RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Republican debate may have been taking place in South Carolina, but over it hung the shadow of Iran. And so, despite its FOX Business hosts, the topic quickly turned to the American sailors who had been captured and humiliated by Iran’s terrorist regime on television.

“We were horrified to see the sight of 10 American sailors on their knees, with their hands on their heads,” Ted Cruz began the debate.

“I give you my word, if I am elected president, no service man or service woman will be forced to be on their knees, and any nation that captures our fighting men will feel the full force and fury of the United States of America.”

That was also the way that Trump closed the debate describing the “terrible sight” of American hostages. “I stood yesterday with 75 construction workers. They’re tough, they’re strong, they’re great people. Half of them had tears pouring down their face. They were watching the humiliation of our young ten sailors, sitting on the floor with their knees in a begging position, their hands up. And Iranian wise guys having guns to their heads.”

Last night, Hillary Clinton was interviewed on a Lifetime show called “The Conversation” by host Amanda de Cadenent and a bunch of “YouTube stars,” and I must admit that it wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be.

It was much, much worse.

Earlier this week, Politico touted the interview as something that would be “showing off a softer side” of Mrs. Clinton. In other words: It would be her campaign’s 9 billionth attempt at humanizing her, an attempt to get voters excited about Hillary the Gal and not just Hillary the Candidate.

There’s just one problem: Hillary is not an exciting person. I’m a young and energetic insomniac, but this “interview” had me wanting to pass out before 11 p.m., and had I not been repeatedly jarred awake by the urge to vomit in disgust, I’m sure that I would have done just that.

It opened with Hillary (her chyron: “presidential candidate and grandma”) and de Cadenet sitting on a couch, gazing into each other’s eyes and smiling sheepishly like two high-school kids who had been left alone in one of their parents’ basements.

And it only got worse from there.

Given that tales of adversity are “in” now, de Cadenet wasted no time in trying to make Mrs. Clinton appear to be a sympathetic figure. Within the first minute, she was prodding Hillary to talk about her “mom’s traumatic childhood.”

If Bonnie and Clyde were alive today, they would stop calling themselves bank robbers and, instead, introduce themselves as “financial-asset removal specialists.” Unfortunately, Republicans and conservatives then would start using that exculpatory mouthful to describe these legendary thieves.

Democrats and liberals are incredibly wily about ditching words associated with themselves and their causes as soon as they become unpopular or indefensible. And, with equal predictability, the Right stupidly plays into their hands by engaging in the same linguistic whitewash.

This shrewd leftist tactic and this vexing rightist tendency help liberals escape accountability, just as bank robbers vanish by abandoning getaway cars and slipping out of the clothes that they wear when they grab the loot.

Obama excels at this dark art. Like the wretched dictator that he is, Obama loudly boasts about “going around Congress” to do whatever he wants. But rather than employ “executive orders,” which suggest ordering people around, Obama adopts “executive actions.” How convenient! Most people appreciate “a man of action” and people who “take action.”

Similarly, Obama and the Left have abandoned the highly controversial term “gun control.” They now push “gun-safety laws.” While many Americans dislike gun control, most folks want guns to be safe. Of course, Obama’s quest has nothing to do with making guns less likely to misfire.

My friend DPS sent me the following appraisal of the tough guy from New Jersey by Andrew McCarthy in 2011

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/273865/christies-crazies-andrew-c-mccarthy
Christie’s ‘Crazies’Sharia is not a figment of our imagination.

This “sharia-law business is crap . . . and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies!” So blustered Chris Christie. Bluster is the New Jersey governor’s default mode. It has certainly served him well. When directed at surly advocates of New Jersey’s teachers’ unions — who, after all, deserve it — bluster can apparently make a conservative heartthrob out of a pol whose bite is bipartisan moderate, however titillating his bark may be.

The style is so effective that Christie seems to be trying it out on everyone. A few weeks back, a local reporter had the audacity to ask His Honor whether he believes in creationism or evolution — a question that seemed more pertinent than impertinent in light of the controversy over whether the former ought to be taught in the schools that the governor’s 9 million constituents subsidize to the tune of $11 billion annually. Yet his answer was to growl, “That’s none of your business.”

“None of your business,” has moved to the front of the Christie repertoire. So discovered a citizen who recently had the temerity to ask her governor why he does not send his children to the public schools whose bloated budgets he is trying to pare. It was a pretty tame question, one customarily asked of politicians who crow about the alleged greatness of our public-education system while opting out of it when it comes to their own kids.

It was a fun Republican debate Thursday night, definitely the most spirited, with some of the best interchanges since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but, sadly, the candidates must have missed the new memo about who their adversary is supposed to be, giving the whole event a decidedly retro feel.

Listen guys (and gals — this would definitely include Carly, who was, no surprise, the star of the undercard), you were running against the wrong Democratic candidate tonight.

You’re not going to be running against Hillary. Our Lady of Chappaqua has 150, count ’em, 150 FBI agents looking into her doings. What single person in our history has had anything close to that? Maybe Al Capone, but he wasn’t a politician. You think they’re not going to come up with something? For all we know, she’s already plea-bargaining her pardon. If you don’t believe me, check out DC Whispers’ “Bill & Hillary Clinton Fear the End – Go Into Survival Mode.”

No, no Hillary. You’re going to be running against Bernie (or Joe Biden or Jerry Brown or Fauxcahontas, but most probably Bernie, because he’s done all the spade work and his supporters are going to be mighty angry if the Democratic Party fat cats cut him out).

And here’s the bad news — Bernie is a much more dangerous opponent. Most of the GOP candidates have been thinking — oh, well, he’ll be much easier to beat than Hillary. He’s a socialist, for crissakes. Didn’t Margaret Thatcher put an end to that silliness decades ago?

I must be an awful human being, because I am reveling in the déjà vu Hillary Clinton must be experiencing, as her presidential campaign appears to be heading toward collapse. And this time, the humiliation – and peril – is far greater than anything 2008 dealt her. To state the obvious, her longstanding preference for pantsuits is one thing, but the orange jumpsuits of a federal penitentiary are quite something else.

I realize I am getting way ahead of myself here, that predictions are always risky – especially about the future, as Yogi Berra reminded us. We don’t yet know if there will be a criminal referral from the FBI, though the D.C. rumor mill is operating at full steam, averring that 50 more FBI special agents have been added to the case, making the total team well into triple digits. That the FBI would devote that level of resources to the case suggests that they are tying up any possible loose ends, to have an airtight cases presented to Loretta Lynch. (More on this later.)

Potential legal peril aside for the moment, the humiliations she faces are daunting for a woman of her arrogance. Her husband’s penchant for illicit sex with women far younger and more attractive is once again being thrown in her face, and this time the trusty old injured wife gambit not only doesn’t work, but is being used against her, painting her as an enabler of a sexual abuser.

There wasn’t one Republican presidential debate going on Thursday night in South Carolina, but rather two. And in that sense, the debate neatly and succinctly summarized this year’s unusual race.

The first debate was between the two unlikely front-runners, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. After months of dancing around each other—and in some cases essentially supporting each other—in crystallizing antiestablishment anger, the two now know they are fishing from the same pond with less than three weeks to go before voting begins. And they conducted themselves accordingly.

The night’s second, parallel debate involved the other five aspirants on the stage— Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie and John Kasich—who seemed uncertain whether their mission was to go after the two top dogs or emerge from the rest of the pack as the alternative to them. By and large, they chose the latter course.
So Mr. Trump repeated, volubly and at some length, his assertion that Mr. Cruz, a Texas senator, might not be eligible to be president because he was born in Canada. Mr. Cruz responded by saying that his status under the Constitution isn’t in doubt, and charging that the businessman Mr. Trump fully agreed until he felt threatened by a Cruz rise in the polls.

“The Constitution hasn’t changed,” Mr. Cruz said. “But the poll numbers have.”

For his part, Mr. Cruz embraced anew his assertion that Mr. Trump embodies “New York values,” which, he said, are “socially liberal or pro-abortion or pro-gay marriage.” To a conservative debate audience in the conservative state of South Carolina, he added: “Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan.”

There are many reasons to dislike Hillary Clinton. For one, she’s an unrepentant liar, fabricating everything from her Brian Williamesque brush with death in Bosnia to her parent’s pedigree to her claim that she believed a video caused the deaths of four heroes in Benghazi.

She is also unethical, having accepted large sums of money to the Clinton Foundation from countries and entities working on behalf of foreign governments impacted by her decisions as secretary of state. There is some circumstantial evidence suggesting that she may have been influenced by these rather large contributions. In one well publicized case, Russia was able to acquire 20% of the United States’ uranium reserves in an energy deal that required State Department approval. A paper trail from that transaction reveals that the Clintons’ and their foundation benefited from substantial donations issued by entities with vested interests in ensuring the Russian acquisition of America’s strategic assets. Clinton was required to publicly disclose these contributions but never did. The FBI has now expanded its Emailgate probe of Clinton to include whether the possible “intersection” of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business violated public corruption laws.

Hillary Clinton, who fancies herself as the champion of human rights and women’s rights, is also a serial hypocrite. Records show that the Clinton Foundation accepted funds from countries with abysmal human rights records where misogyny is regularly practiced and the principles of due process are routinely trampled upon.

Yuval Levin has written one of the best analyses of the Republican primary. In it, he argues that the central theme of the campaign is the relationship between America’s political establishment and the public at large, and that each of the four major contenders offers a different diagnosis. To simplify, Trump thinks the establishment is stupid, Christie thinks it is weak, Cruz that it is corrupt, and Rubio that its ideas are anachronistic. There is, of course, an element of truth to each candidate’s message.

Yuval’s framing makes clear an important distinction in the field that is relevant to the ongoing debate on the future of the Republican party. Though the basic “establishment” and “anti-establishment” labels, applied so often to the field by the media, sometimes muddle as much as they clarify, there really are two camps in this primary: Those who seek to revitalize the establishment and the party by fixing their flaws, and those who think there is a more fundamental problem with the nature of the establishment itself, a matter of identity that cannot be repaired merely with the right president or policy platform.

Christie and other so-called “establishment” candidates clearly fall into the former category. So too, though, does Rubio, a candidate with anti-establishment credentials and a genuinely disruptive message and agenda (just ask the insurance industry) that stands out from those of his competitors.