RUTHFULLY YOURS

For more than 30 years, Iowa’s obsession with its ethanol fuel industry has played an outsize role in its presidential caucuses. The winner of every caucus in both parties during that period has strongly backed federal subsidies or mandates for the corn-grown fuel. That winning streak could end this year if Senator Ted Cruz takes Iowa. Polls currently show him with a narrow lead.

In 2008, Fred Thompson told me he didn’t see merit in subsidizing one fuel over another, but in Iowa’s GOP caucus that year “opposing ethanol was like pushing against a mountain.” Hillary Clinton voted against ethanol a total of 17 times in the U.S. Senate, saying she found it “impossible to understand why any pro-consumer, pro-health, pro-environment, anti-government member” could vote for ethanol mandates. In 2007, as she announced for president, she took a sharp turn on the Road to Des Moines and embraced ethanol. This year, she calls ethanol “a success for Iowa and much of rural America.”

But on the Republican side, two candidates have broken ranks. Senator Rand Paul, true to his libertarian principles, supports an immediate phase-out of subsidies. And Cruz addressed the Iowa Agriculture Summit, run by ethanol and wind-subsidy interests, in March 2015. His message: The federal mandate on ethanol, which has cost consumers at least $10 billion since 2007, had to end. In front of a crowd of pro-ethanol farmers and moneymen, Cruz said:

I don’t think Washington should be picking winners and losers. I have every bit of faith that businesses can continue to compete, can continue to do well without having to go on bended knee to Washington asking for subsidies, asking for special favors. I think that’s how we got in this problem to begin with.

A specter is haunting the conservative movement. From the dark underbelly of corrupt Washington, D.C., an unyielding “Republican establishment” has come out to feast upon the mutilated corpses of Reagan, Goldwater, and Buckley. The smarmy hucksters who make up its rank are masters of disguise: During the day, they insist that they represent the great silent majority of conservative Americans; at night, they prove that they’re in it only for the money, the power, and the Georgetown social scene. The monsters have names — such as Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Nikki Haley, Trey Gowdy, Mike Lee, and . . . wait, what?

To turn on talk radio or to sift through the murkier regions of the Internet is, invariably, to be told that the leaders of today’s reform conservative movement are RINOs — Republicans in Name Only — through and through. According to many who inhabit the Right, even those men and women who rose in the 2010 tea-party wave have fallen now to the dark side. Once, they led the fightback against Barack Obama; now, just a few short years later, they have allied themselves with official Washington in a dastardly scheme to maintain the status quo.

Is this claim true? No, it is not. Indeed, by simply taking a look back at the last five years of conservative commentary on three well-known reform conservatives, we can see that the storyline of “tea-party champion becomes establishment stooge” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Conway, N.H. – Ted Cruz says the Republican presidential primary has reached a “new phase.” He’s acting like it, too.

Less than a month ago, the Texas senator was predicting the contest would narrow, as it typically has, to a two-man race between a conservative and an establishment favorite. But it turns out 2016 may have surprises in store even for Ted Cruz.

On Monday afternoon, as his campaign bus barrels down the highway here, Cruz appears to be surveying an altogether different landscape from the one he’d anticipated: Instead of a potential showdown with Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, he finds himself staring at Donald Trump, perhaps the one candidate with an even bigger claim to the outsider mantle.

“There’s no doubt the contours of the race have changed,” Cruz says, leaning back in the leather seat of his luxury bus, surrounded by campaign aides on all sides.

Cruz now sees Trump as the only man standing in his way. The collapse of their détente has scrambled the Republican race, forcing Cruz to make political calculations he’d planned on avoiding. But he delights in playing political strategist, and he is doing so now, analyzing the field anew, searching for Trump’s hidden weaknesses, and, for the first time here in New Hampshire, going after them aggressively.

Cruz has long scoffed at the traditional notion that there are “three legs” of the Republican stool — that is, that a candidate must satisfy economic conservatives, social conservatives, and foreign-policy hawks. Instead, he has talked about the “four lanes” of Republican voters — Evangelicals, libertarians, tea-party activists, and moderates — and argued that he can win over enough voters in the first three lanes to capture the nomination.

Cruz admits that Trump has eaten into his base. “The voters supporting Trump are coming from multiple lanes,” he says. “He’s got a significant numbers of moderates and liberals that are supporting him. He’s also drawing votes right now from some evangelicals, from some tea-party activists, and from some Reagan Democrats. From three of those four categories — evangelicals, tea-party activists, and Reagan Democrats — we have very, very strong appeal and strong support, and so we are battling him for support in each of those lanes.”

Here in New Hampshire, where Trump leads in the polls, the contours of a Cruz offensive are coming into view. The senator tells me we’re entering the phase of the campaign “when the voters begin seriously examining the records of the candidates.”

The children of political candidates are useful adornments in campaign literature and ads, and when they are older, as character witnesses on the campaign trail.

Rarely are they used as attack dogs, let alone armed with shameless talking points to try to dampen the rise of an inspirational political rival. But nothing is beneath Bill and Hillary Clinton. So they trotted out their daughter, Chelsea, to warn about the dastardly designs that Bernie Sanders has for ending Medicare as we know it.

It’s part of a hammer-and-tongs assault that should feel familiar to Republicans. It turns out that becoming the target of Medicare demagoguery isn’t just for Newt Gingrich or Paul Ryan anymore. No one has released an ad of Bernie Sanders pushing a senior citizen over a cliff yet, but if the Vermont senator continues his rise, just give it a couple of more weeks.

Chelsea Clinton charged that Sanders “wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare, dismantle private insurance.” For those keeping score at home, that’s a lot of dismantling. Chelsea said she worried — the chain of reasoning was left fuzzy — that Sanders would somehow give Republicans “permission” to go back to the pre-Obamacare era and “strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance.”

Frightened yet? What Sanders is proposing is so-called Medicare for all, a universal, single-payer health-care program that has been the goal of progressives for decades. For this, he is being savaged by a Hillary Clinton who in the early 1990s famously immolated herself in a doomed fight for her version of universal coverage.

The gravamen of her case against Sanders is that he is a socialist — and an enemy of the welfare state. He is advocating a further step in the Democratic crusade to expand the social safety net — and is a dangerous radical because of it. He is a threat to all that has been achieved by the Left — because he wants to achieve more.

Max Blumenthal, who was revealed by the Hillary Clinton forced email dump as one of her secret sources and advisers on Israel and Middle East affairs, is one of the great Israel haters in America today.

A writer should avoid hyperbole. But when it comes to Max Blumenthal, son of longtime Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, it’s hard to avoid superlatives. Max is quite simply one of the most biased, anti-Semitic, terrorist-defending, Israel-has-no-right-to-exist haters out there.

Max, who spends most of his professional life being ignored because of his extreme, hate-filled drivel, recently became the focus of scrutiny when it was revealed that his father, Sid Blumenthal, promoted Max’s anti-Semitic writings to Ms. Clinton when she was Secretary of State of the United States. More explosive are Ms. Clinton’s emails praising Max’s work.

Throughout this entire email scandal, both Max and his father have been silent. One might assume the Hillary campaign sees they have a Jeremiah Wright problem and have done everything to muzzle Max.

Now I’ve discovered that Max might have a problem with America too, seeing as he is prepared to repudiate the First Amendment.

It appears Max can malign the Jewish State and falsely accuse it of the most vile atrocities but the moment someone exposes him, he demands press censorship.

After reading my column that exposed the influence of his writings on Ms. Clinton, Max wrote to The Huffington Post demanding my column be removed. A veiled threat of legal proceedings for libel was included.

Once upon a time, in the good old days of the first Clinton presidency, Bill Clinton turned his back on his wife. He did so after her crash-and-burn on HillaryCare helped usher in the first Republican House in 40 years. Mr. Clinton got the message and went on to embrace welfare reform, sign a cut in the capital-gains tax, and even declare that “the era of big Government is over.”

Now his wife is returning the favor. Today Hillary Clinton is running hard against the agenda that defined her husband’s presidency. And not only his economics.

This campaign she has cast aside her husband’s formula on abortion—“safe, legal and rare”—that she herself ran on in the past. Gone is the moderating nuance of yesteryear: reducing the number of abortions, finding “common ground” with pro-lifers, even, in her first campaign for the Senate in 2000, how she would be OK with a limit on partial-birth or late-term abortions so long as it didn’t threaten the life of the mother.

The new Mrs. Clinton has moved to the absolutist position of the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood. Today Mrs. Clinton’s formula is safe, legal, unlimited—and federally subsidized. We saw this new Hillary Clinton at a Planned Parenthood rally in New Hampshire this month, where she said she favored “safe and legal abortion” and denounced the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion.

Two haggard old Democrats took to the stage at a debate hosted by Google, NBC and the non-convicted members of the Congressional Black Caucus to argue over whether America should be run by Vladimir Lenin or Nurse Ratched.

If looks could kill, the glazed hatred in the eyes of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders would have slain more Democrats than heroin and cocaine. Hillary Clinton’s impossibly immobile yellow helmet of hair and impossibly immobile thin-lipped red smile framed two dead eyes filled with an implacable hatred for all human life on earth and especially in South Carolina. Bernie Sanders ranted at the camera, lips wet with saliva, hair wild, eyes unhinged behind dirty bifocals, spotlights glinting off his polished skull.

There were more three-point plans and comprehensive plans and the “most comprehensive plans” on stage at any one time since the fall of the USSR. Everyone had the most comprehensive plan for everything which was endorsed by all the experts which couldn’t possibly fail. Just like all their failed plans before which also couldn’t possibly fail, but somehow had.

Hillary Clinton offered an awkward opening statement comparing herself to Martin Luther King. Bernie Sanders delivered the same rambling soundbite about the 1 percent and a rigged economy that is his only platform. A rigged economy however is just another way of describing Socialism.

Martin O’Malley claimed that he was Martin O’Malley, but no one seemed interested. So he tried to claim that he was Barack Obama and no one believed him.

As of this morning, anyway, it was OK to talk about Paris, also the Chicago Way, meaning the sewer of political corruption that has come to define salient aspects of that great city at least since the Democratic machine arrived in force with the first Mayor Daley.

But as every denizen of New York knows by now, it is not OK to talk critically of the “New York Way,” i.e., “New York Values.”

Why?

It’s important to understand that it is not because Ted Cruz criticized Donald Trump for being tainted by “New York Values” last week. Everyone knew what he meant and most conservatives, if they had thought about it at all, would have agreed.

No, the reason that “New York Values” — the scare quotes are necessary — are an issue is because Donald Trump made them an issue at the January 14 debate. In a typical demonstration of rhetorical ju-jitsu, he pretended to be outraged by Cruz’s phrase. He wrapped the mantle of 9/11 around himself and paraded around the stage, and then the talk shows, claiming to be shocked, shocked! that a U.S. senator — who, by the way, was born in Canada — should have sunk so low as to besmirch the bravery and heroism of the New York fire fighters who risked, and often lost, life and limb on 9/11.

Rudy Giuliani chimed in demanding that Cruz should “apologize to New York,” and other pundits — even ones who repudiated Trump categorically a few months ago — rallied round to claim that because of his remark “Mr. Cruz is disqualified for being president. Disqualified. Disqualified. Hang it up,” etc., etc. It was even suggested that “New York Values” might be a reference to ethnics, you know, code for “Jews.” No-one, I think, actually believed that, but it was a good illustration of the principle that once people start throwing garbage, they’ll throw anything they have at hand.

The firestorm of calumny and loathing that Ted Cruz’s utterance of that dread phrase unleashed underscores the potency of Donald Trump’s rhetorical black magic. His remark that Jeb Bush was “low energy” stuck like a burr and will probably lead to Jeb’s early retirement. His response to Hillary Clinton’s charge that he was “sexist” effectively spayed Bill Clinton, transforming him overnight from an important asset into a blubbering appendage.