RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump last week used some typically coarse language to describe Hillary Clinton, who responded by accusing Mr. Trump of sexism while announcing that she is unleashing Bill Clinton to campaign for her. This was too ripe an opening for Mr. Trump, who is now attacking Hillary for acquiescing in Bill’s predations against women.

Mr. Trump is rude and crude, but in this case he is raising an issue that rightly bears on the 2016 election campaign and the prospect of a third Clinton term. Mrs. Clinton wants to use her gender both as a political sword and shield to win the White House. The purpose is to make male politicians less willing to take her on, while reinforcing her main and not-so-subtle campaign theme that it’s time to elect the first woman President.

So she and her allies will try to spin any criticism as sexist. Even politically correct Bernie Sanders got this treatment after he said during a debate this autumn that “all the shouting in the world” wouldn’t keep guns out of the wrong hands. Mrs. Clinton later said that “I haven’t been shouting, but sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting.” Against Republicans, she’ll play the “war on women” theme non-stop.

No matter how you slice it, Trump’s call to “take out” terrorist families would made war crimes our policy. The fact that he’s either ignorant or uncaring of that fact makes it worse, not better.

For soldiers seeking to earn a green beret, the final test they have to pass at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg is a mentally and physically demanding field exercise called “Robin Sage.”

The student “alpha teams” are inserted (by parachute, mule, helicopter or on foot) in the North Carolina pine forest to reach a mock guerrilla” camp. Their mission is to earn the guerrillas’ trust and begin to train them in our ways of war.

At some point, each team is faced with being compelled by circumstance or ordered to participate in a war crime. The few who do never get a green beret. Donald Trump couldn’t pass that test.

Before the Dec. 15 debate, Mr. Trump said, “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.” He said it again during the debate, so it wasn’t a slip of the tongue.

There’s a fundamental problem with Mr. Trump’s idea: What he advocated — twice — would be a war crime. The intentional killing of noncombatants obviously violates the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If any U.S. soldier — officer or enlisted — were ordered to do it he or she would be duty-bound and legally required to refuse to obey.

One thing that frustrated even the most ardent supporters of George W. Bush’s administration was his refusal to hit back hard at over-the-top, abominable personal attacks against him and his family, including his daughters, by those in the media and in the culture at large.

Bush revered the office of the president and, unlike his successor, held it to a higher standard than did gutter snipes such as Sean Penn or the New York Times.

This is why Newt Gingrich drew cheers and praise during the 2012 election cycle when he hit back at the media for its open bias. Who can forget that CNN’s John King opened a primary debate by asking Gingrich questions about his ex-wife (something to remember every time we’re told Bill Clinton is off limits)?

This election cycle, the role of credible media tormentor has been notably filled not by Donald Trump but by Ted Cruz, and it’s resonating more because Cruz has a clearer path to the nomination than Gingrich did in 2012.

— When Jim Webb, the former Virginia senator and Navy secretary, left the Democratic primary race in October, he hinted that he might mount an independent run for president. That looks more likely now that Webb has blasted his party’s front-runner for her “inept leadership” as secretary of state.

“Hillary Clinton should be called to account for her inept leadership that brought about the chaos in Libya, and the power vacuums that resulted in the rest of the region,” Webb wrote in a Facebook post Saturday. “While she held that office, the U.S. spent about $2 billion backing the Libyan uprising against Qaddafi. The uprising, which was part of the Arab Spring, led directly to Qaddafi being removed. . . . Now some 2,000 ISIS terrorists have established a foothold in Libya. Who is taking her to task for this?”

Political observers can be excused for shaking their heads at a Webb race as an independent. A mercurial candidate and poor fundraiser, he never garnered more than 1 percent support among Democrats before dropping out. But Webb knows that people underestimated the impact of Green-party candidate Ralph Nader on the 2000 race. Nader raised only $8 million and was ignored by major-network TV-news coverage. But he managed to win 2.7 percent of the national vote, clearing 5 percent in ten states. Democrats still blame his presence on Florida’s ballot for costing Al Gore Florida’s electoral votes and handing the presidency to George W. Bush.

It’s unclear whether Webb would hurt one major-party candidate more than the other. Conservatives laud his service as a decorated Vietnam War veteran and secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. But while he was in the Senate, Webb was a reliable vote for Democratic initiatives, including Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation bill. An economic populist, he says that both parties are too close to Wall Street and are responsible for the drop in the median income of middle-class families – it’s fallen four percentage points since 2000.

Donald Trump’s rants against Mexican migrants have helped rocket him to the top of national polls in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. What an inconvenient fact it must be that Mexicans are now leaving the U.S. in greater numbers than they are arriving.

Significant Mexican migration to the U.S. dates back at least to a Bracero program, launched in 1942, to match the supply of Mexican agricultural labor to U.S. demand during harvest time. The arrangement made it legal for Mexican workers to cross the border to work and return home at the end of the season.

The U.S. terminated the program in 1964 under pressure from organized labor. But Congress could not repeal the laws of economics. Opportunities for work and higher wages in the U.S. continued to be a draw, and Mexicans continued to migrate north. But as the risks of crossing the border increased, they tended to stay longer.

In a paper for the Migration Policy Institute, economist Francisco Alba found that the number of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. “doubled from 2.2 million in 1980 to 4.5 million in 1990 and more than doubled to 9.4 million in 2000.” By that time they constituted almost 30% of this country’s immigrant population. The Pew Research Center’s Ana González-Barrera estimated that seven years later the Mexican-born population (legal and illegal) in the U.S. was 12.8 million.

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?