RUTHFULLY YOURS

Las Vegas, Nev. — For years, Ronnie Najarro was a sports anchor at the local Univision affiliate in Las Vegas. He joined the station as a college intern and rose to become sports anchor and then host of the news special “8 Rounds con Oscar de la Hoya,” which won an Emmy in 2007.

He was laid off amidst the economic recession in 2008.

Last week, on a warm Thursday morning, Najarro was dropping in on volunteers with the Libre Initiative who were manning tables at a handful of Vegas-area colleges. Brochures, bracelets, sunglasses, and pens were spread across the tables. They were recruiting attendees for a policy forum with Jeb Bush set to take place this Wednesday. It was billed as an opportunity “for the Hispanic community and others to pose questions about key issues to an influential policymaker.”

“How’s it going?” Najarro asks. He’s the group’s regional press secretary.

Were an alien visitor to these United States to have picked up a newspaper this morning, he would presumably have been surprised to see which political topics were at present under discussion. There are just twelve months until the United States hosts an open presidential election — an election that will most likely determine the future of Obamacare, of the Supreme Court, and of America’s place in the world — and yet, to look across today’s buzzing media landscape is to wonder if anybody has yet noticed. On CNN, MSNBC, and Fox; in The Atlantic, the Times, and the Journal; and across talk radio, social media, and the broader political blogosphere, Americans are happily relitigating a host of fractious questions that were last debated in earnest in the fall of 2008. Among them: “Was the last Republican president responsible for the worst attack on American soil since the bombing at Pearl Harbor?”; “Should the U.S. military have been sent into Iraq or been focused instead on Afghanistan, the ‘good’ post-9/11 war?”; and “Is the current state of the Middle East the fault of local actors or of the United States?”

These are not the conversations the GOP was looking for.

Hillary Clinton’s Enabler-in-Chief
It’s an ancient story: An innocent idealist sets out to change the world and in the process becomes what he hates most. “He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche advised.

That’s probably the best spin one can put on Sidney Blumenthal, the longtime Hillary Rodham Clinton aide and confidant. But it would be just that — spin — given that Blumenthal was never an idealist, never mind an innocent. He has remained the same man he was in 1976, when he co-edited Government by Gunplay: Assassination Conspiracy Theories from Dallas to Today. Other contributors to the paranoid collection included renowned JFK assassination conspiracy theorist Carl Oglesby and former CIA officer Philip Agee, who was giving information to the KGB and Cuban intelligence at the time.

Maybe Carly Fiorina feels like singing Carly Simon’s “That’s the way I’ve always heard it should be”. In other words, Mrs Fiorina cannot be happy with where she stands in the polls.

You may remember that she was the upcoming candidate a month ago. Her performance in that Fox News debate propelled her to the first team in the CNN debate. Everything was about Carly and how Carly would be facing Hillary sometime soon.

I will confess that I was always skeptical, in large part because presidential campaigns are not for people who’ve never run for any kind of office or won an election. Dwight Eisenhower was the exception but the landscape was very unique in 1952 for such a candidacy. Also, General Eisenhower had just won World War II and millions of Americans were connected to him because of that experience.

Again, the polls are not working for Mrs Fiorina. The latest RCP average of polls has Mrs Fiorina at 5.6%. The very latest CNN poll has her at 4%.