RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Trump’s unorthodox style of campaigning for president first took the political world by storm, I thought his ability to connect with the public is a real-life version of the movie A Face in the Crowd.

In the 1957 film, Andy Griffith played “Lonesome” Rhodes, a drifter discovered by a producer of a small-market radio program. Rhodes’s confident down-to-earth, everyman style of speaking ultimately won him great fame and influence on national television, beloved by millions.

I’ll be honest with you, folks. When Trump broke the mold with his bold, straight-talk, politically incorrect campaigning, I loved it. The arrogance of the mainstream media has frosted me for years. So Trump getting into the MSM’s face had me cheering him on. I was also hopeful that, as president, Trump would fulfill all the broken promises of the deceitful, traitorous GOP establishment.

As we move into the final months of the GOP nominating process, art is imitating real life. Trump’s behavior is similar to “Lonesome” Rhodes in the movie. Rhodes was not the person his millions of loyal fans thought him to be. At the end of a broadcast, the same producer who discovered Rhodes turned Rhodes’s microphone back on, unknown to him. Rhodes made shocking, hurtful comments about his audience, heard by and devastating millions.

Recent liberal positions on issues have exposed that Trump is not who he has presented himself to be. It has been reported that in a private meeting with GOP establishment leaders, Trump’s “chief lieutenants” said Trump has been “projecting an image.” They said that “the part that he’s been playing is evolving” to make him more palatable to general election voters.

Trump talking about raising taxes on the rich and saying it is okay for men to use girls’ restrooms confirm the leftward “evolving” his campaign spoke of.

Speaking of taxes, Trump’s tax returns reveal that he donated funds to homosexual activists, including a group whose motto is “championing LGBT issues in K-12 education.”

How bad is Hillary Clinton’s image? This bad:

Fifty-six percent of Americans view her unfavorably, according to the Huffington Post pollster trend.

One-third of New York Democratic primary voters say she is neither honest nor trustworthy.

Her image, writes Dan Balz, “is at or near record lows among major demographic groups.”

Like, all of them.

Among men, she is at minus 40. Among women, she is at minus 9. Among whites, she is at minus 39. Among white women, she is at minus 25. Among white men, she is 17 positive, 72 negative. Her favorability among whites at this point in the election cycle is worse than President Obama’s ever has been. . . . Among African Americans nationally the NBC–Wall Street Journal poll shows her with a net positive of 51 points. But that’s down 13 points from her first-quarter average and is about at her lowest ever. Among Latinos, her net positive is just two points, down from plus 21 points during the first quarter.

Emphasis mine. No doubt some of this degradation is related to a primary that has turned out to be much more competitive than Clinton imagined. But it’s also worth asking why that campaign has lasted so much longer than we assumed.

A lot of the reason is Clinton: her tin ear, her aloofness, her phony eagerness to please, her suspicion of the press and of outsiders, her — let us say –complicated relationship with the truth, the blithe way in which she dissembles and deceives.

Over the course of three decades in public life Hillary Clinton has misspoken and misled the public and mismanaged herself and her team to such a degree that voters cannot help noticing. Yes, many of her falsehoods are white lies. But white lies accumulate. They matter. Not only do they harm the truth. They are turning Clinton into one of the least popular candidates in history.

Since 1998 Clinton has blamed her poor reputation on the vast right-wing conspiracy. Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, the health-care disaster — it was all the fault of the Republicans. What’s forgotten is that Clinton has been lying in the service of her ambitions — most notably by protecting her husband from the truth of his infidelities — since long before Bill ran for president. Nor can she blame conservatives for her failure to win the Democratic nomination eight years ago. Hillary can’t help being secretive and deceptive. It’s her nature.

I’m so glad The Donald brings out the best in his supporters.

Politico:

First it was an email warning Steve House, the Colorado GOP chairman, to hide his family members and “pray you make it to Cleveland.” Then there was the angry man who called his cell phone and told him to put a gun down his throat.

“He said, ‘I’ll call back in two minutes and if you’re still there, I’ll come over and help you’,” House recalled.

Since Donald Trump came up empty in his quest for delegates at the Republican state assembly in Colorado Springs nearly two weeks ago, his angry supporters have responded to Trump’s own claims of a “rigged” nomination process by lashing out at Republican National Committee delegates that they believe won’t support Trump at the party’s convention — including House.

The mild-mannered chairman estimates he’s gotten between 4,000 and 5,000 calls on his cell phone. Many, he says, have ended with productive conversations. He’s referred the more threatening, violent calls to police. His cell phone is still buzzing this week, as he attends the RNC quarterly meetings in Florida, and he’s not the only one.

In hotel hallways and across dinner tables, many party leaders attending this week’s meetings shared similar stories. One party chair says a Trump supporter recently got in his face and promised “bloodshed” if he didn’t win the GOP nomination. An Indiana delegate who criticized Trump received a note warning against “traditional burial” that ended with, “We are watching you.”

The threats come months ahead of a possible contested convention, where Trump is all-but certain to enter with a plurality of delegates bound to him on the first ballot, but he could lose support on subsequent ballots as rules will allow delegates to vote however they choose. And although the harassers are typically anonymous, many party leaders on the receiving end of these threats hold Trump himself at least partly responsible, viewing the intimidation efforts as a natural and obvious outgrowth of the candidate’s incendiary rhetoric.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

I understand that Trump’s supporters — and most Americans — are angry. But this is something unique to the Trump campaign: the overt threat of physical violence that surrounds the candidate.

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.