RUTHFULLY YOURS

Manchester, N.H. — Marco Rubio’s momentum just hit a brick wall in the Granite State.

In the home stretch of a New Hampshire primary famous for its last-minute voting swings, the Florida senator stumbled during Saturday night’s debate while under attack from Chris Christie and Jeb Bush. Both candidates will find themselves on the ropes if they can’t finish strong here Tuesday, and they ganged up on their chief rival early, questioning his readiness for the White House. Rubio appeared rattled by the onslaught, repeating the same talking point three times in a heavily scrutinized sequence that was easily his worst of the entire debate season.

Each of Iowa’s top-three finishers — Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump, returning to center stage after he skipped last week’s debate — had cause to believe they would be in the crosshairs of their opponents as the night began. But with Trump viewed as the clear front-runner to win New Hampshire, and Cruz courting a narrower slice of conservative voters in the state, it was Rubio who absorbed the most damaging blows as both Christie and Bush tried to stave off electoral extinction.

Polls have shown Rubio, Christie, Bush, and John Kasich competing for the same sprawling class of center-right voters in New Hampshire. Rubio had been surging coming into the debate, and seemed to be achieving some separation from the pack thanks to his stronger-than-expected third-place finish in Iowa. But a rocky performance at St. Anselm’s College may have opened the door for his rivals to halt his climb.

In the latest debate, Donald Trump made it clear, once again, that not only he is not conservative, but he has absolutely no idea what conservatism is.

When asked to define conservative, Trump, who usually gives expansive answers, managed to speak for less than 30 seconds before running out of ammo. His answer was that “Conservatism means … to conserve … your wealth”.

That’s not what conservatism is. A two-year transfer student into Wharton College (with an uncle in MIT) should be able to give a better answer than that. Marco Rubio, perspiring like a fire hydrant, nonetheless came closer to the mark with his canned answer to the same question: “Conservatism means limited government, free enterprise, and a strong national defense.” And he (or whoever prepared him with that answer) is right. Conservatism is about advocating the liberty of the individual and preventing the government from encroaching on it. Conservatism is about protecting private property rights and giving businesses the opportunity to grow without the stranglehold of regulation. It’s also about protecting our country with a strong national defense. And, although it didn’t occur to Marco or his debate prep team, it’s also about adhering to what’s in the Constitution.

But Donald Trump didn’t raise any of these points.

But this will not hurt him, because Trump’s supporters, by and large, are not conservatives. It seems as if a reason that he underperformed in Iowa was that he was competing with Marco Rubio for presumably more moderate voters, and when Marco Rubio surged, it was at Trump’s expense.

The failure of Canada’s majority Conservative government to win re-election on October 17, 2015 should serve as an object lesson to the Republican establishment in the United States. Among a number of reasons for the debacle, the abandonment or weakening of first principles in the name of pragmatic and ideological compromise was a major factor leading to the Conservative defeat.

The Tories attempted to cater to non-conservative voters, to appeal to a broad constituency, to be liked, to be moderate, by softening the party’s message and gutting many of its programs. Perhaps most obviously, they drew back from significantly defunding and at least partially privatizing our deep-left state-supported national broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The CBC is a cultural Marxist production that never met a Conservative policy it liked. It sees its mandate as constantly attacking every Conservative idea or piece of legislation while propagandizing on behalf of multiculturalism; Islam as a religion of peace; anti-Zionism; and radical movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Idle No More, and #BlackLivesMatter. It sided with Canada’s two socialist parties, the Liberals and the New Democratic Party (NDP). But aside from legislating a small reduction in the CBC’s operating budget, the Conservatives allowed the “MotherCorp” to continue shilling for the opposition. Afraid of giving its foes something to be offended by, the Conservative government funded its own demise.

No less catastrophic, the Conservatives failed to pass legislation to radically protect free speech across the country – legislation that would outrank our provincial kangaroo courts, known as Human Rights Commissions, whose mandate has been to prosecute individual citizens and groups on the flimsy grounds of “hate speech.” Aside from the fact that leaving these provincial tribunals in place did not garner a single bit of support or sympathy from the social justice totalitarians, this signal failure guarantees that open discussions essential to Canada’s future as a robust democracy – especially conversations about mass immigration, Islamic terrorism, and the relation between the two – will continue to be curtailed by the left-leaning proponents of censorship in the name of social “harmony.” Such conversations are also, not incidentally, essential to the survival of a genuine Conservative party.

I predict that nothing–not the trendiest public-relations firms or the most credentialed drama coaches–will stop the American public from voting against Ms. Hillary because of that voice!

So many issues, so little time, which is why I am studiously avoiding any issues about Hillary other than that voice!

I am definitely not going into the terminal dishonesty thing, you know, when she told the American public, and also the parents of the murdered victims in Benghazi, that the four patriots who lost their lives to a savage Islamic attack was because of an anti-Islam video; that Wall St. and specifically Goldman-Sachs is not donating to her campaign and that, according to Dick Morris, FEC reports say that Hillary has received $21.4 million from the financial and insurance industry—almost 15 percent of the total $157.8 million she raised, and she’s still trolling them for big money.”

How about that she won a smashing victory in Iowa (by six coin tosses that magically landed in her favor)? Dozens of websites have catalogued Hillary’s lies, starting decades ago with her debut on the political scene. Also here and here and don’t miss this one. Not going there.

I’m definitely not going into the incompetence thing, the colossal failure of her secretly-conducted socialized-medicine initiative as First Lady, her stunning lack of accomplishments in the U.S. Senate, or, most damning, the dangerous state of the entire world under her tenure as Secretary of State, which has resulted in a chaotic, devolving Europe, saturated in Islamic-terrorism; a catastrophic Middle East, also inundated with Islamic terrorism; and the mysterious loss of six-billion dollars! Uh uh, not going there.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) got another endorsement from a former presidential contender today as former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared his support for the third-place Iowa finisher.

“We have a lot of great candidates running — a lot of my friends are running,” Jindal told Fox News this evening. “The reality is these are very dangerous times. This president has weakened our standing on the foreign stage. Our enemies don’t fear us, our friends don’t trust us. Marco has been consistent about strengthening America’s foreign policy… Marco has consistently stood up to the threat of ISIS and radical Islam.”

Jindal stressed that despite his friendships with other candidates as well as Rubio, “I do think Marco is best positioned.”

“This election is about the future. I’m an ideas guy. We have got to turn the page on the Obama administration. I offered details policies through America Next on how we rebuild our economy. Marco is doing that as well,” he said, referencing his think tank.

“This is the most important election of our lifetime. We’ve got growing dependence on government. We’ve got more and more debt being piled on our children’s backs. Marco can unify our party,” Jindal continued. “His optimistic message is bringing voters from across the party lines, from across different demographic groups. He can unify our party and he can win this election in November. We cannot afford four more years of this president’s disastrous policies. I think he is a principled conservative. I think he is the right guy to lead us forward.”

A week ago Hillary Clinton’s allies accused the State Department Inspector General’s office of belonging to the vast right-wing conspiracy. So you have to admire her chutzpah this week in trying to spin a memo from that same office to exonerate her use of a renegade private email server. All the more so because the new memo strengthens the case that she mishandled national secrets.

In Thursday’s Democratic debate, Mrs. Clinton hailed a new document from State IG Steve Linick that summarizes his view of the email practices of five prior Secretaries of State. The memo says he found a few instances of “sensitive material” sent to the private email accounts of Republicans Colin Powell and staffers to Condoleezza Rice.

“Now you have these people in the government who are doing the same thing [to Powell and Rice’s aides] they’ve been doing to me,” claimed Mrs. Clinton—that is, “retroactively classifying” documents. “I agree with Secretary Powell, who said today this is an absurdity.”
Ah, yes, the old everybody-does-it defense. Mrs. Clinton wants Americans to believe it was common practice for top diplomats to use private email, and that they are all now subject to overzealous interagency squabbling over classification. By Friday Democrats were spinning that Mrs. Clinton is a political victim for having been singled out. Her media phalanx is buying this line, though the Powell and Rice details prove the opposite—and how reckless Mrs. Clinton was by comparison.

Laconia, N.H.

Lake Winnipesaukee has a monsoon season, apparently, but sheets of rain did not prevent voters from packing the former mill where Marco Rubio spoke Wednesday. The fire marshals closed the doors, as they did the night before in Exeter and would later that evening in Dover. Fresh off his surge in Iowa to a stronger-than-anticipated third, the senator is drawing crowds beyond the merely curious that feature some ineffable, heightened quality—something approaching genuine enthusiasm.

Mr. Rubio’s message is the same as it always was, with a well-rehearsed rap that matches Ted Cruz’s. But his political bet is that some New Hampshire voters want their anger tempered by optimism and a cheerful note or two.

The Florida senator’s combination of optimism and despair can nonetheless be contradictory. America is the greatest nation in the history of the world, he says, but it’s at risk of decline amid extraordinary challenges, and by the way if the present is terrible, look forward to the glorious “new American century” of the future.

Mr. Rubio can be as acid as Mr. Cruz or Donald Trump about the failures of President Obama and the diminished potential of American life, and he says the election is no less than “a referendum on our identity as a nation and a people” (as he says at every stop).

Having been blindsided from the left for the second time in as many presidential campaigns, inevitable Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is trying to mount a defense. Here’s the thrust and parry with immoderate moderator Rachel Maddow, from last night’s Clinton-Sanders squirmish on MSNBC:

Maddow: Secretary Clinton, Sen. Sanders is campaigning against you now, at this point in the campaign, basically arguing that you are not progressive enough to be the Democratic nominee. He has said that if you voted for the Iraq war, if you are in favor of the death penalty, if you wobbled on things like the Keystone Pipeline or TPP [the Trans-Pacific Partnership], if you said single-payer health care could never happen, then you’re too far to the right of the Democratic Party to be the party’s standard-bearer.

Given those policy positions, why should liberal Democrats support you and not Sen. Sanders?

Mrs. Clinton: Well because I am a progressive who gets things done.

Before elaborating, she went off on three separate tangents. First, she informed viewers that “the root of that word, progressive, is progress.” (The word duh, by contrast, is sui generis.)

Second, she listed a bunch of Democrats, past and future, who supposedly wouldn’t be pure enough to meet Sanders’s definition of a progressive: President Obama; Vice President Biden; Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the state in whose primary next week Sanders is expected to trounce Mrs. Clinton; and “even the late, great Senator Paul Wellstone.”

So according to Mrs. Clinton, even Paul Wellstone wasn’t as progressive as Sanders. If that’s meant to be an appeal to the left, it seems like one on Sanders’s behalf, not Mrs. Clinton’s.

Third, she went on about gun control, the only issue on which she is undeniably to the left of Sanders, hailing as he does from a constitutional-carry state. “I don’t think it was progressive to vote to give gun makers and sellers immunity,” Mrs. Clinton said. She said something about immigration, then finally circled back to the “progressive who gets things done” theme:

So we could go back and forth like this, but the fact is most people watching tonight want to know what we’ve done and what we will do. That’s why I am laying out a specific agenda that will make more progress, get more jobs with rising incomes, get us to universal health-care coverage, get us to universal pre-K, paid family leave and the other elements of what I think will build a strong economy, that will ensure Americans keep making progress. That’s what I’m offering and that’s what I will do as president.

Meanwhile … Bernie Sanders could possibly become the Democrat nominee for president.

A reader wrote in:

My wife and I have been looking forward to a Trump/Bernie general election precisely because we could witness a national MMA fight between capitalism and communism, and finish this thing once and for all.

He called my attention to a recent Sanders column by smear artist Ronald Radosh.

First, Paul Sperry wrote a column in the New York Post arguing that “self-described socialist” Bernie Sanders was also a “communist.” Small-c.

Radosh replied with a dissent posted at PJ Media arguing that Sanders was not a “Communist.” Large-C.

Typo? A large-C communist is a party member — a claim Sperry does not make. With Radosh, of course, errors are part of the MO. As redundantly demonstrated in The Rebuttal, Radosh makes errors (lies, smears); therefore he is. What I see more clearly than before is that the errors Radosh makes — and perhaps encourages disciples to make? — are a “bodyguard of lies” for his own line of propaganda.

Take his line against Sperry — Sanders Is Not a “Communist” (which, as noted, is not what Sperry wrote). Regardless of what motivates Radosh to try to knock down such a “charge,” he makes an argument based in error. Following the disinformation campaign against American Betrayal, many have pondered the degree to which such errors reflect sloppiness (as in incompetence) and/or conscious deceit. The point I wish to consider is the degree to which the facts, to Radosh, do not matter, period. His own party-line is the thing.

For the novice who might not understand how I have arrived a such a hypothesis, I will paste in a single page from The Rebuttal to Radosh’s dumbfounding campaign of lies against American Betrayal.