RUTHFULLY YOURS

Every time Obama issues another public ultimatum to Congress (before doing what he wants to do anyway) he phrases it in terms like “common sense” or “pragmatic”. It’s “non-ideological” he insists. The left’s ideological agenda just happens to be the common sense pragmatic non-ideological solution.Obama may be the most radical political figure to occupy the White House, but he is careful to avoid political labels. His leftist allies calculatingly compare him to Reagan or Roosevelt. He’s not an ideologue. Just another one of those “Great American Leaders” bent on helping ordinary people.

A big part of the left’s latest successes can be attributed to this non-ideological rebranding.

The old left (both old and new) was a political movement that wanted to be understood in terms of its ideology. The post-leftist left wants to be seen as progressive. It emphasizes policies linked to people instead of ideology. The ideology is still there and choking entire university departments to death, but its public face emphasizes an apolitical technocracy of pragmatists and caring social workers.

I’ve noticed something about Rubio and Cruz. They’re white guys.

They’re sons of Cuban immigrants, and their ethnic background is Hispanic, in that their ancestors were from Spain. Spaniards are genetically just as white as Finns, only with a dark complexion. Many Hispanics, in Cuba and elsewhere, intermarried with Native Americans, and to a certain extent with black Africans. The ancestors of Cruz and Rubio did not, to any appreciable extent. You can tell by looking at them.

Since they’re Cuban-American, they are not Mexican-Americans. Their language skills will help them a bit, but the large majority of Hispanic-Americans do not identify with them. They’re Cubans.They’re white.

The Republican presidential candidate can prevail by increasing his share of the Hispanic vote, or the white vote. The problem with concentrating on Hispanics is that they’re mainly in the wrong states. Apart from Florida and Colorado, the battleground states cannot be won by a shift to the Republicans by Hispanics. The key to a Republican victory is in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. These are not blue states. Look at their state legislatures. A lot of working class whites in these states stayed home rather than vote for Romney. If Cruz or Rubio can appeal to them in a way that Romney did not, they’ll turn out and give the Electoral College to the Republicans.

The U.S. and International Community Must Hold Palestinians Accountable for Terror

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) submitted the following statement into the Congressional Record concerning the recent Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians:

“My thoughts and prayers are with the Israeli people who are enduring a new escalation of Palestinian terrorism.

“Last Thursday evening, a mother and father were murdered in front of their four children ages 9, 7, 4 and 4 months when Hamas terrorists opened fire on their car. A few days later, another Jewish family was walking in the Old City of Jerusalem after praying at the Western Wall when a Palestinian terrorist went on a stabbing attack. He murdered the father along with another courageous man who rushed to the scene to the family’s aid. Both men leave behind their wives and nine children. In addition to the four murdered, many more Israelis have been seriously wounded from car-ramming, rock-throwing, and brutal knife and screwdriver stabbing attacks in what appears to be a fresh horror—an epidemic of low-tech, brutal attacks by militants who are acting on their own initiative.

For the fourth time this week, Ben Carson finds himself embroiled in controversy. This time, he’s in trouble with the Left for declaring that, “the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.” Before that, he caught flack for saying that people should rush mass shooters, that the loss of constitutional liberties is “more devastating” than a body with bullet wounds, and that not “every lifestyle is exactly of the same value.”

The list could go on — Carson has been touching off such online tempests for months.

Each time, the pattern is the same: Carson expresses his opinion — typically grounded in common sense and widely shared by the American people — the media declares that some people are “offended,” and he doubles down, restating his position again and again in the same calm, even tone.

Here he is, for example, addressing his comments about the Oregon shooting:

House Benghazi committee chairman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.) has accused Hillary Clinton confidante Sid Blumenthal of outing a CIA source in Libya, and using his close ties to the then-secretary of state to profit from the 2011 American intervention that brought down Moammar Qaddafi.

Yesterday, Gowdy sent a fiery letter accusing Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Benghazi committee, of improperly politicizing the committee’s 17-month investigation by selectively leaking information. In the face of Democratic calls to disband the committee, Gowdy’s letter sought to justify the committee’s existence by highlighting some of its key findings.

In particular, Gowdy pointed to the committee’s substantial collection of e-mails between Secretary Clinton and Blumenthal, who had been specifically barred from working at the State Department by White House officials. Gowdy noted that approximately half of all of Clinton’s messages pertaining to Libya were between her and Blumenthal, prompting him to label the former journalist “Secretary Clinton’s primary advisor” on U.S. policy in the North-African country.

Speaking Tuesday night to Brett Baier, Donald Trump sounded more like Democrats Sheila Jackson Lee and Dennis Kucinich than like the Republican front-runner for president. Asked whether he stood behind his 2008 interview where he said it would have been a “wonderful thing” if Nancy Pelosi had attempted to impeach President George W. Bush, Trump said this: “I think he was a disaster and I think it was one of the worst decisions ever made. [He] has totally destabilized the Middle East. If you had Saddam Hussein, you wouldn’t have the problems you have right now.”

I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. The Middle East was not stable with Saddam in power, and the present instability is far more related to the Arab Spring and the American pullout from post-Surge Iraq than it is to the initial decision to invade. In 2009, Barack Obama inherited a Middle East where American and Iraqi forces had crushed the al-Qaeda insurgency, Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi was effectively neutralized — agreeing months after Saddam fell to abandon his own WMD stockpiles — and Iran’s power was checked in part by the presence of American combat troops next door.

From Austrlia but so applicable to US elections….rsk
What is a conservative to do when his favoured party’s leadership falls into the hands of a politician of no known conservative conviction? Loyalty is important, make no mistake about that. But so are values, and they are always worth fighting for.
Christopher Rath, a Young Liberal branch president, makes the following, quite remarkable confession in his Menzies House essay, “In Defense of the Establishment”:

My critics in the Young Liberals may call me an “establicon” or establishment conservative as a pejorative, but I wear it as a badge of honour. Being an “establicon” means being “dry”, it means supporting the Premier and Prime Minister, campaigning, raising money, supporting branches to grow, pre-selecting talented men and women, and fostering our best future leaders. It means loving the Liberal Party and our greatest living Australian, John Howard.

What Mr. Rath makes abundantly clear, if unintentionally so, is that he entirely misunderstands the accusation of “establiconservatism”. An establicon isn’t one who campaigns for one’s party despite personal disagreements with the ruling philosophy of its leader. Basically, and not to mince words, being an establicon means excusing oneself from the struggle for authentic conservative government on the grounds that blind support for the party is the greater good.

For instance, a true conservative could support the Turnbull-led Liberal Party while still advocating a return to conservative leadership, if not by ousting Turnbull then by pressuring him to abide by the principles of the party’s centre-right rank-and-file. On the other hand, we would expect an establicon to say that, since Turnbull and his cabinet have so far governed in accordance with broadly free-market principles, matters of cultural and social importance can be set aside and overlooked.

Let’s be clear: the true conservative is a conservative first, and a party loyalist second. He or she never sacrifices the core convictions of Anglo-Australian conservatism—civil institutions such as marriage, the Constitution, the monarchy; the sanctity of life; the preservation of Australia’s cultural identity, and so on—as a matter of convenience. He never shies from criticising those who would use the Liberal Party, ostensibly the principle vehicle for conservatism in Australia, to advance fundamentally un-conservative ends. He needn’t openly revolt against the Party’s leadership, but he ought not be cowed by the leadership either.

Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn are, in obvious ways, opposites: in the over-used terminology we learned from France’s revolutionary National Assembly in the 1790s, one is at the extreme “left” of orthodox politics in the Anglophone world, and the other at a version of the extreme “right”. But they also have similarities. They have both sprung surprises, one by becoming the leader of a major party and the other by threatening to. In each case they are hostile to something seen as an establishment and stand in sharp contrast to the centrist, professional politicians whom they oppose. But I think the similarities go considerably deeper than that and are best understood in terms of the sort of typology developed by Maurice Duverger, in his Les Partis Politiques, first published in 1951, although the version expounded here will be my own, rather than that of Duverger, who died last year. (Is lasting 63 years after the publication of your best known work some kind of record?)

All parties contain or relate to a number of distinguishable categories of person: these include leaders, aspiring leaders, follower-members, devotee-members, loyal voters and marginal voters. A Tory MP, for example, might be either an aspiring leader or just a follower member or both or fall into several other categories. But the relationship between these elements differs markedly between different parties and determines the nature of the party. What the Labour Party and the Republican Party have in common is that devotees are far more important than they are in other parties, though I am going to call them fundamentalists as I think that word suggests some of their more important characteristics. Therefore the central dilemma of democratic politics — compromise and win, or maintain your principles and lose — is far more central than it is in other parties. They are, of course, more or less opposite principles: egalitarian, collectivist and neo-pacifist as against individualist, nationalistic and puritanical.

John Kasich pointed to his controversial expansion of Medicaid in Ohio today as an example of the type of action government can take to prevent mass shootings.

“Look, part of the reason I expanded Medicaid is so people can get help, so that people can get some help at the community level.” Kasich said Tuesday when asked about the role of government in preventing gun violence. “Yeah, I think it’s very, very important for all of us to think of the things we can do to try to attach ourselves more to building the community from the bottom up.”

Kasich was speaking at an event hosted by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C.