RUTHFULLY YOURS

I must admit, when I clicked this morning on Vox’s ”explainer” of Juanita Broaddrick’s rape allegation against Bill Clinton, I expected a whitewash. I was wrong. Not only did Dylan Matthews do an excellent job laying out the story, he reminded me of a number of details I’d forgotten.

Her story is infuriating, painting a picture of casual, callous brutality. Broaddrick, then a Clinton gubernatorial campaign volunteer, claims that Clinton asked to switch a planned meeting from a hotel lobby to her hotel room. After a few minutes of small talk, Broaddrick says that Clinton began kissing her. She resisted Clinton’s advances, but he “pulled her back onto the bed and forcibly had sex with her.” During the alleged attack, he bit her lip. When he saw that it was bruised and swollen, she claims he said, “You better get some ice on that.” Then he “put on his sunglasses and walked out the door.”

I’d forgotten, however, how many people Broaddrick told after the incident:

Several friends of Broaddrick’s backed up the story. Norma Rogers, who was the director of nursing at Broaddrick’s nursing home at the time, told reporters that she entered the hotel room shortly after the assault allegedly took place and “found Mrs. Broaddrick crying and in ‘a state of shock.’ Her upper lip was puffed out and blue, and appeared to have been hit.” Kelsey elaborated to the New York Times, “She told me he forced himself on her, forced her to have intercourse.”

In the Dateline show, Broaddrick’s friends Louise Ma, Susan Lewis, and Jean Darden (Norma Rogers’s sister) all told NBC News that Broaddrick told them Bill Clinton raped her at the time. David Broaddrick — with whom Broaddrick was having an affair at the time; they both eventually left their spouses to marry each other — also told NBC that Broaddrick’s top lip was black after the alleged incident, and that she told him “that she had been raped by Bill Clinton.”

Then there are Broaddrick’s allegations that Hillary not-so-subtly thanked her for her silence:

Ramesh Ponnuru claims on Bloomberg View that Marco Rubio is trying to “turn Ted Cruz into Rand Paul,” and that attempts to label Cruz as weak on national security won’t work. I disagree. Ponnuru admits that his friendship with Senator Cruz could cloud his judgment, so I’ll state at the outset that I am biased too, inasmuch as I support Senator Rubio’s candidacy.

Setting aside for the moment whether this line of argument will resonate politically, there are at least three issues on which Senator Cruz clearly “stands with Rand.” Each of these raises serious questions about Senator Cruz’s true national-security views and his viability as a candidate for Commander-in-Chief.

The first instance was when Senator Cruz entered the Senate chamber to literally “stand with Rand.” Many will recall Senator Paul’s filibuster, in which he stirred up a frenzy over the possible targeting of U.S. citizens in the United States by U.S. military drones. In a bizarre attempt to suggest that a U.S. citizen sitting in a Starbucks café is at risk from the threat of U.S. Hellfire missiles, the senator from Kentucky held up Senate business until the attorney general certified that the president does not have the authority “to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil.” What a revelation!

Instead of focusing the Senate on the threat posed by radical jihadists, Senator Cruz chose not only to stand with Rand, but to join him in attempting to stir up libertarian passions and create a false choice between liberty and security. This may have been good politics and a great way to increase his Twitter followers (Senator Cruz, in fact, spent part of his time on the Senate floor reading tweets praising Senator Paul), but it certainly wasn’t the conduct of a credible would-be Commander-in-Chief.

‘Common Core, the set of education standards that were adopted by 46 states five years ago but have since become toxic with the conservative base, has not been at the center of the Republican primary debate, which has so far been dominated by national security and immigration,” according to an article in The Hill just a few weeks ago. How quickly things change.

In the final four weeks before the voting begins, Senator Marco Rubio is making opposition to Common Core a key part of his final pitch, featuring it in a new television ad: “One high-tax, Common Core, liberal-energy-loving, Obamacare Medicaid-expanding president is enough,” the voiceover says.

And in Cedar Rapids a few days ago, Rubio brought Common Core up again: “This country cannot afford a president that’s not going to reverse the direction Barack Obama’s taken our country. We can’t have another president that supports Common Core or gun control or expanding Obamacare.”

It’s a smart move for Rubio, first and foremost because Common Core is an issue that deeply moves voters, especially important in a caucus state such as Iowa. Second, it distinguishes Rubio from Chris Christie, who was an early supporter of Common Core but who has changed his position to oppose it more recently, at least in part.

Common Core is a policy failure as well. The state of Kentucky has been implementing Common Core for four years, the longest of any state, and certainly long enough that one would expect to see some positive results. Instead, Ed Week reports, the proportion of Kentucky elementary and middle-school students who are proficient in reading and math dropped by one-third.

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.