RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump has denounced the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as being “obsolete,” and has called for sharply reducing U.S. commitments to the alliance that has been the bulwark of American security since World War II. While Trump’s apologists have attempted to explain these remarks as a mere “bargaining position” to try to get Europeans to increase their military expenditures, the Donald’s announcement of the appointment of Carter Page as one of his principal advisers argues for a far more straightforward and alarming interpretation of his statements.

Carter Page is an out-and-out Putinite. A consultant to and investor in the Kremlin’s state-run gas company, Gazprom, Page has a direct financial interest in ending American sanctions against the company. Not only that, but Page is tight with the Kremlin’s foreign-policy apparatus and has served as a vehement propagandist for it.

In February 2014, thousands of Ukrainians braved police gunfire to rise up and overthrow the corrupt Putin stooge Viktor Yanukovych, who had been president of Ukraine for four years. Yanukovych, breaking his pledge to take Ukraine on the path to freedom offered by the European Union, had decided to surrender the country to the Moscow-run “Eurasian Union” instead. Within weeks, the Kremlin responded by sending troops to invade the Ukrainian province of Crimea, and then, in April, it seized Donetsk, Lugansk, and other parts of eastern Ukraine as well. Under the terms of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in return for Ukraine’s giving up its nuclear arsenal, the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom were all bound to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

It is curious how people romanticize evil and insanity. The habit, I believe, is born of naiveté, or at least inexperience. The college student who prances about in a T-shirt bearing the image of Che Guevara, for example, has no idea of what a malignant figure Che was, how treacherous, how cruel, how murderous. He sees only a handsome “freedom fighter” swaddled in the gauze of exotic Latin flamboyance. The grubby reality escapes him entirely.

The knotty French philosopher Simone Weil saw deeply into this phenomenon when she observed that “imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” Weil understood the converse as well: “Imaginary good,” she wrote, “is boring, real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Something similar can be said about sanity, what David Hume rightly extolled as “the calm sunshine of the mind.” Madness seems like an adventure only if you do not have to contend with it.

But what if you do? Many people, I believe, are beginning to ask themselves that as the glow of novelty deserts Donald Trump and he stands more and more revealed for what he is: an astonishingly ignorant, narcissistic bully and braggart. A populist demagogue whose closest fictional model might be P. G. Wodehouse’s Mosley-esque character Roderick Spode, while the Italian clown, TV personality, and political activist Beppo Grillo might provide the closest real-life analogue.

No one, as far as I know, has compared Trump’s populist rallies with the “vaffanculo” (“f*** off”) rallies that involved more than two million Italians and catapulted the erstwhile clown to the eccentric center of Italian political life. It would be a useful exercise.

The Beppo Grillo analogy was suggested to me by “The revolt of the public and the rise of Donald Trump,” a remarkable essay by Martin Gurri, a former CIA intelligence officer and author of the (equally remarkable) “The Revolt of the Public And The Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.” It is often said that Donald Trump gives voice to the disenchantment of people with the Washington establishment. It would be more accurate, Gurri suggests, to say that he is the embodiment of the decadence or collapse of a political consensus that no longer enjoys our allegiance. “A meticulous study of Donald Trump’s biography, statements, and policy ‘positions,'” Gurri writes:

Seven months ago, after he signed a pledge to support whoever won the GOP nomination, Donald Trump said, “I see no circumstances under which I would tear up that pledge.”

That was then. Today we see a different Trump. On Sunday, he told Chris Wallace of Fox News that while he wanted “to run as a Republican,” he wouldn’t rule out an independent or third-party race this fall. “We’re going to have to see how I was treated,” he warned.

GOP leaders should have known better than to have taken his pledge seriously. As the Associated Press pointed out in September 2015, his record on honoring contracts is at best spotty:

When lender Boston Safe Deposit & Trust refused to extend the mortgage on his Palm Beach resort, Mar-a-Lago, he ceased making loan payments until the bank capitulated in 1992.

In his book The Art of the Comeback, Trump proudly recounts forcing his unpaid lenders to choose between fighting him in bankruptcy court or cutting him an additional $65 million check. Afraid of losing their jobs, the bankers folded, Trump says.

Reince Priebus, the chair of the Republican National Committee, has dismissed the chance of a Trump independent bid as “posturing.” Robert Eno of Conservative Review noted last week that Trump could be kept off many state ballots by “sore loser” laws that bar a candidate who has run in a partisan primary from running in another party in a general election. “If Trump were to wait until after the Republican National Convention to declare an independent candidacy, he could only compete for a maximum of 255 electoral votes,” Emo concluded. “This means he cannot win the presidency were he to wait until after [the] convention to run an independent bid.”

But many Republicans worry that Trump could still play “spoiler” by merely threatening to run an independent campaign. “Sore loser laws don’t hold up well in court,” says Richard Winger, the editor of Ballot Access News. “They also aren’t easily enforced. John Anderson ran as an independent in all 50 states in 1980 after ending his Republican campaign, and not one of the sore-loser laws was enforced against him.”

Led by agenda-setting New York State and radical left-winger Al Gore the progressive persecution of climate change skeptics by the states is underway.

Top law enforcement officers in several states are joining with the Chicken Littles of green activism to weaponize the scientifically dubious argument that human activity is not only changing the earth’s climate but that unprecedented world catastrophe awaits unless draconian, economy-killing carbon emission controls are imposed more or less immediately.

The litigation offensive has nothing to do with justice. It is aimed at forcing those few remaining holdouts in the business community who stubbornly cling to science to confess their thought crimes and submit to the know-nothing Left’s climate superstitions. It is part of modern-day environmentalism’s ongoing assault on knowledge, human progress, markets, and the rule of law.

Repent and embrace the true green faith or else you’ll be investigated and denounced as a climate criminal, is the message of “Inspector Gotcha,” New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman.

“It’s too early to say what we’re going to find,” he said of the five-month-old witch hunt aimed at his current target, the gigantic ExxonMobil, at a press conference this week in Lower Manhattan. “We intend to work as aggressively as possible, but also as carefully as possible.”

The New York Times previously reported that Schneiderman is looking into “whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how such risks might hurt the oil business. … For several years, advocacy groups with expertise in financial analysis have been warning that fossil fuel companies might be overvalued in the stock market, since the need to limit climate change might require that much of their coal, oil and natural gas be left in the ground.”

But “The First Amendment, ladies and gentlemen, does not give you the right to commit fraud,” Schneiderman said this week.

http://www.robmaness.com/
With the extraordinary Cruz vs. Trump battle for the GOP presidential nomination sucking up all of the political oxygen, it is easy to miss the fact that awesome conservative retired Air Force Col. Rob Maness is running for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana.

Folks, please allow me to cut to the chase. Our country is going to hell in a handbasket fueled by GOP cowardice and an entire Democrat party hijacked by anti-American zealots. The only way we stop the horrific effects of Obama’s insanity and corruption in both parties is to send rock-solid conservatives we can trust to Washington, candidates with backbones of steel who refuse to go-along to get-along.

Speaking of backbone, Maness’ military awards and combat decorations include the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, and Air Medal. I am pretty sure Maness will not be intimidated by RINOs, metro-sexual Democrats or Obama bureaucratic henchmen in DC. Maness is like an oak tree firmly and deeply rooted in the rich fertile soil of his Christian faith.

When you cut through all the political deceptions, lies, and broken promises, it always comes down to sending character-driven representatives to Washington. Rob Maness’ record proves he fits the bill. In plain language, Maness is one of us, folks; a real family, God, and country good guy.

I was extremely impressed when I met Rob during his 2014 run for the senate; a strong conservative fighter, highly respected community leader, served 32 years in the military, husband, father of five and grandpa of four.

This story in Politico about Trump delegates willing to bolt the candidate on the second ballot of a contested convention will be dismissed by many Trump partisans as anti-Trump propaganda.

Indeed, it may be. But if we’ve seen any weakness from Trump in the past two weeks, it is the lack of political acumen from his team when it comes to the real nuts and bolts of politics: choosing delegates who are rock solid supporters. The controversies in Louisiana, South Carolina, and North Dakota are just the tip of the iceberg. The fact is, Trump may be winning more votes than Cruz at the ballot box, but the incompetence of his campaign aides in turning those votes into loyal delegates is painfully obvious.

If Trump heads into the convention without the magic number of 1,237, already more than a hundred delegates are poised to break with him on a second ballot, according to interviews with dozens of delegates, delegate candidates, operatives and party leaders.

In one of the starkest examples of Trump’s lack of support, out of the 168 Republican National Committee members — each of whom doubles as a convention delegate — only one publicly supports Trump, and she knows of only a handful of others who support him privately.

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz has been whipping Trump in the quiet, early race to elect his own loyalists to become delegates to the convention, meaning that the Texas senator could triumph through delegates who are freed to vote their own preferences on a second ballot, regardless of who won their state.

“As far as the stealing of the Trump nomination, that’s a big concern for everybody,” said Diana Orrock, the RNC committeewoman from Nevada and the only one of 112 committeemen and women who openly supports Trump. None of the nation’s 56 state and territory GOP chairmen, also convention delegates, have endorsed Trump either. They are subjected to a mix of state-based rules as far as their obligation to back Trump on the first vote.