RUTHFULLY YOURS

Americans are more cynical than ever about politics, and with ample cause. Witness this week’s denunciations of Pfizer Inc. by politicians for trying to survive competitively under the tax laws these same politicians wrote.

On Monday the New York-based drug giant finally announced its long-mooted merger with Ireland’s Allergan in a roughly $160 billion deal that is the largest tie-up in a record year for corporate deal-making. The merger will, among other things, make it easier for the new Ireland-based Pfizer PLC to bring profits generated overseas back to the U.S. But the same politicians who continue to tilt the playing field against U.S. companies are blasting Pfizer for trying to do right by its shareholders, workers and customers.

“For too long, powerful corporations have exploited loopholes that allow them to hide earnings abroad to lower their taxes,” thundered Hillary Clinton, that epic collector of corporate cash tribute. “Now Pfizer is trying to reduce its tax bill even further.”

Even further? Its effective tax rate of 25% is among the highest in its industry anywhere in the world, hence the need to move the legal address and endure grief from politicians like Mrs. Clinton. Senate Democratic leaders Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer also denounced Pfizer for abiding by the tax laws they’ve done so much to write and preserve.

Ya don’t say…

If the attacks in Paris have dramatically reshaped the national conversation surrounding the presidential race, it may be news to Democratic ad makers.

At least three Republican candidates or their super PACs have gone up on television with hard-hitting ads focused on national security in the days since the ISIL assault on Paris — most recently Marco Rubio, in a 30 second, straight-to-camera spot called “A Civilizational Struggle” — but recent spots from the leading Democratic candidates have remained zeroed-in on domestic policy, highlighting the divergent tracks guiding the two primary races.

What the Republican candidates and their PACs are doing could be dismissed as mere opportunism by cynics, but that isn’t what is going on here.

The GOP candidates, however disparate and/or crazy, are, on their shallowest days, the adults in the 2016 campaign room. None of them believe that incandescent light bulbs are a bigger threat to the planet than ISIS, which is a position from which all of the Democrats are operating. They are responding to what happened in Paris more intensely and openly because America and the world need a strong president to emerge from the next election.

A month ago I predicted a Cruz-Rubio ticket. Now that Cruz has overtaken Carson to run neck-and-neck with Trump in the Iowa Quinnipiac University poll, Cruz is looking a lot like a winner. Here are my top 10 reasons to back him.

10. He really knows economics–not the ideologically driven pablum dished out at universities, but the real battlefield of entrenched monopolies against entrepreneurial upstarts. As Asheesh Agarwal and John Delacourt reported in this space, he did a brilliant job at the Federal Trade Commission: “Cruz promoted economic liberty and fought government efforts to rig the marketplace in favor of special interests. Most notably, Cruz launched an initiative to study the government’s role in conspiring with established businesses to suppress e-commerce. This initiative ultimately led the U.S. Supreme Court to open up an entire industry to small e-tailers.” Anyone can propose tax cuts. It takes real know-how to cut through the regulatory kudzu that is strangling America enterprise.

9. He really knows foreign policy. He is a hardline defender of American interests, but wants to keep American politics out of the export business. That’s why neo-conservatives like Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post and Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal keep sliming him. The Bushies started attacking Cruz a year ago, when he stated the obvious about the Bush administration’s great adventure in “democratic globalism”: “I think we stayed too long, and we got far too involved in nation-building….We should not be trying to turn Iraq into Switzerland.” He’s not beholden to the bunglers of the Bush administration, unlike the hapless Marco Rubio.

8. He really knows the political system. As Texas solicitor general, he argued nine cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and won five of them. How many other lawyers in the United States have gone to the Supreme Court nine times on points of Constitutional law? The best write-up I’ve seen on his brilliance as a Constitutional lawyer came from the liberal New Yorker–grudging praise, but praise nevertheless. Some of his legal work was brilliant, displaying a refined understanding of separation of powers and federalism. If you want a president who knows the mechanism of American governance from the inside, there’s no-one else who comes close to Cruz.

More Trump l’oeil from the lout….rsk
‘I have such great respect for The Wall Street Journal and for the people that make up The Wall Street Journal. I have been treated very badly, however, by The Wall Street Journal—and rough. I like your show so much, but between you and Dan, boy, do you kill me,” says Donald Trump, gesticulating with open palms across the boardroom table at editorial-page editor Paul Gigot and columnist Dan Henninger as he eases into his cold-open monologue. “I watch Dan, I watch you just crucify me on Sundays. I mean, it’s like, man, they don’t like me,” he adds. “And honestly, I’ve done a good job. I’m a solid person, I’ve done a good job, I have a lot of common sense. I have a business ability.”

The celebrity billionaire real-estate tycoon turned Republican presidential front-runner has been misjudged and underestimated, not least by us. “I thought I’d come over and if for nothing else, say hey, I do a nice job. So when I listen to Dan just kill me on Sundays, at least I’ll say, well, I tried, OK.”

We on the Journal editorial board would rather cover than participate in the presidential vortex, but then Mr. Trump is a self-reliant phenomenon and the first person is thus unavoidable. Our commentaries in these pages and on our Fox News program have rarely been friendly to Mr. Trump, to put it diplomatically, though we had more immediate reason to wonder if our encounter on Monday would come off as scheduled weeks before.

Last week Mr. Trump went bananas over an editorial—published in print Thursday—that recapped the Republican primary debate and suggested that “it wasn’t obvious that he has any idea what’s in” the Pacific Rim free-trade deal that he reviles. In an early-a.m. tweet storm, Mr. Trump responded that the “dummies” at “the failing @WSJ” are “so wrong, so often” and demanded a retraction and apology. In a cable-TV hit, his second on the topic that day, he ventilated: “They’re third rate. They write so many bad editorials. Whoever the editorial-board top person is—and I think I actually know who the top person is—they ought to resign because they’re incompetent.”

As if we need even more evidence, yesterday Hillary again proved herself incompetent when it comes to dealing with issues of national security, radical Islam, or even Islam in general. In a campaign speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City yesterday, Clinton went to near comical lengths to avoid mentioning “Islam” with “terror” or “terrorism.”

“Let’s be clear,” Clinton said, “Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people, and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Saying Muslims have nothing to do with terrorism is like saying the Clinton’s have nothing to do with corrupt political fundraising.

According to the UK Daily Mail, she even mocked Republicans over the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.” To avoid the use of “Islam,” Clinton repeatedly used the phrase “‘radical jihadism.” Take note of the fact that she assumes that many of us are too stupid to link “jihadism” with Islam. What she’s really doing, evidently being blind to how foolish it makes her appear, is saying, “Look at me! I refuse to say ‘Islam’ when I talk about terrorism! See how tolerant I am!” And, of course, “Vote for me!”

A summary of the rest of her remarks:

Blaming ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ for vicious attacks of the sort that killed 129 people last Friday in Paris, she said, ‘isn’t just a distraction.’ Affiliating them with a religion ‘gives these criminals, these murderers, more standing than they deserve.’

They’re not kidding when they say it’s difficult to hold the White House for three terms in a row. So much depends on the incumbent: Is he deemed a success or a failure? Is he loved or derided? The candidate seeking to replace a president of his own party is betting the country doesn’t want to change. Bush 41 bet correctly — in 1988. Al Gore and John McCain did not.

Hillary Clinton? Her problem was on display Thursday when she presented her anti-ISIS war plan to the Council on Foreign Relations. For ideological and political reasons, she is unable or unwilling to distinguish herself from Obama. If the war against ISIS were going well, her decision would be smart politics. But the war is not going well. The war is a disaster. A growing one, as the Paris attack made clear.

The president is quite the neoliberal — mugged by reality yet refusing to press charges. His approval rating on foreign policy is consistently underwater. Two-thirds of the country say it’s headed in the wrong direction. And yet Clinton’s ISIS strategy is essentially the same as Obama’s. Fierce airstrikes. An “intelligence surge.” Special forces. Pressure the Iraqi government to be nice to its Sunnis. Agree on a diplomatic resolution to the Syrian civil war. “Increased support from our Arab and European partners.” Accept Syrian refugees. Above all, no major deployment of U.S. troops. On ISIS, Clinton is Obama’s prisoner. A willing captive to his strategy. Where it goes, she’ll go.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.

Dear Reader (Including those of you stunned by the news that Charlie Sheen has a sexually transmitted disease. Not since Jim J. Bullock announced he was gay have I been more shocked),

If you Google “Christian terrorism,” you’re probably a jackass to begin with. But if you do — bidden not by your own drive to jackassery but by the natural curiosity inspired by this “news”letter — you’ll find lots of left-wing trollery about how the worst terrorist attacks on American soil have been committed by Christians. Much of it is tendentious, question-begging twaddle. But I really don’t want to waste a lot of time on whether Tim McVeigh was a Christian or not (he really wasn’t).

What I find interesting is that many of the same people who clutch their pearls at the mere suggestion that Islamic terrorism has anything to do with — oh, what’s the word again? — oh right: Islam, seem to have no problem making the case that “Christian terrorism” is like a real thing. Remember how so many liberals loved — loved — Obama’s sophomoric and insidious tirade about not getting on our “high horses” about ISIS’s atrocities in the here and now because medieval Christians did bad things a thousand years ago? They never seem to think that argument through. Leaving out the ass-aching stupidity of the comparison, it actually concedes the very point Obama never wants to concede. By laying the barbaric sins of Christians a thousand years ago at the feet of Christians today, he implicitly tags Muslims with the barbarism committed in their name today.

Now, I see no need to wade too deeply into the theology here, but I think I am on very solid ground when I say that Islamic terrorism draws more easily and deeply from the Koran than Tim McVeigh drew from the Christian Bible. Of course, you’re free to disagree. In a free society, everybody has the right to be wrong in their opinions. (But don’t tell anyone at Yale that.)

As has been made abundantly clear by his incessant mewling and pathetically thin skin, Donald J. Trump is not in fact an unwaveringly resolute tough guy of the type you would hope to find standing next to you in the trenches, but an insecure attention seeker who cannot help but pander to his audiences’ prejudices. In the past few days, Trump has been asked variously whether, if elected, he would use his power to close mosques; whether he believes that Muslims should be registered in a special government database; and whether or not it would be a good idea to suspend the Fourth Amendment for anybody who prays to Allah. In all cases he has either demurred completely or eschewed the more traditional “yes” and “no” categories in favor of some choice hedging. “That may have to be done,” Trump says. “There’s no doubt.” “We’ll look at that.” “We’ll consider all the options.” “We’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely.”

So painful has this tendency become that I have begun to hope his interviewers will get a little surreal, just to see what he says:

“Will you replace your hair with spaghetti and your fingers with soup spoons?”“Sure. We’re going to look at everything.”