RUTHFULLY YOURS

Pseudo-conservative Foreign Policy blogger Max Boot is making the outrageous claim that the entire Republican Party has been taken over by a dangerous racist fringe.

Boot’s insane argument rests on one core contention: that because Republicans tolerate, even like, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a patriot and a truly courageous conservative champion, their party has therefore fallen into the hands of white nationalists. The fact that King isn’t actually a white nationalist or a racist, which is the real thing Boot is accusing the lawmaker of, in no way hinders the writer from making his pitch.

Nor does the unbalanced Boot make any effort to define the term “white nationalism,” presumably because being limited to a rigid definition would make the smear less marketable. Boot’s working definition for the expression appears to approximate, “anything of which I don’t approve.”

Even worse, according to Boot, is the supposed fact that King is similar to President Trump, whom Boot has described as the “No. 1 security threat to the United States today.” He claimed America’s enemies would be emboldened by a Trump presidency. The fact that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are now squirming with Trump in the Oval Office proves Boot wrong.

Reflecting the view of left-wing coastal elites, he described Trump last year as “the most radical and most ignorant major-party presidential candidate in our history.”

Which must be why employment is picking up, consumer confidence is surging, and the stock market is going gangbusters.

Boot is certainly not an apologist for Muslim terrorism but he accepts many of the arguments made by those who do make excuses for it. He pushes the same smears and “Islamophobia” nonsense that the Left habitually deploys, treating Americans’ legitimate concerns about Islam and Muslim immigrants to the country as manifestations of hateful racist bigotry. In at least that way, Boot’s writings bear more than a passing resemblance to those of the arch Israel-hater Max Blumenthal.

For promising to get tough on illegal immigration and making demonstrably true observations about the criminals invading the nation from the south, people like Boot have pilloried Trump as a bigot.

To the Left, mainstream conservatives are regarded as racists and white nationalists because they happen to believe that all lives matter. There is nothing radical or disturbing about opposing illegal immigration and open borders.

Yet on these issues Max Boot sides with the Left.

In a recent Foreign Policy screed titled, “The GOP Is America’s Party of White Nationalism,” Boot declared that “[t] he list of King’s asinine, bigoted, and offensive words and acts is too long to recount.”

For what it’s worth, Foreign Policy is a veritable hotbed of sedition and a stronghold of the Deep State that is now trying to overthrow President Trump.

Rosa Brooks was Counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy from 2009 to 2011. She openly advocated the assassination of President Trump at the magazine’s website. Like Boot, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2006-2007 she was Special Counsel to the President at George Soros’s Open Society Institute in New York.

Boot continues attacking King:

But here’s the thing. It’s not really possible anymore to dismiss him “as a fringe player in legitimate policy debates,” as the New York Times notes that many Republicans would like to do. That may have been true at one time, in the days when the Republican Party was defined by Reagan. But those days are long past.

Today it’s Donald Trump’s party, and there is not much breathing room between King and Trump when it comes to white nationalism. Indeed, after initially supporting Ted Cruz in last year’s primaries, King has become an avid Trump supporter.

The echoes between the two men — the Iowa contractor-turned-congressman and the New York real estate magnate-turned-president — are uncanny and disturbing.

To vilify King and Trump, Boot resorts to lying.

“In 2013, King said most immigrants were ‘drug mules,’” Boot writes. King never said that. After speaking with Border Patrol agents, King concluded that some or most illegal immigrants streaming across the border were “drug mules.”

In a Newsmax interview at the time, King seemed to anticipated Boot’s smear.

“There isn’t anyone that can fairly characterize me as anti-immigrant,” he said.

That’s a label that the open-borders people have tossed around. They’re conflating the terms anti-illegal immigrant and anti-immigrant as if it were the terms healthcare and health insurance. They did that in order to pass Obamacare. Now, they’re conflating anti-immigrant with anti-illegal immigration to pass amnesty.

What the congressman describes is exactly the kind of linguistic sleight-of-hand the Left has been performing for decades.

These people don’t talk about “illegal aliens” or even “illegal immigrants,” if they can help it. They prefer to blur the lines by calling both lawful immigrants and illegal aliens simply “immigrants.” What kind of a monster could oppose immigrants? That way when someone calls for any kind of crackdown on illegals, they can play the Hitler card and accuse that person of being a xenophobic, racist, immigrant-hater. The smear had been working fairly well until Donald Trump launched his candidacy last year.

Boot likens King’s statement to Trump’s “infamous claim” at the outset of his candidacy, that Mexicans were “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Of course Trump’s statement was obviously true. Many of the illegal aliens who come to the U.S. from Mexico are criminals.

Boot writes that “King said in 2010 that racial profiling is an important law enforcement tool.” King did say that on the House floor but he also said racial profiling is only one of many tools that should be used. He criticized the Obama administration for self-righteously refusing to use race as a factor when hunting down suspects.

Would we say that we can’t use [race] as an indicator when it comes time to enforce the law against international terrorism that a young Middle Eastern male cannot be considered as one of the factors? We’ve kind of said that when people go through the airport. I think it’s wrong. I think it’s foolish. And in fact, Mr. Speaker, I think it’s downright stupid to set aside our common sense for the sake of political correctness.

Trump, according to Boot, “endorsed broad racial profiling after the Orlando, Florida, [Muslim terrorist] attack, calling it “common sense.” Trump didn’t say that. He said that authorities have to use the tools available to them. “I am saying you’re going to profile people that maybe look suspicious.”

The fact that Trump was elected president is, fortunately, proof that the “racist” smear no longer carries the sting it used to in American politics.

Boot writes that in 2008 “King questioned how a president with the middle name Hussein would play in the war on terror.” The last eight years have proven that a Muslim sympathizer named Barack Hussein Obama couldn’t be trusted to prosecute the war on terror.

After the Orlando attack, Boot writes, “Trump questioned the president’s commitment to fighting terrorists by seemingly suggesting his loyalties could be compromised.” Again, the last eight years are eloquent testimony that Obama loyalties were compromised.

How Boot, who is a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, got a reputation for being a conservative is unclear. It’s obvious from his own statements he’s not.

He wrote before the election that Trump’s “proclivity for embracing falsehoods and denying reality suggest that he is, literally, uneducable,” which makes him “the most terrifying potential president that we have ever seen.”

Democrat Hillary Clinton is “at least rational,” he writes.

But the Clinton he describes is a fantasy. Boot calls the butcher of Benghazi who bungled the Russian reset “a centrist Democrat” who is “far more principled and knowledgeable about foreign affairs than Trump.”

There is virtually no such thing as a centrist Democrat anymore, at least not in the United States Congress. No one who voted for Obamacare, the nationalization of one-sixth of the U.S. economy, may be called centrist.

Boot despises conservatives. He claims the GOP was “wounded by the tea party absolutists who insisted on political purity and rejected any compromise.” He rejects what he calls “the extreme, holier-than-thou conservatism represented by Ted Cruz.”

He praises Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), bizarrely claiming that the savior of Obamacare somehow “represent[s] Reaganesque conservatism.”

Trump, by contrast, “is an ignorant demagogue who traffics in racist and misogynistic slurs” and “wants to undertake a police-state roundup of undocumented immigrants and to bar Muslims from coming to this country.”

Boot isn’t the only hardcore Never Trumper working in the “think” magazine community.

Like Foreign Policy, National Review is a hotbed of Never Trump sentiment.

David French drew a moral equivalence there between Trump and Hillary Clinton a year ago.

There’s no real difference in character between the two. They lie as easily as they breathe: habitually, transparently, shamelessly. Hillary lies like a lawyer, always parsing her words to provide a legal escape route. Trump lies like a thug, contradicting himself with each successive breath and daring anyone to call him on it. They both seek to destroy their political opponents, and they’d probably both wield the levers of power to do so and to reward their friends. In other words, they’re both fundamentally corrupt.

Recently French has at least had the decency to admit President Trump has done some good things. In office, Trump is “less authoritarian than Obama” and has been “signaling that the executive branch intends to become less intrusive in American life and more accountable to internal and external critique,” he writes.

Deep State operative Evan McMullin accused Trump of racism and Islamophobia on the campaign trail, the facts be damned. “A real conservative, when they see somebody else being attacked for their religion or because of their race, a real conservative will stand up and protect other people,” he told a Utah audience.

McMullin would be right if Trump were targeting a race or a religion, but he’s not.

McMullin’s lunatic rants against Trump have only intensified since the real estate magnate took the oath of office. McMullin is the former CIA employee whose spoiler presidential candidacy was promoted by fanatical Never Trumper Bill Kristol.

After the election when an audience of kooks hailed Trump’s approaching presidency with Hitler salutes, this Energizer Bunny of smear merchants argued such limited incidents coupled with other dubious evidence such as David Duke’s embrace of Trump somehow proved the Republican standard-bearer was a racist and a fascist. “Organized white supremacists[’] … role as an active segment of Trump’s support base raises questions about the influence they’ll have in his administration,” McMullin wrote in an op-ed Nov. 23 in The Hill newspaper.

Everyone knows a candidate doesn’t get to choose his supporters and it’s not like the American Bund has risen from the ashes to support Trump. Besides, for all we know, the slippery McMullin bought and paid for the neo-Nazi gathering in hopes of fueling the false narrative.

Last summer before his mentor, Kristol, completely lost his marbles, the Weekly Standard founder complained about Trump-bashing. “I’m not a Trump fan, I don’t think he should be the Republican nominee, but it’s ridiculous,” Kristol said in a radio interview.

“It’s very, very foolish if the Republican establishment or the Republican candidates treat him with disdain instead of saying, you know what, good to have more voices, good to have some unconventional voices in the race.”

But Kristol’s good-natured open-mindedness didn’t last. By September last year he was bashing Trump vowing never to vote for him. “I just think he has such bad character.”

The increasingly unhinged Kristol indicated this past Valentine’s Day that he preferred dictatorship to Trump’s presidency. “Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics,” he tweeted, “[b]ut if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state.”

He ripped Trump’s inauguration speech as “depressing and vulgar.” The week before that, when civil-rights has-been Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) was smearing Trump and vowing to boycott the inauguration festivities and Trump was fighting back, Kristol dissed the president-elect. “It’s telling, I’m afraid, that Donald Trump treats Vladimir Putin with more respect than he does John Lewis,” he tweeted.

Boot and people like Kristol and McMullin are all in the same camp now. Given their disdain for President Trump and mainstream conservatives like Steve King whom they smear as racists, maybe they should start their own political party.