RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the aftermath of Paris and before San Bernardino, Hillary Clinton articulated the forced catechism of the Left: “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”

What happens when a major political party becomes so wedded to political correctness that it feels constrained to deny reality? Clinton could hardly have chosen a less opportune moment to squeeze her eyes shut about the threat of Islamic extremism — a threat that is glaringly, blazingly obvious.

The first part of what Mrs. Clinton said was true. Islam is not our adversary. There are an estimated 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and if all of them were violent extremists, we’d have a planet drowning in blood. Most Muslims are peaceful. Beyond that, they practice charity, care for the sick, and encourage good works.

But there is a fever sweeping the Muslim world that has infected a significant minority of Muslims — and because Muslims are so numerous, that minority amounts to hundreds of millions. It began in the 1920s with the Muslim Brotherhood. Its Shiite incarnation has captured the government of Iran. Saudi oil money has facilitated its spread to places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. President Obama, deluded from the get-go that our enemy was not Islamic extremism, but merely “al-Qaeda,” stood by while the Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria morphed into a new entity called ISIS. Obama never saw it coming because he was determined to believe, with Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats, that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.

Full transcript further below — immediately below some quotes on key issues.

On Obama and the Palestinians:

“Just weeks ago, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas began a speech to a UN body by asking, quote, ‘For how long will this protracted Israeli occupation of our land last? After 67 years, how long?’

“As we all know, sixty-seven years ago was 1948, the year of Israel’s creation. So the man who is supposed to be Israel’s “partner for peace” has just said that all of Israel is illegitimate and that the Jewish state is an “occupation” of someone else’s land.

“Now, this isn’t unusual rhetoric from a Palestinian leader – but what matters is that it should have provoked a harsh condemnation from the United States. But our president said nothing. By his silence, our government emboldened those who seek Israel’s destruction and made itself a bystander to a poisonous lie.

“Similarly, over the past three months of Palestinian terror attacks, our administration refused over and over again to do anything more than call on both sides for restraint – as if there were no difference between aggression and self-defense.”

On EU labeling of Israeli products:

“Or consider the European Union’s recent approval of a new trade rule that requires special labeling of products produced in what the EU considers “Israeli-occupied territories.” The goal of this is to encourage Europeans to boycott goods from Israel. The rule applies to no other country – not to Russia, which invaded Georgia and Ukraine, nor China, which occupies Tibet. The EU is singling out only Israel.

“Let’s take a step back and realize what this means. Discriminatory laws that apply only to Jews are now being written into European law for the first time in more than half a century.

“I believe we need a president who is not afraid to call this out for what it is: anti-Semitism. I will be that president.”

On the movement to boycott Israel:

“I will also speak out against anti-Semitism here in America.

“One important example is the movement that calls itself ‘BDS’ – for boycott, divest, and sanction. This coalition of the radical left thinks it has discovered a clever, politically correct way to advocate Israel’s destruction. BDS couches hatred in the language of human rights and social justice.

“But the movement reeks of hypocrisy. Boycotters do not seek to punish Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Syria, or Russia – all actual human rights violators. Their campaign is aimed only at Israel. They make wild, false accusations in the hopes of inciting so much hatred of the Jewish state, especially on our campuses, that eventually support for Israel will become politically taboo.

“As president, I will call on university presidents, administrators, religious leaders, and professors to speak out with clarity and force on this issue – the same way they speak out against racism and other forms of bigotry. I will make clear that calling for the destruction of Israel is the same as calling for the death of Jews.”

Christie: Muslim Americans are ‘Not Nearly That Sensitive’ on Syrian Refugee Issue By Nicholas Ballasy
Republican presidential candidate Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) criticized President Obama for standing on foreign soil and belittling governors across the country over the Syrian refugee issue, arguing that Obama does not listen to the majority of the American people.

“It is true today as well that we have a president who I believe no longer listens. He listens to a very small, insular group of people around him, and I’ve said this publicly before and I’ll say it again, that when I look back on this presidency I think it will be marked by one phrase more than anything else: often wrong but never in doubt. That’s a dangerous thing to have in a president of the United States,” Christie said at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The president’s huge blunder, in my view, is going overseas and criticizing folks here at home who have raised genuine concerns about the safety and security of America under this policy,” he said, referring to the president’s determination to allow Syrian refugees in the United States.

A recent poll revealed that the majority of Americans oppose admitting Syrian refugees into the U.S.

Christie said the right path forward on the issue is clear.

“When the FBI director stands up and says that he cannot assure the American people that Syrian refugees can be effectively vetted, that ends the conversation for the moment. We cannot allow ourselves, at a time of great peril, to put ourselves voluntarily at even greater risk just because there are some folks who believe that it will make our country look better here around the world,” he said.

These people are wearisome, and not serious.

“We don’t know yet everything about this specific attack,” Clinton said. But regardless of the couple’s reasons for the murders, something needs to be done to prevent gun violence, she added.

“The vast majority of Muslim-Americans are just as concerned and heartbroken about this as anyone else and, no matter what motivation these killers, these murderers had, you can say one thing for certain: They should not have been able to do this,” Clinton said, transitioning into impassioned comments on gun control.

The reflexive narrative-protection instinct of the Democrats is not only nauseating, it’s dangerous. This woman wants to be commander in chief yet she is more inclined to protect Democrat policy talking points than American lives.

Since Obama gave Nidal Hasan a free pass in 2009 with his “workplace violence” nonsense, terrorists have known that the purported leaders of this country were going to be easy to dupe from time to time because they would never really be looking at the problem clearly. If you’re walking around barefoot on a bed of glass but attribute the pain in your bleeding feet to chapped hands, all the lotion in the world isn’t going to prevent the further slicing of your feet as you move forward.

A few months ago, overhearing some ladies in the audience of a pro-Israel lecture trash Donald Trump, and clearly sensing that they were Obama fans, I turned to them and said, “At least he will be a huge improvement over the current inhabitant of the White House.” They were greatly displeased.

But after reading this account of Mr. Trump’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I think I owe those ladies an apology.

It turns out, after all, that Mr. Trump’s views on the Middle East conflict are a carbon copy of Mr. Obama’s. For one, Mr. Trump believes that it is up to Israel to make peace happen. He is apparently unaware of Palestinians’ outright rejection of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. Secondly, Mr. Trump believes that solving the conflict is a central challenge, and so he promises to jump on it right at the onset of his presidency – as did Mr. Obama, having thought it was the key sore point that ruins the world’s universal happiness.

Donald Trump is not the favorite to win the Republican primary in 2016. National polls can be misleading — there is no day or time when Republicans across the nation will pick their presidential candidate. Instead, there will be multiple elections in all 50 states, on multiple days, and some states will matter more than others. This explains why so many pundits have predicted a Cruz-Rubio race.

In order to make this contest easier to understand, RealClearPolitics authors Sean Trende and David Byler created an interactive tool called the GOP Race for Delegates (you can find it here). Any reader can enter the polling results from each state’s primary and see how these results would affect the overall outcome. For convenience, Trende and Byler integrated each state’s rules into the program, and loaded the RealClearPolitics polling averages for the early states as a guideline.

Using this tool, Trende and Byler discovered many important features of the Republican primary to come. While conservative southern states will likely winnow the field, more liberal northern states will play a huge role in actually determining who will become the nominee. Some traditional wisdom is proven false, and there is a strong likelihood of a final battle between Senators Ted Cruz (TX) and Marco Rubio (FL).
Cruz-Rubio

While Trende and Byler emphasize that “there are an almost infinite number of possibilities,” they did tend to find one much-discussed outcome kept showing up in their simulations — a struggle between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

When Bernie Sanders proposed $18 trillion in increased federal spending over the next ten years, most observers chuckled and asked what else one could expect from the self-described socialist. But what then is one to make of Hillary Clinton? She hasn’t — yet — risen to Sanders-level spending, but she’s certainly heading in that direction.

This week, for example, she unveiled a “jobs” plan that includes the usual motley collection of infrastructure projects, “green energy,” subsidies, manufacturing incentives, government research and development, and so on. In total these proposals would cost at least $350 billion over a decade.

Clinton’s jobs program comes on top of a $75 billion proposal for increased spending on clean energy that she announced earlier. She also wants more government support for child care, a proposal that some estimate could cost $200 billion or more over ten years. That would be on top of her proposal to give states grants to encourage them to implement paid family leave, which would cost at least $10 billion, and her $10 billion proposal for subsidizing home care for the elderly.

One summer afternoon in 2013, Marco Rubio arrived at Mike Lee’s Senate office for a strategy session on derailing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Waiting inside were some of the upper chamber’s most conservative members, along with a group of influential activists. It promised to be an awkward pow-wow for the Florida senator, who had spent the 113th Congress authoring and promoting an immigration bill that turned some of his staunchest supporters — including some of those gathered in Lee’s office — into disgruntled opponents. Unperturbed, Rubio flashed a boyish grin and, according to multiple people present, greeted the group with a declaration: “The prodigal son is here.”

He knew he had sinned in their eyes, and that he needed the leaders of the increasingly powerful conservative movement that had championed his insurgent Senate bid to forgive him if he hoped to win their support for an eventual White House run. Yet one person in the room was already working overtime to make sure that wouldn’t happen. Ted Cruz, having copied Rubio’s anti-establishment blueprint to win his own Senate seat in 2012, had since usurped Rubio’s standing as the Tea Party’s favorite senator — in no small part by becoming the most vocal antagonist of the immigration-reform package that had blown up in the Floridian’s face earlier that summer. Both young senators harbored presidential ambitions, and if they ran against each other, Cruz wanted a clear contrast drawn between his brand of uncompromising ideological warfare and Rubio’s more pragmatic conservatism.

He’s not just sticking around.

Ted Cruz is on the move.

The combative Texas senator has climbed to second place in our GOP Power Rankings, the highest he has placed in the 14 weeks we have been polling political experts on who is the strongest candidate in the Republican field.

“The biggest news of the week was Ted Cruz’s surge in Iowa,” said Emory University professor Andra Gillespie. “One of the interesting features of this cycle has been the crowded evangelical field, where no one candidate has dominated and (Donald) Trump has held his own. Social conservatives may have found their candidate in Ted Cruz.”

Trump remains No. 1 in our survey, with 17 first-place votes. While he has continued to toss out comments that are considered poor taste or inaccurate, he is the unquestioned front-runner.

But Cruz and Marco Rubio are gaining ground. Rubio actually took more first-place votes in our survey (seven) than Cruz (four), but Cruz scored higher in total because 19 of our experts put him in second place.