RUTHFULLY YOURS

We’re living through a revolution, but not the revolution you think.

You’ve probably heard that this presidential campaign is the beginning of the end for the American political establishment. It’s not. Everyone who’s read a history book knows that the end of one establishment usually leads to the rise of another, pretty much indistinguishable from it. But it might be the beginning of the end of something much more foundational to American politics: respecting the dignity of those we disagree with.

In politics, tactics are telling. And when we observe tactics, we see that at least one Republican presidential campaign bears a striking resemblance to a movement on the opposite end of the political spectrum: the rise of exclusionary, powerful, and often oppressive “safe spaces” on college campuses.

These so-called safe spaces are segments of the public square, usually on college campuses, that have been hijacked by illiberal liberals who make them into spaces where only some are safe, and others are in actual danger.

Donald Trump’s rallies, where incidents of racist aggression have become more and more common, take a page from the radical Left’s handbook by offering just such an exclusive space to the one group that is consistently excluded from other so-called safe spaces: lower and middle-class straight white Americans. As was recently pointed out in The Atlantic, what unites Trump voters is that they feel politically voiceless and powerless. They have watched their jobs dry up, their homes be repossessed, their costs for basic health care soar, and themselves become targets for ongoing insults from the Left. They’ve been called racist for being angry at President Obama’s refusal to enforce immigration laws; bigots for thinking homosexual behavior is wrong; extremists for standing up for innocent human life by opposing abortion on demand, and backwards for wanting to exclude men from the women’s restroom. And they can’t say anything about it without having their words twisted and thrown back in their faces — all in the name of “tolerance.”

It’s only a small step from “I feel voiceless” to wondering who stole your voice. At a Donald Trump rally, it’s clear who’s to blame: the politicians, the judges, the Left, the illegal immigrants. What Trump is doing so successfully isn’t new; he’s using the narrative of oppression, a narrative employed by groups across the political spectrum, to overcome rational analysis and inflame the survival instinct of his constituency. It’s worked so well partly because of the political climate created by the radical Left.

While everyone was watching videos of protesters being hustled out of Trump rallies last week, here’s what happened under the radar in California that illustrates the point.

The campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) at California State University–Los Angeles invited conservative author Ben Shapiro to speak to their group about trigger warnings and illiberal liberalism in general. Just a week and a half before the event was to take place, Cal State–Los Angeles’s president, William Covino, canceled it, saying that Shapiro couldn’t participate in an event that would feature only his view. He would have to appear on a panel with a diverse group to “better represent our university’s dedication to the free exchange of ideas.”

Donald Trump suffered a sharp drop in CNN’s Political Prediction Market after Saturday’s voting. CNN’s market uses polling and forecasts from more than 100,000 users to predict election outcomes. Trump had a 78 percent chance of winning the GOP nomination before the voting in four states on Saturday. Afterwards, in the wake of his losses in Kansas and Maine, his odds fell to 63 percent. Trump narrowly won Kentucky and tied Ted Cruz for delegates in Louisiana.

Whether or not Donald Trump becomes the GOP presidential nominee will depend in large part on whether his support is declining in strength — as it did on Saturday – or continuing to expand.

If he takes from candidates who have left the race, such as Ben Carson, he is on track to win. If he is declining, he is unlikely to enter the Cleveland convention with the 1,237 delegates needed to win, because many of the delegates bound to win on the first ballot aren’t personal supporters and will probably abandon him. Trump could cut a deal for the delegates of, say, John Kasich, who has been noticeably reluctant to criticize Trump, even in the wake of the KKK brouhaha. But there are obstacle to such a deal as well.

So far, there are signs that Trump’s debate antics, his flip-flops, and the consolidation of the GOP field is slowing him down. As Henry Enten of FiveThirtyEight pointed out, Trump won 35 percent of the vote in Super Tuesday primaries on March 1 and only 33 percent in Saturday’s contests in Maine, Kansas, Louisiana, and Kentucky. He was favored to win the first two states but saw Ted Cruz beat him instead.

Consider what happened in Louisiana, a state where Trump’s final lead in the average of all polls surveyed by RealClearPolitics was 15.6 percent of the vote. He wound up winning by three points, only because he carried early votes with 47 percent. Ted Cruz won 23 percent, and Marco Rubio won 20 percent. Of the votes cast on Election Day, Cruz beat Trump, by 40.9 percent to 40.5 percent.

Right now, Trump has won 44 percent of the delegates selected so far. Cruz has won 34 percent, and Rubio has won 17 percent. Starting on March 15, the first states to allocate delegates on a winner-take-all basis start voting, led by John Kasich’s home state of Ohio and Marco Rubio’s home state of Florida.

If Trump wins both, he will have about half the delegates needed to clinch the GOP nomination. He then would have to win just over 50 percent of the delegates selected after March 15 to reach the magic delegate number of 1,237. If he did so, he would enter the convention with enough votes for a first-ballot victory, although some of his delegates who are established party officials and not Trump partisans could abstain and bring his total below a majority.

Donald Trump fundamentally misunderstands the American military. He sees it as an instrument of savage brutality, restrained only by political correctness. There is no honor. There is no law. If only the military were free to torture, murder, and blaspheme, then America would win its wars. By believing that American soldiers would follow those orders — or would want to follow those orders — he slanders the character of the American military.

For months, he has promised that he would order the military to commit war crimes, torturing militants and targeting their families for execution. He was just as emphatic in promising that those orders would be followed.

He was wrong. There is no scenario under which the military would ever follow directives so offensive to its honor and so blatantly illegal. No man I served with in Iraq would comply with an order to intentionally kill an innocent woman or child, and no officer with a shred of decency or honor would give such an order. The Pentagon has many flaws, but truly bad soldiers are few and far between, and the military is institutionally hard-wired to resist exactly this kind of corruption. Trump would instantly sever the relationship between America’s armed forces and their commander-in-chief just by asking them to do such things.

As Lieutenant General James Mattis put it in a 2005 memorandum to the United States Marine Corps, “Marines fight only enemy combatants.” It should go without saying that the same principle applies to soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Our men and women in uniform do not fight innocent civilians and they do not assault prisoners in their custody. Both the War Crimes Act of 1996 and the Uniform Code of Military Justice bind American soldiers to the laws of war, which prohibit such actions.

“Anyway, Sort-of-Super Saturday confirmed my feeling that while it is late, it is not yet too late. From where I sit, the candidate who has the best chance of derailing the Trump Express is Ted Cruz. He performed far better than predicted on Super Tuesday and Sort-of-Super Saturday. His talk at CPAC was a masterly performance, full of humor, insight, and sober political analysis. Watch it. Unlike Mitt Romney in 2012, he has a superb ground game. And Donald Trump’s not-so-slow-motion implosion gives Ted Cruz some momentum of his own. It’s by no means a sure thing. It will be an uphill struggle. But the most savvy candidate is also the one most committed to returning the country to its tradition as a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law and a deep respect for individual liberty.”

Impressions

The great Ace of Spades captured the essence of last night in a headline:
Rubio Collapsed, Cruz Surged, Trump Stable

Peeking behind the headline, however, Ace shows that Trump’s “stability” is anything but stable. First, the math. Cruz scooped up 64 delegates last night. Trump took 49. In Kentucky, Trump’s narrow win gave him 17 delegates to Cruz’s 15; in Louisiana, it was even closer: 18 for Trump, 18 for Cruz. In Kansas, by contrast, Cruz walked away with 29 delegates while Trump took 9. In Maine, it was Cruz 12, Trump 9 [NOTE: these figures and those below have been updated since this morning.]

Getting out the abacus and doing the sums that gives us:

Trump: 382 delegates

Cruz: 300 delegates

382 – 300 = 82

So, now Trump, who was supposed to win everything, is only 83 delegates ahead of Ted Cruz. At the moment, Marco Rubio has 128 delegates.

During the most recent Detroit debate, even a reformed “inclusive” and “presidential” Donald Trump still was crass and vulgar. (Has a candidate ever crudely referred to the size of his phallus, and in our sick world is that a Freudian admission of doubt, or a macho reassurance in LBJ fashion?)

Trump gave more than enough evidence that his positions are liquid and change as often his perceptions of his flatterers and critics. He is a blank slate, who as president could build or tear down a southern wall with equal ease, depending on the dynamics of the political deal of the moment. Has there ever been a Republican candidate that Republicans feared was too liberal and Democrats too reactionary? Planned Parenthood advocates usually do not wish to build a wall on the southern border. Trump’s perceived danger to the Republican Party is that he would move not only to the Left, but do so in an especially crass and crude way—expanding the party by not being of the party, winning as a Republican precisely by not being a Republican. To the degree that he would succeed as a president, liberals would applaud his conversion to liberalism; to the degree that he would fail, they would cite his innate conservatism.

In the debate, in passive-aggressive fashion Trump pouted and pounced, furious that others had broken the Golden Rule and done unto him what he has done unto others. His entire moral universe is predicated on a preteen morality of liking those who praise him, and hating those who criticize him. For Trump, to the extent that Megyn Kelly or Bill O’Reilly is or is not a good journalist depends entirely on his own transitory perceptions of how obsequious or prickly each was to Trump in their last encounter. All politicians operate like that; Trump’s great strength or weakness is that he is not shy in expressing it. (And that he knows most journalists wish to be liked rather than respected, and so make the necessary adjustments for Donald J. Trump.)

All that said, I doubt Trump will lose much of his 35-45% support in the next rounds of elections. It does no good for his critics to point out that he never reaches 50% margins in either elections or polls, when he can still win primaries well enough without gaining half the electorate. His genius so far has been to turn his third of the electorate into proof he’s a winner because his opponents never united to marshal a majority against him. In other words, Trump counted on the egos of his opponents to outweigh their concerns for their establishment party. His 35% is unimpeachable, and the anti-Trump 65% is at this late date still hopelessly fragmented. The more candidates talk about “uniting” around an anti-Trump candidate, the more they sound like medieval proverbial mice who dream of someone else putting a warning bell on the marauding cat.

Donald Trump supporters believe that they’ve got a novel candidate whose ideas have never been tried. They might be disappointed to learn that Mr. Trump’s political playbook is right out of 20th century Latin America. If he should become president, the country is likely to be about as successful as the region has been under this kind of leadership.

As Latin America has learned the hard way over the last 100 years, capital goes, and stays, where there is a rule of law that treats it well. It’s why the U.S. has developed and most of the rest of the hemisphere has been left behind.

Mr. Trump believes the rule of law is for pansies. His fans adore him because he promises to override institutional inertia and simply decree whatever is on his mind, like a caudillo. This won’t end well.

If elected, Mr. Trump would inherit a country where the rule of law is already under attack by President Obama. Long-winded and ruling by decree whenever Congress—the constitutionally coequal branch of government—does not accommodate him, Mr. Obama is a classic Latin American demagogue.

Conservatives despise the 44th president’s refusal to acknowledge the pluralistic traditions of the republic and its constraints on the executive. Yet there was a time when the loyal opposition viewed this abuse of power as an anomaly, a blip in an otherwise institutionally robust nation.

Now the Republican Party is host to another faction and it is asking for its own mano dura. Far from restoring respect for the Constitution, Mr. Trump is promising to be more Obama than Obama. His supporters are fine with that; it’s their turn. Which is to say, we’re becoming Bananalandia. CONTINUE AT SITE

Saturday night’s four nominating contests provided little clarity as to who has the edge in the race for the Republican nomination. But at the end of the night one thing was clear: It was a bad night for Marco Rubio.

Ten days before the Florida primary — the most important contest of the primary season for him — Rubio finished poorly across the board. Coming on the heels of a disappointing Super Tuesday, this lent ammunition to his opponents’ contention that the establishment spoke too soon in anointing him the best challenger to take on Donald Trump.

Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Maine all held nominating contests Saturday. Ted Cruz handily won the Kansas and Maine caucuses. Donald Trump beat out Cruz for narrow wins in the Louisiana primary and the Kentucky caucuses. In all of those contests, Rubio was a distant third — except in Maine, where he came in a distant fourth, behind John Kasich. In Louisiana and Maine, Rubio finished so far behind that he failed to meet the threshold necessary to receive any delegates at all.

To be sure, these four states were not expected to be Rubio strongholds. But he fell short even in areas where he ought to have done well. Kansas Republicans, for instance, expected that Rubio would win in Johnson County, the area around Kansas City. Instead, Cruz bested him there nearly two to one — 42 percent to 22 percent. Maine Republicans predicted that Rubio would finish behind Trump and Cruz in the state, but they expected him to perform more strongly in the Portland area. Instead, he finished in fourth place in the Portland-area caucus, trailing Cruz, Trump, and Kasich.

It’s the third night this week that headlines have proclaimed a disappointing night for Rubio. On Super Tuesday, he fell to Trump and Cruz in all but one state: Minnesota. On Thursday, he had a disappointing debate performance: Hoarse and fighting the flu, he climbed down into the mud pit to fight with Trump, and did not always emerge the victor. He earned criticism for contributing to the mayhem and was outshone by both Cruz and Kasich, who came off, by comparison, as the adults on the stage.

I love and admire Joan Swirsky but this is not a matter of ” ballots not bullets”…..it is more a matter of “bullies and blowhards”…..Trump is a liar and a cur….rsk

Donald Trump’s success represents a peaceful “overthrow of the government” and that the Republican establishment should be glad it’s being achieved with “ballots not bullets.”
Sure enough, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump racked up impressive statistics in his Fox News debate tonight, effectively trouncing the competition that included Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Once again, however, Fox’s Megyn “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” Kelly ambushed Mr. Trump by falsely stating that the Better Business Bureau had given Trump University a D-minus rating, when in fact it’s rating is, as Trump asserted, an A!

Below is the Better Business Bureau report, with an “A” grade for Trump University.

The same trouncing happened last week when Trump’s victories in the primaries garnered him the lion’s share of electoral votes by winning Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Virginia, which, according to Philip Bump of The Washington Post, “no Republican has ever won…going back to 1960.”

Both pundits and pollsters attributed the massive turn-outs to Mr. Trump’s having excited, inspired and therefore mobilized the electorate—in some cases well over 100% increase above the 2012 midterms. In one instance, Mr. Trump beat Sen. Cruz by 450,000 votes; in another he beat Sen. Rubio by over a million votes! According to writers Bill Barrow and Emily Swanson, Trump had “significant support across educational, ideological, age and income classifications.”

In his victory speech last week, looking and sounding presidential, Mr. Trump accurately proclaimed: “We have expanded the Republican Party.”

This ought to have been music to the ears of Republicans everywhere, especially “establishment” types who constantly seek to attract influential voting blocs comprised of African-Americans, Hispanics, and young people, all of whom—mysteriously, incomprehensibly, self-destructively—have huddled under the Democrat tent for decades, gaining not a micrometer of progress in their personal lives, wages, schools, crime rates, the pathetic list is endless.

If a state doesn’t vote for Hillary Clinton, it’s racist.

That’s the label that poor New Hampshire, the state just too white to appreciate the virtues of a white woman with dyed blonde hair who occasionally puts on a bad fake southern accent and switches from loving the Yankees to hating them, was stuck with after turning her down.

Sensing trouble up the road in Nevada, Clintonworld tried to accuse Nevada, a state with a sizable Latino population, of also being too white for Hillary. Then once Nevada voted the right way, its was suddenly just right enough.

Ex-Salon boss Joan Walsh suggested that Hillary Clinton was losing white voters because of second-hand racism from her time working for Obama. She’s losing men because they’re sexist and she’s losing women because, according to Gloria Steinem, they’re going ”where the boys are”. It won’t be long before the handful of black people who vote for Bernie Sanders are accused of “acting white”.

Hillary Clinton has turned into Tonya Harding; an obnoxious criminal who can’t stop making excuses, while towing around Bill Clinton as her Jeff Gillooly to kneecap her opponents with awkward attacks. After trying and failing to run on experience, the only thing she’s running on now is identity politics. And her campaign has tapped into the most repugnant and obnoxious politically correct smears.

If you don’t vote for Hillary Clinton, you’re a racist. If you’re a woman who doesn’t vote for her, you’re going to hell. If you ask her about her illegal email server or her speaking fees, you’re sexist.