RUTHFULLY YOURS

“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.

“Free stuff” is an aphrodisiac; it is like honey to a bear – who can forget the image of Pooh stuck head-first into a tree, bees swarming about him. It was why Odysseus had his men lash him to the mast as they approached the island of the Sirens. It appeals to the emotions, not the intellect. Listening to Bernie Sanders speak after trouncing Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire last week, it was easy to be swept away with his promises of free stuff – healthcare and college – all with the illusion this would solve unfairness and inequality. No discussion of the cost or how it would be financed, other than to raise taxes on Wall Street moguls. No mention of the decline in cultural and moral habits, like marriage, religion and work habits, that accompanied the rise in entitlements. It is not just the words; it is the way they are said.

Those who are duped with promises of “free stuff” ignore the simple fact that everything has a cost. Mr. Sanders’ admirers are asked to reject the critical concept underlying our history, which is the opportunity to succeed. No government can guarantee individual success, but ours does provide equality of opportunity and equality before the law, without regard to class, race or religion. Our government was created to protect us from the threat of kings and oppressors. It was based on the notion that our rights are God, not man, given. The Constitution provided us the freedom to think, speak, assemble and pray as we like. It enacted laws that protect us and our property from unlawful imprisonment and seizure. It promised that we would be judged by juries of our peers. America’s democracy recognizes inherent differences in individuals, as well as culture and heritages – that we are (and always have been and always will be) a nation of immigrants tossed in a cauldron, but maintaining our individual identities. American culture was based on pluralism, not multiculturalism. We are individuals, not cattle to be placed in pens convenient for politicians focused on group solutions to group problems. We are meant to be unified, not divided. The American meaning of liberty was never based on the promise of equality of outcomes – something that can never be delivered.

Here’s a part of the political calendar that nobody in the Republican Party seems to have noticed: This spring, just as the GOP nomination battle enters its final phase, frontrunner Donald Trump could be forced to take time out for some unwanted personal business: He’s due to take the witness stand in a federal courtroom in San Diego, where he is being accused of running a financial fraud.

In court filings last Friday, lawyers for both sides in a long-running civil lawsuit over the now defunct Trump University named Trump on their witness lists. That makes it all but certain that the reality-show star and international businessman will be forced to be grilled under oath over allegations in the lawsuit that he engaged in deceptive trade practices and scammed thousands of students who enrolled in his “university” courses in response to promises he would make them rich in the real estate market.

Although the case has been winding its way through the courts for the past five years — and Trump has denied all wrongdoing — the final pretrial conference is now slated for May 6, according to the latest pleadings in the case. No trial date has been set, but the judge has indicated his interest in moving the case forward, the pleadings show.

“This is pretty amazing,” said Scott Reed, a veteran Republican Party consultant, about Trump’s upcoming due date in federal court. “Usually, you clean this stuff up before you run for president.”

Trump’s new lead lawyer in the case, Daniel Petrocelli, best known for representing one of the slain murder victims in a civil suit against O.J. Simpson, did not respond to emailed questions about Trump’s upcoming testimony, including how long he expects his client to be on the witness stand.