RUTHFULLY YOURS

Trump is a vulgarian. Trump is a winner. Trump is not a real conservative. Trump is this, that, or the other thing. Everybody has an opinion.

I have to start by confessing that I like Ted Cruz as a principled conservative. Trump is more like Winston Churchill’s line about Russia: He’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma. Everybody talks about Trump, but nobody knows what he believes.

Let’s look at his actions so far. Forget his words.

The first big fact is that we’re talking about Trump at all, among an exceptionally good field of GOP candidates – much better than Bob Dole and John McCain. Almost any of our runners is better than the Hillary-Bernie socialist throwback team. Hillary could be indicted soon – not saying she will be, but the evidence keeps piling up for culpable and extremely dangerous violations of national security in her State Department. The words “espionage,” “massive bribery,” and “sabotage in time of war” might leap into the headlines any day now.

The second major fact is that Trump keeps defeating the Party Line cartel. Trump’s daily jiu-jitsu blows against the media are unprecedented in recent decades, ever since the P.C. police took over.

That is a big achievement by itself, because Trump’s big mouth is making it possible for millions of Americans to speak their minds honestly for the first time in many years. Big, big news.

Yes, he sounds like a guy on the street in New York or Jersey, but our freedom of speech is worth it. If Cruz wasn’t running, I would certainly vote for Trump, just because the United States needs a break from years of politically correct witch hunts, courtesy of Al Sharpton and the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, come back to haunt us. Obama would never have made it big in politics without years of leftist media indoctrination of the American public.

It was easy to dismiss him as the blowhard with the bouffant, the vulgarian whose bellicose manner could appeal only to the dim and angry. What his detractors failed to see — or, if they did, to acknowledge — is that China, borders and Muslim immigration are issues that very much needed to be raised
This little note comes as a response to my friend and regular Quadrant contributor James Allan, whose piece in the latest Spectator Australia takes Donald Trump to task for his personality and lack of credentials as a movement conservative. Jim isn’t alone in these charges, which also have been made rather grandly by National Review, the most influential US journal of conservative opinion. All are criticisms I understand and ones I’ve made myself.

I don’t blame anyone for thinking that way, especially when they’re not witnessing American politics up close and firsthand, as am I. Back home once more in my native land, I am thinking that way, and it’s why my opinion has changed. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not on the Trump train by any means — but it’s become impossible to ignore the mogul’s serious appeal to voters, not just as ‘an outsider’, a man who vows to throw a wrench into the machine, but for the priorities and anxieties he raises.

Attacks on Trump’s conservative credentials usually cite comments from years gone by about abortion and healthcare. Without going into those points too deeply, we can say quite confidently that those aren’t positions weighing heavily on the average Trump voter. They’re neither driving nor hindering his campaign. Rather, Trump is running on three issues: trade inequality, immigration, and the question of Islam’s compatibility with the West.

Never mind that Trump donated to the Clinton Foundation, the power couple’s all-purpose slush fund. Forget that he hailed Hillary when she was Secretary of State. What this pompadoured contradiction offers is an alternative — not a good one, to be sure, but that is beside the point

I had long believed Donald Trump to be no better than a blowhard capable of attracting fans but not votes. How wrong I was, as his victory in New Hampshire attests. But conventional wisdom and precedent offer little guidance to what comes next. With US voters even more irritable than I could have imagined, it is apparent that standards of consistency, logic and substance expected of every other Republican candidate just don’t apply to Donald Trump.

Never mind that this pompadoured contradiction has donated to the Clinton Foundation, the power couple’s all-purpose slush fund. Never mind that he praised Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State. Who among his “conservative” supporters cares that his position on health care is similar to that of the socialist Bernie Sanders, who thrashed Hillary in New Hampshire. And where was Trump in 2013 when Ted Cruz, along with Senator Jeff Sessions, led the fight against amnesty for illegal aliens?

One has to see Donald Trump as a cultural phenomenon, rather than as a conventional political candidate. Back in 2012, the likes of Trump would have been laughed out of the Republican race; indeed, his promulgation of “birther” conspiracy theories about Obama rendered him a non-starter in the primaries of that year. Back then, Trump was not taken seriously precisely because the Republican base naively believed the party’s establishment would effectively oppose Obama’s attempted radical transformation of the United States. There was no perceived need nor appetite for a candidate bent on summoning the pitchforks and flaming brands of popular revolt.

Today, though, given what is widely perceived to have been the total failure of the congressional GOP leadership, voters have latched on to the candidate promising “creative” political destruction: he will tear it all down and build something allegedly better in its place, although just what Trumpism’s shining new world will look like is anyone’s guess. Interestingly, his only coherent and practically articulated policy is the promise to halt Muslim immigration. It seems that, while voters may or may not be prepared to swallow all manner of populist nonsense, they have a sharper awareness of the existential threat to the West and its values than do the political elites. The voters, in other words, may be stupid, but they are less stupid than the powers that be.
They are right, too, in accepting the oft-demonstrated truth that nothing can equal the stupidity of what passes for the Republican Party establishment. The three-cornered campaign of mutual destruction between Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie in New Hampshire has ensured that none can emerge as the standard bearer, as did Mitt Romney in 2012. Indeed, having quite probably destroyed Rubio’s candidature without any gain to his own, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has now withdrawn from the race. Bush staggers on to South Carolina, driven on by dynastic entitlement and having blown $35 million to secure no better than fourth place in New Hampshire.

Poor Hillary! It turns out that there is a price to being a lying hypocrite. That’s just so unfair. After all, Bill got away with posing as a feminist champion while assaulting, groping, and exploiting women for decades. But when Hillary tries to match Bernie Sanders on a comparable pose as anti-Wall Street, she gets herself in a no-win situation.

Goldman Sachs people are leaking out what she said in her $675,000 worth of three paid speeches, and it is now clear that releasing the transcripts of her talks will expose her hypocrisy. But of course, refusing to release them raises all sorts of worse suspicions. Shades of Nixon’s missing 13 minutes of tape.

Ben White of Politico reports on the leaks from Goldman:

She spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly for its role in the 2008 financial crisis.

“It was pretty glowing about us,” one person who watched the event said. “It’s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.”

At another speech to Goldman and its big asset management clients in New York in 2013, Clinton spoke about how it wasn’t just the banks that caused the financial crisis and that it was worth looking at the landmark 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law to see what was working and what wasn’t.

“It was mostly basic stuff, small talk, chit-chat,” one person who attended that speech said. “But in this environment, it could be made to look really bad.”

My read is that Hillary will choose to continue to keep the transcripts secret, preferring to let people imagine what they will. She is so surrounded by sycophants and so contemptuous of those who criticize her that she is unaware of how damaging her secrecy will be.

The campaign of class-warrior Hillary Clinton is pushing the panic button over the prospective release of secret transcripts of high-dollar speeches she made to Goldman Sachs that threaten to portray her as a two-faced un-progressive Wall Street elitist who is out of touch with the common people.

The Democrats’ leading avatar of avarice depicts herself as the candidate of Occupy Wall Street, a fearless champion of the downtrodden, but the transcripts of three speeches for which Goldman paid her an astonishing $675,000 threaten to torpedo the false, focus group-friendly image she has cultivated.

In the speeches to her fellow one-percenters, she reportedly comes across as unduly cozy with the financial titans that her angry left-wing base blames for most of America’s (and the world’s) problems today. In the current political environment publication of the transcripts could be as damaging to her run as Republican Mitt Romney’s ruinous “47 percent” speech was to his 2012 campaign.

One speech attendee reportedly said Clinton “sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director” than a politician. This phrase could easily end up in her Democratic opponent’s TV ads as the race shifts to the March 1 vote in critical South Carolina.

~Long, long ago – August 12th last year, in fact – I wrote:

The integrity of a nation’s borders and the privilege of its citizenship is certainly a “truly conservative” principle. More practically for this election, it may be the one on which all the others depend… And, as Ann Coulter says to the other candidates, if you don’t like Trump, steal his issue.

According to exit polls, in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, two out of three GOP voters favor Trump’s proposed temporary ban on all Muslim immigration – despite the universal reaction from the massed ranks of the politico-media class that this time he’d really gone too far. In other words, as I said all those months ago, it’s the old Broadway saw: Nobody likes it but the public.

The only reason any pollster is even asking this question is because Donald Trump proposed it. As those numbers suggest, any of Trump’s rivals could have helped themselves by “stealing his issue”. And yet no other candidate has gone anywhere near it – or anything like it. Perhaps one reason why American elections have the lowest voter participation rate of almost any developed nation is because the political class mostly seems to be talking about its own peculiar preoccupations. Consider this astute observation by Steve Sailer:

American citizens have turned in large numbers to old-white-guy candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. For all their differences, both give the impression that they are running for president of the United States, not president of Davos.

I live in northern New Hampshire, where every town that isn’t a ski resort is dead. They were pleasant, sleepy places in genteel decline 20 years ago. Now they’re hollowed out by heroin and meth, and offering no economic opportunity beyond casual shifts at the KwikkiKrap. And when you listen to the Dems they’re worried about micro-aggressions and transphobia and when you listen to Congressional Republicans they’re talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The two-party one-party state has nothing to say to tens of millions of Americans.

Trump won because he put real-world issues on the table. Nobody needs to be told that he “isn’t a real Republican”. That’s the point of Trump. The Republican base loathes the Republican leadership far more than they love the vessel they’ve chosen to express their loathing.

Assessing the influence that Jewish associates, advisors, and relatives have on Presidential candidates is complicated. Just being Jewish does not mean automatically understanding the issues confronting Israel and world Jewry. It surely does not mean the politicians’ advisors will be supportive of Israel or effective advocates for the Jewish state.

All too often, Jewish voters believe that if Jews are involved in a candidate’s campaign, this will benefit our people. History has painfully shown this is to be a false assumption.

Hillary Clinton’s anti-Israel advisors, including Sidney Blumenthal, Sandy Berger, Anne Marie Slaughter, and former US Ambassador to Israel Thomas Pickering, have been the subject of discussion within the Jewish community. Michael Oren’s description of Mrs. Clinton’s condescending behavior toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and her view that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are the impediment to peace, speak volumes about her feelings towards Israel and her failure to understand why this conflict remains unresolved.

Mrs. Clinton’s views are also influenced by her husband. In an impromptu discussion with a pro-Arab Palestinian activist in Iowa in September 2014, former President Bill Clinton was overheard asserting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “not the man” to sign a peace agreement. Mr. Clinton agreed with the activist that “if we don’t force him to have peace, we won’t have peace.”

I sometimes have the fantasy of approaching Huma Abedin as a scout for Playboy Magazine and offering her a cover and foldout deal with the publication. I’m more curious about her possible response to such a proposition. Perhaps she would cast a voodoo hex on me, or a curse, or turn to a handy Muslim djab or imam to issue a fatwa. Or perhaps she’d just slap my face and sic the Secret Service goons on me. I’ve never seen her in a bathing suit, so I’m not sure about her figure. Perhaps she isn’t Dallas Cheerleader material.

But she certainly is a fashion plate – unlike her boss, that aging Goodyear blimp in pantsuits – and apparently a well-paid one, at that. Huma is always expertly groomed, she looks like she lives comfortably in the nicest, safest neighborhoods, and possesses some poise, almost as much poise as Queen Noor of Jordan (Lisa Halaby) and that regal fox, Queen Rania, wife of King Abdullah.

But one would not be in error to claim that Huma Abedin is a card-carrying member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Or, shall we say, of the Muslim Sisterhood? Not so far-fetched a charge. There is an actual division of the Muslim Brotherhood called the Muslim Sisterhood. Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power are only honorary members of that organization, because they’re not Muslims. But they, too, work against U.S. interests, and against Israel’s. They, too, wish to see Israel wiped from the map and the U.S. beholden to Islam.

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There is so much dope on Huma Abedin that it could serve as raw material for a Mata Hari movie, and certainly enough to send her to prison at least on charges of treason, for helping Hillary breach national security, together with half a dozen other Federal felonies. She is, after all, an American citizen, born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There are several blog sites that contain all the necessary information that could be used to indict Abedin for at least acting as an agent against the U.S. for a foreign power, particularly Saudi Arabia, and generally, for the Muslim Brotherhood.