RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

New Hampshire primaries are occasionally unpredictable, but this time around Iowa proved to be unpredictable, while the outcome in New Hampshire was known to everyone and their second cousin.

But New Hampshire was less about winning votes and more about constructing a winning narrative. As Iowa showed us, early primaries are not so much about delegates as about stories. Win or lose, every candidate uses the process as background for a narrative about their own trajectory. Winning candidates boast inevitability. Losing candidates claim that they exceeded expectations or were robbed.

For Sanders and Trump, their wins allowed them to reclaim the victories they thought had been denied to them in Iowa. New Hampshire was a do-over, rebooting the narrative of their inevitable candidacies.

For Hillary Clinton, New Hampshire is a setback, but not a major one. She had won New Hampshire in ’08 against Obama, but the racial calculus has since flipped. In ’08, Hillary Clinton’s base was white Democrats and New Hampshire is as white as the driven snow. Now Bernie Sanders is breathing down Hillary’s neck with white voters, but her political firewall is her base of black and Latino voters.

In ’08, Hillary Clinton had desperately scrambled to hold on to New Hampshire after her loss in Iowa. This time she desperately held on to Iowa, using tactics that look suspiciously like fraud, complete with magic coin tosses, but could afford to accept defeat in New Hampshire. Her victimhood antics from ’08 made a comeback in New Hampshire as Bill Clinton whined about “sexist” attacks, but if the candidate has any crocodile tears to cry on camera, she held them in liquid suspension in her steel ducts even in chilly New Hampshire, saving them for sunny Nevada or for an emergency Super Tuesday Weepathon.

Hillary’s Use of the Gender Card Isn’t Working By Jonah Goldberg —

Hillary Clinton is not a woman, and that’s a triumph for feminism and a problem for Hillary.

Let me clarify.

Yes, technically she is female. But when millions of Americans think of Hillary Clinton, they don’t think of her gender; they think of, well, Hillary Clinton. Some may think of her as a heroic liberal technocrat. Others might think of her as a deeply partisan politician. The list goes on: She’s a supportive (or enabling) wife, a great (or terrible) former secretary of state, a left-wing bully, or a victim of political witch hunts.

What she is not is an icon for a category of humanity called “womanhood.”

This strikes me as a significant victory for feminism, though not for professional feminists and certainly not for Hillary Clinton.

Clinton, who on her best days is a workmanlike (workwomanlike?) politician, desperately wants to borrow some unearned excitement about her gender. And to her great frustration, it’s not happening. In Iowa, Bernie Sanders crushed Clinton among women under 30 years old by 70 percentage points (84-14). He beat her significantly among 30- to 44-year-old women (53-42). Meanwhile, Clinton trounced Sanders among mature and, uh, very mature women. Women over the age of 65 backed Clinton 76 percent to 22 percent.

But in the lead-up to the New Hampshire primary, Sanders had opened an eight-point lead over Clinton among New Hampshire women, according to polls.

While a gaggle of female Democratic politicians and aging feminist writers and actresses have tried to gin up female solidarity, it’s largely backfired.

Gloria Steinem, a fading icon of a bygone era, said that Bernie Sanders is attracting young female supporters because they’re boy-crazy, and “the boys are with Bernie.” She later apologized.

Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright was trotted out to issue her favorite quip: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”