RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is curious how people romanticize evil and insanity. The habit, I believe, is born of naiveté, or at least inexperience. The college student who prances about in a T-shirt bearing the image of Che Guevara, for example, has no idea of what a malignant figure Che was, how treacherous, how cruel, how murderous. He sees only a handsome “freedom fighter” swaddled in the gauze of exotic Latin flamboyance. The grubby reality escapes him entirely.

The knotty French philosopher Simone Weil saw deeply into this phenomenon when she observed that “imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” Weil understood the converse as well: “Imaginary good,” she wrote, “is boring, real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Something similar can be said about sanity, what David Hume rightly extolled as “the calm sunshine of the mind.” Madness seems like an adventure only if you do not have to contend with it.

But what if you do? Many people, I believe, are beginning to ask themselves that as the glow of novelty deserts Donald Trump and he stands more and more revealed for what he is: an astonishingly ignorant, narcissistic bully and braggart. A populist demagogue whose closest fictional model might be P. G. Wodehouse’s Mosley-esque character Roderick Spode, while the Italian clown, TV personality, and political activist Beppo Grillo might provide the closest real-life analogue.

No one, as far as I know, has compared Trump’s populist rallies with the “vaffanculo” (“f*** off”) rallies that involved more than two million Italians and catapulted the erstwhile clown to the eccentric center of Italian political life. It would be a useful exercise.

The Beppo Grillo analogy was suggested to me by “The revolt of the public and the rise of Donald Trump,” a remarkable essay by Martin Gurri, a former CIA intelligence officer and author of the (equally remarkable) “The Revolt of the Public And The Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.” It is often said that Donald Trump gives voice to the disenchantment of people with the Washington establishment. It would be more accurate, Gurri suggests, to say that he is the embodiment of the decadence or collapse of a political consensus that no longer enjoys our allegiance. “A meticulous study of Donald Trump’s biography, statements, and policy ‘positions,'” Gurri writes:

Seven months ago, after he signed a pledge to support whoever won the GOP nomination, Donald Trump said, “I see no circumstances under which I would tear up that pledge.”

That was then. Today we see a different Trump. On Sunday, he told Chris Wallace of Fox News that while he wanted “to run as a Republican,” he wouldn’t rule out an independent or third-party race this fall. “We’re going to have to see how I was treated,” he warned.

GOP leaders should have known better than to have taken his pledge seriously. As the Associated Press pointed out in September 2015, his record on honoring contracts is at best spotty:

When lender Boston Safe Deposit & Trust refused to extend the mortgage on his Palm Beach resort, Mar-a-Lago, he ceased making loan payments until the bank capitulated in 1992.

In his book The Art of the Comeback, Trump proudly recounts forcing his unpaid lenders to choose between fighting him in bankruptcy court or cutting him an additional $65 million check. Afraid of losing their jobs, the bankers folded, Trump says.

Reince Priebus, the chair of the Republican National Committee, has dismissed the chance of a Trump independent bid as “posturing.” Robert Eno of Conservative Review noted last week that Trump could be kept off many state ballots by “sore loser” laws that bar a candidate who has run in a partisan primary from running in another party in a general election. “If Trump were to wait until after the Republican National Convention to declare an independent candidacy, he could only compete for a maximum of 255 electoral votes,” Emo concluded. “This means he cannot win the presidency were he to wait until after [the] convention to run an independent bid.”

But many Republicans worry that Trump could still play “spoiler” by merely threatening to run an independent campaign. “Sore loser laws don’t hold up well in court,” says Richard Winger, the editor of Ballot Access News. “They also aren’t easily enforced. John Anderson ran as an independent in all 50 states in 1980 after ending his Republican campaign, and not one of the sore-loser laws was enforced against him.”

Led by agenda-setting New York State and radical left-winger Al Gore the progressive persecution of climate change skeptics by the states is underway.

Top law enforcement officers in several states are joining with the Chicken Littles of green activism to weaponize the scientifically dubious argument that human activity is not only changing the earth’s climate but that unprecedented world catastrophe awaits unless draconian, economy-killing carbon emission controls are imposed more or less immediately.

The litigation offensive has nothing to do with justice. It is aimed at forcing those few remaining holdouts in the business community who stubbornly cling to science to confess their thought crimes and submit to the know-nothing Left’s climate superstitions. It is part of modern-day environmentalism’s ongoing assault on knowledge, human progress, markets, and the rule of law.

Repent and embrace the true green faith or else you’ll be investigated and denounced as a climate criminal, is the message of “Inspector Gotcha,” New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman.

“It’s too early to say what we’re going to find,” he said of the five-month-old witch hunt aimed at his current target, the gigantic ExxonMobil, at a press conference this week in Lower Manhattan. “We intend to work as aggressively as possible, but also as carefully as possible.”

The New York Times previously reported that Schneiderman is looking into “whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how such risks might hurt the oil business. … For several years, advocacy groups with expertise in financial analysis have been warning that fossil fuel companies might be overvalued in the stock market, since the need to limit climate change might require that much of their coal, oil and natural gas be left in the ground.”

But “The First Amendment, ladies and gentlemen, does not give you the right to commit fraud,” Schneiderman said this week.

http://www.robmaness.com/
With the extraordinary Cruz vs. Trump battle for the GOP presidential nomination sucking up all of the political oxygen, it is easy to miss the fact that awesome conservative retired Air Force Col. Rob Maness is running for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana.

Folks, please allow me to cut to the chase. Our country is going to hell in a handbasket fueled by GOP cowardice and an entire Democrat party hijacked by anti-American zealots. The only way we stop the horrific effects of Obama’s insanity and corruption in both parties is to send rock-solid conservatives we can trust to Washington, candidates with backbones of steel who refuse to go-along to get-along.

Speaking of backbone, Maness’ military awards and combat decorations include the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, and Air Medal. I am pretty sure Maness will not be intimidated by RINOs, metro-sexual Democrats or Obama bureaucratic henchmen in DC. Maness is like an oak tree firmly and deeply rooted in the rich fertile soil of his Christian faith.

When you cut through all the political deceptions, lies, and broken promises, it always comes down to sending character-driven representatives to Washington. Rob Maness’ record proves he fits the bill. In plain language, Maness is one of us, folks; a real family, God, and country good guy.

I was extremely impressed when I met Rob during his 2014 run for the senate; a strong conservative fighter, highly respected community leader, served 32 years in the military, husband, father of five and grandpa of four.

This story in Politico about Trump delegates willing to bolt the candidate on the second ballot of a contested convention will be dismissed by many Trump partisans as anti-Trump propaganda.

Indeed, it may be. But if we’ve seen any weakness from Trump in the past two weeks, it is the lack of political acumen from his team when it comes to the real nuts and bolts of politics: choosing delegates who are rock solid supporters. The controversies in Louisiana, South Carolina, and North Dakota are just the tip of the iceberg. The fact is, Trump may be winning more votes than Cruz at the ballot box, but the incompetence of his campaign aides in turning those votes into loyal delegates is painfully obvious.

If Trump heads into the convention without the magic number of 1,237, already more than a hundred delegates are poised to break with him on a second ballot, according to interviews with dozens of delegates, delegate candidates, operatives and party leaders.

In one of the starkest examples of Trump’s lack of support, out of the 168 Republican National Committee members — each of whom doubles as a convention delegate — only one publicly supports Trump, and she knows of only a handful of others who support him privately.

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz has been whipping Trump in the quiet, early race to elect his own loyalists to become delegates to the convention, meaning that the Texas senator could triumph through delegates who are freed to vote their own preferences on a second ballot, regardless of who won their state.

“As far as the stealing of the Trump nomination, that’s a big concern for everybody,” said Diana Orrock, the RNC committeewoman from Nevada and the only one of 112 committeemen and women who openly supports Trump. None of the nation’s 56 state and territory GOP chairmen, also convention delegates, have endorsed Trump either. They are subjected to a mix of state-based rules as far as their obligation to back Trump on the first vote.

Donald Trump is not a details guy. From his checkered experience in business, he draws this lesson: “One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper.”

Question: Who thinks that Donald Trump actually has read the paper?

Asked at a town-hall meeting (which isn’t actually a town-hall meeting, but we insist on calling these dog-and-pony shows that and pretending that they are) to list the top three priorities of the federal government, Trump responded: “Security, security, and security.” That the candidate was stalling for time while his political mind, honed to the fine edge of an old butter knife, ran through the possibilities was to be expected. We are used to his filibustering by now. He was right to identify security as the overriding concern of the U.S. government.

The federal enterprise was created to handle those tasks that are by their nature interstate or national: War, relations with foreign powers, international and interstate trade, immigration, and relations between the states are the reasons it exists. A superior power is required to solve problems that cannot be adjudicated by a single state, such as cooking up an excuse for why Texas must be forced to honor your Massachusetts-issued same-sex-marriage license while Massachusetts has no reciprocal obligation to honor your Texas-issued concealed-carry permit, despite the pesky fact of gun rights actually being right there in the Constitution and all. All right, maybe not the best example. The federal government is necessary because it alone can create and execute a program under which “aid” to foreign governments is laundered back into the pockets of campaign contributors through military-procurement rules. Okay, not a great example, either. But the federal government does something useful, of that we are assured. It’s not like all those thousands of federal factota hived up in Washington do nothing but sit around and masturbate to Internet porn all day.

But the Trumpkin view of all Trumpkin enterprises is expansive, demanding superlatives. And so Trump expanded. Other top federal duties, he declared, included “health care, education . . . and then you can go on from there.” Go on to where? “Housing, providing great neighborhoods.” Anderson Cooper, tasked with the necessary duty of reminding Trump that this contradicts everything he said until five minutes ago, asked: “Aren’t you against the federal government’s involvement in education? Don’t you want it to devolve to states?” Sure, Trump said, but — see if you can make anything of this — we must consider the “concept of the country.” (If that sounds like a cheesy theme hotel, well . . . ) And: “The concept of the country is the concept that we have to have education within the country.” Indeed. Likewise, he rejects the notion of a federally run health-care system, advocating instead a “private” system that is . . . federally run, or, in Trump’s phrasing, led by the federal government, in case you for some reason believe that “led by” and “run by” mean different things when the federal government is involved — which is to say, if you are a credulous rube.

With apologies to Buffalo Springfield, there’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.

Here’s Bill Clinton in Spokane, Wash., making the pitch for his wife last week: “But if you believe we can all rise together, if you believe we’ve finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us and the seven years before that . . . ”

The awful legacy of the last eight years? That’d be a strange thing for any Democrat to say, but it’s particularly odd given that Hillary Clinton has made it abundantly clear that she’s running for a third Barack Obama term.

Last year, she loved telling voters that she wasn’t running as a continuation of Obama. But that was before Bernie Sanders ignited a left-wing populist backlash against the status quo. Unable to get to Sanders’s left — understandable, given that it would require embracing Bolshevism — Clinton was forced to defend the administration she worked for.

Also, as has been widely reported and dissected, Clinton’s strategists concluded months ago that she had no choice but to embrace Obama and his policies, because Obama is popular with precisely the voters Clinton needs in order to assemble a winning coalition. These voters may think the country is on the wrong track, but they don’t blame Obama for it.

That’s one reason why Team Clinton has charged, sometimes hysterically, that Sanders is somehow attacking the president when he says, for instance, that Obamacare doesn’t go far enough. The Clintonistas touted the fact that Sanders blurbed a book by left-wing writer Bill Press critical of Obama as if it were a confession of treason.

But now comes the former president attacking the Obama record head-on. The Spokane speech wasn’t a fluke. Bill has also taken to explaining that the real reason this election is so crazy is that “80 percent of the American people haven’t gotten a pay raise since the crash.”

No doubt he wouldn’t put all the blame on Obama, but that’s some odd messaging for a campaign looking to run on “four more years.”

Donald Trump argues that America’s problem is that it has sent its wealth overseas. Exactly the opposite is the case: America’s problem is that the world’s wealth came to America, and bought subprime mortgages. At the peak of the housing bubble America imported capital each year equivalent to 6% of GDP. Everyone from China’s central bank to Arab sovereign wealth funds to German provincial-government banks bought American mortgage debt until the housing bubble crashed. Virtually all of the world’s available savings came to the United States.

The world used to believe in the United States. America was the world’s only superpower back in the mid-2000s. The American consumer looked like a perpetual-motion machine. Housing prices had risen for fifty years in succession. American economic growth was steady. And American investment banks manufactured synthetic AAA-rated securities that paid more than banks’ cost of funds. They seemed safe as houses.

We saw the same thing in Southeast Asia in 1996 or Mexico, Argentina in 1999, Turkey in 2010 and countless other third-world economies: massive capital imports push up local asset values and make the locals feel rich, until the bubble pops. Americans watched their home prices appreciate by 10%-15% a year between 1996 and 2006. As money poured in (and the current account deficit widened) home prices rose.