RUTHFULLY YOURS

At a campaign rally in Iowa on Saturday GOP frontrunner Donald Trump bragged about how loyal his followers are.

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump boasted, as he formed his fingers into the shape of a gun and pointed at the crowd:

I’m beginning to believe that Trump could do about anything at this point and his most loyal followers would find a way to justify it. He makes disgusting, sexist comments about women and his supporters think it’s hilarious —Megyn Kelly had it coming, they say. Trump makes fun of a reporter’s disability and his loyalists laugh right along with him—because they love his ability to crush people under the awesome weight of his 3rd grade insults. He tells students at Liberty University that he’s a good person and has no need for God’s forgiveness and the crowd—including the school’s president, Jerry Falwell, Jr.—goes wild. The guy is bigger than God now, I guess.

Matt Walsh wrote at the Blaze this week:

I watch it unfold feeling like a guy whose best friend just started dating the town floozy. I try to tell him that she’s sleeping around, she’s betraying him, she’ll break his heart, but he’s too smitten to hear me.

That’s exactly what it feels like when you try to have a conversation with Trump’s ardent followers. They are card-carrying members of Trump’s cult of personality now, and I fear they’re not coming back. You can’t reason people out of something they haven’t been reasoned into. Many of these people are caught up in the emotion of this moment and it doesn’t bother them one bit that a man who could quite possibly become president of the United States in a few months is openly bragging that his sycophants will blindly follow him, no matter what he does. But don’t worry. It’s all a show! He’s just entertaining the crowds and schlepping for votes. He doesn’t really mean any of this crazy stuff. Except for the stuff we like, and then we’re sure that he really, truly (pinky promise!) means all of that. Because he fights!

Perhaps on the issue of e-mails Hillary is worse, but frankly I shed no tears for the troubles of David of Surgeistan whose rules of engagement were more sensitive to the religious mores of barbarians than to the safety of our troops surrounded by terrorists hidden among “civilians.” rsk

Liberals are saying that since Hillary didn’t actually hand over secret data to someone she’s not guilty of anything. They also use that “reasoning” to say that her case is nothing like that of General David Petraeus who was found guilty of mishandling classified information.

The liberal position essentially holds that if General Petraeus had brought home top-secret SAP documents and left them on his dining room table in a neighborhood with a large number of recent robberies and then gone on vacation for a few years, he would have done nothing wrong.

Liberal reasoning also says that if General Petraeus had just removed the classification markings from the data he shared then he would have done no wrong.

Yet it’s hard to imagine anyone in the national security community or the military, or even the FBI or your local police department, thinking that if General Petraeus had done either of those things he’d be legally free and clear.

Essentially Hillary is guilty for two reasons:

Contrary to some who have expressed concerns about Ted Cruz’s temperament and qualifications to be an effective president, my experience in working with the Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate during the early 2000s convinces me that he is the right person at the right time for the job.

Although not a close friend of Senator Cruz, I got to know him reasonably well as a colleague at the Federal Trade Commission from mid-2001 until he left the commission to return to Texas in 2003. During that time, we worked together on a number of projects, including efforts to curtail anticompetitive legislation pending in several states to protect incumbent businesses such as gasoline retailers and automobile dealerships, and a task force established by the FTC’s Chairman charged with looking into litigants’ abuses of legal immunities to the antitrust laws. The Chairman appointed Cruz to lead that task force, and I was one of several members.

In this capacity, I was able to observe Ted’s professional skills, his personal characteristics, and, significantly, his commitment to constitutionalism, the rule of law, and free-market economics. These personal observations impel me to conclude not only that Ted possesses the qualifications to be president in terms of intellect, temperament, and knowledge of the issues facing the country; but even more importantly, that he is uniquely the right person to lead America at this time in its history.

As a resident of New York I resent a billionaire who literally bought a third term despite term limits. After 9/11 when Giuliani suggested remaining on the job for a few months to complete the cleanup after the downing of the World Trade Center-Bloomberg ungraciously reminded Rudy that New York City had term limits ….What a hypocrite….rsk
You read it here last week. As the odds rise of extreme outcomes in the presidential election, so do the chances of a serious third-party candidate getting into the race, especially Michael Bloomberg. Now word has leaked that the former three-term mayor of New York is actively exploring the possibility.

Mr. Bloomberg considered a run in 2008 and 2012, only to conclude he couldn’t win, and that may be what happens this year too. The U.S. political system is tilted against third-party candidates, which is why the last one to take the White House was Abraham Lincoln in 1860 as the nominee of the antislavery Republicans.

Third-party candidates have made other notable runs but their influence has mainly been as spoilers or to force the major-party candidates to confront issues they’d ignored. Teddy Roosevelt ruined William Howard Taft’s chances for re-election in 1912, and Ross Perot contributed to George H.W. Bush’s defeat in 1992 though he won no electoral votes. He split the Reagan coalition by winning 19% of the vote and helped Bill Clinton win with only 43%.

CLINTON, Iowa—In her closing pitch to Iowa voters, Hillary Clinton is casting herself as the one Democrat who has the experience to make the life-or-death choices that come with the presidency.

It echoes the argument she made in 2008, when she ran an ad saying a president must be ready for a “3 a.m. phone call” warning of imminent peril. It didn’t work then and some people close to the Clintons worry it won’t succeed now.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has narrowed Mrs. Clinton’s lead in Iowa ahead of the state’s Feb. 1 caucuses. He could scramble the race should he notch a victory there and in New Hampshire. His theme is direct: He is the champion of voters who are disillusioned with Washington politics and impatient with an economy that lavishes rewards on a tiny fraction of families.

“I am angry…and the American people are angry,” Mr. Sanders said Sunday on CBS.

He is promising a political “revolution.” Even if his ideas may be difficult to achieve in a polarized, Republican-controlled Congress—a point Mrs. Clinton often makes—his message is overshadowing Mrs. Clinton’s focus on experience, some Clinton allies said. They want to see her return to an argument more central to her campaign when she entered the race nine months ago: that she will shake up the system.

On April 14, 2015, a much ballyhooed “compromise”—but in fact a constitutional capitulation—regarding S.615, the “Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015,” was unanimously agreed upon within the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Independent Politico.com and Washington Post assessments of critical aspects of the lauded compromise brokered by Republican Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker and Democrat Ben Cardin confirmed my worst fears about what had actually transpired.

Politico observed:

Though it gives Congress an avenue to reject the lifting of legislative sanctions that will be a key part of any deal with Iran, it explicitly states that Congress does not have to approve the diplomatic deal struck by Iran, the United States and other world powers… nor does it treat an Iran agreement like a treaty

This claim was substantiated on p. 32 of the updated bill, under a section titled “EFFECT OF CONGRESSIONAL ACTION WITH RESPECT TO NUCLEAR AGREEMENTS WITH IRAN,” which states in lines 16-19,

16‘‘(C) this section does not require a vote by

17 Congress for the agreement to commence;

18 ‘‘(D) this section provides for congressional

19 review,

Furthermore, as Karen DeYoung and Mike DeBonis added in their Washington Post report:

Obama retains the right to veto any action to scuttle an Iran pact. To override, a veto would require a two-thirds majority of both House and Senate.

Another day, another double-take reading the New York Times.

The latest shoe in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s scandalous mishandling of classified information dropped heavily this week. It had already been reported that, contrary to her denials, hundreds of secret intelligence communications were transmitted over the private, unsecured e-mail system on which the former secretary of state recklessly conducted government business. It is now clear that some of these contained “top secret/SAP” information. (SAP is “special access programs.”) This indicates defense secrets of the highest order, the compromise of which can destroy vital intelligence programs, get covert agents killed, and imperil national security.

Yet, in reporting the story, the Times’ Mark Mazzetti took pains to stress: “The government has said that Mrs. Clinton is not a subject of the investigation.”

Really? Well, to put it in Clintonian terms: It all depends on what the definition of “subject” is.

Though you wouldn’t know it from the Times, “subject” is a term of art in criminal investigations. It refers to one of the three categories into which prosecutors fit every relevant actor. Subjects are people whose conduct is being scrutinized and who, depending on what evidence turns up, may or may not be charged. This distinguishes them from targets, who are suspects virtually certain to be indicted for an obvious crime; and from mere witnesses, whose interaction with a suspect suggests no criminality on their part (e.g., the teller in a bank hold-up, or the neighbor awakened by a fatal gunshot next door).

For law enforcement, targets and mere witnesses are easy to deal with. Targets usually decline to be interviewed (as is their right under the Fifth Amendment). Even if they are not guilty, it is often prudent for them to wait to see what the government alleges before they answer questions. Witnesses tend to speak freely because there is no reason not to.

It’s the political season, and I want to cut Sarah Palin some slack. She and her family have endured disgusting, unjust verbal abuse over the years, and I like her, personally.

But some things cannot be overlooked. I would not be discussing her son’s arrest this week except that, in the highest-profile way, at a Tulsa rally, she did something grotesque and disturbing: She blamed President Obama for the fact that her 26-year-old son beat up his girlfriend this week.

Allegedly, I must say, since he hasn’t yet been convicted. But Palin did not claim that her son was innocent; she instead said that, because he served in Iraq, post-traumatic stress disorder was responsible for his behavior: “I can talk personally about this. I guess it’s kind of the elephant in the room — because my own family, going through what we’re going through today with my son, a combat vet having served in a Stryker brigade fighting for you all, America, in the war zone. But my son, like so many others, they come back a bit different. They come back hardened,” Palin said.

As Politico reported her speech:

“They come back wondering if there is that respect for what their fellow soldiers and airmen and every other member of the military have given so sacrificially to this country, and that starts at the top,” she continued, touting Trump as the best choice for president. “It’s a shame that our military personnel even have to question, have to wonder if they’re respected anymore. It starts from the top. The question, though, it comes from the top, the question, though, that comes from our own president where they have to look at him and wonder, ‘Do you know what we go through? Do you know what we’re trying to do to secure America and to secure the freedoms that have been bequeathed us?’”

As a thought experiment, let us take Hillary Clinton at her word. The dismissive excuse that she has consistently offered is that, to paraphrase, the documents were not “marked” correctly such as to put her on proper legal notice that the specific information revealed therein was, in fact, “classified” at any secrecy level. By this argument, Hillary claims it was “AOK” for her to have “inadvertently” sent them over her unsecured home computer server because, after all, “how was one to know?” She cannot be faulted in any of this because she had no way of realizing at the time that she might be handling secret information — which “after all” was classified as such “retroactively.”

But isn’t this admission disqualifying for a presidential candidate? It raises automatic doubts about her level of mental acuity in reading, assessing, and (most emphatically) appreciating sensitive, high-level information, especially national security info. Whenever she and/or her aides viewed a satellite image did they assume it was from Google Maps? In effect, Hillary is saying that although she had reviewed dozens if not hundreds of emails bearing national security secrets — never once did she recognized on her own that the transmissions contained state secrets. We know this because Hillary cannot admit otherwise. For if Hillary had recognized that the emails carried unsecured state-secrets, this recognition would consequently have immediately burdened her with the duty and obligation to report the insecurity in her communications for correction.