RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two things are worth noting about Donald Trump’s whining over what he suddenly perceives as the “rigged” GOP nomination contest.

1. Trump is powerfully illustrating the fraud at the core of his case for the nomination. He claims that because he is a successful businessman he would be much more adept than conventional politicians at mastering the intricacies of problems and processes. He will, he brags, figure out how to deal with challenges in a way that maximizes American interests, assembling the best, most competent people to execute his plans of action. As a result, we are told, American will “win, win, win” with such numbing regularity that we will be bored to tears by all the success.

But look what is happening. The process of choosing a Republican nominee for president, while far from simple, is not as complicated as many of the challenges that cross an American president’s desk. There are, moreover, countless experienced hands who know how the process works and how to build an organization nimble enough to navigate the array of primaries (open and closed), caucuses, party meetings, varying delegate-allocation formulas, etc., exploiting or mitigating the advantages and disadvantages these present for different kinds of candidates. Yet, Trump has been out-organized, out-smarted, and out-worked by the competition – in particular, Ted Cruz, whom I support.

Trump is not being cheated. Everyone is playing by the same rules, which were available to every campaign well in advance. Trump simply is not as good at converting knowledge into success – notwithstanding the centrality of this talent to his candidacy. Perhaps this is because he is singularly good at generating free publicity (and consequently minimizing the publicity available to his rivals). Maybe he underestimated the importance of building a competent, experienced campaign organization. But he can hardly acknowledge this because it is a colossal error of judgment – and his purportedly peerless judgment is the selling point of his campaign.

As the prospect of a contested Republican presidential convention increases, so does the brawling over delegates—and the whining from the losers. If someone decides to run for President, is it too much to ask that he or his campaign managers understand the nominating rules?

“The system is rigged, it’s crooked,” Donald Trump said Monday on Fox News, with his usual understatement, after Ted Cruz won 34 GOP delegates in Colorado while Mr. Trump was shut out. “The people out there are going crazy, in the Denver area and Colorado itself, and they’re going absolutely crazy because they weren’t given a vote. This was given by politicians. It’s a crooked deal.” The truth is that he lost due to his own campaign’s ineptitude.

The state politicians in Colorado did exactly what they are entitled to do under Republican Party rules: set up a process that allocates delegates to candidates in any way a state party sees fit. Most state parties nowadays hold primary or caucus elections, but some do so with a hybrid system that can seem convoluted but makes sense if the goal is to build a party of volunteers from the ground up.

Colorado awarded delegates through a caucus process that began with precinct meetings and moved to congressional district and state GOP conventions. The attendees at those conventions then voted to elect the delegates to the national convention, and Mr. Cruz won 30 delegates that will be pledged to him on the first ballot. Another four are free agents but say they prefer Mr. Cruz. Three others are state party leaders who are free to vote as they please.

None of this was “crooked.” Mr. Trump is claiming the process was rigged because the Colorado GOP cancelled its usual straw poll held on Super Tuesday (March 15 this year). But the state party made that decision last August because such a poll would have been binding under new national GOP rules, and the Colorado party wanted its delegates to be free to support the candidate they liked in what was then a crowded field. The decision wasn’t aimed at Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cruz cleaned up in Colorado because his campaign was paying attention to the process. Whatever one thinks of the Texan’s appeal as a candidate, his campaign is organized and focused on winning the required 1,237 delegate majority. This speaks well of his ability to lead a complex organization. CONTINUE AT SITE

At a Bernie Sanders event in New York City, a black “community activist” began ranting about “Zionist Jews” running the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. At previous events, Sanders had been quick to condemn what he claimed was bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric by Republicans. But when confronted with the real thing by a left-wing activist at one of his own events, he couldn’t do it.

There was no condemnation of anti-Semitism. Instead after an initial claim that he was proud to be Jewish, he switched to a rambling speech criticizing Israel and distancing himself from Zionism.

Bernie Sanders had suggested at the same event that President Clinton was racist for defending his crime fighting policies to Black Lives Matter protesters, but would not condemn anti-Semitism. Instead of defying left-wing hatred for Jews, he tried to suggest that he wasn’t one of the “bad Zionists”. He was one of the “good Jews” who had a balanced position on Israel and “Palestine”.

It was a sad and shameful display. And this was not the first time that Bernie saw bigotry and blinked.

When NPR’s Diane Rehm accused him of having dual citizenship in Israel, he stumbled through a reply, but never condemned the anti-Semitism inherent in the question. He backed Jesse Jackson despite the Hymietown slur. When asked about it, he did his best to avoid directly condemning anti-Semitism.

Bernie Sanders came out of a political movement rife with anti-Semitism. He encounters it in public on a regular basis. And he is too much of a coward to stand up to it.

After Roseanne Barr ran for president, she stated that during the campaign, “everything I had ever believed about the left was severely shaken” and that she discovered that “many of those I had considered comrades were naked bigots”.

And she did what Bernie Sanders won’t do. She condemned the bigotry.

There’s little doubt that Bernie Sanders has encountered far more anti-Semitism in private than he has in public. And at every turn of the road, he made the decision to fall in line and keep his mouth shut.

In the UK, prominent Jews and non-Jews within Labour have been speaking out against growing anti-Semitism within the party and its political adjuncts. But here there’s a culture of silence about anti-Semitism on the left. And those who speak out pay the price. Consider the response to Phyllis Chesler’s The New Anti-Semitism. And, in contrast, the mainstreaming of Max Blumenthal’s blatant bigotry.

The “gentleman’s agreement” used to be that Jews were expected to keep quiet about anti-Semitism on the left while claiming that all the bigots were on the right. Bernie Sanders is a product of that system. His refusal to talk about anti-Semitism while accusing the right of bigotry is typical of how it works.

The Sanders event at the Apollo Theater also featured Harry Belafonte, who had claimed that “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich” and Spike Lee who had responded to criticism of anti-Semitic stereotypes in his movies by saying that he “couldn’t make an anti-Semitic film” because Jews run Hollywood. What does it say about Bernie Sanders that these are the ugly views of the people whom his campaign used in order to present him to a black audience?

A highly controversial Muslim leader appeared on a panel with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in Los Angeles last month. Salam al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), was kicked off of a congressional terrorism commission in 1999 when his organization’s open support for terrorist organizations was brought to light.

Marayati came under fire again just a few years later when on the day of the 9/11 attacks he fingered Israel as the culprit in a radio interview on a Los Angeles radio station.

Under his continued leadership, MPAC continues to promote extremist conspiracy theories, including accusations published on the group’s website in 2010 that Israel was harvesting the organs of Palestinians — a claim that was denounced by the Anti-Defamation League as a blood libel.

But Marayati’s appearance with Hillary Clinton is hardly unusual, as the relationship with the Clinton family goes back to 1996 — when he served as a delegate for Bill Clinton during the Democratic National Convention that year.

Waves of controversy have not stopped Hillary Clinton from continuing to promote Marayati, including appointing him to positions during her tenure as Obama’s secretary of State. So his appearance at the March 24th campaign panel held at the University of Southern California is no surprise.

In a Fox News debate, Donald Trump attacked Sen. Ted Cruz’s critical reference to “New York values” with a passionate reference to the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. As Real Clear Politics reported his remarks:

I’ve had more calls on that statement that Ted made, that New York is a great place, it’s got great people, it’s got loving people, wonderful people. When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York.

You had two 110-story buildings come crashing down, I saw them come down, thousands of people killed, and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup, probably in the history of doing this, and in construction, I was down there. And I’ve never seen anything like it. And the people in New York fought, and fought, and fought, and we saw more death and even the smell of death, nobody understood it, and it was with us for months, the smell. the air.

And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched, and everybody in the world loved New York, and loved New Yorkers, and I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.

Trump once wasn’t so enamored of the World Trade Center or its replacement, the Freedom Tower, describing them in terms that, according to the Independent Journal Review, provoked a backlash from outraged New Yorkers:

In an article from the New York Post dated September 18th, 2001, Trump said of the towers:

“To be blunt, they were not ‘great’ buildings… They only became great upon their demise last Tuesday…”

But Trump’s controversial statements surrounding the World Trade Center towers and the 9/11 attacks were far from over. In 2005, victims of the 9/11 attacks lambasted the billionaire for his insensitive remarks about the proposed “Freedom Tower.”

In regard to the construction of the Freedom Tower, Trump called the building inappropriate, which he suggested was unfit for that part of New York City:

“The Freedom Tower should not be allowed to be built. It’s not appropriate for Lower Manhattan, it’s not appropriate for Manhattan, it’s not appropriate for the United States, it’s not appropriate for freedom.”

Even before he entered the political arena, it was evident to most anyone with eyes that Donald Trump was a moral disgrace.

Philandering, misogyny, fraud, bankruptcy and tackiness were almost synonyms for his name. To all that, as a candidate for the presidency, Trump has added serial lying, racism, religious bigotry, slander and the outright encouragement of violence, with threats of more violence should he be deprived of the delegates needed to clinch his party’s nomination.

Yet many people with eyes — millions of them, in fact — have cast their votes for this creature from the cesspool. What are we to make of these fellow Americans?

CLINTON DISLIKED BY 55% OF AMERICANS, BUT TRUMP HATE ‘YUGER’

For obvious reasons, they are being treated by Trump’s rivals with tender solicitude. Trump’s followers remain important players in the ongoing battle for votes in the Republican primaries that remain. And whoever ends up as the Republican nominee will need them to show up at the polls in November to defeat Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

What is harder to excuse is the fact that more than a few conservative commentators, including many who revile Trump himself, have addressed his supporters with sympathy. The conservative columnist and Cruz supporter David Limbaugh has appealed to Trump’s followers as “patriots,” telling them, “I understand and share your frustration” as he implores them not to vote for their candidate of choice.

Part of the problem

To Peggy Noonan, Trump’s supporters are “are earnest and full of concern for America”; they are the “unprotected,” full of “legitimate anger” at the “protected” class that misgoverns them.

Going one step further is the commentator Dennis Saffran, writing in the American Spectator, who hastens to defend Trump’s supporters from their critics, calling them victims of “blatant class bigotry.”

Whatever you want to say against Ted Cruz, the excellence of his campaign operation is unarguable.

The Cruz team has stood head and shoulders above any other national campaign in either party and the Texas senator just might be rewarded with the nomination because of it.

The Cruz delegate wrangling operation literally ran rings around the Trump team in Colorado this weekend, giving the candidate 21 more delegates and a chance for more. This comes after another stellar performance by the Cruz team in North Dakota last weekend.

ABC News:

Slates loyal to Cruz won every assembly in Colorado’s seven congressional districts, which began April 2 and culminated Friday with 12 delegates selected. The Texas senator is well-positioned to pad his total Saturday, when 13 more delegates will be chosen at Colorado Republicans’ state convention.

Of Cruz’s delegates, only 17 were formally pledged to him, and in theory the other four could change their vote in Cleveland. But they were all included on the senator’s slates and are largely state party officials who said they were barred from signing a formal pledge for Cruz but have promised to back him in balloting at the convention.

The result shows how Cruz’s superior organization has helped him as he tries to catch up with front-runner Donald Trump. While Cruz’s campaign spent months recruiting slates of delegates and securing pledges, Trump only this week hired a Colorado state director. Two candidates Trump’s campaign told backers to support in one district were not even on the ballot.

The Trump campaign said it wasn’t worried and had always expected to fare poorly in Colorado because its assembly process is dominated by party insiders. “If we had a primary, yes, we would have done very well here,” said Trump senior adviser Alan Cobb.

Cruz also appeals to Colorado Republican activists who dominate party functions — a deeply conservative, religious crowd with a libertarian streak.

Bubba Bites Back

I guess we can start with Bill Clinton’s outburst against the Black Lives Matter crowd yesterday. Again, since the caffeine hasn’t even sunk in yet, let’s kick this bullet-point style. (I find transitions between paragraphs to be something of a burden these days. For instance, I wrote this piece on contested conventions for the Corner the other day in about 25 minutes. I let my research assistant Jack out of his kennel and told him, “Sniff for typos, boy. That’s a good boy.” He caught a bunch, but also said, “You don’t need to number your points. It reads fine without them.” He was right, of course. But that didn’t spare him a savage beating. I told him, “It puts the numbers back in, or it gets the hose again.”)

So where was I? Oh right Phoenix, Clinton, Black Lives Matter. I found the whole episode interesting for three however many reasons I come up with below.

1. Bill is doing something Hillary won’t: defend the Clinton record of the 1990s. Hillary’s happy to campaign on the gauzy nostalgia for the 1990s, when the gauzy nostalgia helps her. But the moment the politics change from taking credit to taking responsibility, she quietly slinks away like Joe Biden after farting at an arms-control summit. (“Look at Putin’s face! He thinks it was his translator! He’s gonna have that guy killed!”)

2. Unlike Hillary, who thinks her place in the history books is in front of her, Bill knows that 95 percent of his obituary has already been written. So he has a much more vested interest in defending his record. By moving to the left of her husband (where she was in the 1990s!) on economics, criminal justice, foreign policy, etc., Hillary slowly strips away the substance of Bill’s presidency. Take away the Balkan war, banking reform, etc., and what’s left of the Clinton legacy? Pretty much the fact that he singlehandedly turned the West Wing into a penile colony.

RELATED: Hillary’s Still Weak

3. Oh, at this point, I should also say Bill Clinton is right! The Black Lives Matter movement is not without its legitimate complaints and arguments — I’m in favor of some criminal-justice reforms. But they want to work from the assumption that there are no black bad actors in this story. It’s white supremacy all the way down. The problem with this is that even if white supremacy — whatever people mean by that — is the massive problem some lefties imagine, it still doesn’t excuse bad individual moral choices. Excuses don’t become explanations simply because you shout them. It’s a very weird corollary to social-justice logic. If you see everyone simply as representatives of groups — white oppressors and black victims — you withdraw the moral agency from individual actors on both sides of the equation (which, technically speaking, is racist). White people become agents of oppression and morally culpable even if they’ve done nothing wrong. Black criminals who prey on innocent black people become victims, about whom no one can say an unkind word.

4. One fun consequence of all this is that Bill very well could turn out to be a liability for Hillary, which would be kind of hilarious given that Hillary would be just another left-wing activist lawyer were it not for her husband. She rode her Arkansas mule all of the way to the White House gates only to see the sign reading, “No Mules Allowed.”

RELATED: Hillary’s Democratic Party Is What an Actual ‘Establishment’ Looks Like

5. There’s an old cliché that we become more conservative as we get older. The social science on all this is more mixed than you might think, depending on what you mean by “conservative.” There’s definitely a tendency for people to become more curmudgeonly as they age. That’s certainly my experience. I find myself yelling at clouds a lot more than I used to. But that’s not what’s going on here. Bill Clinton is probably a good deal more liberal than he was 20 years ago. The problem is the Democratic party is a lot more liberal than it was 20 years ago. Bill’s locked-in to his positions (See item No. 2) and that means he’s sliding rightward on the ideological spectrum.

Times Change

P. T. Barnum did not actually say, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The maxim endures nevertheless, and if ever anything showed why, it is the chimerical immigration plan Donald Trump has managed to turn into a front-running presidential bid. On Tuesday, Trump shared that plan’s centerpiece with the Washington Post: his strategy to force Mexico to pony up the $5 to $10 billion he insists will be enough to build 1,000 miles of towering, impregnable wall.

The squeeze-thy-neighbor gambit hits the Trump trifecta: it is at once vain, authoritarian, and asinine.

After ten months, The Donald’s stand-up routine has descended into self-parody: As the Myrmidons sing along, Trump first brays that he “will build the wall” (which, incidentally, would have no bearing on visa overstays, who account for nearly half of the illegal-alien population). Then, he vows to get Mexico to foot the bill, as if there were honor in extorting a poor but reasonably amicable neighbor into paying the vital border-security costs of a profligate superpower in whose budget $10 billion barely qualifies as a rounding error. (Compare, e.g., Trump’s promise to do nothing about unsustainable entitlements that are bankrupting the economy.)

Yet, absent from most of his speeches to the ardent faithful — and from his campaign’s position paper, with which he seems unacquainted — is the vow he reserves for more progressive audiences and media interviews: He will readmit most of the 11 million illegal aliens (as he puts it, “the good ones”) with legal status after he wastes considerably more than $10 billion to chase down and deport them.

RELATED: Donald Trump and the Return of Right-wing Statism

That is, while portraying himself as the scourge of illegal immigration, Trump is actually proposing amnesty of the “touch-back” variety occasionally championed by open-borders advocates. In Trump’s plan, deportation is not a security measure; it’s a laundering scheme.

Mind you: That position paper of his laments “the influx of foreign workers [from illegal immigration],” which “holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans — including immigrants themselves and their children — to earn a middle class wage.” Which sentiment is hard to square with an amnesty plan that, by Trump’s own reasoning, will hold down salaries, keep unemployment high, and make it difficult for poor and working-class Americans to earn a middle-class wage.