RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The world will respect us like never before?” Do you respect Donald Trump tonight like never before?

The personal attacks that have worked so well for Donald Trump these past few weeks fell flat tonight. Trump didn’t get this at first, and even threw out a gratuitous insult or two mid-debate. Gradually, however, Trump woke up to the fact that crass wasn’t working anymore. By the time Carly Fiorina took him down, we’d crossed into new territory. Trump looked small and ugly.

Is this the guy who’s going to make America great again?

I’m sympathetic to the frustration with the GOP establishment, and with the overall direction of the country, that are feeding the Trump phenomenon. But I don’t think Trump is the answer. After this debate, I don’t think voters are going to see him as the answer either.

Simi Valley, Calif. — The skills that make a good president aren’t necessarily demonstrable on a debate stage. But a candidate must be elected, which means being able to win some debates.

On Wednesday evening, a consensus formed quickly: Florida senator Marco Rubio and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina had emerged victorious.

In the spin-room scrum that followed, some were quick to voice their objections. “A good performance doesn’t mean you’re a solid conservative,” said former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, who is supporting the rumpled and prickly Ohio governor, John Kasich.

It’s true. Success on the debate stage doesn’t require passing a test of ideological purity or managerial competence; it demands qualities that are easy to identify and hard to define: charisma, stage presence, self-possession. Underlying these “winning” traits is usually some even-more-elusive mix of appearance, body language, voice control, eye contact, style, humor, temperament, and message.

There is a tragic monotony to the latest massive human migration, this one involving Syrians fleeing their war-torn country.

Whether the migrants are from Mexico, the Islamic world, or elsewhere, it is always the same: Migrants flock to the West.

Mexicans who elect to leave their country do not hop trains to Guatemala. Fleeing Libyans do not head for the Congo. And Syrians do not go to Russia or China.

Migrants — many of them young men — come in such numbers that Western immigration laws are often rendered null and void. Western nations tend to apply their exacting immigration laws only to the much smaller number of immigrants who obey the law.

Sometimes the exoduses are due to endemic poverty, usually brought on by the utter failure of non-Western governments to provide jobs, security, and basic social services. Sometimes tribal, religious, or drug wars cause the exoduses.

“ . . . they went up on the breadth of the Earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and the fire came down from God out of heaven and devoured them.” – Revelation 20:9

It’s curious how often life imitates art. Germany recently won plaudits from the world’s elites when it announced it would accept 800,000 Muslim “refugees [1]” this year. There have been some cold feet in Berlin since then, but it’s probably too late. The hordes are on their way. Per Jean Rean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of Saints [2], on an Easter weekend with an old professor watching an armada of rotting ships steaming slowly up to the coast of the Riviera:

On this Easter Sunday evening, eight hundred thousand living beings, and thousands of dead ones, were making their peaceful assault on the Western World. Tomorrow it would all be over.

The Camp of the Saints tells the story of the destruction of European civilization (including its outpost in the United States), partly by a flood of unassimilable wretches from India, partly by a failure of nerve on the part of the custodians of European civilization. The choice, Respail noted in an afterword, was stark:

To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them.

Here’s my 10-minute summary of the CNN Republican debate (which should have been renamed the CNN-Pssst-did-you-hear-that-nasty-thing-one-Republican-said-about-another-Republican debate):

The Winners:

Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina were the two standouts in Wednesday’s debate.

Rubio brought an appealing mix of the common touch and tough talk on foreign policy to the debate stage. Unlike some other candidates, he didn’t seem like he was elbowing his way into the debate, so it “felt” like he was a featured speaker. He sounded like the grownup in the room when he tussled with Trump on foreign policy. Trump grimaced and rolled his eyes, but offered no substantive rebuttal. Rubio has a nice way of dispensing with an opponent without sounding angry.

Fiorina was smart and scrappy. Her Planned Parenthood screed was fantastic. She rightly redirected the focus away from the faux “women’s healthcare” straw man (straw woman?) to the real issue of Planned Parenthood selling chopped-up babies. Other candidates ought to take note. Carly does need to soften her edges a bit because she tends to dial it up to harsh and stay there.

Middle of the Pack:

Ted Cruz was brilliant and in command of the facts (despite the fact that Jake Tapper cut him off at nearly every pass). It occurred to me that Mike Huckabee could do a great service to his country by dropping out of the race and coaching Cruz on the common touch. Cruz’s talking points are spot on, but he is missing warmth and the ability to connect on a personal level.

Mike Huckabee’s shining moment was his defense of religious liberty. He noted that GITMO prisoners are afforded more religious accommodations than county clerks in Kentucky. He has a point.

Chris Christie also had a good night and he landed some solid blows in Trump’s direction. But he was crowded out by Carly and Rubio, so viewers will likely only remember his “You kids stop fighting or I’ll pull this debate over!” moment when he told Carly and Trump to knock it off.

The international left wasted no time in using the below tragic image as fodder for the multiculturalism/open borders war, suggesting that somehow the West’s reluctance to provide safe haven for potentially every human being on the planet is responsible for the death of this 3-year-old boy and the other displaced people with whom he was traveling.

The reason these people left their homes is not in dispute. They were fleeing ISIS and their trademark hellish barbarism. Why is there an ISIS? Because our president is determined to create an Islamic counterbalance to perceived Western hegemony.

Europe and America are too strong, and they achieved their success on the backs of the oppressed peoples of the world, most notably the peaceful Islamic peoples of the Middle East. So goes the narrative.

If there were only some political construct that could unite the oppressed Islamists in a sort of “pan-Arabic Islamic Union,” then the Muslims of the world could take their place among the economic privileged of the world, functioning like an Islamic version of the European Union, or our NAFTA, eliminating their need to lash out in acts of barbarity that (of course!) can be fueled only by their righteous anger at their exploitation by the Western powers.

This is the Arab Spring, folks. It has never been a democracy movement, nor is it a cry for self-government; it is a movement to replace largely secular non-Islamist governments with fully Islamist theocratic regimes that will eventually fall under the umbrella of a restored caliphate, led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

For those who thought the idea of importing 10,000 “Syrian refugees” was bad enough and who feared the number would go even higher, it just did.Much, much higher.

Per Bloomberg:

Wednesday at the White House, the most senior national security officials will discuss raising the limit on the number of refugees from around the world allowed to enter the United States — from 70,000 this year to 85,000 next year and 100,000 in fiscal 2017, three administration officials told me. If members of the National Security Council Principals Committee agree on the plan, it will be sent to President Obama’s desk, and administration sources say he is likely to quickly approve it.

Got that? Obama wants to import 250,000 more Muslims in the next two years. And what better cover than to appear compassionate and compelled to act after seeing “images of children washing up on European shores”? The talking point is that these images “spurred the Obama administration into action” to ensure we take in “our fair share.”

Obama must be frothing at the mouth to have this excuse to flood the United States with more Muslims. Because it is an excuse and nothing more since we know full well that as Christians in the Middle East have been kidnapped, raped, enslaved, and murdered in all manner of horrific ways, Obama has not been “spurred” to action.

Substance only appeared after Christie, to his credit, chided the moderator for spending so much time on spats among Rand Paul, Kasich, Bush, Fiorina and the Trump….CNN questions became virtually irrelevant as Rubio, Christie and Fiorina stepped up the debate and the substance….rsk
Candidates fielded questions ranging from immigration and national security to the economy.

Attitude met substance on a California debate stage Wednesday night. And if substance didn’t win, it at least made a comeback.

For two months, the Republican presidential race has been dominated by Donald Trump, whose approach has been to boast about his leadership style—“I’m a winner, I’ll negotiate great deals”—while skirting past detailed policy discussions.

The remainder of the field was left fuming, talking about Mr. Trump and seeing media coverage flow his way. What they weren’t doing was talking about their agendas.

That changed in the debate at the Reagan presidential library in California. While many of the questions posed by the CNN moderators began with a recitation of comments Mr. Trump has made, which left him still at the center of the conversation, his competitors managed to launch a conversation that, for the first time in weeks, got beyond the Trump orbit.

Frustration, anger, despair. Allow life’s negatively charged emotions to run free long enough and they all arrive at the same place—madness. We are there.Or many of us are, in the U.S. and all over a troubled world.

Some 30% of Republican voters want as their president the former host of “Celebrity Apprentice.” About the same percentage of Democrats prefer a 74-year-old Socialist who seems to believe federal revenue is created by pixies.

The British Labour Party just cast its lot with a leader whose choice for finance minister includes among his interests “fomenting the overthrow of capitalism.” A torrent of Syrian refugees has unhinged European liberalism. Islamic State is drowning history itself in blood, while the pope is giving speeches on climate change.

Not least, the future of the slow-growth, anxiety-producing American economy is in the hands of one nice lady named Janet Yellen, who presides over what is literally a central-bank black box. Crazy.

A friend last weekend said he thought the story about the University of New Hampshire’s website publishing a bias-free language guide, which declared that use of the word “American” is “problematic,” was a hoax. Of course, it was real.

Is it trivial of me to conflate campus microaggression theory with Islamic State’s barbarism? I don’t think so. Because it is when people start to conclude that all of this stuff has rolled into a huge, spinning, out-of-control ball of incomprehension that it becomes madness.

American politics among both parties is in a grim temper, and the new estimates of income and poverty for 2014 that the Census Bureau published on Wednesday help explain why. The report is a portrait of economic stagnation.

Real median household income—the exact halfway point of the earnings distribution—was statistically identical to the 2013 median. The $53,657 for 2014 follows two consecutive years of decline in 2011 and 2012 and remains 6.5% lower than the median in 2007. About the only indicator of well being that hasn’t declined in the Obama recovery are measures of income inequality.

These trends would be less worrisome were there more mobility over time, but the Census data suggest that fewer people are moving up the pay ladder compared to earlier periods. Some 57.1% of households were cemented in the same income quintile between 2009 and 2012.