RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

With the country, and now, slowly parts of the rest of the world, in a state of outrage over presidential candidate Donald Trump’s controversial statement to cut off immigration and visits by foreign Muslims to the U.S., it is worth noting that Trump is not the first major figure to suggest that a certain class of humans be barred from entry into a country.

Of the following examples, however, there are two significant differences between Trump’s call and that of all the others. See if you can come up with the two differences by the end of this article.

First, what did Trump actually call for? Did he, as some claim, call for all Muslim Americans to leave? No. What he did call for was a halt to Muslim immigration and tourists into the U.S.

TRUMP’S CALL FOR A BAN

“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” a campaign press release said.

The ban Trump is seeking is based on what he called “the hatred [which] is beyond comprehension.” It is his view that his proposed ban should remain in place “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

Trump called for the ban on Muslim entry into the U.S. in the wake of the terrorist attack in San Bernardino last week by two previously unknown radicalized Muslims who entered the U.S., Syed Farook and his wife, Nashfeen Malik. While few Americans ever met Malik, Farook was accepted as a “normal,” “average American,” and the two were understood to be “living the American dream,” until the moment they began blasting Farook’s co-workers and associates to death in a bloody rampage which claimed the lives of 14 and injured many more on Dec. 2, 2105.

What has become of the “constitutional conservatives”?

For seven years now, President Obama’s opponents have shouted righteously outside the White House. This president, they have argued, does not care about the law; his Democratic party, they have charged, has adopted a “will to power” approach to politics; and the media . . . well, the media has been complicit in the ruse.

Offenses both small and great have been catalogued in horror. Obama has not only undermined the separation of powers, but he has arrested inconvenient video-makers, just like a fascist. He has not only unilaterally rewritten congressional law, but he has attempted to circumvent the right to bear arms, just as Adolf Hitler might. He has not only claimed powers that the Constitution clearly does not give him, but he has laid out plans to kill Americans without due process on their own soil. No departure has been too slight to invite protest. As Edmund Burke put it all those years ago, conservatives in the Obama years have not always waited for despotism before making their appeals, preferring instead to “augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.”

ISIS is now training pilots for future terrorist missions on an imported flight simulator in Libya, according to Arabic media reports citing Libyan and Egyptian military officials.

The flight simulator, apparently imported in October, is now located in the former Qaddafi stronghold of Sirte, about halfway between Benghazi and Tripoli.

“It’s a modern simulator, which apparently arrived from abroad,” the officials told the London-based Arabic daily, Al Sharq al Awsat. The simulator is the size of a compact car and includes a steering wheel, radar and communications gear, so student pilots can practice take-off and (crash) landing.

For now, it would appear that ISIS is “merely” training pilots to fly small aircraft, not military jets. “We’re talking about very basic, rudimentary pilots who can take off in a light plane and crash themselves into the Vatican, for instance,” Colonel Jacques Neriah, a retired Israeli military intelligence official, told FoxNews.

Bernie Sanders has no chance to win the Democratic presidential nomination, but the breathtaking details of the climate-change plan he released this week are still worth noting. They show where the Democratic Party is headed.

The Vermont Senator calls climate change “the single greatest threat facing our planet,” and he seems to mean it. He is proposing a 40% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, and an 80% reduction by 2050, which is significantly more than the up-to 28% cut by 2025 that President Obama has pledged at the Paris climate confab.

To reach this developing world level of CO2 emissions, Mr. Sanders would: impose an unspecified carbon tax; ban all offshore drilling and fossil-fuel leases on federal lands; stop “dirty pipeline” projects; ban natural gas and oil exports; force states to ban fracking; ban mountaintop coal mining; impose a new fuel-efficiency standard of 65 miles per gallon by 2025; spend “massive” federal dollars on subsidies for wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, home-efficiency programs and energy storage; federally underwrite electric-car charging stations, high-speed passenger and cargo rail, a smart grid, and clean-energy job training; shut down the nuclear industry; and provide “clean energy funding” to the rest of the world.

Quite a lead, actually.

Ted Cruz commands the top spot in the latest Monmouth University Poll of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers – his first lead in any early state poll of the 2016 cycle. Donald Trump and Marco Rubio are within a few percentage points of one another for second place. The poll also found that an influential House member’s recent endorsement is only one factor behind Cruz’s rise, which has come primarily at Ben Carson’s expense.

Ted Cruz earns 24% support when likely caucusgoers are asked who they will support in the Republican contest. This marks a clear lead over Donald Trump (19%), Marco Rubio (17%), and Ben

Carson (13%). Jeb Bush stands at 6% and Rand Paul is at 4%, while Carly Fiorina and John Kasich earn 3% each. None of the other six candidates tested in the poll draws more than 2% support.

Carson’s fade is happening almost as quickly as his rise. He has cratered by 19 points in just a couple of months, as his mostly social conservative support realizes that Cruz is the more polished and electable choice, despite what moderate Republicans and establishment types would have people believe.

It’s a mystery what the rationale in Camp Jeb! is these days. He is mired at six or seven percent in Iowa and New Hampshire polls, and the only candidate above him whose fade he might benefit from is Rubio’s. That doesn’t seem a likely scenario.

We are living in a time of great dissensus, when political arguments are not merely rife but emotionally and verbally, if not actually, violent. People who are certain of the urgency of climate change often treat doubters as if they were hopelessly stupid flat-worlders. People who oppose abortion tend to consider those who feel otherwise as little less than murderers. Run down the list of the leading issues—and an issue, recall, is a subject still in the flux of controversy—and one discovers similarly tempestuous reactions, pro and con, everywhere.

Not that I am without my own political views. The English historian A.J.P. Taylor once claimed to have “extreme views, weakly held.” My own position is moderate views, extremely held. Whenever the subject of politics comes up in one or another of my social circles, I always jump in to offer a label warning: “I have never lost a political argument,” I say, adding, “which would be more impressive if I didn’t have to admit that neither have I ever won one.” As Jonathan Swift averred, one cannot hope to reason people out of those things they haven’t been reasoned into, which often enough includes politics.