RUTHFULLY YOURS

Since Hillary announced that her husband would be joining her on the campaign trail, people have been debating whether or not it’s fair for the GOP to attack Bill’s sexual misdeeds in order to indirectly attack her.

This makes sense. After all, we’re talking about a guy who has been accused of the sexual assault of more than ten women. Think about it: How is her appointing him really any different than if she’d appointed Bill Cosby?

But here’s the thing: The real issue isn’t whether or not to attack Bill to indirectly attack Hillary — it’s about directly attacking Hillary for how she herself treated the women involved.

Hillary Clinton claims to be pro-women, yet has actively worked to ruin lives of so many of them. She’s running on a “feminist platform” — she’s even dared to say that sexual-assault survivors have a “right to be believed” — despite the fact that what she did to the women who accused Bill went far beyond not believing them.

She attacked them.

When allegations of sexual misconduct emerged during Bill’s 1992 presidential run, she’s reported to have said “Who is going to find out? These women are trash. Nobody’s going to believe them.” Multiple people also report that she called the women “sluts” and “whores” — you know, for daring to be raped. A private investigator named Ivan Duda claims that, after Bill lost his second governor’s race, Hillary told him: “I want you to get rid of all these b****** he’s seeing . . . I want you to give me the names and addresses and phone numbers, and we can get them under control.”

Speaking Fees Meet Politics for Clintons By James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus
At Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing for secretary of state, she promised she would take “extraordinary steps…to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

Later, more than two dozen companies and groups and one foreign government paid former President Bill Clinton a total of more than $8 million to give speeches around the time they also had matters before Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

Fifteen of them also donated a total of between $5 million and $15 million to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the family’s charity, according to foundation disclosures.

In several instances, State Department actions benefited those that paid Mr. Clinton. The Journal found no evidence that speaking fees were paid to the former president in exchange for any action by Mrs. Clinton, now the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Mrs. Clinton has come under fire from Republicans and some Democrats for potential conflicts of interest between her family’s work at the foundation and her duties as secretary of state between 2009 and February 2013. Her husband’s high-profile activities pose a unique challenge for Mrs. Clinton as she runs for president and he prepares to step up his role in her campaign.

If current trends continue, Republican primary voters will give themselves a warm “stick it to the man” feeling by defying Mitch McConnell, the Bush family, and the greater GOP establishment and nominating Donald Trump for president. They have endured years of policy disappointments and ideological betrayals by Washington Republicans; it’s hard to blame them.

There’s just one problem: Once this fight-the-power euphoria has ebbed, Trump would face the Democratic nominee, most likely Hillary Clinton. Fairly or unfairly, she will pound the Manhattan real-estate mogul as a mean, insensitive, sexist, and possibly racist multi-billionaire “who doesn’t care about people like you.” Clinton, the Democrats, and their butlers and maids in the old-guard media will tar Trump as Mitt Romney with more money and less warmth.

Indeed, Clinton would smash Trump 50 percent to 40, according to a December 14 NBC/Wall Street Journal survey of 1,000 adults (margin of error: +/- 3.4 percent). A December 16–17 Fox News survey of 1,013 registered voters finds Clinton thumping Trump by 11 points – 49 percent to 38 (MOE: +/- 3.0 percent). A December 22 Quinnipiac University poll found that 50 percent of 1,140 registered voters surveyed would be “embarrassed to have Donald Trump as President.” Only 35 percent said this of Hillary Clinton. (MOE: +/- 2.9 percent).

With his coattails drenched in Crisco, Trump most likely would see Republican senators, congressmen, state-level candidates, and even local contenders slip down the general-election ticket and slide to defeat.

Memo to GOP primary voters: Breathe deep the gathering doom.

Rather than engineer a Hillary Clinton landslide, Republican voters should nominate a stalwart, quick-witted conservative whose immigrant roots and modest means make him a far more elusive target for Clinton’s slings and arrows.

It is now axiomatic that Marco Rubio is the “establishment” favorite in the 2016 Republican primaries, due for a collision with a conservative alternative such as Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or Ben Carson.

But if Rubio really represents the new GOP “establishment,” then the fight is over and the conservatives won. Despite infuriating many grassroots conservatives by pushing the failed Gang of Eight immigration-reform bill and advocating a path to legalization, Rubio has an indisputably conservative record as a senator.

This is a man who has a lifetime ACU rating of 98 out of 100. A man who has a perfect rating from the NRA in the U.S. Senate. A man who earned scores of 100 in 2014, 100 in 2013, 71 in 2012, and 100 in 2011 from the Family Research Council. A “Taxpayer Super Hero” with a lifetime rating of 95 from Citizens Against Government Waste. A man Club for Growth president David McIntosh called “a complete pro-growth, free-market, limited-government conservative.”

Across the board, Rubio’s stances, policy proposals, and rhetoric fall squarely within the bounds of traditional conservatism.

Populism is typically born in places like Nebraska, Louisiana, Kansas, and the other places given short shrift in that famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cartoon showing the view of the world from Ninth Avenue.

It’s not supposed to hail from Brooklyn or Queens, never mind Burlington, Vermont, or midtown Manhattan. But that’s where the two reigning populists of the 2016 cycle call home.

You could say that Donald Trump, the son of a rich real-estate developer in Queens, was always a populist at heart. All his life he wanted to break into the fancy-pants world of Manhattan real estate. Despite his wealth, he still has that bridge-and-tunnel chip on his shoulder. And that chip explains the garishness of his publicity-seeking lifestyle, as well as his politics.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants. He followed a somewhat familiar path to politics. As Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina quipped in one of the recent Republican debates, Sanders went to the Soviet Union on his honeymoon and never came back. In reality, he ended up in Burlington and became the socialist mayor of one of the very first latte towns.

Looked at through a historical lens, a billionaire Manhattanite from Queens and a Jewish socialist from Brooklyn should be standing at the pointy end of the pitchforks, not leading the mobs holding them. Nearly all of the famous populists hated the East Coast, the super-rich, and the big cities. A good number — but not all — of them disliked Jews.

And yet, what you might call “blue state populism” is here.

Consider this: when more women than men attend college and graduate school by increasingly sizable amounts (Latina females over white males by 14%!) and the American male breadwinner looks to be going the way of the dodo bird, Hillary Clinton is basing her campaign for the presidency largely on breaking the glass ceiling.

Not only that, she is accusing her putative opponent Donald Trump of sexism. This is the woman who blamed her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky on the “vast rightwing conspiracy,” apparently imputing magical-mystical aphrodisiac powers to conservatives.

The Donald — you’ll be surprised to hear if you’ve been living on Pluto — has been firing back, sweeping Mr. Hillary, now supposedly about to stump for his wife, into the fray.

“You look at whether it’s Monica Lewinsky or Paula Jones or many of them,” Trump said on NBC’s TODAY. “That certainly will be fair game. Certainly if they play the woman’s card with respect to me, that will be fair game.”

In recent days, the GOP front-runner has been highlighting the former president’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky, saying that Bill Clinton has a pattern of “abuse of women.”

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.