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Donald Trump constantly brings up Iraq to remind voters that Jeb Bush supported his brother’s war, while Trump, alone of the Republican candidates, supposedly opposed it well before it started.

That is a flat-out lie. There is no evidence that Trump opposed the war before the March 20, 2003 invasion. Like most Americans, he supported the invasion and said just that very clearly in interviews. And like most Americans, Trump quickly turned on a once popular intervention — but only when the postwar occupation was beginning to cost too much in blood and treasure. Trump’s serial invocations of the war are good reminders of just how mythical Iraq has now become.

We need to recall a few facts. Bill Clinton bombed Iraq (Operation Desert Fox) on December 16 to 19, 1998, without prior congressional or U.N. approval. As Clinton put it at the time, our armed forces wanted “to attack Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors. Their purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States, and indeed the interests of people throughout the Middle East and around the world. Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas, or biological weapons.” At the time of Clinton’s warning about Iraq’s WMD capability, George W. Bush was a relatively obscure Texas governor.

Just weeks earlier, Clinton had signed the Iraq Liberation Act into law, after the legislation passed Congress on a House vote of 360 to 38 and the Senate unanimously. The act formally called for the removal of Saddam Hussein, a transition to democracy for Iraq, and a forced end to Saddam’s WMD program. As President Clinton had also warned when signing the act — long before the left-wing construction of neo-con bogeymen and “Bush lied, thousands died” sloganeering — without such an act, Saddam Hussein “will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he’ll use the arsenal.” Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, often voiced warnings about Saddam’s aggression and his possession of deadly stocks of WMD (e.g., “Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face”). Indeed, most felt that the U.S. had been too lax in allowing Saddam to gas the Kurds when it might have prevented such mass murdering.

Donald Trump is not content to bully the residents of just one continent, it seems.

In the mid 1990s, there was Vera Coking, the septuagenarian widow whom Donald Trump tried to squeeze out of her Atlantic City apartment to make room for a limousine parking lot for his nearby casino. Ten years later, in Scotland, trying to foist a golf course and resort onto a stretch of Scottish coastline, Trump encountered a set of equally incorrigible homeowners — and did his best to run them out of their homes, too.

In March 2006, Trump visited Scotland and proposed to build a 36-hole golf course — “the greatest golf course anywhere in the world,” as he would reiterate time and again — along with a 450-room hotel with a conference center and spa, 950 time-share apartments, 36 golf villas, and 500 for-sale houses, and accommodations for hundreds of full-time employees, in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire. He billed it as an economic boon to the country and, in his usual theatrical fashion, as a “homecoming,” waxing poetic about his immigrant mother, who departed Scotland’s Western Isles for the U.S. as a young woman. In reality, it was a vanity project.

“I always wanted to do a golf course in Europe, and of the 211 sites we have looked at, we have seen some incredible places,” said Trump. “But this was something special.” Indeed — more than Trump understood. The Menie Links, north of Aberdeen, is home to the Foveran Links, a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). The Foveran Links – which is a dynamic dune system that moves several meters annually, giving rise to a unique collection of plants and wildlife — is unique in the United Kingdom.

In her desperate scramble to the top every Hillary victory is accompanied by a setback. The corrupt Democratic machine that has kept her going this far eked out a victory in Nevada, but took down her minority firewall.

In earlier primaries, Hillary had lost women and young voters. In Nevada, she lost Latinos.

The last and only element of the Obama coalition that she has retained are black voters. Black voters helped Hillary in Nevada. While Latinos defected to Sandernistan, black voters remained loyally behind on Hillary’s Happy Plantation. If the black voters, primarily women who powered the Obama campaign, wave goodbye to life on the Clinton Tara, then Hillary’s path to the White House ends with Sanders’ Socialist march to the Potomac.

Despite her victory in Nevada, the Clinton crisis is now real. Hillary Clinton has lost nearly every demographic of what was supposed to be her base. She has become a purely political machine candidate with no supporters, only staffers, no appeal, only strategy, and no way forward except increasingly grotesque forms of electoral fraud that risk alienating Democrats until she becomes unelectable in a general election as the voters who saw their efforts to vote for Bernie Sanders thwarted resentfully decide to stay home.

A similar stolen nomination in which Hillary Clinton was the victim led to a crisis in ’08 which was only resolved with a deal between Obama and Clintonworld that allowed her to use his administration as the platform for her own future presidential campaign. But Hillary may not be able to buy the elderly Bernie Sanders, who would be 82 in time for Hillary’s two terms to end, and his supporters off in the same way.

To listen to some of the commentary about yesterday’s primary in South Carolina, you would think that Donald Trump now had the nomination sewn up. Yesterday, the pundits crow, Trump won by a comfortable ten points, beating Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz 32.5 to 22.5 (22.3 for Cruz). Gosh. Slam dunk, what? Time for Mrs. Trump to start thinking about new curtains for the Oval Office or at least battling against whoever the Democratic nominee will be after Hillary Clinton drops out sometime (I predict) before the end of March.

But there are several things to note about yesterday’s primary that make this exercise in congratulation premature.

First of all, a scant week ago, the polls had Trump at 38, Cruz at 28.5, Rubio at 13.5. Clearly, this is one of those “plastic moments” of political fermentation that Karl Marx told us about. Things can change quickly.

Second, it is worth casting one’s mind way back to ancient times, to the winter of 2012, when Newt Gingrich won South Carolina with 40.4% of the vote. Mitt Romney took 27.8, Rick Santorum (remember him?) took 17%.

Gingrich lost no time announcing on some talk show that it was obvious that he was going to be the nominee.

It didn’t turn out that way, but he came in a respectable second in Florida and won decisively with 48.5% in the key southern state of Georgia.

How do you spell “Romney”?

I suppose it is possible that Donald Trump — the man who supports single-payer health care (Obamacare on steroids), who didn’t know about the nuclear triad until a few weeks ago, who once proposed a 14.25% wealth tax on “the rich,” and until 15 minutes ago was an enthusiastic proponent of abortion on demand, even that form of infanticide euphemistically described as “partial birth abortion” by its partisans — I suppose it is possible that Donald Trump will get the country to rally around him and hand him the Republican nomination.

Norm Coleman is free Thursday after all. The former Republican senator from Minnesota was supposed to co-host a fundraiser for Jeb Bush, but the former Florida governor on Saturday gave up his bid for the GOP nomination after a limp finish in the South Carolina primary. Now Mr. Coleman – who originally backed South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham before he quit the race in December — is throwing his support to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

Virginia Republican fundraiser Bobbie Kilberg, who joined Mr. Bush’s camp last week, said nine donors reached out Sunday morning to say that if she backed Mr. Rubio, they would, too.
“That’s a lot of people to call you at 10 in the morning on a Sunday,” said Mrs. Kilberg, who originally backed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s now-defunct presidential campaign. “I really believe (Mr. Rubio) is the only candidate around which mainstream Republicans can coalesce in order to win this nomination and win the general election.”

It’s the presidential version of musical chairs, as one candidate after another no longer sees a path to the nomination, goes home and leaves rivals jockeying for their cushion, so to speak.

Mr. Coleman and Mrs. Kilberg are among the first wave of major donors, elected officials and party leaders who are gravitating to Mr. Rubio after Mr. Bush’s exit. Despite his resistance to being lumped with the Republican “establishment,” Mr. Rubio is emerging as that wing of the party’s top choice. READ MORE AT SITE

http://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-moment-of-trump-1456076806

Donald Trump’s convincing victory in South Carolina Saturday marks a moment of truth in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. The businessman is now the clear favorite for the Republican nomination, yet he is also the candidate most disliked by GOP voters and according to the polls the least likely to win in November. Are Republicans really going to jump off the cliff into the great Trump unknown?

Perhaps so. About a third of GOP voters seem to be confirmed cliff-divers, as Mr. Trump won handily by rolling up a similar share of the vote he won in New Hampshire. He won again across most demographic and ideological groups, especially with those most fed up with Washington and GOP leaders. Mr. Trump should also send a thank-you note to the pope for attacking him, since he won 34% of evangelical Protestant voters who may have resented the Catholic pontiff’s ill-conceived intervention.

Mr. Trump now heads into Nevada and the March 1 southern primaries with momentum that would typically carry him to the nomination. The difference is that Mr. Trump engenders passionate support and also passionate opposition. His unfavorable ratings are the highest in the GOP field, with a net negative in the most recent WSJ/NBC poll of minus-31. Hillary Clinton is only minus-13.

The blustery businessman also doesn’t seem all that eager to expand his support. In his victory speech Saturday night, he offered a passing grace note to Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz for doing well but he was mostly self-referential and didn’t mention Jeb Bush, who had earlier announced he is leaving the race. Mr. Trump declared that he is leading “a movement,” but for that to be true he will have to unify the Republican Party. It still isn’t clear what his movement represents other than Mr. Trump’s blunt persona, his family and ultimatums to various countries. READ MORE AT SITE