RUTHFULLY YOURS

For political veterans, much of what we’re starting to hear about Ted Cruz has an eerily familiar ring. Too extreme. Unelectable. Scares people. A radical, not a conservative.

The American people will hear a lot about Cruz’s extremism in the year ahead, just as they were told about Reagan’s. It may cause them to hesitate before supporting him. But over the course of the campaign they’ll be able to make that determination for themselves. In fact, Ted Cruz represents the mainstream of conservative thought in this country, just as Reagan did two score years ago. Reagan’s victory vindicated everything we’d been saying for twenty years. A Cruz win next year would do so again.

Precisely 36 years ago Reagan was on his way to the Republican nomination. George Will and the church ladies of the party were concerned, even trying to lure former President Ford into the race. Reagan was just too conservative to get elected. A few years earlier Will had described Reagan’s support as “. . . kamikaze conservatives who thought the 1964 Goldwater campaign was jolly fun.” The reasonable, establishment Republicans settled on Bush 1 as their candidate, and it was game on. Marco Rubio is, or will be, their choice this time. Same song, same singers.

Even those of us in the Reagan campaign had concerns. In January of 1980 Reagan trailed Carter 62-33. This in spite of the fact that our embassy in Iran had been overrun, and hostages taken, a couple months before. Carter had earlier been openly humiliated by Brezhnev in Afghanistan. A weak economy, and soaring inflation, combined to give us the worst of both worlds, stagflation. The previous summer Carter had complained to the American people about their malaise. He seemed to be over his head. In the face of all these troubles, Carter still had a 2-1 lead. Reagan was too extreme.

Sen. Ted Cruz has surged in the 2016 GOP presidential primary contest, consolidating support from the party’s most conservative voters and emerging as a leading alternative to businessman Donald Trump, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

The latest poll, coming after a tumultuous month of international and domestic terrorism, found Mr. Trump tops in the GOP field, with Mr. Cruz in second place. The Texas senator appears to be benefiting from the sharp decline in support for Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who led the pack in Journal/NBC News polling six weeks earlier.

The poll also showed a substantial lead for Hillary Clinton over her main rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders, although the gap has narrowed.

Until recently, Messrs. Trump and Cruz have refrained from attacking each other, saving their barbs for other rivals in the crowded Republican field. But with a separate poll showing Mr. Cruz rising to first place among likely Republican caucusgoers in Iowa, he has increasingly come under direct and pointed attack from Mr. Trump, suggesting a messy new chapter in the GOP campaign on the eve of a nationally televised debate from Las Vegas on Tuesday night.

If not a smoking gun, veteran journalist Edward Klein exposes a smoldering pistol in his new book about Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary cites three of her former State Department colleagues who saw Clinton weave her diplomatic duties with her financial interests in the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. They also report that Clinton let her foreign-policy responsibilities take a back seat to her presidential ambitions. These three sources insisted on anonymity.

“The Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative have very distinct logos. . . . Often, when I went into the secretary of state’s conference room, I saw those logos on papers that were strewn all over the big table,” one of Clinton’s college interns told Klein.

This observer’s low rank gave him surprisingly high-level exposure to Clinton and her confidantes. “It was like I was the invisible man,” he said. “Nobody gave me a second look. They obviously didn’t think it mattered what a young intern saw, so they didn’t make an effort to hide anything from me.”

There’s a tendency in politics to mistake personal animosity for ideological animosity.

Consider Bill Clinton. His staggering dishonesty, tackiness, and scorn for the rule of law aroused a lot of anger from the Right. But he wasn’t really that left-wing.

Oh, he was certainly more liberal in his heart than he let on, but he also worked from the assumption that this was a center-right country, and that limited what he could get away with.

Clinton ran for president the first time by “triangulating” against the base of his own party. He took time off from the campaign to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man so mentally disabled, when he left for the electric chair, he told the guards that he was saving the pecan pie from his last meal “for later.” Clinton signed welfare reform (reluctantly), the Defense of Marriage Act (less reluctantly), helped to balance the budget, and proclaimed that “the era of big government is over.”

And yet, many conservatives insisted he was a no-good hippy left-winger.

There is little doubt this presidential campaign season is unique, at least in one respect: for the first time in a long time, the despicable nature of the mainstream media’s double-standard is as much in focus as the candidates themselves. And perhaps nothing screams double-standard more than the calculated lack of attention on Hillary Clinton’s latest assertion that she never told the families grieving over the loss of their loved ones in Benghazi that an anti-Muslim video was to blame for the attacks.

We begin with where that assertion was made. Clinton floated this latest insult to those families and the American public within the friendly confines of ABC News’ This Week, hosted by pseudo-journalist and former Clinton toady George Stephanopoulos. The would be the same George Stephanopoulos that still passes muster in the corporate suites at ABC, despite having made three separate donations of $25,000 apiece to the Clinton Foundation in 2012, 2013 and 2014 respectively. Those donations remained under the radar, even when Stephanopoulos engaged in a contentious interview with “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer, during which he rose to the Clinton’s defense. After being outed, Stephanopoulos apologized for the oversight, insisting he thought his contributions were “a matter of public record.” “However, in hindsight, I should have taken the extra step of personally disclosing my donations to my employer and to the viewers on air during the recent news stories about the Foundation,” Stephanopoulos confessed.

One of the Obama administration mantras, repeated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is that a military rescue of our trapped Benghazi mission could not have been mounted in time to make a difference, a bizarre claim since at the beginning of the first of two attacks no one could have known when the terrorist attack would end or how long the survivors could hold on.

Now an email unearthed by the relentless watchdog group Judicial Watch and detailed in a December 8 press release exposes that claim to be as much a lie as the one Hilary Clinton told the parents of the dead in front of their sons’ caskets as they arrived at Joint Base Andrews. The Benghazi terrorist attack was not caused by a video offensive to Islam and, yes, a Benghazi rescue not only could have been attempted but in fact was ready to go:

Judicial Watch today released a new Benghazi email from then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash to State Department leadership immediately offering “forces that could move to Benghazi” during the terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. In an email sent to top Department of State officials, at 7:19 p.m. ET, only hours after the attack had begun, Bash says, “we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak.” The Obama administration redacted the details of the military forces available, oddly citing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemption that allows the withholding of “deliberative process” information.

The country’s newest cult of personality is driven by deep dissatisfaction, frustration, and anger at the sitting commander in chief, with the promise of an omnicompetent hero to fix. Haven’t we seen this story before?
It’s impossible to get through a day without hearing the name Donald Trump…over and over again. His name is plastered across the pages of newspapers and magazines. His speeches and interviews are continuously replayed on television, radio and the Internet. Friends, family, and colleagues bring him up at every opportunity as if the most important topic in the world today is whether Trump will win the nomination. And perhaps it is.

Barack Obama has almost single-handedly destroyed America’s standing in the world and certainly our relationship with our allies. He has aided and abetted the rise of ISIS and other terrorist organizations as well as enemies such as Iran, Russia, and China. And he has fomented division and unrest here at home.

I say “almost single-handedly” not just because his administration has been filled with accomplices to his destructive policies. I’m referring to the American people who elected him — twice. Americans enabled Obama to accomplish his promised transformation of the country — and the world — as they bought into his false promises and messiah-like personality cult. They are blameworthy for our situation today because they were blindly ignorant and ideological then.

As tribune of the base Donald Trump is successful and inadequate. You see it in the Muslim question. His strength is that he responds to and appears to share the concerns of those who are legitimately worried about whom we allow into the United States—our visa protocols, our vetting, our standards. This is a national-security issue. We have entered the age of ISIS-inspired and ISIS-directed attacks on the West. The latter (Paris) have tended to be bloodier than the former (San Bernardino), because they involve more operatives, more simultaneous targets, more weapons. Whether inspired or directed, the idea of future hits in the U.S.—and everyone, from the most sophisticated desk-jockey intel analyst in Washington to the receptionist at your dentist’s office, will tell you they believe more are coming—is very much on the public mind.

A Paris here would change everything, transposing a detached debate about strategy into a hot and immediate political exigency. There is the real danger events will outstrip sober decision making. The smartest thing I’ve heard the past few weeks was the suggestion that America figure out the most effective and constructive things it could do after a Paris-style attack, and start doing them now. I hope everyone who runs the country is thinking about this. They’d better have a plan.

Twenty-two years ago, my esteemed colleague Dan Henninger wrote a blockbuster Journal editorial titled “No Guardrails.” Its subject was people “who don’t think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them,” as well as the elites who excuse this lack of self-control and the birth of a less-civilized culture.

We are today witnessing the political version of this phenomenon. That’s how to make sense of a presidential race that grows more disconnected from normality by the day.

Barack Obama has done plenty of damage to the country, but perhaps the worst is his determined destruction of Washington’s guardrails. Mr. Obama wants what he wants. If ObamaCare is problematic, he unilaterally alters the law. If Congress won’t change the immigration system, he refuses to enforce it. If the nation won’t support laws to fight climate change, he creates one with regulation. If the Senate won’t confirm his nominees, he declares it in recess and installs them anyway. “As to limits, you set your own,” observed Dan in that editorial. This is our president’s motto.

Mr. Obama doesn’t need anyone to justify his actions, because he’s realized no one can stop him. He gets criticized, but at the same time his approach has seeped into the national conscience. It has set new norms. You see this in the ever-more-outrageous proposals from the presidential field, in particular front-runners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Mrs. Clinton routinely vows to govern by diktat. On Wednesday she unveiled a raft of proposals to punish companies that flee the punitive U.S. tax system. Mrs. Clinton will ask Congress to implement her plan, but no matter if it doesn’t. “If Congress won’t act,” she promises, “then I will ask the Treasury Department, when I’m there, to use its regulatory authority.”

Mrs. Clinton and fellow liberals don’t like guns and are frustrated that the duly elected members of Congress (including those from their own party) won’t strengthen background checks. So she has promised to write regulations that will unilaterally impose such a system.