RUTHFULLY YOURS

President George W. Bush left office seven years ago, but his shadow still weighs heavily on the Republican Party. His failures, along with those of President Barack Obama, arguably inspired the anti-establishment furor of 2015 — with media mogul Donald Trump leading the polls and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush floundering despite his money lead. The two rising challengers to Mr. Trump — Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz — represent two transformative approaches to the legacy of one of America’s most controversial leaders.

According to CBS, President George W. Bush left office with a depressing 22 percent approval rating, with 73 percent saying they disapproved of his performance as commander in chief. The unpopularity of the Iraq War and the housing market crash in 2008 propelled Barack Obama to power. But four years later, Bush’s legacy enjoyed an upswing, as his approval rating rose to nearly half in 2013.

This year, with the rise of the Islamic State, the continuing struggles of Obamacare, and a sluggish economic recovery, George W. Bush’s more famous policy positions — compassionate conservatism and a hawkish foreign policy — might just seem attractive once again.

According to The Federalist’s Ben Domenech, Florida Senator Marco Rubio has largely endorsed George W.’s old positions, giving the 2004 winning coalition a new face. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, by contrast, has taken a more nuanced position — opposing big government even when used for conservative aims, and supporting civil liberties over NSA surveillance.

Despite reports that Trump was flirting with a bid to run as an independent, his campaign missed a deadline to file as independent in Texas today. Trump registered weeks earlier to run as a Republican in Texas.

While Trump could embark on an independent run in a handful of other states, he will be locked out of an independent run in Texas until after the Republican and Democratic primary.

Texas is the biggest prize for Republican presidential candidates: Texas has chosen the Republican nominee in every election cycle since 1980. Trump will need to gain the 38 electoral college votes in the state to become President. Without Texas votes, Trump’s bid to become President in a close election are extremely remote.

On September 3, Trump signed a pledge after causing a controversy at the first GOP presidential debate, hosted by Fox News, where he was the only candidate who would not commit to remaining a Republican during the presidential election.

Trump could still run as an independent in Texas. In Texas, independent candidates must gather signatures from 79,939 registered voters by May 9 if they did not already register. Candidates who run as independents can only gather signatures after March 1, the date of the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries in that state. All of the signatures must be from voters who did not cast their ballots in either party’s primary election.

On September 14, 2012, three days after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods in Benghazi, Libya, Hillary Clinton appeared at Andrews Air Force Base, where she spoke with family members of those slain.

Shortly afterward, Tyrone Woods’s father reported that she told him, “We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.” Sean Smith’s mother recently repeated this, saying, “She said it was because of the video.” Glen Doherty’s sister said she chose “in that moment to basically perpetuate what she knew was untrue.”

In public remarks Clinton said, “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.” Those words and her assurances to the family members stand in stark contradiction to what Clinton said in messages she sent over her private e-mail system at the time.

On September 11, 2012, she told her daughter that the “officers were killed in Benghazi by an al Qaeda-like group.” On the morning of September 12 she told an Egyptian diplomat, “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest.”

Blaming the Benghazi murders on spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video (whose maker was indeed arrested, on unrelated charges) was apparently part of an Obama administration strategy. On September 15, Susan Rice, then ambassador to the United Nations, after a White House briefing went on five Sunday interview programs and blamed the attacks on the video.

Can the American people be trusted?

We’ll find out the Republican answer in a few hours, when their presidential contenders take the stage in Las Vegas for their first post-Paris, post-San Bernardino debate. It promises to be a boisterous night, given how they are already mixing it up offstage. Their challenge will be to get out from under the rhetoric of both President Obama and Donald Trump.

Mr. Obama does not trust the American people. We saw this earlier this month, when he used an Oval Office address about the carnage in San Bernardino to lecture the rest of us about tolerance. Once again he refused to call Islamist terror by its rightful name, perhaps because he is not sure how Americans he once described as clinging to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” might react if he were to speak honestly.

Today Mr. Obama has become our most politically correct president, with nothing real to say on the threats we face. No surprise, then, that the chief beneficiary would be our most politically incorrect candidate, Mr. Trump.
Because when Mr. Trump speaks about suspending Muslim immigration or “bombing the s—t” out of oil fields controlled by Islamic State, what supporters hear is this: I won’t let political correctness stand in the way of keeping America safe. And when Republicans respond by tut-tutting about how distasteful they find him—instead of showing why his argument is full of holes—they too come across as condescending, implicitly sharing the president’s belief that the knuckle-dragging American public just can’t handle the truth.

Not everything in Ted Cruz’s foreign policy speech on Thursday at the Heritage Foundation was awful. There was enough intellectual heft in there to suggest that the senator from Texas is too smart to believe the ideological contrivances and strategic impostures by which he seeks to gain the GOP nomination.

The central foreign-policy challenge facing the next president is how to re-establish American credibility with friends who no longer trust us and enemies who no longer fear us. Mr. Cruz gets this, just as he gets that the purpose of U.S. foreign policy cannot be to redeem the world’s crippled societies through democracy-building exercises. Foreign policy is not in the business of making dreams come true—Arab-Israeli peace, Islamic liberalism, climate nirvana, a Russian reset, et cetera. It’s about keeping our nightmares at bay.

Today those nightmares are Russian revanchism, Iranian nuclearization, the rise and reach of Islamic State and China’s quest to muscle the U.S. out of East Asia. How to deal with them? Mr. Cruz has thoughts on these and other important matters, but first he wants you to know that he intends to finish the wall along the border with Mexico. And triple the border patrol. And quadruple the number of aircraft patrolling the border.

Why? Because “when terrorists can simply swim across the Rio Grande, we are daring them to make the journey.”

On December 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” The announcement came on the heels of the San Bernardino massacre committed by two Muslim extremists one of whom was a citizen of Pakistan who entered the United States on a K-1 (fiancée) visa.

While Trump’s announcement received support from several quarters of the American public and conservative media, it drew immediate condemnation from many on both the Left and the Right — with some even questioning the constitutionality of such legislation. White House Spokesman Josh Earnest let loose with a torrent of pejoratives directed at Trump, taking aim at his “fake hair” and stated that his position “disqualifies him from serving as president.” Hillary Clinton, who stands to gain most by seeing Trump surge in Republican polls, echoed those sentiments, noting that Trump’s comments were “shameful,” “wrong,” and “dangerous.”

Donald Trump is all about winning. “If we win Iowa, we run the table,” he told a Des Moines rally on Friday. “It will be over quickly; we win virtually every state in the union.” But how will he handle defeat if the Superman of the Polls suddenly starts losing?

Now there are three respected polls (Monmouth, Des Moines Register, and Fox) that show Trump losing to a surging Ted Cruz in Iowa. Trump could certainly surge back in the next 50 days, but right now, Cruz is on track to win. He is relentlessly using social media data to build what he calls “very much the Obama model – a data-driven, grassroots-driven campaign.” And, he says, “it is a reason our campaign is steadily gathering strength.” Trump is relying on rallies and the endless free TV coverage the media provide him.

Trump promises he will bring a flood of new voters into Iowa’s caucuses, dwarfing the traditional total of 125,000 Iowans who vote in a typical presidential-election year — even though the caucus method requires voters to express their preference in public, over two hours, on what will probably be a frigid February evening.

Is the tide turning against Donald Trump in Iowa? According to the latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll, the answer is clearly “yes.”

The billionaire businessman and loose cannon extraordinaire has fallen to second place in the poll with 21 percent. He picked up 2 percentage points since the last poll, but is trailing Ted Cruz by 10 percentage points. The senator from Texas is now the favorite of 31 percent of likely Republican voters in Iowa.

There are two stories here. The first is that Trump seems to have reached his peak in Iowa. The second story is Cruz’s amazing surge. The senator is rapidly ascending; he has experienced a 21-point leap since the last DMR/Bloomberg poll. No other candidate in history has seen such a big surge in such a short amount of time.

Dishonest, incompetent, greedy, very angry, fundamentally unlikeable, and lacking a trace of integrity; you might think that the woman, now running to be our president, would get a bit of a grip on her more obvious failings. Like telling unnecessary whoppers. But she just can’t help herself – she has lived a lie for so long that she no longer can tell the difference between truth and falsehood. She very much reminds me of a statement made by David Horowitz (a real truth teller and a true patriot) in an effort to distinguish Al Gore and Bill Clinton: Clinton lies to help himself, Gore lies because he can’t help himself, i.e. he invented the internet, Love Story was about him and Tipper, etc.

While Hillary’s lies remind one of Gore’s fables, they are actually worse. Why? Because they are so transparent and thus so easily proved wrong. That is, Gore told self-aggrandizing lies (because he had actually accomplished so little) so that his statements took on the color of an adolescent trying to invent an adult resume, i.e. they were not only transparently false, they were silly. Hillary tells lies that are not only unnecessary (the thing might just die of its own weight), she compounds the problem by making the lie much more blatant by giving it that much more exposure, e.g. her taking sniper fire at Tuzla, or Chelsea was in harm’s way on 9/11.