RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech has created expectations that he will match Marco Rubio’s pledge to stand by the commitments made by President Bush to Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Bush’s letter dated 14 April 2004.

Rubio made his unequivocal pledge on 3 December 2015 at the Republican Jewish Coalition Presidential Forum during his unsuccessful race to secure the Republican Party’s endorsement as its Presidential nominee:

“I will revive the common-sense understandings reached in the 2004 Bush-Sharon letter and build on them to help ensure Israel has defensible borders”

President Obama and his then former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did everything in their power to wriggle out of those Bush commitments – despite their having been overwhelmingly endorsed by the Senate 95:3 on 23 June 2004 and by the House of Representatives 407:9 on 24 June 2004.

Trump clearly had Obama and Clinton’s betrayal of Israel in his sights – when stating:

“… your friends need to know that you will stick by the agreements that you have with them. You’ve made that agreement, you have to stand by it and the world will be a better place.”

The Bush-Congress endorsed commitments made in that 2004 letter undoubtedly represent such an agreement.

After the departure of Ted Cruz and John Kasich, Donald Trump is now the Republican candidate for president. For many in the party, this will be the “Trumpacolypse,” as a Twitter hashtag has it. His unfavorable ratings are at 65%––70% with women, and up to 80% with blacks and Hispanics. With those numbers, a Clinton victory is assured, according to three-quarters of Republican “political insiders” polled by Politico.

Such hysteria six months out from the general election is premature. Much of it reflects the Republican political class’s distaste for the New York real estate developer, reality television star, and braggadocios conspicuous consumer. Trump has violated every canon of presidential campaigning, and scorned all the received wisdom that pundits and prognosticators reflexively dispense. He says what “you can’t say,” and says it in a brutal manner ––“lyin’ Ted” and “crooked Hillary”––that gives many “political insiders” the vapors. In their darker moods, they brood over the possibility of fascism coming to America, or a return of Joseph McCarthy. His biggest offense, though, is that he wins without their help.

They may be right about Trump losing the general. But such a prediction at this point is a guess. Polls record the transient impressions of the people who are polled. Then there’s the “shy Tory” phenomenon, the reticence of people to state their true preference even to an anonymous pollster, leading to a mismatch between the poll numbers and the actual votes. In the last six primaries before Indiana, Trump’s percentage of the vote averaged eight-and-a-half points higher than the polls, according to the New York Times. Of course, if Trump’s favorability numbers are still as dismal on in Octoberr, his defeat will be more certain.

As of the Indiana primary and Ted Cruz’s bruised exit, the vulgarian protectionist is the last Republican standing and all but certain to carry his party’s banner into November. If Hillary Clinton thinks it will be a cakewalk, she hasn’t paid attention to the man who makes his own rules
Whenever someone asked for my opinion on Ted Cruz, I couldn’t help but start on a litany of negatives. “Well, his voice is really annoying. So is his nose. Or maybe it’s his cheeks? I can’t really tell. Something about his general face region just seems a bit off. He was a great debater in high school, but doesn’t really seem to have evolved much on that front since. His father, and radio talker Glenn Beck too, said he was appointed by God to be the next president, which is weird. Even his kids don’t want to hug him. And he eats boogers.”

A few hours later: “Then again, I agree with basically everything he says.”

You could probably leave it there. On paper, Ted Cruz is everything the “Outsider” movement could have asked for in a candidate. He’s a strict constitutionalist, a social ultra-conservative, an immigration hardliner, a foreign policy moderate, and he’s the leader of the conservative anti-establishment faction in the senate. True, he’s not a protectionist; but I don’t think the Outsiderists went into this contest as protectionists, either. The chicken came before the egg in this particular instance: they became anti-free trade because Trump is anti-free trade. Had Cruz gotten the momentum instead of Trump, the North America Free Trade Agreement would not have come up once in the entire primary season.

But he didn’t get the momentum. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that he comes off as hobbledehoy-ish. We say of George W. Bush, “He’s the kind of guy you’d have a beer with.” That was his charm, and it helped Republicans overlook his lackluster ideological credentials. (He’s conservative, William F. Buckley wrote, but he’s not a conservative.) Cruz is the opposite. His ideological credentials are impeccable, but he seems like the kind of guy who was carded at the bar well into his thirties. “I’ll have one alcoholic beverage, please, my good publican.”

With his victory in the conservative heartland of Indiana, Donald Trump is the likely Republican nominee for President. A plurality of GOP voters has rejected the strongest presidential field in memory to elevate a businessman of few fixed convictions and little policy knowledge who has the highest disapproval ratings in the history of presidential polling. Now what?
***Mr. Trump wasn’t our first choice, or even the 15th, but the reality is that more GOP voters preferred him to the alternatives. Dozens of miscalculations made his hostile takeover possible, not least decisions by other candidates in the early primary states to attack each other instead of Mr. Trump. Ted Cruz and his allies also prepared the ground by stoking rage against “the establishment” and immigrants, only to have Mr. Trump hijack their stage-managed rebellion as a more convincing restrictionist. (See nearby.)

Yet GOP voters made the ultimate decision, and that deserves some respect unless we’re going to give up on democracy. The GOP electorate had its chance to reconsider Mr. Trump after his Wisconsin defeat a month ago. Instead the voters rallied behind him for seven straight wins with a majority in each state.

The most hopeful way to look at this is that GOP voters see Mr. Trump as the vehicle for American revival. They are at heart nationalists who see the U.S. in retreat abroad and the economy failing to raise wages at home, and they are revolting against both. Unlike the Japanese or the French, they aren’t going to accept decline without a fight.

In that sense they hope Mr. Trump will be another Ronald Reagan, who can storm Washington and overturn the status quo. This may be one reason so many of Mr. Trump’s voters are older Americans who recall the failures of the 1970s and the Reagan revival that followed.

The problem is that Mr. Trump is no Gipper, who had spent 40 years developing a philosophy of limited government and the U.S. national interest. As his letters show, he had superb instincts about the major issues of his day and was a brilliant political strategist. Mr. Trump is a clever political tactician, but his policy and rhetorical jaunts don’t lead to anything coherent we can detect beyond his desire to “do great deals.”

Donald Trump is a businessman, television star, and a newcomer to campaigning for public office. Running for president as your first elected office is highly unusual. A few have tried before, but in the last hundred plus years, only Dwight Eisenhower, a highly decorated World War II general, has succeeded. There were 17 Republican candidates who made it to the debate stage this year, and only Trump and Ben Carson had never run for office before. Carly Fiorina, despite having never held office, did run for the U.S. Senate in California.

Trump, with his victory in Indiana, appears at this point destined to be the winner of the GOP nominating process. His campaign over the past year has been an unusual one, to say the least, and could not have been more different than that of his all but certain opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton. Clinton, a product of more than 40 years of obsessive political campaigning for herself and her husband on both the state and national level, is one of the most scripted candidates ever to run for president. Clinton holds morning conference calls with as many as dozens of campaign aides to review her talking points for the day. If there was ever a consensus candidate whose themes have been tested with her handlers, and poll tested by her large campaign staff, it is Clinton. Clinton spent most of her two years after leaving the State Department mapping out her future campaign, warehousing future campaign team members at the Clinton Foundation and speaking before likely future campaign contributors and supporters. The lives of both Clintons has been all about politics at every stage.

Clinton’s goal for both the primary and the fall campaign, which she has viewed as a sure victory, has been to stay on message. Despite this, her message has been impacted by the leftist populism of her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s junior senator, who has proved profoundly resilient and therefore extremely annoying to Clinton. Sanders has pushed Clinton leftward, at times even to Sanders’ left (gun control), and she has on occasion made some unusually foolish remarks for someone so experienced in the business of politics. One of these remarks was her promise to put out of business a lot of coal companies and coal miners. Today, she was forced to eat crow and explain to some West Virginians that she can not really explain what prompted her to say something like that:

“I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context from what I meant, because I’ve been talking about helping coal country for a very long time,” Clinton said. “And it was a misstatement, because what I was saying is that the way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs.”

I am not #NeverTrump, but I’m getting close… thanks to Donald Trump and his supporters.

The fact is, Trump often makes profoundly stupid and manifestly false statements. These are the kind of statements that always offend the intellect of anyone who thinks analytically and is interested in the actual truth, regardless of who is saying them. If you are not offended by such, then by definition you simply have jettisoned any concern for truth and intelligence. That Trump runs afoul of both concepts is beyond debate.

Written words are the least emotional medium possible, so let’s remove the feeling of the mob rally or the sycophantic television interview and dispense with a few Trump pronouncements in the cold harsh reality of the written word.

No doubt some of Trump’s supporters will quickly retort that Trump is a billionaire, so there’s no way he could possibly say anything stupid about any topic. Or that it’s impossible that Trump would lie. Yet Trump can, and does, routinely lie. In the words of Victor David Hanson, for Trump “truth is simply a narrative whose veracity is established by the degree of power and persuasion behind it.”

Let me translate: Trump repeats nonsense loudly and often. Moreover, he daily adds insults to anyone who opposes him, which is an odd strategy for someone wanting to “unite the party.” He’s doing everything now to make that impossible for anyone to do anytime soon. His apparent cliching of the nomination simply lends more urgancy to the matter.

But I digress. To the cold hard words, in perfect context, starting this week in Indiana.

“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up? They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it. I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”

What is this, coming from a man who wants to be the most powerful in the world? Does Trump consider the National Enquirer to be the gazette of truth? Was Ted Cruz’s father at Area 51 too? It’s not even clear that Trump has any idea whose death he’s even rambling about. Serious people would be bothered by a candidate who is capable of saying this.

How about the Mike Tyson endorsement: “So Cruz is now saying, ‘Oh, he (Mike Tyson) was a rapist. This guy is a real liar, that’s why we call him Lyin’ Ted Cruz. I mean, the greatest liar that ever lived except he gets caught every time.”

Trump may have no responsibility over embarrassing endorsers. But Tyson was in fact convicted of rape and served hard time for it.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump insists Israel should keep building West Bank settlements as he says Netanyahu should ‘keep moving forward’ because Palestinians fired ‘thousands of missiles’ at Jewish state

In interview with DailyMail.com, Donald Trump says Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu should continue building West Bank settlements
Rejects call for a pause in settlements as a precursor to peace talks with Palestinians
‘I don’t think there should be a pause,’ Trump said; ‘Look: Missiles were launched into Israel’
The billionaire GOP front-runner said of Netanyahu: ‘I don’t know him that well, but I think I’d have a very good relationship with him’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3571403/Trump-insists-Israel-building-West-Bank-settlements-says-Netanyahu-moving-forward-Palestinians-fired-thousands-missiles-Jewish-state.html#ixzz47fti572A

Hillary Clinton ventured into Appalachia this week, seeking forgiveness for promising to destroy the carbon-based economy. Her 53%-47% loss to Bernie Sanders in Indiana suggests she’ll need it, especially among working-class voters, even if she still maintains a commanding delegate lead.

Mrs. Clinton calls her swing through West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio a “Breaking Down Barriers” tour—but the truth is that President Obama’s green agenda broke down coal country, and Mrs. Clinton is promising to preserve these barriers to the region’s economic revival.

The presumptive Democratic nominee told out-of-work coal miners in Williamson, West Virginia that she felt their pain, promising to “do more to see how we can get coal to be a fuel that can continue to be sold and continue to be mined.” In a perfect Clintonian non-apology, she added that “I do feel a little bit sad and sorry that I gave folks the reason and the excuse to be so upset with me because that is not what I intended at all,” referring to her remarks in March.

Mrs. Clinton claimed those remarks were “totally taken out of context,” so here’s the full context: “I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” CONTINUE AT SITE

With Ted Cruz’s withdrawal from the race after his loss Tuesday, Donald Trump should be well on the road to the 1,237 delegates needed to secure a nomination majority in advance of the convention.

Mr. Trump’s Tuesday victory in Indiana shows that he was able to transform his wins in the recent eastern primaries into momentum that overwhelmed Mr. Cruz, despite a strong effort from the Senator in the Hoosier State. It wasn’t enough to overcome the consolidation of Republican support by the New York businessman.

While by no means minimizing Mr. Trump’s considerable achievement here, we must ask again why Senator Cruz made so little effort to expand his appeal beyond the slice of very conservative voters who were his target from the start. The time to do that was after his Wisconsin victory, but the broadening never came, and Mr. Trump continued to siphon away the greater share of the GOP primary vote.

Mr. Trump won Indiana among most demographic, income and ideological groups, while Mr. Cruz carried “very conservative” voters and people with post-graduate degrees. Mr. Trump won 46% of women to Mr. Cruz’s 42%.

Now as the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, it is past time for Mr. Trump to start acting like it. He says that it’s time for the GOP to “unify.” But most of the responsibility for unification is now his. CONTINUE AT SITE