RUTHFULLY YOURS

Notwithstanding international and domestic criticism, and irrespective of his crude and rude style, Donald Trump’s candidacy for the Republican nomination has gained momentum, in part, due to his proposal for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration, until the introduction of an effective counter-terrorist vetting process. According to a December 10, 2015 Rasmussen poll, his proposal is favored by a majority of GOP voters (66%:24%) and a plurality of all voters (46%:40%).

Trump is leveraging, not shaping, the current US state of mind – and especially that of Republican voters – which reflects frustration with the federal, state and local political and non-political establishment/elites, as well as with political-correctness in the areas of the economy, crime, immigration, foreign policy, the war on Islamic terrorism, and homeland security.

Trump benefits from the drastic erosion in the stature of conventional wisdom/orthodoxy, and, therefore in the stature of conventional/orthodox candidacy.

Trump is aware of the yearning to resurrect the ethos of the American Dream, which featured the USA – until the 2007-2009 Great Recession – as the only moral, economic and military super-power. He attempts to echo the eagerness to stop the slippery slope of the American state of mind from boundless optimism to pessimism, from patriotism to skepticism, from faith and confidence in American exceptionalism to national and personal uncertainty and anxiety, from expected upward mobility to feared downward mobility.

The fabricated on-air debate claim of Hillary Clinton that Islamic State is showing videos of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump “to recruit more radical jihadists” has gone largely unchallenged in the mainstream media.

In fact it is the Benghazi bungler’s husband, not Trump, who is featured in an Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh) recruiting video in which he is labeled a “fornicator” for his many sexual improprieties.

“No Respite,” a four-minute video published online by Islamic State in November, shows images of Bill Clinton, along with former President George W. Bush, who is called a “liar,” and President Obama. The propaganda piece makes the pitch that the U.S. military is no match for Muslim armies.

But you probably haven’t heard about the appropriation of Bill Clinton’s image for jihadist recruitment efforts.

A number of editorials have appeared in center-right outlets accusing Trump supporters of wanting a dictator.

Well obviously.

Politics is a competition. Everyone wants to win the game based on the rules of the game. And the current rules of the game are not Constitutional. The left wanted a dictator. Obama gave them one. He implemented laws, started wars and took on powers which were not only beyond his authority, but which were opposed by the majority of Americans and elected legislators in Congress.

And he won. He got away with it. And that made his way of doing things the new game.

The media and some Republicans sputter that Trump’s proposals couldn’t be carried out. Well of course they could be. If Trump were to run things the way that Obama has.

There are two responses to this.

The left deems this unacceptable because it has a double standard. There’s always some reason why its rulebreaking is okay, but why the rules must be applied to the right. Mocking the kids of presidential candidates is off limits… unless they’re Republicans. Ruling by Executive Order is tyranny… unless a progressive does it. Starting wars based on lies is wrong unless… etc.

Now that kind of hypocrisy is only to be expected from politicians. The trouble is that the left encompasses the media, much of the legal system, academia and a raft of other key network institutions that make it impossible to have any kind of honest discourse about the rule of law.

That means the game is rigged. There are two sets of rules. So why play by them?

In a New Hampshire town hall meeting, Republican presidential candidate Gov. Chris Christie (N.J.) referred to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as “Secretary Happy Talk” and suggested she suspend campaigning over her recent ISIS comments.

“We had the woman who wants to succeed [Obama], who said in the debate here in New Hampshire Saturday night that as to ISIS we’re finally exactly where we want to be. Here’s what I suggest to Secretary Clinton: I suggest that she suspend campaigning, get on an airplane, fly to Paris and before Christmas meet with the families of the murdered victims in Paris and tell them we’re exactly where we want to be as to ISIS as they endure, not celebrate, endure Christmas this year without their loved ones. I want her to look them in the eye,” Christie said at a town hall meeting in New London, N.H.

“The fact is she is Secretary Happy Talk. That’s her new name, that’s all I am going to call her from now on is Secretary Happy Talk. The slogan for this administration should be, ‘do you believe me or your lying eyes?’” he added.

Christie also labeled Clinton a “hypocrite” due to her support for military intervention in Libya.

Donald Trump thinks he can win the race for president. So does Ted Cruz. Maybe Marco Rubio thinks that, too. And maybe even Ben Carson, though he doesn’t have much grounds to anymore.

But what about all the other candidates, who are way, way down in the polls? At least Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal could see they weren’t going anywhere and pulled out. But what about the others? It’s no longer early in the political season, where anyone at 3% has a chance. If you’re at 3% nationally in the polls now, there is no chance you are going to be president. So what are they thinking?

George Pataki:

Pataki knows about struggle. He travels with only a few aides and has met with mostly small groups of voters. “Everybody goes, ‘How long, Pataki, can you stay in this?’ We’ve been running on a bare-bones campaign from the beginning,” he said last week.

Pataki is a former three-term governor of New York who has been out of office for ten years. He has spent most of his time practicing law and working at an environmental consulting firm to cash in on imaginary global warming. He is currently at zero percent in the polls. Maybe he’s thinking to raise his profile so he can get a job in the next administration? The only problem is that he hasn’t. He hasn’t even made it to the main debates. By wandering around alone in New Hampshire like a homeless man, he basically degrades himself.

Hillary Clinton this week promised to cure Alzheimer’s disease inside of a decade—even as she bemoans the tragedy of the Hepatitis C cures that are on the market today because she feels the prices are too high. That isn’t the only contradiction—or outright falsehood—dominating the political debate over pharmaceuticals.

Also this week the Health and Human Services Department created a “dashboard” that claims to show what Medicare’s drug-benefit program spent on individual drugs over the last five years. “You’ve probably heard about—or seen on your drug store receipt—evidence of the rising cost of prescription drugs,” the White House’s Jeanne Lambrew and Erin Richardson wrote in a blog post. “The tool allows you to sort these drugs in different ways, so you can rank them by total spending, spending per person, or by cost increases.”

But something about this data dump is off. The dashboard lists “total spending” on Medicare drugs at $121.5 billion last year. The Congressional Budget Office reports that actual spending in 2014 was $65 billion. The dashboard says Medicare spent $2.5 billion on Abilify. Bristol-Myers Squibb booked total U.S. revenues of $1.6 billion for that antipsychotic medicine in 2014, and that figure includes private insurance and Medicaid.

The phrase “follow the money” is supposed to help explain human behavior, especially in politics. So why has Donald Trump embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin? Why has he denied the evidence of Putin’s killing of Russian journalists and dissidents? A savvy businessman, Trump is certainly not dumb. There must be something else to it.

Reports dating back to 1987, during the time of the old Soviet Union, reveal that Trump has been seeking business in Russia and attempting to build a “Russian Trump Tower” in Moscow and perhaps other Russian cities.

At this particular time in history, with Putin’s cronies under financial sanctions because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s praise for Trump may signal another attempt to get the capitalists and their money back into Russia. Such a ploy depends on Trump and others rehabilitating Putin by claiming that he is fighting terrorism in Syria, not bolstering a long-time Soviet/Russian client state. Thanks to the effectiveness of the Russia Today (RT) channel, which saturates the U.S. media market, especially cable television, Putin is indeed looking like a statesman on the world stage.

Trump’s relationship with Russia goes far back. In 1987, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was meeting with Soviet officials and negotiating the building of “luxury hotels” in Moscow and Leningrad. A story [1] at the time said Trump had met Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin, who mentioned how much his daughter had admired the “opulent” Trump Tower in New York City. This led to an invitation to Trump to visit the USSR. The story said Dubinin wrote a letter to Trump, who hosted a meeting with Soviet officials in New York.

‘She was favored to win — and she got schlonged. She lost, I mean she lost,” Donald Trump said, describing Hillary Clinton’s 2008 White House bid at a Grand Rapids campaign event Monday night.

This is our presidential race in 2015: “linguistic investigations” into whether the term “schlonged” is accurate Yiddish, consternation over whether it’s unacceptably sexist or vulgar, and the Clinton campaign’s insistence that the remark requires a response from “everyone who understands the humiliation this degrading language inflicts on all women.”

Trump is the race’s shock-jock, a master at gleefully overstepping boundaries we didn’t even know were there, and there’s little reason to think that the “schlonged” comment will hurt his standing in the polls. Nor will we see immediate fallout from Trump’s lengthy assurance on Monday night that he wasn’t going to discuss the “disgusting” bathroom break Clinton took during last Saturday’s Democratic debate. While he’s bobbled the lead in Iowa, Trump is still ahead nationally and in the other early states; so far, the cycle of controversy, outrage, and denunciation hasn’t hurt him.

But does this sort of talk help Trump at all? If it brings him closer to the Republican nomination, what does it say about Republicans? And is there any way it won’t repel a significant number of voters who might otherwise consider supporting the Republican standard-bearer in November 2016?