RUTHFULLY YOURS

One summer afternoon in 2013, Marco Rubio arrived at Mike Lee’s Senate office for a strategy session on derailing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Waiting inside were some of the upper chamber’s most conservative members, along with a group of influential activists. It promised to be an awkward pow-wow for the Florida senator, who had spent the 113th Congress authoring and promoting an immigration bill that turned some of his staunchest supporters — including some of those gathered in Lee’s office — into disgruntled opponents. Unperturbed, Rubio flashed a boyish grin and, according to multiple people present, greeted the group with a declaration: “The prodigal son is here.”

He knew he had sinned in their eyes, and that he needed the leaders of the increasingly powerful conservative movement that had championed his insurgent Senate bid to forgive him if he hoped to win their support for an eventual White House run. Yet one person in the room was already working overtime to make sure that wouldn’t happen. Ted Cruz, having copied Rubio’s anti-establishment blueprint to win his own Senate seat in 2012, had since usurped Rubio’s standing as the Tea Party’s favorite senator — in no small part by becoming the most vocal antagonist of the immigration-reform package that had blown up in the Floridian’s face earlier that summer. Both young senators harbored presidential ambitions, and if they ran against each other, Cruz wanted a clear contrast drawn between his brand of uncompromising ideological warfare and Rubio’s more pragmatic conservatism.

He’s not just sticking around.

Ted Cruz is on the move.

The combative Texas senator has climbed to second place in our GOP Power Rankings, the highest he has placed in the 14 weeks we have been polling political experts on who is the strongest candidate in the Republican field.

“The biggest news of the week was Ted Cruz’s surge in Iowa,” said Emory University professor Andra Gillespie. “One of the interesting features of this cycle has been the crowded evangelical field, where no one candidate has dominated and (Donald) Trump has held his own. Social conservatives may have found their candidate in Ted Cruz.”

Trump remains No. 1 in our survey, with 17 first-place votes. While he has continued to toss out comments that are considered poor taste or inaccurate, he is the unquestioned front-runner.

But Cruz and Marco Rubio are gaining ground. Rubio actually took more first-place votes in our survey (seven) than Cruz (four), but Cruz scored higher in total because 19 of our experts put him in second place.

It can be tiresome and ultimately pointless to fact-check Donald Trump: He and his supporters will believe what they want to believe. But it is nevertheless dismaying the extent to which he plays fast and loose with the facts. “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan (a far greater New Yorker than Trump will ever be) once said. Trump wants to prove Moynihan wrong by showing that he is entitled to his own facts.

Just look at what happened when Trump was confronted by demands for evidence to back up his claim that “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City were cheering at the World Trade Center was falling — a claim denied by the mayor of Jersey City, its police chief, and every other responsible individual who has ever looked into this matter.

First Trump claimed that it must be so because he remembered it happening, and “I have the world’s greatest memory. It’s one thing everyone agrees on.” (Everyone? Does anyone outside of Trump himself and his paid sycophants actually think so?)

New Hampshire’s largest newspaper picked from a crowded field to anoint their pick for the first-in-the-nation GOP primary, but didn’t leave the editorial board’s losers unscathed in announcing their favorite.

The Union-Leader endorsement might give a shot to the campaign of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who’s polling at seventh in New Hampshire but is focusing his attention on the early state 10 weeks away from the vote.

“As a U.S. attorney and then a big-state governor, he is the one candidate who has the range and type of experience the nation desperately needs,” wrote the paper’s publisher, Joseph McQuaid.

“We don’t need another fast-talking, well-meaning freshman U.S. senator trying to run the government. We are still seeing the disastrous effects of the last such choice. Chris Christie is a solid, pro-life conservative who has managed to govern in liberal New Jersey, face down the big public unions, and win a second term. Gov. Christie can work across the aisle, but he won’t get rolled by the bureaucrats. We don’t need as President some well-meaning person from the private sector who has no public experience.”

Think of Chris Christie as one of 14 Republicans vying for the presidential nomination and the odds appear insurmountable. But think of him as a defensive lineman with a talent for stripping the ball from an opposing quarterback and the race now becomes far more interesting.

Back in the October CNBC debate, the quarterback was Jeb Bush, who fumbled when asked whether the feds should regulate fantasy football. Mr. Christie gave the answer Mr. Bush should have: “Fantasy football? We have ISIS and al Qaeda attacking us and we’re talking about fantasy football?”

Cue to Paris, where world leaders are meeting this week to discuss . . . climate change. This time the hapless quarterback is President Obama, who declares the conference a show of “resolve” against Islamic State terrorists.

“This is the president once again living in his fantasy world rather than the world as it actually is,” says Mr. Christie, calling in from the campaign trail in New Hampshire. “He really believes that folks are worried about climate change when what they really care about now is the Islamic State and Syria and terrorism.”

On Meet the Press this morning, Donald Trump insisted that:

he was “100 percent right” when he said he saw thousands of Muslims in Jersey City, New Jersey, cheering the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, even though fact-checkers have debunked his assertion.

In a phone interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said he has heard from “hundreds of people that agree” that there were televised Muslim celebrations of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which he used as evidence to show his remarks were true.

“I saw it. So many people saw it,” said Trump, who, in the race for the November 2016 election, has been among the most vocal of the Republican candidates in expressing skepticism about Muslims in the United States. “So, why would I take it back? I’m not going to take it back.”

When NBC anchor Chuck Todd suggested the people Trump heard from are supporters and might want to agree with him, Trump interrupted to note the “huge Muslim population”

The ISIS Threat Represents a Clash of Civilizations, and Hillary Won’t Admit It

Has Hillary Clinton separated herself from President Obama by taking a tougher and more realistic position on the threat from ISIS? That’s what many in the news media are saying based on some of her recent foreign-policy statements, such as her remarks in a November 19 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations:

ISIS operates across three mutually reinforcing dimensions: a physical enclave in Iraq and Syria; an international terrorist network that includes affiliates across the region and beyond; and an ideological movement of radical jihadism. We have to target and defeat all three, and time is of the essence.

This portrayal of the ISIS threat sounds like an improvement over the awkward rhetoric used by President Obama to discuss what he insists on calling ISIL or Daesh, and his refusal to use words such as “jihad” and “jihadism.” But Hillary’s rhetorical improvements were offset by caveats indicating that she actually has not moved very far from the president and has a worldview that is just as incoherent.

For example, Clinton criticized “the obsession in some quarters [meaning Republicans] with a clash of civilizations.” Clinton also echoed Obama’s frequent claims that the United States is not at war with Islam when she said, “I don’t think we’re at war with all Muslims. I think we’re at war with jihadists.”