RUTHFULLY YOURS

Well before Donald Trump entered the race, there were lots of warning signs that the Republican party was on the road to perdition.

After the marathon 20 debates of 2012, with the ten or so strange candidates who brawled and embarrassed themselves, there had to be some formula to avoid repeating that mob-like mess. Instead, in 2016 there were 17 candidates and 13 debates along with seven forums. There were supposed to be tweaks and repairs that were designed to avoid the clown-like cavalcade of four years ago, but they apparently only ensured a repetition.

Three of the most experienced candidates, at least in the art of executive governance — Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and Scott Walker — were among the first to get out. The most experienced government CEOs somehow (or logically?) performed poorly in the raucous debates and lacked the charisma or the money or at least the zealous followers of Cruz, Rubio, and Trump.

Or they had too much pride (or sense) — unlike Carson, Christie, Kasich, and Paul — to insist that they were viable candidates when fairly early on, by most measurements, they were not. How strange that those who would have been more credible candidates saw the writing on the wall and left the field — to those marginalized candidates who had no such qualms and ended up wasting months of their time and ours in splintering the vote, engaging in endless bickering on crowded stages, and ensuring that there were few occasions for any of them to distinguish himself. At some point, someone should confess that Democratic debates further Democratic causes far more than Republican debates help Republican causes.

RELATED: At Current Rate, Trump Might Not Get to 1,237 Delegates

The other veteran governor in the race, Jeb Bush, may have felt, at 63 years old and eight years after the end of his brother’s administration, that his presidential ambitions — born in the pre-Trump-announcement days — were now or never. But after the failures of McCain and Romney, the hard left drift of the country, and the spectacle of utter chaos on the border, political correctness run amuck, the huge debt, Obamacare, and the implosion of the Middle East, primary voters were in no mood for another sober and judicious establishmentarian, however decent Jeb sounded. The unfortunate outcome of the 2016 Bush campaign and its affiliates was spending several million dollars to help destroy the candidacy of fellow Floridian Senator Marco Rubio. That did nothing for Bush and only further empowered Donald Trump. Never in all his business days has an enemy of Trump’s proved so helpful to him.

Then there was the strange career of Chris Christie. His campaign was an odd mixture of bullying and New Jersey tough-guy schtick with temporizing and split-the-difference politicking in a year of take-no prisoners politics. His bluster was Trumpian, but he was no Trump-like showman — and he ended only with another destructive legacy of tearing down others without helping himself. His mean-spirited candidacy confirmed that his 2012 ill-timed hug of President Obama in the hours before the election was no accident. His gratuitous attack on Rubio — followed by his obsequious lapdog role with Trump (who does not suffer toadies gladly) — proved kamikaze-like, blowing up the attacker while damaging somewhat his target.

After Bernie Sanders visited the Marxist Sandanista regime in Nicaragua on a propaganda tour, he argued that the bread lines in major cities were a good thing. “American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing!”

The bread lines had been caused by the radical regime’s socialist agricultural policies of land seizures from farmers. Those farmers who refused to be drawn into Soviet-style communal farms rebelled, along with Indian and Creole racial minorities, and became the core of the Contras, the heroic resistance fighters whose mass murders at the hands of Sandinista terrorists were cheered by American leftists.

What had been productive farmland vanished into a warren of newly invented government agencies run by leftist university graduates with no agricultural background obsessed with seizing land, but with no idea of how to run it. The remaining farmers were forced into grinding poverty by a government purchasing monopoly while the profits went not to their farms, but to the political class of the Sandanistas who lived in luxury while farmers fled and city workers waited on bread lines.

Think of them as the Bernie Bros of Nicaragua. Except they wore khaki fatigues, not pajamas. And instead of angrily tweeting, they marched their victims into churches and set them on fire.

The unfortunates that the Democratic Party’s aspiring top Socialist saw lining up for bread were the victims of a regime that had destroyed the country through socialist thievery. And he learned absolutely nothing from the experience. Just as the Sandinistas had learned nothing from the Soviet Union and Venezuela’s Socialists learned nothing from the Sandinistas so that once again today crowds wait for bread, milk and toilet paper in an oil-rich country that has run out of everything except Socialists.

Marco Rubio may be on his way out of the presidential race, but he’s not going out quietly. For the first time in this campaign, actual dollars are being spent in traditional media to attack Donald Trump — and it’s mainly Rubio and his allies who are spending it.

Trump began the primary season with a couple of yuge advantages that many didn’t fully appreciate the significance of at the time. Specifically, he started at near 100% name recognition. Trump has been a fixture in our lives, and on our TV sets, since the 1980s. In a political campaign, being known is half the battle. If you think about it, the next most recognizable candidate in the GOP primary was Jeb Bush — and really it was only his last name that was famous. Outside of Florida, most people wouldn’t know Jeb Bush if he was standing next to them on an elevator. So in a field as large as the one we started with, Trump began with an incredible head start.

The other advantage Trump has enjoyed is the disproportionate amount of media coverage he has garnered, particularly early on. Again, with such a crowded field it was easy for the media to pump up the most recognizable candidate, particularly when that person is a bombastic, controversial, and larger than life caricature of what liberals perceive Republicans to be.

Trump has been very fortunate that the forces within the GOP big tent who find him objectionable as the party’s nominee were slow to recognize the level of support that he might garner and were slow to rally around a more palatable alternative. Many were skeptical (myself included) that Trump could stand the scrutiny once actual voting was underway. Many (myself included) could not have been more wrong.

For this, Jeb Bush bears a lot of the blame. Bush should have suspended his campaign before South Carolina, not after. Also, Right to Rise, the Jeb-supporting Super PAC, spent tens of millions of dollars trying to knock Marco Rubio, and not Donald Trump, from the race. The ad spend weakened Rubio and ironically gave Jeb’s tormentor aid and comfort. A Bush endorsement of Rubio is still being speculated upon but is less likely with each passing day.

Only time will tell if Donald Trump takes the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, but the fact that he is ahead of the pack surely tells us something: of all the Oval Office hopefuls, he is the only one game enough to address the issues blue-collar Americans rate as most important.
Mitt Romney didn’t mix it with Barrack Obama in 2012. He didn’t have the fortitude to skewer to him on the Benghazi attack and murder of a US ambassador mere weeks before Americans went to the polls. It was an electoral gift to the challenger, courtesy of a dead diplomat and three other slain Americans left to die without help and commemorated with a pack of lies about an irrelevant video. Yet Romney let Obama off the hook.

Where was the Commander in Chief throughout the night and early morning, when those who he had sworn to lead were fighting for their lives and when he was the only one with the authority to order in nearby airpower. Bizarrely, we still don’t know. We can conjecture. He was likely asleep, preparing for a fund-raising event while the killings went on.

What we know with certainty, no conjecture required, is that Romney was too polite (too craven?) to ask tough questions. He was unequivocally a weak reed when it counted and consequently lost an election that was eminently winnable.

The election lost and more than three disastrous years later, a strong candidate, unafraid to ask tough questions, is leading the Republican race. Hello! Here comes Mitt back from oblivion; spineless then, full of spite and spittle now. Apparently he’s afraid his grandchildren will ask him ‘What did you do, grandpa, to stop Trump?’ A more pertinent question to ask of him is what he did to stop Obama. And why he effectively threw in the towel?

It comes to this. The Republican establishment can’t stand someone outside of the political class gaining power. That is why Romney and some other elites have said that they will not vote for Trump if he becomes the Republican nominee. There is them, the political class, right or left. And then there are the outsiders. Part of the outsiders is the great unwashed, otherwise called blue-collar workers. I will come back to them.

Donald Trump’s demagoguery may be a foretaste of what’s to come.

In temperament, he was “bombastic, inconsistent, shallow and vainglorious.” On political questions, “he made up his own reality as he went along.” Physically, the qualities that stood out were “the scowling forehead, the rolling eyes, the pouting mouth.” His “compulsive exhibitionism was part of his cult of machismo.” He spoke “in short, strident sentences.” Journalists mocked his “absurd attitudinizing.”

Remind you of someone?

The description of Benito Mussolini comes from English historian Piers Brendon’s definitive history of the 1930s, “The Dark Valley.” So does this mean that Donald Trump is the second coming of Il Duce, or that yesteryear’s Fascists are today’s Trumpkins? Not exactly. But that doesn’t mean we should be indifferent to the parallels with the last dark age of Western politics.

Among the parallels: The growing belief that democracy is rigged. That charisma matters more than ideas. That strength trumps principles. That coarseness is refreshing, authentic.

Also, that immigrants are plundering the economy. That the world’s agonies are someone else’s problem. That free trade is a game of winners and losers—in which we are the invariable losers. That the rest of the world plays us for suckers. That our current leaders are not who they say they are, or where they say they are from. That they are conspiring against us.

These are perennial attitudes in any democracy, but usually marginal ones. They gained strength in the 1920s and ’30s because the old liberal order had been shattered—first at Gallipoli, Verdun and Caporetto; then with the Bolshevik coup in Russia, hyperinflation in Germany, Black Tuesday in the United States. “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?” wondered T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land,” in 1922. Mussolini’s Blackshirts marched on Rome the same year. CONTINUE AT SITE

Romanian hacker Marcel Lazăr Lehel — better known as Guccifer — is being extradited to the United States, say news reports.

The hacker has scored many notable victims in recent years, including Hillary Clinton shadow adviser Sid Blumenthal.

Guccifer once bragged to PANDO that “I used to read [Clinton’s] memos… and then do the gardening.”

As the Daily Caller has previously reported, Guccifer’s hacking has played a role in the Clinton email scandal:

Sidney Blumenthal emailed Hillary Clinton at least two intelligence reports about Libya which were not included in the trove of 296 emails released by the State Department on Friday.

Clinton has claimed that in December she turned over all official government emails she sent or received from her personal account while in office. In turn, the agency has claimed it turned all Clinton emails related to Libya or Benghazi over to the House Select Committee investigating the Benghazi attack.

But a screenshot of Blumenthal’s email inbox, which the Romanian hacker Guccifer published in March 2013, shows two reports about Libya emailed to Clinton which were not released in Friday’s batch.

It’s not known whether Guccifer’s extradition is in any way connected to the investigation into Clinton’s private email server.

Last week’s Washington Post bombshell, the news that the Justice Department has given immunity from prosecution to the former State Department staffer who maintained Hillary Clinton’s “homebrew” email server, is forcing Mrs. Clinton and her apologists to alter their media strategy.

For months it has been obvious that a serious criminal investigation of the former secretary of State’s reckless mishandling of classified information has been underway. Yet Camp Clinton has maintained that the government is merely engaged in a “security inquiry” that is focused on the physical server itself — not a probe of criminal suspects. This has never made sense. The FBI, which has assigned many agents to the case, is in the criminal investigation business.

Plus, when the now-immunized former staffer, Bryan Pagliano, invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege in refusing to testify before the House Benghazi committee, it signaled that he feared truthful answers would incriminate him.

Now with Pagliano apparently poised to cooperate with the FBI, the claim that Mrs. Clinton is not a criminal suspect is untenable. So Clinton and her supporters are changing tack: instead of implausibly insisting there is no crime to investigate, they argue that there is no crime worth prosecuting.

This narrative was first floated a few months ago. The story goes like this: retired General David Petraeus, the former CIA director, committed a classified information offense that — according to Clintonistas — was far more serious than Mrs. Clinton’s conduct, yet Petraeus was permitted to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor count. Ergo, a prosecution of Mrs. Clinton over her comparatively minor misconduct cannot be justified.

Donald Trump is a lying liar. His fabrications and confabulations are too numerous to tally. At the same time, his falsehoods do not halt his progress. The press dutifully records them. The public dutifully reads about them and absorbs them. And Trump and his loyal followers march forward to the Republican presidential nomination and possibly the White House.

It need not be this way. Take one of the more important matters in the presidential vetting process: personal tax returns.

In January, just before the Iowa caucuses, Trump suggested to NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the release of his returns was imminent: “We’re working on that now. I have big returns, as you know, and I have everything all approved and very beautiful and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time.”Subsequently, Trump told CNN that he couldn’t release his returns because he is being audited, suggesting that perhaps he’d been singled out by the IRS because he is “a strong Christian.”

On yet another occasion, Trump has promised that “I will absolutely give my return, but I’m being audited now for two or three years, so I can’t do it until the audit is finished, obviously.”

On another occasion, he has explained that he can’t release his returns because “four or five years” of them are under audit.

Now that the Republican field has been winnowed down to the final four, it’s time to judge what they’re saying about how to repair our nation’s military and intelligence community. To do that, we have to measure how well they meet the standard established by Ronald Reagan.

Each year the Reagan administration did a study that resulted in the “Defense Guidance” report. In simplest terms, Defense Guidance took the best intelligence information available and determined the threats that our military had to deter or defeat. Then, on the basis of a stated national defense strategy, it derived a defense budget to meet those threats.

On the surface, there appears to be very little difference among the defense plans offered by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. They just want to throw money at the Pentagon to expand our forces. (John Kasich calls himself a “cheap hawk,” about which more later.) Simply put, none of the four meets the Reagan standard.

Under President Obama, our intelligence agencies have been substantially weakened. In the absence of current, accurate intelligence and expert analysis, policymaking is mere guesswork. Despite this, none of the four candidates has said why or how the capabilities of our intelligence community must be restored, modernized and better integrated.

Of the four, Donald Trump has said the least about rebuilding the military. He’s said, “I will make our military so big, powerful and strong that no one will mess with us,” adding that he’d get rid of ISIS quickly. How he would achieve that is left to our imagination.

Mr. Trump evidences no knowledge of and gives no opinion analyzing the threats America faces or what means we need to deter or defeat them. His worldview, at least what we know of it, is not reassuring. Take the apparent mutual admiration he shares with Russian President Vladimir Putin.