RUTHFULLY YOURS

The denouement of my appearance on the ABC’s Q&A echoes on. Chris Kenny writes in The Australian:

In the final minute, US-based Canadian commentator Mark Steyn was summing up the prospects of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the US presidential race. He quipped that Guardian journalist Lenore Taylor might get her wish — a socialist president. The audience burst into spontaneous applause, welcoming the prospect of a socialist president of the US. Steyn was flabbergasted.

“That’s not an applause line,” he admonished the crowd.

Host Tony Jones suggested it might have been a “laugh” line while a bemused Steyn suggested he might as well get a taxi to the airport. Then the insight of the moment seemed to dawn on Jones: “Well, it wasn’t the entire audience,” he protested.

Perhaps he was right. Maybe there were a few non-socialists in the ABC audience.

Speaking of Bernie, because of the openly corrupt nominating process in the Democrat Party, he’s getting stiffed in the delegate count by the so-called “super-delegates” who are pre-pledged to Hillary. So, even though he tied her in Iowa and whumped her 60-38 in the New Hampshire primary, she’s leading with 468 delegates to 53. The slugs who run the party loathe their voters and rig the system to render it a sham. Sporadic reader Bill Tomlinson proposes a solution:

Hi Mark

I have been a sporadic fan of yours for years, and I particularly enjoyed your “The March of Trump, and the Feel of Bern”.

But here’s a thought. Suppose Bernie wins the popular vote for the Democrat nomination, but Hillary leapfrogs him using her super-delegates. Bernie will be mad, but his supporters will be madder still.

If you need further evidence that Donald Trump is running for president in order to serve the best interests of Donald Trump, here it is from the Associated Press:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday offered rival Ted Cruz an ultimatum, threatening to sue Cruz over his eligibility to serve in the White House unless the Texas senator stops airing what Trump calls “false ads” and apologizes for what the billionaire real estate mogul called a series of lies about his positions.

… Trump saved the bulk of his criticism for Cruz. “If he doesn’t take down his false ads and retract his lies,” Trump said in a statement bashing Cruz, he will immediately file a lawsuit challenging Cruz’s eligibility to serve as president.

Trump has previously said a federal court should decide whether Cruz meets the constitutional requirement of being a “natural-born citizen” to serve as president. Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother, and many legal experts have said he meets that test.

Ask yourself, does Trump really care whether or not Ted Cruz is eligible to be president of the United States? If so, by presenting this ultimatum, hasn’t he effectively agreed to let Cruz’s eligibility go unchallenged in exchange for favorable treatment? If Cruz’s qualifications are truly in doubt, shouldn’t his eligibility be challenged regardless?

In The Race Card, a book examining the influence of racial stereotypes in manipulating election results, Tali Mendelberg’s analysis applies as well to voting patterns in general. “Norms and consciousness,” she explains, are the “necessary and missing factors” in shaping electoral response. The extent to which the individual feels that his self-understanding or desired identity resonates with the party’s implicit message and nature significantly conditions the way he votes. In other words, it is not only a question of policy compatibility but of an internal norm, a tacit or latent identification of the voter’s ideal self with the party’s, and its representative’s, manifested character.

This is why many potential Republican voters may sit out an election or, from a reaction of frustration or resentment, cast their ballots for the opposition. For they do not see their self-image reflected in the stance of the Republicrat who advances such policies as amnesty for illegals, entitlement spending, pro-choice abortion, hospitality for unvetted refugees, green energy boondoggles, carbon taxes to combat non-existent global warming, and the social leprosy of Islamic accommodation. Blue Republicans only kindle a feeling of disappointment or betrayal in those who would in optimal circumstances be natural constituents.

What most politicians forget is that the voter essentially votes for himself. Regarding himself as insightful, trustworthy and unafraid, his candidate must strike him as replicating these qualities. Thus, a Republican campaigner who fearlessly embraces the core tenets—what we might call the intrinsic platform—of his party’s history, or at the very least is not reluctant to be upfront, vocal and vigorous in disseminating his message despite the dead hand of political correctness, stands a good chance of succeeding.

In the course of his mercurial rise to national prominence, Senator Bernard Sanders has diligently affixed the adjective “democratic” to the “socialism” that is the name of his desire for America. Unlike the semi-educated “millennials”and historical amnesiacs who now flock to him, he is old enough and smart enough to recall such monstrosities as Germany’s “National Socialism,” the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” (and its numerous Eastern European satellites), and — lest we forget — the Oceania of Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, where Ingsoc, (Newspeak for English socialism) is the political ideology of totalitarianism. With that single adjective, Sanders seems to align himself (but only up to a point) with such estimable figures as Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, who founded Dissent magazine in 1954 primarily to declare their severing of ties to Bolshevism. They also made, in Howe’s words, “the indissoluble connection between democracy and socialism a crux of our thought.”

If, however, the connection is really indissoluble, why did Howe, and why does Sanders, find it necessary, compulsively, always to insert the qualifier “democratic”? Does this not suggest that socialism is inherently undemocratic? At least the socialist George Orwell recognized that in societies like the Russia and China of his day, where there is no private property and therefore no separate economic power, the ruling class looks upon political power as its essential and exclusive end; in a thoroughly socialist society, all jobs come under the direct control of political authorities. Orwell understood that a free market is the necessary, although not sufficient, condition of a free society. But Senator Sanders gives no indication that he comprehends how a free market keeps the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority and thus severely limits the coercive power of the state. (What Sanders does understand very well is that, to quote Orwell himself: “The mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist. . .” )

Railing against corporations that leave America to relocate to another country is a winning tactic. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has fully endorsed this strategy during his stump speeches. When speaking about American business expats, he recently told supporters at a campaign rally in New Hampshire, “You can tell them to go f*** themselves.”

Many economic factors, stretching from labor costs to regulatory burdens to foreign demand, have led U.S. companies to move some or all of their operations out of America. But one of the main causes, especially when it comes to relocating a corporation’s headquarters abroad, is America’s internationally uncompetitive corporate-tax system.

The fault lies with the federal government, not corporate managers fulfilling their legal duties. Despite Trump’s rather heated rhetoric, his own tax plan shows that he fully understands this cause when he is not tossing applause lines to his supporters.

America’s combined federal and average state corporate-tax rate of 39 percent is the highest in the developed world. But it was not always this way. America missed the global party when it came to lowering corporate tax rates.

Since 1988, the average corporate-tax rate for 34 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries has fallen from 44 percent to 25 percent. Over that time, the U.S. rate actually increased. Even the Nordic countries that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders so admires have lower corporate-tax rates than America does. Finland has a corporate tax rate of 20 percent, Sweden’s is 22 percent, and Denmark’s is 24 percent.

American companies also have to pay federal taxes on the income that they earn overseas if they bring that money back to America. This is the case even though these earnings were already taxed by another country. Besides the United States, only five other OECD countries tax corporate income earned outside their borders, down from 19 in the 1990s.

— Mike Pompeo represents Kansas’s Fourth Congressional District and serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Select Committee on Benghazi. He is a graduate of West Point and an Army veteran.

There is only one Republican presidential candidate that has a proven, courageous, and conservative record on national security: Marco Rubio. Contrast him with Senator Ted Cruz who says he is prepared to defend America, but repeatedly finds a way to vote against that very goal. When we need leadership, Cruz plays politics with America’s national security. Put another way: Cruz is pro-military when he passes a soldier in uniform, but he abandons that same soldier when he does not vote to raise active-duty pay or provide our warriors with the tools they need to accomplish their critical missions.

I am a West Point graduate and an Army veteran. In Congress, I represent South Central Kansas, home to McConnell Air Force Base. I am proud to serve on the House Intelligence Committee and every day I see the lifesaving work of our men and women in uniform. I serve with Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina on the Benghazi Committee and came to Congress alongside Trey and South Carolina senator Tim Scott. All three of us believe in Marco’s ability to keep our families safe and have endorsed him.

Bernie Sanders is a nice, avuncular character who seems to be harmless enough — a nostalgic throwback to another era — but his espousal of socialism, “democratic” though it may be, misleads an entire generation of American youth who have absolutely no idea of the economic or social ramifications of the senator’s ideology.

Lovable Bernie is essentially propagandizing a generation of gullible American young people who don’t have anything near the education or experience to understand what is happening to them. His task is made simpler because his Democratic Party opponent is demonstrably and obviously corrupt and in danger of prosecution. She has also been pushed so far to the left by Bernie’s success (and her own fears) that no serious questions about socialism are even asked.

Our educational system, which, even at the college level, rarely looks at socialism from a results-oriented perspective, exacerbates this situation. Yet those results sit just below our southern border in catastrophic form for all to see, though few, especially among the young, have the background or, frankly, even the interest, to look.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/more-essential-than-ever-gop-electability-1455572580

The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has raised the stakes of the presidential election. If there is a silver lining, it’s that maybe conservatives will finally sober up and stop indulging their self-destructive impulse to choose the “most conservative” candidate or the one with no internal censor (or compass). They may finally realize how important electability is—and take a fresh look at Marco Rubio.

After an uninspiring performance in New Hampshire, the Florida senator used the South Carolina debate on Saturday as a mulligan to dispel criticisms that he is too callow and glib. While discussing immigration and foreign threats, Mr. Rubio came across as confident and capable without sounding robotic.

At the end of the night, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump were the ones looking juvenile after they engaged in a playground game of “liar, liar.” Mr. Trump sounded as uninformed as usual, though his supporters may not care. He had no solution for out-of-control entitlement spending other than promising, as so many politicians have before him, to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. His harangue against trade deals and endorsement of an exit tax for companies that move abroad showed a shaky grasp of economics.

Unlike the front-runners, Mr. Rubio projected hope. Recalling the election of 1980, he noted that Americans “were scared about what kind of country their children were going to live in and inherit. And yet somehow Ronald Reagan was able to instill in our nation and in our people a sense of optimism. And he turned America around because of that vision and ultimately because of that leadership.”

Ronald Reagan aside, Mr. Rubio’s chiaroscuro contrasting the dark present with a bright future seems more to echo John F. Kennedy, who notably was also a youthful senator when he sought the Democratic nomination in 1960. In his acceptance speech at the convention, Kennedy said: “We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.” There are other similarities. As with JFK, some voters don’t take Mr. Rubio seriously because of his boyish good looks. A new Cruz ad mocks him as “just a pretty face.”

READ MORE AT SITE

If the GOP wants to win, it should learn how not to lose.

On the similarities between Canada’s Conservative party and the GOP, I have previously argued that the latter must not repeat the mistakes of the former if it wishes to succeed in November 2016. As I explained, the Conservatives lost the recent Canadian election at least in part because they failed to stick by their central principles, attempting to cater to the voting bloc of the opposition parties by soft-pedaling or even abandoning basic policy decisions or by camouflaging their fundamental ethos so as not, they calculated, to alienate the electorate. The result was predictably twofold: in manifesting as Liberal lite the party made no inroads among a skeptical population and simultaneously lost many of its long-standing supporters, in total dropping 67 of its previous 166 seats.

When a party begins to shed its own constituents by aping the agenda of its competitors or by failing to reframe its image, it has effectively sealed its fate. Greg Richards points out in a cogent article for American Thinker that “The ascendancy of liberalism in America is the cause of the silence of Republicans in Congress since they won the House in 2010. One would think that a solid majority in the electoral body closest to the people would provide a platform for advancing the Republican case. But no.” The Republican establishment is “unwilling to challenge the liberal world view, [which] controls the debate in the public space… Republicans have had neither the skill nor the intestinal fortitude — the courage — to operate outside the culturally dominant liberal paradigm.”

Hillary Clinton may yet win the Democratic nomination—if she is not indicted. After all, it is hard for a New England spread-the-wealth socialist like rival Bernie Sanders to appeal to working-class southern whites, minorities, or the wealthy Democratic establishment. It is still likely that the Democratic Party will find a way to aid an ailing and scandal-plagued Mrs. Clinton, rather than turn over its future to a 74-year-old scold, who for most of his voting life was not a Democrat and whose redistributionist agendas and Woodstock fables about the 1960s make Obama seem centrist in comparison.

All that said, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign rhetoric is coming up empty—largely because it is at odds with the way she has lived her life and conducted her various careers over the last two decades. Voters, even younger ones, are now sorely aware of those flagrant contradictions.

The so-called Republican war on women was successful Democratic demagoguery in 2008 and 2012. That paranoid mythmaking worked with urban, unmarried young women. They were terrified of old white-guy Republican bogeymen, who would make them pay for their birth control and take away abortion on demand, were indifferent to new expansive definitions of sexual harassment, and seemed hung up on what were seen as roadblocks—religion, marriage, and family—to a young, college-educated woman’s self-expression. Yet Hillary has now lost that long-enshrined wedge issue after only 24 hours of Donald Trump’s withering counter-fire—in stark contrast to past years of failed Republican counter-strategies.

Trump assumed that her problem was not just that Bill Clinton had been a recognized serial womanizer and cheat for over forty years, but involved far greater hypocrisies. First, it was hard to find any sexual liaison of Bill’s that ever had a good word to say about him. The consensual Monica Lewinsky variety all felt used and manipulated. The Juanita Broaddrick-Paula Jones-Kathleen Willey category alleged that they were victims of crude coercion or violent assault.