RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

It’s about time to vote. It’s now time to get serious about who can win in the general.

It is true that we have a slate of better than average candidates, but Rubio comes across as better than the others for ten reasons.

Since this is turning into a three-way race, I have to contrast Rubio mainly with Cruz and Trump (but some others, too). Here’s why you should vote for Sen. Marco Rubio and not throw away your vote on the other candidates.

1. Rubio has the best chance to deliver Florida.

This reason comes first because we need that state to win electorally. In 2010, he won 48.49% in a three-way race; former Republican turned independent Crist got 29.71, and Democrat Meeks got 20.20%. We already have states like Texas, so we don’t need Cruz. We need Ohio, but I doubt Kasich would run as the V.P. Maybe he would campaign for Rubio. If Rubio’s opponents claim he can’t deliver Florida, then how could Cruz (see the other points below)? And certainly Trump can’t. It’s doubtful he could get even 30% of the N.Y. voters.

2. He speaks Spanish fluently.

At my large, mostly white church in the greater L.A. area, we sometimes sing in Spanish. The lyrics are put up on the screen. This is happening in historically white churches across the Southwest. We like Hispanics in our congregations.

TBN, the world’s largest family of Christian networks, has opened a new network called “Salsa.” Here are the cities into which they broadcast across the nation.

“True” conservatives have a knack for misreading their own country. Will they get caught flat-footed by this inexorable trend line and continue to be shrill and hysterical about Hispanics and their immigrant relatives?

Like it or not, we need someone at this time in our nation’s history to persuade them in Spanish to come over to our side. We don’t need one hundred percent of them – just enough to tip the scales our way.

Rubio can go into the Southwest and Colorado and other markets and give speeches and TV interviews in Spanish, explaining why conservative politics is what the nation needs now. He won’t scare them off.

From my own experience, I know they are persuadable.

In contrast, Cruz barely speaks “Spanglish” and can’t debate or interview on Spanish TV.

Rubio can reassure concerned Hispanic voters in Spanish that Trump’s harsh rhetoric and Cruz’s politically convenient “never” even to legalization don’t represent the best kind of conservatism.

3. His faith seems genuine.

Whichever church he has eventually chosen, his journey seems sincere. He gave a talk before a conference of Iowa ministers, and he spoke as an insider, not an outsider whose religion is politically motivated and convenient (Trump).

Also, he doesn’t get into needless controversies, like tracing the current Middle East conflict all the way back to Jacob and Esau in Genesis (Carson). Surely there are more proximate causes than that. But even if, hypothetically, those two characters were the main cause, this knowledge about them doesn’t lead to solutions today.

4. He outpolls Hillary in a head-to-head matchup.

I don’t trust campaign polls nowadays because the news media gleefully obsesses over Trump, so he gets the most attention, but that linked one at least offers a little perspective.

I swore that I wouldn’t write another column on Donald Trump this month, but the mouthy New York billionaire has forced my hand.

Over the weekend a New York Post headline smacked me in the face: “Trump praises Kim Jong-un’s murderous ascent to power.” I double-checked to make sure it wasn’t the Onion instead. It wasn’t. So I read on.

Here’s part of what Mr. Trump had to say about the North Korean dictator in Iowa on Saturday: “You’ve got to give him credit. He goes in, he takes over, he’s the boss. It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one.”

Machiavelli, who admired Hannibal for his “inhuman cruelty,” would have said it more elegantly, but the sentiment is the same.

This is not the first time Mr. Trump has praised an autocrat, and it probably won’t be the last. In December Vladimir Putin called him a “very bright and talented man.” Informed of this news, Mr. Trump said it was “a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

When a stunned Joe Scarborough, the co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” pressed him about Mr. Putin’s thuggish rule, Mr. Trump shot back, saying: “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country.” Mr. Scarborough pressed on: What about the murder of Russian journalists? Mr. Trump: “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe.”

Jane Mayer’s bias has long been on display….she is co-author of a hagiography of Anita Hill and a book bashing Clarence Thomas… “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas”by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson 1994….rsk
Jane Mayer, a New Yorker magazine staff writer and former Washington reporter for this newspaper, introduces “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right” by comparing current-day America to the Gilded Age of the 1890s and bemoaning the ways in which rich people today are trying to “remake America” to advance their interests. Inevitably, she quotes New York Times columnist Paul Krugman: “We are on the road not to just a highly unequal society but a society of an oligarchy. A society of inherited wealth.”

That claim may have a familiar ring. Populists have been deploring the power of the rich since the birth of the republic. In 1907, Teddy Roosevelt railed at “malefactors of great wealth.” His fifth cousin, Franklin, laced his 1933 inaugural speech with a promise to drive the “money changers” out of whatever temples they occupied. The formula works well.

Dark Money

By Jane Mayer

(Doubleday, 449 pages, $29.95)

Ms. Mayer is highly selective about which super-wealthy dabblers in politics she wants to expel. Warren Buffett, whose $62 billion fortune ranks second only to that of Bill Gates ($76 billion), is not one of her targets. Rather she quotes him in support of her thesis, to the effect that the rich are winning the class war. Tom Steyer, the West Coast hedge-fund billionaire environmentalist, gets a bye as well. So does former Google CEO Eric Schmidt ($11 billion), a big campaign contributor to Barack Obama, and Steven Spielberg, who has generously shared from his $3 billion nest egg to aid the goals of Bill and Hillary Clinton. A host of think tanks and political websites depend on liberal deep pockets, but their donors do not figure in “Dark Money.” Politically active, left-of-center oligarchs are apparently wonderful people, not dangerous ones.

Ms. Mayer mainly dislikes foes of big government. Her list of the rich and dangerous begins with figures whose heyday has passed, such as Richard Mellon Scaife and John M. Olin. For decades, their philanthropies supported conservative journals, scholars and think tanks, much as the Bradley Foundation does today, another organization that earns her contempt. But most of “Dark Money” is aimed at just two people, Charles and David Koch

What to make of Senator Ted Cruz? He is a very, very smart man who apparently believes that the median Republican presidential primary voter is very, very dumb. There’s some evidence for that proposition — Donald Trump still leads in the national polls — but Cruz’s strategy rests on the proposition that these voters will enjoy being condescended to. He may very well have chosen the most effective strategy.

Senator Cruz is very much hardwired into the current us-and-them mood of the electorate, Right and Left, and though he is a creature of Princeton and Harvard Law whose household long has been sustained by a Goldman Sachs paycheck, Cruz is keenly interested in giving the impression that there exists a vast cultural chasm between himself, the champion of what some populists like to call “the Real America” — as though Ronald Reagan of Hollywood, J. P. Morgan of Wall Street, and Bill Gates of Harvard weren’t real Americans — and the wicked Washington-based elite. Cruz is an outsider to the extent that a member of an Ivy League eating club (have someone explain it to you) who went on to be a member of the nation’s most prestigious lunch club, the Senate, can be an outsider. He is a Texan, albeit a Texan from the anodyne suburbs of Houston, which could be the suburbs of anywhere. He didn’t grow up baling hay in Muleshoe.

Courting the boob vote, Cruz is campaigning as a boob, a project complicated by the fact that there is a much bigger boob in the race: Donald Trump. Cruz, an affluent Ivy Leaguer, needed to distinguish himself from Trump, a very rich Ivy Leaguer, and what he came up with was: “New York values.” A Republican presidential candidate need not trouble himself too much about New York’s votes in the Electoral College, and Trump himself had used the phrase to characterize his many departures from the traditional conservatism of the Republican party, of which he is a freshly minted member. Cruz, canny politician that he is, never bothered to go into much detail about what is meant by “New York values.” Sneering at them was enough.

Trump says liberal Republican Scott Brown would make a great VP By Ed Straker
Donald Trump says that former senator Scott Brown, one of the most liberal Republicans, would make a great vice president.

Donald Trump said Saturday that Scott Brown would be a vice president straight out of “central casting.”

“You know what? He’s central casting,” Trump replied, nodding. “Look at that guy! He’s central casting! A great guy and a beautiful wife and a great family. So important!”

So who is Scott Brown? First of all, Scott Brown is a big loser. He filled the partial term of Teddy Kennedy and was defeated for re-election in Massachusetts. Then he carpetbagged over to New Hampshire and lost a Senate race there. It’s inconceivable that Trump would call a two-time loser great VP material.

But even more, Scott Brown is extremely liberal:

Brown does not support President Obama’s health care reform plan in its current form as approved by the Democratic-led House and Senate. [But] Brown supported the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform, which requires all residents to have health insurance, with a state-subsidized plan created for those who cannot afford to insure themselves. Brown refers to the currently legalized same-sex marriage in New Hampshire as a settled issue, which he does not wish to change. Brown has said he personally believes marriage is between a man and a woman, but would still oppose a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. He is in favor of civil unions. Brown has stated that Roe v. Wade is settled law and is self-described as pro-choice.