RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Republican Senate caucus has been divided in its endorsements of candidates in the 2016 presidential primary, but a Colorado freshman has decided to formally back a senator who helped him with his own campaign last year.

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who served in the House before defeating Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) a year ago, announced his support today for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Rubio stepped in with a Spanish-language ad, released by the Chamber of Commerce, on behalf of Gardner in May 2014. More than one in five residents of Colorado is Hispanic.

Rubio and Gardner serve together on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

No more beating around the bush-Jeb should now leave graciously….he has lived graciously….before his name becomes a national joke…..rsk
The greatest fiction writers will tell you that the best way to describe a character in a story is to show him in action, not to describe him with adjectives.

Unfortunately, Jeb Bush doesn’t employ very talented novelists to write his speeches. In an effort to re-re-reboot his campaign, he gave a major speech in Miami in English on Monday.

First, Jeb started talking about his exciting new book – about his emails.

For eight years, I gave out my jeb@jeb.org email address to anyone who wanted to talk to me.

And email they did!

People across the state told me their stories.

Sometimes they asked questions.

On the Fox show Outnumbered Thursday, Newt Gingrich referred to liberals as “the totalitarian Left.” That same day, on Fox Business’s Varney & Co, political commentator Monica Crowley remarked that the Democrats of today, seeking a fundamental transformation of America, are not the classical liberals of the past.

Gingrich’s description of the Left’s totalitarianism dovetails directly into Crowley’s, since that fundamental transformation is a total one that necessarily must be coerced. Both their comments echo what the Horowitz Freedom Center has been declaring for twenty years: that “inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”

I reached out to Monica Crowley for her further thoughts on the matter.

Mark Tapson: Monica, on Varney & Co you commented that new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan may be under the illusion that he will be dealing with the Democratic party of old, but today’s Dems want to fundamentally transform America and can’t be viewed as partners in restoring America. Could you elaborate on that a bit?

The scathing eye that The Associated Press cast over Hillary Clinton’s latest deceptions will make for an interesting election season if it marks the birth of a trend. Here’s to the hope, a faint one, that the lure of a good story trumps Big Media’s leftist orthodoxy
Only hours after the first Democratic debate closed on October 13, the Associated Press fact-checkers issued their analysis of a random sample of the lies told by the two leading candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. This exercise was charitably described in the headline as “Clinton, Sanders revise history”. But it was weightier than the catalogue of minor errors that usually constitutes media fact-checking.

It pointed first to shameless and serious denials of the truth, such as Mrs Clinton’s claims that she had not reversed herself on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. For some years she has been praising the trade agreement (which she helped to negotiate) as “the gold standard” of such deals. In the debate before a highly-partisan and unionised Democrat audience, however, she switched, claiming with a straight face merely that she had “hoped” it would be the gold standard but that, alas and alack …

The White House is conducting a full-court press to stop the releasing of emails between President Barack Obama and his former Secretary of State , and now the Democratic Party’s presidential heir apparent, Hillary Clinton. According to reports in Washington, D.C., news outlets, the White House is claiming they are required to keep presidential communications confidential at least until a president exits the White House at the end of his or her term.

While the majority of print and broadcast news media all but ignore the information emanating from the drip-by-drip release of Clinton emails, on Friday the State Department released another batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails from her tenure as top diplomat. However, the White House will not allow the release of emails between Obama and Clinton even if some are communications between the two regarding the Benghazi terrorist attack in 2012.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.

Dear Reader (including those of you Donald Trump didn’t call “truly odious”),

True story. When I took the SAT (which once was an acronym for “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” then “Scholastic Assessment Test,” but is now simply called the SAT because the gormless quislings of the higher-education establishment are too scared even to defend the idea their test actually measures anything. But that’s a topic for another day) . . .

. . . Where was I? Oh right. True story: When I took the SAT (at Martin Luther King Jr. high school on West 65th street), right before the administrator guy said, “Open your books,” a kid raced into the room and took the chair right in front of me. He was a species of Manhattanite I knew very well: The urban hippie, a close relative of the more dignified bohemian, but a distinct breed. This guy was a cross between Jeff Spiccoli, Shaggy, and maybe a young Lincoln Chafee.

Anyway, the instructor told us all to open our booklets and get started. Almost immediately, the kid started shifting in his seat like maybe he was sitting awkwardly on his roach clip. By the middle of the test’s first section, the urban hippie started muttering in an exasperated whisper: “Oh man.”

With every turn of the page, he’d suck in a lungful of air through clenched teeth and run his fingers through his greasy pre-white-guy-dreadlocks hair, while kicking out his feet in shock. “Aw man, aw man, aw man.” His anguish was matched only by his surprise at how much worse each new page could be the than the one that preceded it.

I thought the whole thing was hilarious, and ended up giggling through most of the test, which probably seemed prickish to kids who thought I was gloating.

I bring this up partly because I had no idea how to begin this “news”letter this morning and partly because I imagined something similar was going on at Bush campaign HQ during the CNBC debate.

The Jeb Test

Full disclosure: I don’t hate Jeb Bush, nor do I scorn him. I respect the guy. I don’t like the way people trash him and act as if no serious conservative could possibly support him. But, as I’ve been saying for a longtime now, I don’t think he’s the right candidate for 2016. While not my first choice by any measure, I think he could be a fine president, and it would be a no-brainer to vote for him over Hillary Clinton. That said, I’ve always thought he’d be a deeply, deeply, flawed nominee. As I’ve written before, in a contest of familiar brands, the more popular one does better — and the Clinton brand is more popular than the Bush brand. In a change election, when the other side has an old and tired brand, the last thing in the world you should do is respond with an older and even more tired brand.

But if anyone put on a worse performance than Bush, it was CNBC’s moderators: John Harwood, Becky Quick and Carl Quintanilla. That became clear when Ted Cruz answered the second question posed to him. The lengthy exchange is worth quoting in full:

Quintanilla: Sen. Cruz, congressional Republicans, Democrats and the White House are about to strike a compromise that would raise the debt limit, prevent a government shutdown, and calm financial markets that fear of another Washington-created crisis is on the way. Does your opposition to it show that you’re not the kind of problem-solver American voters want?

Cruz: You know, let me say something at the outset. The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media. [applause]

This is not a cage match. And you look at the questions: “Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?” “Ben Carson, can you do math?” “John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?” “Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?” “Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?” How about talking about the substantive issues people care about? [applause]

Quintanilla: Does this count? Do we get credit for this one?

Cruz: And Carl—Carl, I’m not finished yet. The contrast with the Democratic debate, where every fawning question from the media was, “Which of you is more handsome and wise?” And let me be clear.

Quintanilla: So, this is a question about the debt limit, which you have 30 seconds left to answer, should you choose to do so.

Cruz: Let me be clear. The men and women on this stage have more ideas, more experience, more common sense than every participant in the Democratic debate. That debate reflected a debate between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. [laughter and applause]

And nobody watching at home believes that any of the moderators has any intention of voting in a Republican primary. The questions that are being asked shouldn’t be trying to get people to tear into each other. It should be: What are your substantive solutions to [inaudible]?