RUTHFULLY YOURS

The overcard Fox News debate was amusing to watch. Did anyone win? I don’t know. Trump is in the lead in the Drudge poll, but Frank Luntz’s focus group vilified him (not Drudge readers, apparently). They liked Huckabee and Ben Carson, who gave a beguiling closing speech. I suspect the Republican masses may have been turned off by Trump’s refusal to pledge no third-party run, but we’ll need a day or two to find out. I have to confess I am beginning to find him a bit tedious, like a vaudeville act that repeats one too many times.

But who knows how I and anyone else will feel tomorrow? That’s the odd nature of these campaigns. They swing so fast. Your opinions keep changing — especially because the policy distinctions between the many candidates are relatively small. (Marco Rubio said during the debate the Republicans were blessed by God to have so many good candidates while the Democrats didn’t even have one.) Style and feeling count more than we think. Most of our reactions to candidates are instinctual. There’s a great quote reflecting this from Hugo von Hofmannsthal above the desk of my friend writer David Freeman: ”Politics is magic. He who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow.”

Several in the media have speculated that Trump is somehow connected to Clinton in his decision to campaign as a Republican.

Now WaPo confirms it:

Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire investor and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House, according to associates of both men.

Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.

It all makes sense. Only recently did he self-identify as a Democrat and donate a lot of money to them and contribute around a $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Imagine if Jeb had done that! So why does Trump get away with it? Maybe because he “tells it like it is!” (whatever the two “its” mean), and he’s “refreshing.”

WASHINGTON – Donald Trump stole some of the biggest moments of the night in Thursday night’s GOP presidential debate, but his flap with Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly on insulting women may backfire, political observers say.

In the opening, Kelly repeated comments Trump had made about women: “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals” and asked whether that’s the temperament of a president.

Trump brushed them off, joking they were directed at Rosie O’Donnell.

But when Kelly pushed back that Trump had gone “well beyond” the comedian, he said maybe he shouldn’t treat her so nicely.

“Trump’s spat with Megyn Kelly was stomach turning and will haunt Trump in commercials,” said RC Hammond, former spokesman for Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign. “Start the speculation of what the stage would have been like with Carly Fiorina.”

Katie Packer Gage, Mitt Romney’s former deputy campaign manager, said Trump fell short.

“Trump is Trump,” Gage said. “Bloviating blowhard. He’s on defense and isn’t giving solid answers to back up his ideas. Bluster isn’t a plan.”

Despite the administration’s arrogance and incompetence, we still have options.
In defending his nuclear deal with Iran in his speech at American University on Wednesday, President Obama resorted to a familiar strawman. Congress, he said, is faced with a decision: Either accept the agreement as negotiated, or go to war.

In addition to presenting this false choice, the president personally attacked the motives of anyone who differs with him, and he accompanied the attack with outrageous hyperbole. His description of the Iran accord as “the strongest nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated” is not just wrong; it’s demonstrably absurd.

One would have thought the president’s staff would have warned him against stating such an obvious falsehood. Someone in his entourage must be aware of the 2003 agreement with Libya that resulted both in anywhere/anytime inspections and in the total elimination of Qaddafi’s uranium-enrichment program. All associated nuclear equipment, hundreds of metric tons of it, as well as Libya’s longer-range ballistic missiles, were loaded on a ship and taken to the United States. But perhaps President Obama’s staff, which includes many individuals with more experience running political campaigns than dealing with national-security matters, is not aware of the facts — a condition that would help explain many of the other foreign-policy blunders of this administration.

If you want to irritate promoters of the Clean Power Plan, just state the obvious: It’s going to increase electricity prices, and that will be bad for the poor and the middle class.

Last Monday, I made that very point during an interview on KPCC radio in Los Angeles, (“Air Talk with Larry Mantle”). My counterpart was David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a group that has pushed hard for the Clean Power Plan. After I pointed out that electricity prices in Europe had soared due to renewable-energy mandates, Doniger replied with something to the effect that I should not be using “scare stories” that are a “decade old.”

Doniger’s reply was hardly surprising. The claque that’s pushing the Clean Power Plan — the White House, the wind lobby, the solar lobby, NRDC, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Sierra Club — don’t want to admit that it will probably increase costs for the poor and the middle class. On Monday, the White House even published an article on its website that declared, “The most cynical claim is that EPA’s plan will harm minority and low-income communities.”

We’ve been here before.

Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said a while ago that an Iran deal would be the health-care bill of President Barack Obama’s second term, and he was right.

Like Obamacare, the Iran deal represents an ideological fixation of the president’s; it is unpopular; and it will get through Congress — or to be more exact, avoid disapproval by Congress — by sheer partisan force.

When Obama mounted a defense of the deal in a speech at American University, it was aimed less at public persuasion — never a strength of his during the Obamacare debate — than base mobilization as he seeks to hold the Democrats he will need to sustain a veto of a resolution of disapproval.

How else to explain a speech that chastised opponents for their “strident” rhetoric at the same time it contended that Iranian hard-liners “are making common cause with the Republican caucus,” a juvenile little jab worthy of a Daily Kos diarist?

For years, we’ve heard Obama say that all options are on the table in forcing the Iranians to “end their nuclear program.” But he believed in having all options on the table about as much as he opposed gay marriage. Saying that he didn’t rule out military options was all about buying time until he could turn around and say, in effect, that a bad deal is better than all military options.

When a bank gets robbed, is it now the Justice Department’s practice to let the suspect hold on to the money while the FBI does its investigation?

According to the Washington Examiner, the Justice Department has still not seized the Clinton server and at least one thumb-drive copy of its contents even though government officials have conceded that national-defense secrets are stored on them. Former secretary of state Clinton apparently still has the server, while the thumb drive is reportedly in the possession of her private lawyer, David Kendall.

Remarkably, although these private parties are being permitted to maintain custody of classified information, the State Department has denied the intelligence community’s inspector general access to Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails — at least, the 30,000 or so she finally deigned to surrender.

This was the most entertaining debate I’ve seen, but there was no additional light shed on the candidates’ views on immigration.

The issue came up early, but both the questions and the answers were predictable. Everybody’s against illegal immigration. Everybody wants better border enforcement. Everybody’s against sanctuary cities and pretty young women being killed by illegal-alien felons protected by commies in San Francisco.

Trump claimed that “if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even be talking about illegal immigration.” This is Trumpishly exaggerated, of course, but if you de-Trumpize the comment, he’s right – without his grabbing the issue (and then being vindicated by Kate Steinle’s death shortly afterwards), the public anxiety about the issue would not be on the front burner. But when pressed on his ridiculous assertion that the Mexican government is intentionally sending criminals north (like Castro did during the Mariel boatlift, seems to be the idea), all he could offer by way of evidence is that some guys he met at the border told him so.

Of the 10 Republicans in Thursday’s debate, none was harder to explain than Donald Trump. It’s not that he isn’t a serious candidate. It’s that he was on the wrong stage, with the wrong people, at the wrong time.

Republicans have been working for the past decade to reconstruct a movement that collapsed in the mid-2000s as a result of laziness and loss of principle. It has been a wrenching process, full of tea-party uprisings and bitter primaries, uninspired presidential candidacies and blown elections, policy setbacks and government shutdowns. Still, the number of triumphs has been growing. The Republicans’ hold over governorships and takeover of the Senate, their new faces and new ideas, and their brimming presidential field all are signs that the Republican electorate has grown more thoughtful about the political process—and more demanding of smart, principled conservatives.

There was never any mistaking the aura of confident superiority from the host of ‘The Daily Show.’

It comes as no surprise that the end of Jon Stewart’s reign at Comedy Central should occasion a flow of testimonials fit for a revered leader. All that’s missing are the floral tributes in the streets. Long before word of Mr. Stewart’s departure was in the air, the reverential status he enjoyed as combination show host, news commentator and disseminator of all the latest in received wisdom was clear to all. Some of this week’s testaments, recorded in a New York Times piece Wednesday, sum the tone up nicely.