RUTHFULLY YOURS

What Rich Lowry tartly labeled “the Trumpless Debate” exposed the fracture of the Republican party’s base with a clarity that the Donald’s presence would not have allowed.

For those of us in the commentariat, the evening was a joy. It was an exhibition of substance and seriousness, a night of lively exchanges where quality candidates took shots at each other that were hard but fair. The Fox News moderators were no wallflowers, but they were clearly determined to make the night about the contestants: Questions were succinct; interruptions were reserved for moments when candidates were unresponsive or in denial over inconvenient, incontestable facts. It was a glimpse, as David French put it, at “what might have been” — without the blaring Trumpet of snark and bully bravado, it was as if Henry Gondorff had never crashed the old boys’ poker game.

But the thing is: Most people who have a stake in the Republican race are not in the commentariat. They are the people who have been ill-served by the old boys. They are no longer impressed by slick-sounding policy wonkery because they are finally on to the charade: The candidates say one thing to get elected and then do very different things once they’ve been elected.

They like Trump precisely because of the wrench he has thrown in the works. He makes the pols and the press feel as powerless as the pols and the press have made them feel. He doesn’t care about the Beltway’s rules; Trump plays by his own and invites them, vicariously, to play along.

The State Department said it would launch its own investigation into whether top-secret information on Hillary Clinton’s personal email server was classified at the time it was sent or received—a dramatic reversal that comes just days before the Democratic presidential front-runner faces the first nominating contest in Iowa.

Department spokesman John Kirby said 22 documents containing highly classified information will be excluded entirely from the release of Mrs. Clinton’s archive. So far, more than 1,300 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails have been redacted, with portions blocked out, due to the presence of classified information, but this is the first example of emails being entirely withheld from public release.

Friday’s announcement is the first time State Department officials have said they have concerns about the classification level of some of the information contained on Mrs. Clinton’s server. Officials have previously said the redactions in the roughly 43,000 pages of her emails so far released were made for information that was classified only after the fact.

The Clinton campaign said the emails in question probably originated on the department’s unclassified system before they were ever shared with Mrs. Clinton.

Locked in a tight primary battle with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Mrs. Clinton now faces the possibility of another investigation, led by the department she ran, into whether she compromised sensitive or classified national-security information.

Ted Cruz Embraces Preacher Who Said Jews Will Die If They Reject Christ John A. Oswald

Ted Cruz is trumpeting the endorsement of a doomsday preacher who warned Jews must accept Jesus — or face extermination.
His name is Mike Bickle, and he is the founder of the International House of Prayer (yes, IHOP), based in Kansas City, Mo.

Back in 2004, Bickle had this to say about the Jews:
“Let me tell you, these 20 million — less than 20 million Jews worldwide, there’s about 5 million in Israel, about another 15 million worldwide, a little bit less than that — those 15 million, God is going to bring them all back. Two-thirds will die in the rage of Satan and in the judgments of God and one-third, every one of the one-third, will be in the land before it’s over and they’ll be worshipers of Jesus … The Lord says, ‘I’m going to give all 20 million of them the chance. To respond to the fisherman. And I give them grace. And I give them grace …if they don’t respond to grace, I’m going to raise up the hunters … And the most famous hunter in recent history is a man named Adolf Hitler.’”

Des Moines, Iowa — Fox News’s Megyn Kelly called him “the elephant not in the room.” And yet, improbably, Donald Trump seemed somehow to emerge victorious from the last GOP presidential debate before Monday’s Iowa caucuses.

The Republican front-runner, who, citing Kelly’s alleged bias as a moderator, announced at the last minute that he would skip the debate to hold a dueling event nearby, left political onlookers confused and bemused once again. As seven of his Republican challengers duked it out for Fox’s cameras, it was he who dominated Google and Twitter searches across the country. While his closest competitors in Iowa, Texas senator Ted Cruz and Florida senator Marco Rubio, endured painful moments at the hands of their fellow candidates, Kelly, and her colleagues, Trump, through his absence, floated above it all.

A stone’s throw away from the Iowa Events Center, where the rest of the leading candidates spent two hours beating one another up, Trump was joined at his own event, a fundraiser for veterans, by the two previous winners of the Iowa caucuses, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Their presence alongside the brash real-estate mogul, who is locked in a dead heat with Cruz four days from the caucuses, was a visible testament to their desire to deny the Texas senator a victory here, where his campaign has devoted so much time and energy, and where a loss will be considered an enormous setback.

As my colleague Jonah Goldberg notes, the Left and some of the Right has long been waiting for a “conservative crack-up,” first predicted by R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. of The American Spectator . . . a generation ago. I am a middle-aged man with more grey in my beard than I would really like to see in the morning, but I was a high-school boy when Mr. Tyrell wrote that book.

These crack-ups are an awful long time coming.

If you spend very much time reading the Left’s advocacy journalism — as I do, for my sins — then you are accustomed to seeing headlines about the pending destruction of the Republican party and the conservative movement. It has been nearly 15 years since John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira heralded “The Emerging Democratic Majority” in their celebrated book by that title. Articles titled “The End of the Republican Party” or similar are found almost daily not only in moonbat online journals such as Salon but in the New York Times.

This isn’t new. The failure to convict Bill Clinton in his impeachment trial was welcomed by Democrats as the end of the Republican party, as a sign of its “disarray” — they are fond of that word, for some reason — and its debilitating internal contradictions. Clinton’s election had been similarly greeted, as was Barack Obama’s. The eventual unpopularity of the Iraq war among the fickle and childish American electorate was supposed to have made the GOP a pariah for a generation. The Donald is not the first trump sounding the conservative apocalypse.

After all that, where is the Republican party, and the conservative movement, in actuality?

Something did surprise me though — and it was Frank Luntz’s focus group. I have never seen them so unanimous in their reaction. Almost all of them seemed to think Rubio had won the debate and the vast majority said they had decided to switch their votes to the Florida senator. Virtually all of them thought he could defeat Hillary Clinton.

I don’t blame Donald Trump for passing on the seventh Republican debate Thursday night. It was pretty boring, even for a political junkie like me, though I did enjoy Rubio’s one-liner about Bernie Sanders running for president of Sweden. (Frankly, I think even the terminally PC Swedes might not even be able to handle Bernie in the end the way things are headed.)

I heard some of the spin-room pundits nattering on about how serious the debate was, ostensibly because of the absence of Donald, as compared to the previous encounters. I didn’t see it. Fox had promised new and interesting questions but they weren’t much (except perhaps from some minor video assist). It felt to me like everything had been “asked and answered” before, maybe several times before. And I found it hard to sit through all that spin-room blather about who did or didn’t win the debate. Did Jeb rise above his low expectations? Yawn.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: During the debate I was simultaneously streaming Trumps’ veterans’ benefit on my computer, turning the volume up and down on each as I went, so I may have missed some key minutes. The benefit was intermittently entertaining and it was heartening to see them raise so much money for disabled vets.)

The essential difficulty of these debates is the distinctions between the candidates are so narrow that mostly they seem manufactured, even between the so-called insiders and outsiders. In actuality, the only real outsider in the Republican field is Dr. Carson. Trump has been wheeling-and-dealing with politicians for decades, Cruz is a senator, and Fiorina is an ex-CEO of a major corporation who has spent years negotiating with politicians and jetting around the world for major foundations. During Thursday’s debate, the only ones with substantive policy differences were Rand Paul and possibly Kasich, who sometimes appears to been running for the nomination of the Democratic Party. Maybe he should, because all they have at the moment is a semi-felon and that “Swedish” president.

Marco Rubio is suddenly everywhere in Iowa. He’s campaigning alongside Joni Ernst, the state’s popular senator. He’s in the headlines of the Des Moines Register and Sioux City Journal, both of which endorsed him. He’s playing to standing-room-only crowds, jamming in three or four events a day.

That is a change for the Florida senator—and a carefully planned one. Of all the Republican candidates, none is playing a more complex (or longer) game than Mr. Rubio. Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz are following the conventional route of betting that big early victories will lock in the nomination. Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and John Kasich are using another classic approach—putting all their chips on one state, hoping to jump-start a move.

Mr. Rubio by contrast is flouting the usual rules, playing everywhere at once and nowhere on top. It’s the Wait Them Out strategy. The plan hinges on edgy calculations and big risks. Yet given the unusual nature of this primary cycle, the approach may prove as plausible as any other.

The first of those Rubio calculations is that he has the ability to finish strong in Iowa. The Rubio team has bided its time in the state, convinced that it is possible to peak too soon. And Iowa voters do tend to be last-minute deciders. Rick Santorum, a few weeks from the 2012 Iowa caucuses, was averaging about 7%; he finished with nearly 25% of the vote. Newt Gingrich, by contrast, saw his numbers tank in the homestretch.

Donald Trump missed Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate, and a funny thing happened: A serious conversation broke out.

The conversation was, among other things, about what it would take to ensure American security in a time of Islamic State terrorism, what it means to be a conservative in the mixed-up environment of 2016 and, most heatedly, about what to do with illegal immigrants.

The seven candidates who did show up argued with one another, pointedly and occasionally angrily but rarely on personal terms. Significant differences emerged, which is what is supposed to happen in debates.

The last Republican presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses focused on many issues from immigration to Putin. Watch the highlights in two minutes. Photo: Getty

The consensus second-ranking contender, Sen. Ted Cruz, had to explain why there was no inconsistency between his votes against defense budgets and his fiery rhetoric about sending waves of American bombers to attack Islamic State forces in Syria and Iraq.

Sen. Marco Rubio tried to sound the toughest notes on fighting extremists. At one point he said Islamic State forces “want to trigger an apocalyptic Armageddon showdown” and “need to be defeated militarily, and that will take overwhelming U.S. force.”

The Hillary Clinton apparat has never obeyed Marquess of Queensberry political rules, and they’re most vicious when cornered. So perhaps it reveals something about the probe into Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified material on her personal email server that her enforcers are now assailing the integrity of the investigators.

The latest target is David Seide, who serves as counselor and acting senior adviser to State Department Inspector General Steve Linick. A decade ago as an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, Mr. Seide was tangentially involved in the prosecution of David Rosen, the finance director of Mrs. Clinton’s New York Senate campaign in 2000, who was acquitted at trial.

“You have a guy who used his former position to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into Mrs. Clinton that amounted to nothing, who then continues that work in the State Department. That has fingerprints on it that are just too visible and just lead to all sorts of questions,” Steve Israel told Politico for a Jan. 25 hit and run.

The wired-in New York House Democrat is a Clintonista in good standing, and Mr. Israel went on to speculate: “It actually seems to be a pattern emerging. This is the second known high-ranking official in the IG office with a glaring conflict of interest.” Emilia DeSanto, the deputy IG at State, is a former aide to Republican Senator Chuck Grassley.

A spokesman for the IG denied any conflict, noting that Mr. Rosen was indicted by a different federal prosecutor after Mr. Seide left the government. Mr. Seide did investigate the same 2000 Brentwood gala and fundraiser whose alleged campaign-finance violations led to the Rosen charges, and he won a conviction against a separate Clinton donor, who helped bankroll the event, for stock-price manipulation.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz both have been described as “insurgency” candidates, but it is important to ask: Insurgents on behalf of what, exactly? An excellent example of what this means in real terms is the question of ethanol, the useless gasoline additive that the federal government inflicts on American consumers at the behest of corn growers, processors, and related special interests.

Ethanol is, inevitably, dear to many hearts in corn-producing Iowa, which makes it a tender subject for presidential candidates of both parties facing the early test of the Iowa caucus. It presents a test of principle. One of the basic problems of American governance is the interaction of what is known in political-economy terms as “concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.” A manufacturing tax credit that subsidizes Starbucks as a “manufacturer” to the extent that it puts beans into bags doesn’t mean very much to the average taxpayer or member of Congress, but it may mean a lot to Starbucks. Special-interest groups will fight very hard for their perks, and no one has as strong an incentive to fight against them.

RELATED: Refusing to Kiss King Corn’s Ring in Iowa

The ethanol program is pure corporate welfare. It is marketed as an environmental initiative to the Left and a hedge against filthy “foreign oil” to the Right, but it is simply a mandate, a federal rule that says gasoline producers must buy ethanol and mix it into their product. It’s nice to have a marketing department with nuclear weapons and an IRS, so the corn-juice guys are very defensive about their mandate.

To stand against the ethanol mandate in Iowa is a test of political character.