.

In Wyoming’s case, “every presidential candidate for the last 40 years has managed this process and has worked through this process and has followed the process,” state GOP Chairman Matt Micheli told Fox News. Having failed to organize well enough to compete on these open terms, Mr. Trump is inventing complaints that such caucuses are “voterless.” CONTINUE AT SITE