RUTHFULLY YOURS

The opposing waves of response to the Politico story are a reminder that sometimes the truth is somewhere in between. Some are defending Ben Carson from Politico, and most every mainstream news organ is turning him into wood pulp. The truth about his West Point saga might be somewhere in between.

But whatever the truth is, the incident reveals a recurring and perhaps unrecoverable trait of candidate Carson. He just doesn’t seem to know what he is talking about, whether it be Cuba, the Voting Rights Act, or how West Point works.

First, the easy truth. The heart of the Politico story is this line from Carson’s book, courtesy of Dave Weigel’s snippet of it:

Later, I was offered a full scholarship to West Point.

There you have it. Now things get foggy. To a teenage Ben Carson, this might mean he thought he heard some authority figure tell him he should go to West Point and it wouldn’t cost him anything. That figure might be General William Westmoreland. Carson isn’t clear who offered the “scholarship.” But maybe to a young Ben Carson, that’s what he honestly thought was on the table.

Mr. Zuckerman has often mentioned that either George Bush or Hillary Clinton would be good presidents. I will stick with Marco Rubion and Ted Cruz….rsk

Carson speaks about it in moral terms, while Trump takes the low road. Bush has the most rational plan.

I was born in Canada, a country I love, but entered the United States for education and stayed for a career. I have rejoiced at the opportunities, openness and friendliness of this society, and I became an American citizen many years ago. That is why I have looked on with perplexity and some astonishment at the way candidates for the Republican presidential nomination have approached immigration.

The retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has made an unlikely vault into the front of the Republican presidential pack with a weird mix of ideas—and an apparently shaky grasp of his own biography. But the gentle political novice’s appeal is easy enough to understand: He dares to talk about morals, including in reference to immigration, in an age when that has gone out of fashion. “Is it moral for us,” he wrote in “America the Beautiful,” his 2012 book, “to take advantage of cheap labor from illegal immigrants while denying them citizenship? I’m sure you can tell from the way I phrased the question that I believe we have taken the moral low road on this issue.”

Jeb Bush admits he “screwed up” during last week’s GOP debate, fumbling an attack against Marco Rubio. “I just gotta get better,” he told reporters in New Hampshire. Then he proceeded to prove he wasn’t getting better, by apologizing to the French for his debate jab against the length of their work week.

Bush campaign officials went to some effort to paint the apology as partly in jest, having it reported that Bush delivered it with mock solemnity. But the words of the apology were quite serious and, more importantly, the French took the apology completely seriously and reported it as such.

Apologizing to the French will not score Bush any points with the GOP primary electorate. It may show he is a gentleman, but it also shows he lacks the killer instinct of his father and brother when they ran for president In 1988, George H. W. Bush would pointedly refer to Pete du Pont, his GOP primary competitor, as “Pierre” during debates. In 2004, Jeb’s brother made sure Democratic nominee John Kerry was ridiculed for his closeness to the country seen as having spurned the U.S. after 9/11.

Bill Clinton’s famous defense, “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” was not a Heideggerian musing. It was the most obvious example of the linguistic trapdoors that the Clintons regularly install to slither out of countless corners. Now, following Marco Rubio’s charge during last week’s Republican debate that Hillary Clinton lied about the Benghazi attacks, Clinton’s defenders are highlighting those escape hatches — and using them as evidence of her honesty.

“Last week, Hillary Clinton went before a committee,” Rubio said at the debate:

She admitted she had sent e-mails to her family saying, “Hey, this attack at Benghazi was caused by al-Qaeda-like elements.” She spent over a week telling the families of those victims and the American people that it was because of a video. And yet the mainstream media is going around saying it was the greatest week in Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It was the week she got exposed as a liar.

The next morning Rubio faced a testy Charlie Rose, who goggled at the charge (“You called Hillary Clinton a liar, senator.”), then tried to shift the blame to fluid CIA intelligence. Rubio stood by his comments and added: “There was never, ever any evidence that [the attack] had anything to do with a video.”

What if the polls just stopped working?

Admittedly, this needs work as a plot device for a Stephen King novel. But for politics, it might be pretty awesome.

This week, businessman Matt Bevin won a stunning upset in the Kentucky governor’s race. It was only the second time in more than four decades that a Republican took the governor’s mansion in the Bluegrass State. Bevin’s margin of victory: nine percentage points.

Bevin’s win was big political news for a lot of reasons. Kentucky’s state health-care exchange, Kynect, was supposed to be the shining success story of Obamacare. Bevin vowed to dismantle it, a fatal mistake according to many inside-the-Beltway types.

The results in Kentucky — along with state-senate elections in Virginia — also demonstrated that however successful Barack Obama has been as a president, he’s been terrible for the Democratic party. On his watch, Democrats have lost more than 900 seats in state legislatures, 12 governorships, 69 congressional seats, and 13 Senate seats. The GOP, according to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, has full or partial control of 76 percent of state legislatures.

As the attendee puts it, “His hostility to Rubio was unbridled and unfiltered.”

Marco Rubio has gotten some glowing notices in the press lately. But if the last few years are any indication, he won’t be receiving any from one of the most prominent Republican pundits in the mainstream media.

Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman and influential host of the eponymous MSNBC program Morning Joe, has been so hostile in public and private toward the Florida senator that it’s now turning heads in Republican circles.

On television and social media, Scarborough has dismissed Rubio as a wannabe student-council president and lambasted him for lying to the American people. Scarborough’s distaste is returned in kind: Rubio doesn’t think much of him, either.

The two were ships passing one another in the night in Florida. Rubio was elected to the state’s House of Representatives in 2000, and Scarborough resigned his congressional seat one year later. Both are young men of tremendous talent and promise who came out of the same political jungle and who have landed in very different places — one a presidential candidate, the other a highly successful media personality.

Political beauty (Carson) and the beast (Trump)…..one is civil and ill equipped and the other is a bufoon and cur…..When they cancel each other out as they should and will, a rea; candidate will emerge and garner their votes…..Rubio and Cruz? rsk

It’s hard to say who’s leading on the national level because some polls show Ben Carson ahead while others show Donald Trump ahead, with wide differentials between polls. But on the state level, Ben Carson is beating Donald Trump in too many state polls to be ignored. He is leading in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Wisconsin, and Iowa. That’s impressive. It’s well-known that he’s doing well with religious conservatives in Iowa, but now it looks as though he has appeal throughout the South and other Midwestern states.

In North Carolina, Carson has a huge 31% base of support, while Trump has only 19%. In Iowa he has a whopping fourteen-point lead over Trump according to one poll and leads of various sizes in other polls. He is one point ahead in Texas, six points ahead in Oklahoma, and two points ahead in Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, Carson is neck and neck with Trump, only 2% behind him in a recent poll. In Pennsylvania he is only 1 point behind Trump.

It looks as if Trump is slowly losing voters to Carson.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is drawing sharper distinctions with front-runner Hillary Clinton, casting her policy reversals over the years as a character issue that voters should take into account when they evaluate the Democratic field.

Sen. Sanders of Vermont, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, also said the federal investigation of the security surrounding Mrs. Clinton’s private email account is appropriate.

In the Democratic debate last month, Mr. Sanders said voters were “sick and tired” of the focus on Mrs. Clinton’s “damn emails.” Afterward, many Democrats and political analysts said that he had appeared to dismiss her use of a private email account and server in her four years as secretary of state.
Mr. Sanders rejected that assessment on Wednesday. If her email practices foiled public-records requests or compromised classified information, those are “valid questions,” Mr. Sanders said.

The swirl this week over Marco Rubio’s personal finances brings to mind that popular children’s word game, “Would You Rather.” Cut through the hype and the question Mr. Rubio presents to the electorate is this: “Would you rather a president who is above it all, or who has lived it all?”

Only the voters can answer that question—if they have the chance. The press for its part is more interested in presenting Mr. Rubio’s financial history as some evidence of scandal. The New York Times has devoted near novel-length inches to the non-news (this was all covered in Mr. Rubio’s Senate race in 2010) that as a Florida legislator he used a Republican Party charge card for personal purchases.

And? The card was used primarily for political expenses—which were covered by the party. Mr. Rubio occasionally used it for a personal expense, which he then paid for each month by writing a check to the card company. No one is suggesting that the party paid a dime toward Mr. Rubio’s expenses, or that the candidate was a dime short in promptly paying back his personal charges. If this is a scandal, we’ve found a cure for insomnia.