RUTHFULLY YOURS

Simultaneously, as if signals from a council of sachems had summoned them to the warpath, the Republican establishment’s warriors took after Ted Cruz. Pat Buchanan encapsulated this establishment: “… officeholders past and present, donors, lobbyists, think-tankers angling for jobs, party hacks and talking heads [who] discuss how to frustrate the rising rebellion against what they have done to America.”
Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz

The establishmentarian drumbeat against Cruz has involved but a whiff of argument on policy, and a few twisted or out of context attributions. But it has consisted mostly of attacks on the man’s character. Fox News led the way with characterizations ranging from flip-flopper to “servile.”

Britt Hume, heretofore its resident adult, said that Cruz had “difficulty shaking hands with the truth.” The point in print, in the blogosphere, as well as on TV is: he’s not one of us, not of our kind, and hence unsuited for responsible office. This very vehemence ensures the attacks’ success. For sure, Cruz ain’t no part of the establishment. Whether that convinces voters to vote against Cruz or for him is another matter. What follows here is an overview of the written attacks, which reveal more about the attackers than they do about the target thereof.

The Wall Street Journal is the Republican establishment’s intellectual apex. This is what flows down from that hill.

Angelo Codevilla is the dean of conservative strategists, a senior member of the Reagan team during the 1980s, and the author of the best recent book on American security strategy. Like Ted Cruz, Prof. Codevilla rejects the false dichotomy of isolationism vs. neo-conservative interventionism: America is not out to remake the world in its own image, but to secure itself from foreign enemies. Sometimes that means using power abroad, and using a lot of it–but the criteria must be America’s self-interest.

In a new essay for Asia Times, Codevilla make short work of the Establishment counter-attack against Sen. Cruz, taking on the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, the Weekly Standard’s Lee Smith, the American Enterprise Institute’s Gary Schmitt, and other luminaries. It’s a must read. Some choice excerpts:

Simultaneously, as if signals from a council of sachems had summoned them to the warpath, the Republican establishment’s warriors took after Ted Cruz. Pat Buchanan encapsulated this establishment: “… officeholders past and present, donors, lobbyists, think-tankers angling for jobs, party hacks and talking heads [who] discuss how to frustrate the rising rebellion against what they have done to America.”

The establishmentarian drumbeat against Cruz has involved but a whiff of argument on policy, and a few twisted or out of context attributions. But it has consisted mostly of attacks on the man’s character. Fox News led the way with characterizations ranging from flip-flopper to “servile.”

Candidate Donald Trump has called for the United States to bar all Muslims from entering the country until the nation’s leaders can “figure out what is going on”. Saying that “hatred” among many Muslims for Americans is “beyond comprehension,” Mr. Trump said in a statement that the United States needed to confront “where this hatred comes from and why…” “Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life,” Mr. Trump said.

According to the New York Times, “Repudiation of Mr. Trump’s remarks was swift and severe among religious groups and politicians from both parties. Mr. Trump is “unhinged,” said one Republican rival, former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, while another, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, called the ban “offensive and outlandish.” Hillary Clinton said the idea was “reprehensible, prejudiced and divisive.” Organizations representing Jews, Christians, and those of other faiths quickly joined Muslims in denouncing Mr. Trump’s proposal. Even Pres. Obama joined in.

All seem to have forgotten that Muslims from many Mideast countries have participated in terrorist attacks in the U.S., attacks on U.S. passenger airplanes, and attacks in friendly countries like the Philippines and France. The Muslim terrorists involved in those attacks came from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Pakistan, Chechenia, and others with Muslim populations. America’s leaders ought to have figured out what’s been going on two decades ago.

Nuclear threats aside, North Korean political propaganda seems pretty silly to wised-up, postmodern American sophisticates. Who do these guys think they’re fooling, with their cheesy posters of happy children flocking around the knees of a benevolent Great, or Dear, or Current Leader? And surely only the brainwashed or the very young could ever swallow the regime’s steady supply of tales extolling the miraculous achievements of the Kim dynasts.

Yet perhaps we Americans are not entirely immune to this sort of thing, especially in an election year. Two new picture books put such a gloss on the life and career of the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president that book editors in Pyongyang could take a few tips from them. In the doctrine of these tales for children 4 to 8, not only has the mark of greatness been upon Hillary Clinton since her birth, but she has also been the liberator of her people—that is, of women.

Michelle Markel’s “ Hillary Rodham Clinton: Some Girls Are Born to Lead” (HarperCollins) begins with an alarming account of the darkness that enfolded this land as recently as the 1950s, when, horrible to relate, “it was a man’s world. Only boys could grow up to have powerful jobs. Only boys had no ceilings on their dreams. Girls weren’t supposed to act smart, tough, or ambitious.”

Senator Ted Cruz is wise to laugh off Donald Trump’s intimation that his constitutional qualifications to serve as president may be debatable.

The suggestion is sufficiently frivolous that even Trump, who is apt to utter most anything that pops into his head, stops short of claiming that Cruz is not a “natural born citizen,” the Constitution’s requirement. Trump is merely saying that because Cruz was born in Canada (of an American citizen mother and a Cuban father who had been a long-time legal resident of the United States), some political opponents might file lawsuits that could spur years of litigation over Cruz’s eligibility.

The answer to that “problem” is: So what? Top government officials get sued all the time. It comes with the territory and has no impact on the performance of their duties. Indeed, dozens of lawsuits have been brought seeking to challenge President Obama’s eligibility. They have been litigated for years and have neither distracted him nor created public doubt about his legitimacy. In fact, most of them are peremptorily dismissed.

On substance, Trump’s self-serving suggestion about his rival is specious. (Disclosure: I support Cruz.)

Ruth Marcus, the reliably liberal Washington Post columnist, wrote a piece the other day that came close to being brave. Given the source, for much of the paper’s readership its very headline was surely a stunner: TRUMP IS RIGHT: BILL CLINTON’S SORDID SEXUAL HISTORY IS FAIR GAME. Yes, Marcus noted, Trump may be everything progressives say he is, “racist, sexist, narcissist, for starters . . . . But he has a point about Clinton playing the ‘woman’s card,’ and about the male behavior that’s more concerning: her husband’s . . . . (I)n the larger scheme of things, Bill Clinton’s conduct toward women is far worse than any of the offensive things that Trump has said . . . . Trump has smeared women because of their looks, Clinton has preyed on them, and in a workplace setting where he was by far the superior.” “Ordinarily,” she added, “I would argue that the sins of the husband should not be visited on the wife . . . . But Hillary Clinton has made two moves that lead me, gulp, to agree with Trump on the ‘fair game’ front. She is (smartly) using her husband as a campaign surrogate, and simultaneously (correctly) calling Trump sexist.”

What’s the problem with such a piece? It is at its essence a dodge, an attempt to avoid a far more serious indictment by copping to a lesser charge. In fact, Bill Clinton was not just a workplace harasser, or even a serial adulterer; he was, and remains, someone credibly accused of sexual assault. And what goes unmentioned—for this obviously could be catastrophic for Hillary’s campaign—is that she has been his willing cohort, the energetic enabler who sought to destroy his accusers to protect their joint political and financial interests.

In this regard, the piece is emblematic of what the Clintons have done to their fellow liberals and Democrats, in the media and beyond, over the past couple of decades—they turned them into serial equivocators and liars. Never mind that progressives continue to see (and often define) themselves as morally and ethically superior: in the fight to save Bill Clinton’s presidency there could be no adherence to larger truths, or moral consistency, or commitment to time-tested standards; all were sacrificed in defense of Clinton’s political survival.

A group of state legislators in Missouri has, after a great deal of nagging by your favorite roving correspondent and many others, come around and made a public statement that Professor Melissa Click of the University of Missouri should be fired.

Professor Click, you’ll recall, is the petty commissar who assaulted a student journalist (who has since filed a police complaint) who was covering one of the daft, diaper-filling protests on the Mizzou campus. The protest was happening on a corner of the campus that not only is a public space but a public space recognized as such in Missouri state law, with access to it guaranteed. Professor Click attempts to intimidate the student, physically blocks him, and then swats at his face before calling for “some muscle” to forcibly remove him. So far, neither the university nor the campus police department, which are manifestly run by miscreants and moral cowards, has seen fit to do anything about the case.

When Rolling Stone published its breathless account of what turned out to be an entirely fictitious rape on the campus of the University of Virginia, some critics (ahem) were denounced as monsters for asking such straightforward questions as “Why wasn’t a violent gang rape, purportedly committed on a bed of broken glass, followed up by a police report, which surely, given the details, would have produced physical evidence supporting prosecution and conviction?” In the Missouri case, there was not only a police report but video of the incident, shot by the victim of the crime himself. One can only imagine what would have happened if there were a similar video of, say, a white, portly Mizzou football coach physically laying hands on a young black woman going about her legally protected and legitimate business on the campus.

But, so far, not one thing of any consequence has happened to Professor Click.

On December 29th Hillary Clinton sat down for an interview with the editorial board of The Conway Daily Sun. (I’m on the western border of New Hampshire, Conway is down the other end of the Kancamagus on the eastern border.) As you can see from the photograph at right, the occasion lacks the glamour of her sit-downs with court sycophants like George Stephanopoulos, but it did provide a glimpse of the kind of day Mrs Clinton would be having every single day if the US media were journalists rather than Hillary’s palace guards. Tom McLaughlin is a member of the Sun’s editorial board, and, unlike most of the bigshots at The New York Times, he knows the facts on Benghazi.

Just by way of background, three months ago, the latest crop of email releases from Hillary’s secret server reveals that she knew even as the Benghazi attack was unfolding that it was terrorism and not, as I put it back in September 2012, a spontaneous class-action movie review. As I said to Hugh Hewitt in October:

She chose to politicize it from the moment it was happening, even as it was underway. In other words, in the afternoon of September 11th, when it was 9:00 in the evening in Benghazi, she was already politicizing it. And I think it was damaging that on September 12th, she told not only the President of Libya and the Prime Minister of Egypt, but also her own family members that it was a terrorist attack. And yet, there she was on September 14th at Andrews Air Force Base over the coffins of the dead lying to Tyrone Woods’ family when she told them we’re going to get that guy who made the video, and we’re going to have him arrested and prosecuted… She tells the truth to the Government of Libya. She tells the truth to the Government of Egypt. But she lies to the people to whom she is meant to be a public servant, the American people…

At a critical moment on a critical date in American history, she opened her mouth and vomited forth a sewer of lies that everybody else is supposed to just try and swim their way through to find out the reality of what went on. And if you’re a foreign government leader, you know the truth. If you’re the American people, you get lied to.

Once you know the timeline of her communications with the Libyans, the Egyptians and with Chelsea Clinton, it becomes harder and harder to accept that the video distraction was anything other than a consciously constructed official lie.

Now listen to Tom McLaughlin at the Conway editorial meeting. He has the facts, and she has a lot of generalized evasions about the “fog of war”:

With the next Republican debate scheduled for later this month, I thought it might be worth stepping back to ask about the state of play on the political field. The first item of business is

TRUMPERY. I last wrote at any length about The Donald at the end of July when he was first really soaring in the polls. “I don’t think Donald Trump will be the GOP candidate in 2016,” I wrote then, and I still believe that.

But I also continue to believe, as I said then, that Donald Trump “has raised some issues that the high and mighty dispensers of conventional wisdom would do well to ponder.” Sure, Trump is the walking epitome of vulgarity, a veritable Platonic Form of the gilded comb-over. But what repels the Volvo-driving, Ivy-League-aspiring, SNL-watching, post-Christian, gun-hating, illiberal liberal elite often plays well in flyover country where, mirabile dictu, many folks who still possess

the franchise reside. They kind of liked it when Donald Trump said, à propos John McCain, that he preferred war heroes who did not get captured by the enemy. They liked it when he called Rosie O’Donnell a “fat pig”: between us, they think she is a fat pig, too. The mot about the dishy Megyn Kelly bleeding from “the eyes or wherever” was kind of gross, but CNN got it exactly wrong when they said that Trump’s comment “draws outrage.”

What it drew were titters, partly of admiration (in the old sense), partly of relief. At a time when politicians, like academics, like journalists, are enjoined to walk about on a field of eggshells, worried about offending feministsblackscripplesgaysmexicansinjunsmuslimsweirdosofalldescriptions, Trump’s bravado was . . . refreshing. “He can’t say that” screamed the Minders: “But he just did say it” chortled the insensitive masses. “What are you going to do about it?”

Of all the welter of predictions for 2016, by far the most dramatic seems to have been given short shrift or swept under the rug — the possible indictment of Hillary Rodham Clinton while running for the presidency. Were such an event to occur, it would dominate our culture as nothing since Watergate. Yet most of us put it in the back of our minds, thinking it could never happen and focusing on the latest back and forth with Trump.

Nevertheless, as pointed out on PJM by Debra Heine, it very much could happen. Heine cited Laura Ingraham’s Tuesday radio interview with former U. S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Joe DiGenova, some of which went as follows in verbatim transcription (you can listen to the full interview here):

DiGenova: Hillary Clinton’s going to have problems because of what’s in the emails, but also the classifications. Her biggest problem right now is the FBI. They’re not going away. They have reached a critical mass in their investigation of the Secretary and all of her senior staff. And, it’s going to come to a head, I would suggest, in the next sixty days. And, I predict Hillary will not make it to the finish line. She’s not going to be able to complete her campaign. The criminal investigation must focus on her and all the people around her. And, if Jim Comey, the FBI director, is doing his job, which I expect him to do as an honorable man, she cannot be the nominee of the Democratic Party. She’s going to have to be charged with the crime. It’s going to be a very complex matter for the Department of Justice, but they’re not going to be able to walk away from it. She and her staff have committed numerous federal crimes involving the negligent and improper handling of classified information. They are now at over 1,200 classified emails. And, that’s just for the ones we know about from the State Department. That does not include the ones that the FBI is, in fact, recovering from her hard drives. (1:08)