RUTHFULLY YOURS

Conservative luminaries have been warning that Donald Trump poses a threat to the Republican party and to the political future of conservativism. Charles Krauthammer has called him “political poison.” Fred Barnes says Trump has “made the GOP’s future dicey.” George Will thunders characteristically that “every sulfurous belch from the molten interior of the volcanic Trump phenomenon injures the chances of a Republican presidency.”

All this may be true. Trump is indeed a braggart who goes out of his way to antagonize people — not a winning approach in electoral politics. And he’s shown little real commitment to conservative principles — or principles of any other kind, for that matter.

But Trump is not the long-term problem faced by the Right. Ramesh Ponnuru’s assurance regarding Trump that “this too shall pass” may be underestimating Trump’s staying power, but at some point he will pass.

But if mass legal immigration is permitted to continue, the Right is finished regardless of what Trump does or says.

ew e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private server released late Monday night by the State Department reveal the increasingly nasty tone and tactics deployed by her shadow adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, with the close Clinton confidant blasting Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, savaging Republican leader John Boehner, and suggesting ways to impeach African-American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Though President Obama banned Clinton from bringing Blumenthal into her State Department coterie, the latest tranche of private e-mails from 2010 released Monday by the department illustrates the extent to which Clinton relied on Blumenthal for political and diplomatic advice. From the conflict in Northern Ireland to Israel to the U.S. midterm elections, Blumenthal was intimately involved in some of the most sensitive topics that crossed Clinton’s desk that year.

The former prosecutor who let Petraeus slide weighs in on the e-mail scandal.

Well, well, well: The Obama-appointed prosecutor who gave Obama’s former CIA director a sweetheart plea deal when he was caught mishandling classified information now says there’s no case against Obama’s former secretary of state for mishandling classified information. How very persuasive.

Oh, and did I mention that the Obama-appointed prosecutor is a donor to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign?

In what appears to be an audition for attorney general in a hoped-for Clinton II administration, Anne M. Tompkins, the former U.S. attorney for the western district of North Carolina (appointed by President Obama in 2010), has penned an op-ed for USA Today arguing that Hillary Clinton is not guilty of “knowingly sending or receiving classified materials improperly.”

Understand: Ms. Tompkins has had nothing to do with the FBI’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information through an unauthorized private e-mail system. She is not privy to the evidence the FBI is gathering — she knows no more about the case than anyone else who reads the papers. To exonerate Clinton, she relies on nothing other than her status as the government lawyer who oversaw the prosecution of David Petraeus.

The Petraeus case, she insists, was much stronger than the case — or at least what she frames as the case — against Hillary Clinton. She thus contends that there is “no merit” to the comparison between the Petraeus and Clinton situations offered in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by former Bush attorney general and top federal judge Michael Mukasey.

Trump is political street theater. If voters want a rant, they will get it from Trump. If they want solutions with substance they can get that from Ted Cruz, Rubio. Walker, Fiorina. ….rsk

Donald Trump has at least three things going for him.

One, the mood of the country remains foul and fed-up — and volatile to the point that conventional wisdom is hardly reliable. Two, Trump has turned invective and narcissism into an art form, and his simplistic putdowns seem to garner ever more attention even as they become more monotonous and banal — largely because they are directed at a despised media elite. Three, the Democratic party is in worse shape than the Republican party. Apparently Trump’s attacks can still safely be savored as long as the Democrats are imploding.

Trump’s successes have come about not because of a brilliant new Contract with America or because he is reassuringly conservative on the issues. His diehard supporters — and even those who would never confess that they derive a perverse and stealthy delight from watching him put down the New York/Washington political and journalistic elite — don’t care that just in the last decade he has flipped on all the issues. They apparently ignore the fact that Trump is often self-contradictory, as he wings his way through endless interviews and blustery press conferences.

Those putting party over country try to conceal their votes from the public.

Democratic senators supporting President Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran are cowards. They know that a majority of Americans oppose the deal. Thus, they are running for cover to avoid going on the record and voting against a resolution disapproving the deal. A filibuster to block a vote on the merits altogether is the Democratic Senate caucus’s preferred way out.

The White House is reportedly pushing the filibuster strategy even though Obama is virtually certain to have enough votes to sustain a veto of a resolution of disapproval passed by both houses of Congress. Two-thirds votes are required in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to override an Obama veto. But if Obama can get out of using his veto pen and expending political capital to sustain it, he is all too happy to hide behind the filibuster fig leaf.

So far only two Democratic senators have declared their opposition to the deal – New York’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, and New Jersey’s senior senator, Robert Menendez. Assuming they both would vote with the Republican majority to end a filibuster, four additional votes would be needed to reach the magic closure number of 60 and allow the resolution to proceed to a floor vote. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is doing what he can to corral enough support among his fellow Democrats to prevent the closure number from being reached.

Even black voters, Obama’s most enthusiastic base, split on the deal 39 to 38 percent.
Obama’s case for the Iran deal has gotten tangled up in his own lies. He’s claiming that the Iran deal will give Iran near zero breakout time to the bomb and that it will “permanently” stop it from developing a bomb. He claims that the deal is rigorous and yet we’ve learned that Iran will be doing at least some self-inspections.

The poll numbers for the deal keep getting worse. Some Democrats have done the responsible thing by coming out against the deal.

Obama’s associates have tried to portray opponents as Republicans, Iraq War supporters and chickenhawks, but as Senator Webb, a member of his own party, a Vietnam vet who was against the Iraq War, said, “I think it’s a bad deal and I’ve said so for several weeks now. I think we need to put country ahead of party.”

But Democrats refuse to do that. Instead they’re putting Obama over party. They’re even putting Obama over their own constituents, as Nadler did, betraying his voters who have made it very clear that they oppose the deal.

You can never be equal if you’re always angry and afraid. There is a war on black people.

You hear about it from powerless black men like Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Al Sharpton. Black people can hardly leave the house without being shot by a cop for no reason at all. That’s what you hear from the activists of #BlackLivesMatter who illustrate the point by blocking traffic, harassing white people in restaurants and shoving elderly Democratic presidential candidates… without getting shot.

Black racist activists and their white leftist allies like to talk up “White Fragility” which means that white people are used to sitting down for brunch without having fat black women yell in their faces about genocide. Or as the official definition would have it, white people are so insulated from critical dialogues about race that they get upset when those women, who are actually working on their PhDs in critical race theory, loudly accuse them of white supremacy.

Secretary of State John Kerry said today at an Arctic conference in Anchorage that “anybody running for any high office in any nation in the world” should visit a place where the “seismic challenge” of climate change is happening “and inform themselves about this.”

“And we as leaders of countries will begin to witness what we call climate refugees moving – you think migration is a challenge to Europe today because of extremism, wait until you see what happens when there’s an absence of water, an absence of food, or one tribe fighting against another for mere survival,” Kerry told the Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement, and Resilience (GLACIER) Conference.

“We are hardly the first generation in human history to face uncertainty about the future. Seventy-five years ago, our predecessors faced a world that was literally engulfed by strife, where seemingly all of Europe was overrun by evil, and civilization itself seemed to be in peril. We had leaders then who rose to that occasion, and we have all seen a world that is better for what came out of it with the United Nations and multilateralism and commitments to humanitarian and other missions,” he said.

A new trove of Hillary Clinton emails released by the State Department tonight includes scathing opinions about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from close confidante Sidney Blumenthal — and an agreement in internet slang from Hillary.

Blumenthal was an aide to President Clinton and has been a longtime loyalist of the Clinton family, so fiercely loyal that he wasn’t welcome in any State Department position in the Obama administration. He went to work for the Clinton Foundation and has been subpoenaed by the House Select Committee on Benghazi to testify about his communication with Clinton in his time period.

His analysis, suggestions and advice show up regularly in the official State Department correspondence conducted on Clinton’s private email server.

A number of the latest emails from 2010 center on the Gaza flotilla raid. Israeli commandos boarded the “Freedom Flotilla” to force the ships to port for inspection. A few dozen of the hundreds on board fought the commandos; 10 activists were killed and 10 of the Israeli commandos were wounded.

The unmistakable signs of a disaster from which we would all suffer, the fall of the once-greatest nation on earth, have left me “shaken.”

I have never been partial to doomsday scenarios. End-of-the-world prophecies always seem to leave their proponents in the throes of revisionary confusion, manically adjusting their calculations and hoping to get it right the next time, and the time after that, ad vomitatum. Mark Biltz [2] and John Hagee [3] have belabored the blood moon event, but lunar tetrads of no overwhelming significance have occurred before. Population gurus promise mass starvation while the food supply defiantly increases. Flood experts inform us that the entire eastern seaboard will soon be under water but ocean levels remain insolently stable. Global warmists predict an atmospheric inferno while the temperature refuses to comply and the next Ice Age gradually but inexorably approaches. And so it goes.

Real threats to our wellbeing and even existence—a wayward asteroid, an EMP attack neutralizing the electrical grid, or the cultural debacle of unrestricted Islamic immigration—are exigencies that can be met, given the mental alertness and political will to prepare for and defuse them. Doomsday scripts and warnings are another matter, figments of the realm of theological speculation or pathological fantasy. Yet one must always allow for a possible exception to the general rule, if only to avoid the intellectual rigidity of epistemic and ideological dogmatism.