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

Hillary Clinton is her own worst enemy. Just as Bill Clinton’s worst impulses did more to sabotage his presidency than any Republican, his wife’s worst impulses have always undermined her. Some couples balance out each other’s weaknesses, but Bill and Hillary enable each other’s misbehaviors. While Hillary enabled her husband’s abuse of women, Bill enabled her paranoia and obsessiveness.

Hillary Clinton has a longstanding tendency to turn to a dark conspiratorial mindset when things don’t go her way. She blamed her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky on a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. Her close friend’s papers reveal that Hillary thought Bill had been “driven” to the affair by his “political adversaries”.

It was easier for Hillary to blame her husband’s misbehavior on Republicans than to deal with reality. And her campaign is showing that her worldview hasn’t changed any since then.

The entire FBI investigation would not exist if Hillary Clinton had just followed the law. Instead she chose to engage in a preemptive cover-up of her emails as preparation for her presidential campaign.

The job of Secretary of State had never meant anything to her except as a stepping stone to the White House. She took it to fundraise and build up her resume while maintaining total control over her emails, in violation of the law, while displaying no regard for national security by storing highly classified materials on her own server. But instead of protecting her campaign, the cover-up created its biggest challenge.

“The $64,000 question, of course, is exactly when the rude awakening will come. I pray it will not be too late.”

As expected, Donald Trump won the Nevada caucus handily. Nevada, casino capital of the country, is Donald Trump’s sort of place. Naturally, his supporters are ecstatic, and congratulations to them. As I wrote just a few days ago, however, it is premature for Mrs. Trump to be checking out new curtains for the Oval Office.

Lou Cannon is right: there is nothing inevitable about Donald’s Trump’s nomination (to say nothing of his election, should he be nominated). Here are a few of the things Cannon adduces:

With last night’s win, Trump has only 79 of the 1,237 delegates needed for the nomination. 79, Kemo Sabe.
He is “stuck” in the mid-30s of support, sufficient to win primaries with a platoon of candidates but not in a head-to-head race.
Trump had the lowest percentage of any South Carolina primary winner in the last 10 contests.
Late-deciding voters broke against Trump, giving him a victory margin less than his lead in pre-primary polls.
Jeb Bush’s withdrawal helps Trump’s opponents.
Trump has sky-high unfavorable ratings, with 28 percent of Republicans saying they’d never vote for him. Indeed, Gallup’s surveys show Trump has the highest unfavorables of any presidential candidate in modern history, a net minus 70 among Democrats and a net minus 27 among independents.

I am not saying that Trump cannot win the nomination, merely that I don’t think he will: hence my addition of a question mark to the word “nominee” on the graphic from this morning’s Drudge Report. Trump’s performance — or, more to the point, the performance of the two remaining serious candidates, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — will be the deciding factor.

“It is hard to think of another major party presidential candidate in our history as ignorant, mendacious, and offensive as Trump. And yet a significant share of the GOP electorate, amounting to roughly a third of early state voters, has been supporting him in no small part because they think he is telling it “like it is.” No, he isn’t. What he is saying bears no relation to basic truth or common decency”

Donald Trump, the undoubted Republican front-runner after winning the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, is — there is no way to sugarcoat this — a liar, an ignoramus, and a moral abomination. I have never previously described any presidential candidates in such harsh terms — not even close — but there is no other way to accurately describe him. There simply isn’t. This past week, the week culminating in his big South Carolina win, provided yet more evidence, as if any were needed, of the validity of all these words to describe him.

Start with the lying. Trump has consistently claimed that he was the “only” Republican candidate who opposed the Iraq War from the start. Until recently, commentators could do no more than note there was no evidence of his opposition. Now we can go further because, thanks to the ground-breaking work of BuzzFeed reporter Andrew Kaczyinski, we know that Trump actually supported the invasion.

On September 11, 2002, Trump told Howard Stern “yeah I guess so” when asked if he supported an invasion of Iraq. Why his hesitation? Only because he thought it should have happened sooner. As he said: “I wish the first time it was done correctly,” suggesting, as he had previously written, that George H.W. Bush should have toppled Saddam in 1991.

After the invasion started, on March 21, 2003, Trump called it a “tremendous success from a military standpoint.” He did not come out in bull-blown opposition until April, 2004, calling it a “terrible mistake,” by which time the Abu Ghraib excesses had been revealed and the U.S. was suffering battlefield reverses in Fallujah and elsewhere.

Asked now to explain his quotations from 2002-2003, Trump can only say: “I really don’t even know what I mean.” That’s a pretty weak way to explain away a blatant lie, and one that has been at the core of his claim to possess the kind of foreign policy judgment we need in a president.

During his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, Secretary of State John Kerry confirmed that a secure email account had been set up for Hillary Clinton when she became secretary of state, but that she neglected to use it. What’s more, he was unable to answer a question regarding any actions that may have been taken by the intelligence community to mitigate the damage her unsecured server did to our national security. Via The Daily Caller:

During one part of an at-times intense exchange, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson read from a letter from Julia Frifield, who serves as State Department assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs.

“Secretary Clinton did not use a classified email account at the State Department. An account was set up on ClassNet on her calendar, but it was not used,” Frifield wrote in response to a Sept. 21, 2015 letter from the committee asking for information about Clinton’s use of an account equipped to handle classified information.

ClassNet refers to the State Department workstations that are designed to allow employees to view classified information.

Clinton opted instead to harbor classified information on her own personal, unsecure email account, which was hosted on her private “home-brew” server at her home in Chappaqua, New York.
More than 1,7o0 emails that Hillary Clinton sent or received have been determined to contain some level of classified material. At least 22 email chains have been deemed to be the highest level of “top secret,” which is described by members of the intel community to be “the crown jewels” of the United States government because if the information is compromised, national security can be seriously damaged, and people’s lives put in danger.

“Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are sharp, appealing candidates. Are they wise enough to know that neither can win without the backing of the other’s core supporters, and that destroying those supporters’ preferred candidate is not the way to get it? There are not enough committed conservatives in the country for Cruz to win without broadening his appeal. And Rubio cannot win without conservatives, who like Cruz and who are very suspicious of Rubio. No one expects the two senators to stop competing with each other, but the pair needs to home in on Trump’s progressive, incoherent record. They also need to project the uplifting aspects of their candidacies. If, instead, the fratricide continues, some of their disaffected supporters will opt out of the process entirely while others gravitate to Trump, who will waltz to the nomination. And then the Democrats will waltz to victory in November.”

Rick Tyler, the now-former Cruz campaign spokesman, is a good guy who, by his own admission, exercised very poor judgment in publicizing what turned out to be a false story about Marco Rubio.

The story, which contorted an incident caught on video, sounded kooky from the start: Rubio, while encountering Ted Cruz’s father and a Cruz staffer reading the Bible in a hotel lobby, purportedly said, “Got a good book there, not many answers in it.” Rubio is, by all accounts, a devout Christian and he has spoken eloquently about his faith during the campaign; if there were a report of his having made a statement so contradictory of his nature, it should have been quadruple-checked before anyone decided to go public with it. And even if verified, it would have been more sensible to think the remark a poor attempt at humor than a reflection of Rubio’s beliefs, so far better to ignore it as one of those dumb things exhausted people say in a tense situation.

But of course, Rubio did not say what Tyler reported; he said the opposite: “All the answers” are in the Bible.

As many have observed, this incident does not occur in a vacuum. I am a Cruz supporter, so it is perhaps no surprise that I think the two others that have gotten attention are much ado about nothing.