RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are the same candidate. They’re both leftist radicals with degrees in political science who held back some of their more radical ideas to pursue political office. In the two years that they served together in the Senate, they voted the same way 93 percent of the time.

They’re also political opportunists. Bernie Sanders, no less than Hillary, reinvented his political views, including his allegiance to Socialism, numerous times over the years. Sanders moderated his positions on everything from gun control to Israel when it helped his political career. He’s now modifying plenty of positions all over again in order to appeal to new and different voters.

Bernie Sanders is no more authentic than Hillary Clinton and she is no less radical than he is. Both her attempts to appear mainstream and his efforts to seem radical are political poses that they deploy to bring in money and support from major blocs within the Democratic Party. Underneath the theater, Hillary Clinton is a longtime Alinsky fan while Bernie Sanders stumbles trying to update his views with the current obsessions of the radical left on everything from immigration to gun control to race.

The real struggle isn’t over beliefs, but over tactics.

While Hillary Clinton and her allies are attacking Bernie Sanders over his radical backing for Single Payer, in 1993, she told her husband that “managed competition“ was a “crock” and that “single-payer” was necessary. Hillary had proposed her own version of “Medicare for All” and when asked if it would be a backdoor for single payer, said, “What are we afraid of? Let’s see where the competition leads us.”

Here’s How He Would Defend America Against Threats from the Middle East, Russia and China, According to His Chief National Security Advisor Dr. Victoria Coates

You might not think that the national security and foreign policy advisor for one of the leading 2016 presidential candidates would have the pedigree of a University of Pennsylvania art history Ph.D. specializing in Italian renaissance studies, and a former consulting curator title at the Cleveland Museum of Art. But then you haven’t met Dr. Victoria Coates, the self-described Renaissance woman and the chief articulator and defender of Cruz’s Jeane Kirkpatrick-inspired philosophy that has vexed many across the Republican political spectrum to date.
During an in-depth interview with Dr. Coates on her new book, David’s Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art, we had the chance to pick the brain of Cruz’s national security consigliere on topics including:

The principles that underlie the “Cruz Doctrine”
Dr. Coates’ challenge to Cruz’s critics in the GOP foreign policy Establishment
What “winning” in the Middle East would look like for America under a President Cruz
The single greatest underestimated or ignored threat to America’s national interest

Ben Weingarten: Who are some of the individuals, or what are some of the works that have had the greatest influence on your worldview as it relates to foreign policy and national security, and by extension the worldview of Senator Cruz?

Reagan and Kirkpatrick (Wikipedia)
Dr. Victoria Coates: Well certainly in terms of David’s Sling, it’s in many ways a cautionary tale about how one chooses to understand the development of democracy, and how it can be spread. I mean because certainly this tells us it is a trial-and-error process, it takes a long time and it can’t be taken for granted. So certainly that’s how it has informed my worldview. For Senator Cruz, I know he looks very much for models of success, which sounds very simple, but it’s amazing to me how many people will look at failed models and sort of “try, try again,” using tactics that have not been particularly successful. So he looks at a President like Ronald Reagan, which is very popular to do, but it’s very hard to actually imitate the Reagan model because you have to make a number of very difficult choices, you have to set your priorities clearly, and you have to just stay focused on them like a laser. And so as he looks at our challenges today, he would see Reagans’ and [Jeane] Kirkpatricks’ and Fred Iklés’ interactions with the Soviet Union as a great model: That you don’t pretend that you can domesticate them; you don’t pretend that they are suddenly going to become your friend; but rather that they are a terrible threat that has to be fought every time they poke their heads up. And that does not mean necessarily invading, but it does mean being extremely mindful of America’s interests.
“[Senator Cruz] would see Reagans’ and [Jeane] Kirkpatricks’ and Fred Iklés’ interactions with the Soviet Union as a great model”
Ben Weingarten: Do you view Islamic supremacism as the analogue — although obviously differing in some ways — to the ideology and forces of the Soviet Union?
Dr. Victoria Coates: Certainly in terms of being an existential threat, it was interesting over Christmas the [Iranian] Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini came out with a little-noticed statement about how he felt Iran was locked in a “civilizational struggle” with the West. Now, I’m not in the business of destroying anybody else’s civilization, but I am in the business of protecting my own. And when somebody says they’re out to destroy it, I think we should probably pay some attention. And so, it’s not as you said, directly analogous to Soviet totalitarianism, but it could only be a matter of time. And so I think we need to organize the way we think about this in terms of protecting and celebrating both our culture, our allies because I think we are a tremendously powerful force for good around the world, and so that’s something I’d like to perpetuate.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) today recalled “the good old days” when Donald Trump “did a fundraiser or two for me.”

Reid was asked outside a closed policy luncheon on Capitol Hill today about Trump’s compliments.

“I’ve always had a good relationship with Nancy Pelosi. I’ve never had a problem. Reid will be gone,” Trump told MSNBC yesterday, in reference to the Nevada senator’s impending retirement. “I always had a decent relationship with Reid, although lately, obviosuly, I haven’t been dealing with him so he’ll actually use my name as the ultimate — you know, as the ultimate of the billionaires in terms of, you know, people you don’t want.”

“But I always had a great relationship with Harry Reid,” Trump continued. “And frankly, if I weren’t running for office I would be able to deal with her or Reid or anybody. But I think I’d be able to get along very well with Nancy Pelosi and just about everybody. Hey, look, I think I’ll be able to get along well with Chuck Schumer. I was always very good with Schumer. I was close to Schumer in many ways.”

Since Trump began his presidential run, Reid has slammed many of the real-estate mogul’s statements on topics like immigration and Muslims from the Senate floor.

Today, Reid noted, “We’ve gotten along fine.”

Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) said on The Hugh Hewitt Show Monday that the Select Committee on Benghazi will be issuing a report “sooner rather than later” and predicted that the part of the report that people will find “the most eye-opening” deals with how military assets were positioned on the night of the attacks, and why they sat idle “for hours and hours and hours.”

The investigation has been organized around what Chairman Gowdy calls the “three tranches”: What happened before, during, and after the Benghazi attacks.

Why was security at the Benghazi diplomatic and CIA compounds inadequate? Why did the U.S. military fail to respond? And why did the administration initially describe the attack as a spontaneous demonstration over a YouTube video, rather than a pre-planned terrorist attack?

Gowdy told Hewitt that people will be most surprised by what the committee discovered regarding what happened during the attacks, and noted that those findings were somehow missed by the other committees. Asked if he had yet seen “13 Hours,” the movie about Benghazi currently in theaters, Gowdy answered that he had not.

“We have one more book author to interview, and I realize I’m old-fashioned, and a lot of people could see the movie and still do a fair job of questioning one of the book authors. But it is important to me that I have his testimony in mind as opposed to what I may have seen in a movie theater,” Gowdy explained.

Hillary Clinton’s email excuses fell apart under public scrutiny many months ago, but that hasn’t stopped her from repeating the same failed excuses over and over again on the campaign trail. When asked to explain her ever-changing email story during an editorial board interview with the Quad-City Times in Iowa yesterday, she floundered badly.

One of the board members reminded her that last summer, she described her decision to use a private, insecure email system while secretary of state as “an error in judgment,” but on Monday during CNN’s town hall, she refused to call her home-brew server an “error in judgment” because [as she claims] she did nothing wrong.

Hillary’s answer was pretty stunning: “Well — you know — look, I just think it was a mistake because it’s caused all this uproar and commotion.”

In other words, the reason her unique email arrangement was a mistake is not that she mishandled classified information (making it easier to hack into, possibly even exposing intelligence assets on the ground) but because it got her in trouble.

Sarah Palin rallied for Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) in his 2014 quest for Congress.

Now, the freshman senator has pledged to do everything he can to ensure that Palin’s pick for the GOP presidential nomination is defeated.

Sasse is campaigning with both of his upper chamber colleagues, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in the hope that one of them can defeat The Donald.

The Nebraska senator told MSNBC this morning that he’s campaigning against Trump because “I’m pro-Constitution and I want to make America great again.”

“And the best way to do that is by uniting around the things that bring us together and that’s not one guy’s ego, that’s a system of laws and limited government,” Sasse said. “So if being pro-Constitution makes me anti-Mr. Trump, I think that’s his problem.”

“The guy talks constantly about how he’ll get everything done alone. He said recently that if he’s elected president he’ll be able to do whatever he wants. That’s pretty much what the American Revolution was about. We already have one party in this country that’s gone post-constitutional. We don’t need another one.”

Financial analyst and our contributor Donald Luskin has described Donald Trump as a “black swan” over the political economy. He’s referring to an outlier event that few anticipated and whose impact is impossible to predict. As the voting season begins in Iowa, this strikes us as a useful way for Republicans to think about the Trump candidacy.

We’ve been critical of Mr. Trump on many grounds and our views have not changed. But we also respect the American public, and the brash New Yorker hasn’t stayed atop the GOP polls for six months because of his charm. Democracies sometimes elect poor leaders—see the last eight years—but their choices can’t be dismissed as mindless unless you want to give up on democracy itself.

The most hopeful way to interpret Mr. Trump’s support is that the American people aren’t taking decline lying down. They know the damage that has been done to them over the last decade—in lower incomes, diminished economic prospects, and a far more dangerous world. But they aren’t about to accept this as their fate.

Americans aren’t Japanese or Europeans—at least not yet. Mr. Trump’s promise to “make America great again” is for many patriotic voters a rallying cry for U.S. revival. In that sense it is motivated more by hope than by the “anger” so commonly described in the media.

Just weeks before the Iowa caucuses Donald Trump was subjected to a barrage of criticism from Republican commentators. New York Times house conservative David Brooks, who has threatened to move to Canada if Trump becomes president, called Trump a “solipsistic branding genius whose ‘policies’ have no contact with Planet Earth.” The National Review devoted a whole issue to parsing Trump’s manifold flaws and dangers to the Republican Party and the country: “Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.”

And those were the nicer comments.

This battle between Trump and the Republican establishment raises interesting questions about where we are politically after the disastrous seven years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Start with the contested notion that there even exists something we can call the Republican establishment. Trump along with Ted Cruz have presented themselves as anti-establishment candidates, “outsiders” battling the inside-the-Beltway “cartel,” to use Cruz’s word. As such they appeal to those voters who long have despised Congress and its pundit enablers for “going along to get along” rather than taking legislative action to slow down Obama’s ongoing fundamental transformation of America into an EU social-democratic nanny-state populated by the spawn of Julia and Pajama Boy.

Critics of this formulation argue that there is no “establishment,” that the diverse and conflicting opinions among Republican leaders, and the failure of this establishment to use its imagined powers and slow down Donald Trump, is proof that it is a figment of a paranoiac imagination. Didn’t the Chairman of the Republican National Committee punish National Review for dissing Trump by disinviting it from cosponsoring the next debate? And didn’t establishment stalwart Bob Dole say nice things about Trump during his evisceration of Ted Cruz? There is no unified cabal of Republican bigwigs colluding with the enemy and betraying the ordinary voters who put them in office.

As Hillary Clinton sinks ever deeper into E-mailgate, her excuses for grossly mishandling state secrets grow ever weaker. In defense of her gross negligence, Clinton and her comrades have dusted off a vintage 1990s cliché: “It’s the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy!”

Clinton has been hobbled by Inspector General of the Intelligence Community I. Charles McCullough III’s discovery that her private, unsecure computer server contained “several dozen” e-mails classified TOP SECRET/SAP. “Special Access Programs” is America’s highest clandestine designation. Such secrets must remain concealed because, under federal law, their “unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” As former Africom strategist Dan Maguire told Fox News, “There are people’s lives at stake.”

The response in Clintonia? Blame the Right and tar IGIC McCullough as a partisan GOP hack.

“I can’t control what Republicans and their allies do,” Clinton said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. Her outburst echoes Brian Fallon, her campaign flack.

As the SAP story broke on January 19, Fallon told Politico, “It is alarming that the intelligence community IG, working with Republicans in Congress, continues to selectively leak materials in order to resurface the same allegations and try to hurt Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

Fallon repeated this charge nearly verbatim when he told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota: “I think that Republicans are continuing to try to trump it up and resurface these allegations for the purposes of hurting her campaign.”

I’ve been hearing about the impending “conservative crackup” for nearly 25 years. The term was coined by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., the founder of The American Spectator. He meant that conservatism had lost its philosophical coherence. But the phrase almost instantly became a catchall for any prediction of the Right’s imminent demise or dissolution.

These dire prophecies always reminded me of those “Free Beer Tomorrow” signs. As Annie sings, tomorrow is “always a day away.”

Well, thanks to Donald Trump, tomorrow may be here. There’s a fierce internecine battle over whether to oppose Trump’s run, passively accept his popularity, or zealously support his bid.

The level of distrust among many of the different factions of the conservative coalition has never been higher, at least not in my experience. Arguments don’t seem to matter, only motives do.

Here’s Rush Limbaugh on Friday: “Forget the name is Trump. If a candidate could [guarantee to] fix everything that’s wrong in this country the way the Republican party thinks it’s wrong, if it were a slam dunk, if it were guaranteed, that candidate will still be opposed by the Republican-party establishment. . . . If he’s not part of the clique, they don’t want him in there.”

In other words, the GOP establishment has become so corrupted, its members would knowingly reject a savior just to protect their comfortable way of life.

Limbaugh also says that the conservative “intelligentsia” — in the form of conservative magazines and think tanks — doesn’t want to solve problems, it just wants to score points in an “academic exercise” within a perpetual “debating society.” “In other words,” Limbaugh says, “some people constantly need something to run against as a reason to exist.”

Meanwhile, many in the so-called establishment and intelligentsia have similar complaints about Limbaugh and his imitators on radio and cable TV, although most don’t say it publicly for fear of reprisal. I’ve lost track of the number of congressmen, consultants, and so forth who’ve told me that talk-radio hosts spend their time criticizing fellow conservatives because that’s what brings in the highest ratings. (Beating up on liberals just doesn’t animate the base like it used to.)