RUTHFULLY YOURS

Las Vegas — Ted Cruz can see himself on a collision course with Marco Rubio, barreling toward a head-to-head battle with his fellow senator for the Republican nomination — that is, if Rubio can deliver on his end of the deal.

In a wide-ranging interview here Thursday, Cruz predicted that the GOP race will boil down to the familiar dynamic of an establishment favorite squaring off against a conservative challenger after they claim victories in New Hampshire and Iowa, respectively. “I believe I will be that conservative candidate,” Cruz says. “I don’t know who the moderate candidate will be.”

The Texas senator says he has consolidated the conservative “lane” of the race — thanks to the exits of Scott Walker, Rick Perry, and Bobby Jindal as well as to the fade of Ben Carson — and is confident he will win Iowa and become one of the two finalists. “I don’t believe we have peaked,” he says when asked about surging to the top of several Iowa polls this week, and about the potential danger in taking the lead there seven weeks from the caucuses.

In Saturday’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton claimed that Donald Trump “is becoming ISIS’s greatest recruiter.”

It’s a self-evidently ludicrous claim, unsupported by even the tiniest shred of evidence, as PolitiFact, CNN, and even Vox were quick to point out. But when Meet the Press host Chuck Todd pressed Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta about the claim on Sunday, Podesta pointed to a little-noticed report from NBC News.

“Well look, Chuck, your own network ran a piece citing the most important organization that follows ISIS on social media that said that they are using social media, that they are using Donald Trump as a recruitment tool,” Podesta said. “So that’s what she was referencing and that’s the interpretation we made.”

The report’s headline — “Donald Trump’s Muslim Bashing Aids Cause of Terror Networks, Say Experts” — would seem to give Clinton cover, but its contents are entirely speculative: It never references any specific video or message from the group.

Come on, you were all wondering about this…

Days after pushing back on allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin has killed journalists, Donald Trump assured a rally here that despite his hatred of the press, he would “never kill them.”

Holding his second Christmas themed rally where he spoke flanked by lighted wreaths and entered and exited the stage to the tune of Christmas classics, Trump assured that he “would never kill” journalists. He then sarcastically added:

“Uhh, let’s see,” pausing as if to think if there would be circumstances under which his unequivocal “never” would change.

As the crowd laughed and turned their eyes to the media, Trump became serious once more: “No I wouldn’t. I would never kill them, but I do hate them. And some of them are such lying, disgusting people, it’s true.”

The longest traveling bad stand-up open mic performance in history continues without the audiences ever getting tired, it seems. I’m no full time Trump scold, and there’s never a bad time to take the press down a peg or two, but at some point one has to worry about what this guy would do with the launch codes and the Joint Chiefs at his disposal.

On the cusp of a critical — perhaps historic — election year, House Republicans (the faction that rules) have declared independence — on behalf of the GOP establishment. The omnibus budget deal that Republicans cut with President Obama was surrender, but underlying that was a portentous statement: establishment Republicans affirmed their intention to break away from the party’s conservative grassroots.

Key provisions of the budget deal can be interpreted in no other way than a premeditated decision to dismiss conservatives on vital issues. The price might be the presidency in 2016, but it could well be a price the establishment is willing to pay for longer term realignment.

Much of the House Republicans’ eschewing touches on social issues, immigration, and refugees (Syrians this go-round). Their full funding of Planned Parenthood goes beyond crass political calculation to basely immoral. The Faustian deal with Democrats on illegals opens the way to vote-harvesting opportunities for Democrats in future elections, while giving establishment-aligned business interests the cheap labor they desire.

The budget deal is a dramatic departure for a party on the eve of a presidential election year. It represents a brazen effort to reposition the GOP. Boehner assuredly made his surrenders, but it’s the timing of this agreement that marks it as troubling.

American television viewers were subjected to the usual smorgasbord of left-wing dhimmitude, foreign-policy impotence, bleeding-heart lunacy, lies about America, and ugly class-warfare rhetoric by the three radical leftists still standing in the Democrats’ presidential primary race in a debate that aired on the weekend.

The winner, of course, was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, because Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley refused to lay a glove on her over her deadly bungling of the Benghazi terrorist attack and its aftermath, her dangerous, illegal, email system, and the international clearinghouse for bribes and future presidential favors known as the irredeemably corrupt Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Foundation.

Americans were told in the debate Saturday night in Manchester, N.H., that GOP frontrunner Donald Trump is a racist and a fascist, taxes need to go up, gun control needs to be strengthened, America is a terrible, racist, Islamophobic country, and Muslims are our best hope for combating Muslim terrorism.

Perhaps you haven’t heard that the Democratic presidential candidates held a debate Saturday night, which is how the party’s elites like it. This faux nomination fight is about coronating Hillary Clinton, and the last thing Democrats want is voters watching if the other candidates expose her weaknesses. Maybe they’ll schedule the next debate during the NFL playoffs.

Not that Democrats needed to worry. Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, the two competitors on stage with the former first lady, couldn’t have been more solicitous if they were Ted Cruz praising Donald Trump.

The wonder is why Mr. O’Malley is still running. The former Maryland Governor is getting little support even in a three-person race and he has even less to say. He keeps looking for running room on the left on guns and taxes, but there isn’t any. He wants to make the case for change but oh-so-gently so he doesn’t have to criticize President Obama’s record. This leaves him saying things like “the President had us on the right course” in the war against Islamic State, but “we have to increase the battle tempo, we have to bring a modern way of getting things done.” General O’Malley reporting for duty.

At the beginning of December, Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell asked Secretary of State John Kerry whether Charles and David Koch, two libertarian political activists, should be considered — his remarkable words — “an enemy of the state.” He posed the same question about Exxon, and John Kerry, who could have been president of these United States, said that he looked forward to the seizure of Exxon’s assets for the crime of “proselytizing” impermissibly about the question of global warming.

An enemy of the state? That’s the Democrats’ theme for the New Year: totalitarianism.

Donald Trump may talk like a brownshirt, but the Democrats mean business. For those of you keeping track, the Democrats and their allies on the left have now: voted in the Senate to repeal the First Amendment, proposed imprisoning people for holding the wrong views on global warming, sought to prohibit the showing of a film critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton, proposed banning politically unpopular academic research, demanded that funding politically unpopular organizations and causes be made a crime and that the RICO organized-crime statute be used as a weapon against targeted political groups. They have filed felony charges against a Republican governor for vetoing a piece of legislation, engaged in naked political persecutions of members of Congress, and used the IRS and the ATF as weapons against political critics.

Air Force fighter pilot John Boyd’s theory about confounding opponents with a constantly shifting battlefield applies to Donald Trump and all GOP aspirants.

No matter how much you dislike Donald Trump and his effect on the Republican presidential primary race—and there are many, many good reasons to do so—you have to spare a little grudging admiration for the sheer madcap genius of Trump’s ability to disrupt, unsettle, and exploit the primary system.

We can better understand what Trump has done successfully, as well as his ultimate limitations as a candidate and why he would be such a terrible president, using the ideas of military strategic theorist John Boyd. Trump has been, thus far, the true Boyd candidate in this race, yet he is already exhibiting symptoms of precisely the flaws that Boyd saw as fatal in combatants.

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act

Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot, Vietnam and Korea veteran, and fighter design engineer, is best known for the “OODA Loop” or “decision cycle,” a concept he developed as part of a broader study of “patterns of conflict” in the 1970s and 1980s later widely adopted in the military, especially the U.S. Marine Corps. OODA stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, and refers to the process by which soldiers in combat—or humans engaged in any form of conflict—absorb information, make decisions, and act on them. Boyd illustrated this with a graph:

OODA1

Boyd’s theories were complex, constantly evolving, and never formally written down in one place in his lifetime—he preferred to play Socrates, and let others be Plato—so they are often oversimplified. But for present purposes, four generalizations will do.

First, operational tempo—speed—lies at the core of Boyd’s theory of conflict, and has been the most influential element of his thinking, both in the military and in how the concept of a “decision cycle” has seeped into our popular vocabulary. (Indeed, Boyd first made his name in the Air Force as “40-Second Boyd,” a fighter jock with a standing bet that he could get on any opponent’s tail in 40 seconds. Many took the bet; he never had to pay up.)

Boyd’s core insight was about the interactive and disruptive nature of speed on human decision-making: success in conflict can be rapid and dramatic if one can “operate inside the OODA Loop” of the opponent. Operating inside the opponent’s OODA Loop means presenting him with a constantly shifting battlefield that keeps him off-balance and disoriented so he is unable to process information and make and implement sound decisions before the situation changes again.