RUTHFULLY YOURS

Just weeks before the Iowa caucuses Donald Trump was subjected to a barrage of criticism from Republican commentators. New York Times house conservative David Brooks, who has threatened to move to Canada if Trump becomes president, called Trump a “solipsistic branding genius whose ‘policies’ have no contact with Planet Earth.” The National Review devoted a whole issue to parsing Trump’s manifold flaws and dangers to the Republican Party and the country: “Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.”

And those were the nicer comments.

This battle between Trump and the Republican establishment raises interesting questions about where we are politically after the disastrous seven years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Start with the contested notion that there even exists something we can call the Republican establishment. Trump along with Ted Cruz have presented themselves as anti-establishment candidates, “outsiders” battling the inside-the-Beltway “cartel,” to use Cruz’s word. As such they appeal to those voters who long have despised Congress and its pundit enablers for “going along to get along” rather than taking legislative action to slow down Obama’s ongoing fundamental transformation of America into an EU social-democratic nanny-state populated by the spawn of Julia and Pajama Boy.

Critics of this formulation argue that there is no “establishment,” that the diverse and conflicting opinions among Republican leaders, and the failure of this establishment to use its imagined powers and slow down Donald Trump, is proof that it is a figment of a paranoiac imagination. Didn’t the Chairman of the Republican National Committee punish National Review for dissing Trump by disinviting it from cosponsoring the next debate? And didn’t establishment stalwart Bob Dole say nice things about Trump during his evisceration of Ted Cruz? There is no unified cabal of Republican bigwigs colluding with the enemy and betraying the ordinary voters who put them in office.

As Hillary Clinton sinks ever deeper into E-mailgate, her excuses for grossly mishandling state secrets grow ever weaker. In defense of her gross negligence, Clinton and her comrades have dusted off a vintage 1990s cliché: “It’s the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy!”

Clinton has been hobbled by Inspector General of the Intelligence Community I. Charles McCullough III’s discovery that her private, unsecure computer server contained “several dozen” e-mails classified TOP SECRET/SAP. “Special Access Programs” is America’s highest clandestine designation. Such secrets must remain concealed because, under federal law, their “unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” As former Africom strategist Dan Maguire told Fox News, “There are people’s lives at stake.”

The response in Clintonia? Blame the Right and tar IGIC McCullough as a partisan GOP hack.

“I can’t control what Republicans and their allies do,” Clinton said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. Her outburst echoes Brian Fallon, her campaign flack.

As the SAP story broke on January 19, Fallon told Politico, “It is alarming that the intelligence community IG, working with Republicans in Congress, continues to selectively leak materials in order to resurface the same allegations and try to hurt Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

Fallon repeated this charge nearly verbatim when he told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota: “I think that Republicans are continuing to try to trump it up and resurface these allegations for the purposes of hurting her campaign.”

I’ve been hearing about the impending “conservative crackup” for nearly 25 years. The term was coined by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., the founder of The American Spectator. He meant that conservatism had lost its philosophical coherence. But the phrase almost instantly became a catchall for any prediction of the Right’s imminent demise or dissolution.

These dire prophecies always reminded me of those “Free Beer Tomorrow” signs. As Annie sings, tomorrow is “always a day away.”

Well, thanks to Donald Trump, tomorrow may be here. There’s a fierce internecine battle over whether to oppose Trump’s run, passively accept his popularity, or zealously support his bid.

The level of distrust among many of the different factions of the conservative coalition has never been higher, at least not in my experience. Arguments don’t seem to matter, only motives do.

Here’s Rush Limbaugh on Friday: “Forget the name is Trump. If a candidate could [guarantee to] fix everything that’s wrong in this country the way the Republican party thinks it’s wrong, if it were a slam dunk, if it were guaranteed, that candidate will still be opposed by the Republican-party establishment. . . . If he’s not part of the clique, they don’t want him in there.”

In other words, the GOP establishment has become so corrupted, its members would knowingly reject a savior just to protect their comfortable way of life.

Limbaugh also says that the conservative “intelligentsia” — in the form of conservative magazines and think tanks — doesn’t want to solve problems, it just wants to score points in an “academic exercise” within a perpetual “debating society.” “In other words,” Limbaugh says, “some people constantly need something to run against as a reason to exist.”

Meanwhile, many in the so-called establishment and intelligentsia have similar complaints about Limbaugh and his imitators on radio and cable TV, although most don’t say it publicly for fear of reprisal. I’ve lost track of the number of congressmen, consultants, and so forth who’ve told me that talk-radio hosts spend their time criticizing fellow conservatives because that’s what brings in the highest ratings. (Beating up on liberals just doesn’t animate the base like it used to.)

Of the remaining Republican presidential candidates, Senator Ted Cruz is the best choice to repair the mess that Eric Holder and Barack Obama have left at the United States Department of Justice. Cruz alone has an understanding of both the corrosive and lawless policies of the last seven years as well as the complex task of restoring the rule of law.

Cruz has an outsider’s zeal to reverse Obama’s lawlessness with the insider’s ability to overcome bureaucratic inertia.

No matter what issue you care about most, all policy roads lead through the Justice Department bureaucracy. If you care about energy, national security, religious liberty, immigration or the power of government, it is the Justice Department lawyers that develop the intricate legal policies that support the agency decisions. They are the lawyers that make the litigation decisions. That’s precisely why Obama installed a radical ideological crony like Eric Holder to lead the place.

When Obama radicalized the Justice Department, he radicalized the government.

Donald Trump doesn’t talk much about this radicalization at Obama’s Justice Department. When Trump touches on Obama’s radicalization of the ministerial state, Trump’s understanding is a mile wide and an inch deep. Ted Cruz has an understanding of Justice Department radicalization that is a mile wide and miles deep.

Fired by antipathy to Sen. Ted Cruz, which is easy to understand, the Washington Republican establishment is stampeding into the arms of Donald Trump. Prominent former members of Congress who have publicly signaled their preference for Mr. Trump include Bob Dole, Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich. A greater act of self-defeating myopia is hard to imagine.

It’s not exactly a secret that I’m a Democrat. But I’m also a citizen, and as a citizen, I’m risk-averse. I don’t want to take a chance on the future of my country. That’s why I want both parties to nominate candidates who are clearly qualified by virtue of knowledge, temperament and experience to serve as president.

Can anyone say with a straight face that Mr. Trump is such a candidate?

A much-debated issue of the National Review makes the fullest case yet that he is not, and the bill of particulars is impressive. The editors and 31 contributors demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Trump is no conservative and that his recent claims to the contrary are the political equivalent of a deathbed conversion. He backed the Obama administration’s economic stimulus and the bailouts for the banks and the automobile industry. He supports higher taxes on the wealthy and the aggressive use of eminent domain. He has spoken approvingly of single-payer health insurance, tougher gun-control legislation and Planned Parenthood.

As Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention points out, Mr. Trump has backed partial-birth abortion; he has abandoned one wife after another for a younger women while denying that he has any need to seek forgiveness; and his comments about Muslims show that his commitment to religious liberty is at best skin-deep.

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa— Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said the GOP front-runner plans to skip the Fox News debate Thursday in Des Moines, the final one before the Iowa caucuses, in the latest turn in its long-running dispute with the TV network.

Mr. Trump told reporters Tuesday he would likely skip the televised event. Shortly afterward, his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said the candidate had decided to bypass the debate.

“He is definitely not participating in the Fox News debate on Thursday,” Mr. Lewandowski said.
The announcement came amid a long-running public spat between Mr. Trump and the network. The billionaire businessman had threatened to boycott the debate if Fox’s Megyn Kelly served as a moderator, calling her “biased.”

A Fox News spokesman later Tuesday criticized Mr. Trump’s decision not to participate in the debate, calling it “near unprecedented.”

“We’re not sure how Iowans are going to feel about him walking away from them at the last minute, but it should be clear to the American public by now that this is rooted in one thing—Megyn Kelly, whom he has viciously attacked since August and has now spent four days demanding be removed from the debate stage,” the spokesman said.

Can Republicans and conservatives bring themselves to maybe support Donald Trump after all?

The question has come up as people like Bob Dole and Rudy Giuliani have begun to express themselves on the preferability of Mr. Trump to Ted Cruz, though it’s far from obvious that the choice comes down to those two. At the other end are the conservative writers at National Review who’ve tried to excommunicate Trump from themselves, or vice versa.

Mr. Trump calls himself a conservative because it is convenient to do so when stumping for GOP primary votes. He has adopted positions on abortion and guns that nobody believes.

He’s an avatar of New York values, goes the slur, but that’s a way of saying he fits the mold that umpty-million upscale voters say they want; a socially liberal, fiscally conservative candidate.

Indeed, if Mr. Trump bothered to know what he really thinks, as a lifelong New Yorker, business person and multiple divorcee, he probably slots right in with GOPers who aren’t social conservatives or evangelicals. And yet his success so far has been almost entirely with the social conservatives and evangelicals.

If angry white populists can make the unlikely Mr. Trump a vessel for their hopes, why not economic conservatives with NYC values? Coalition building!

Immigration has been central to his campaign but try to figure out what he’s saying. A respected social scientist like Christopher Jencks can admit that low-skill migrants may undermine the earnings of low-skill workers. The phrase downward assimilation has been adopted for the fact that not all second- and third-generation immigrant kids climb the educational and income ladder; some expand the ranks of the underclass.

Ted Cruz has dared to provoke the ire of one of the most ruthless and vengeful political forces on the planet, and it’s not Donald Trump. The Texas senator has crossed the ethanol industry in Iowa, which is a little like getting on the wrong side of the Catholic Church in Vatican City.

Cruz’s core theme is fighting the “Washington cartel,” which would be a lot easier if its tentacles didn’t extend all the way into the state crucial to Cruz’s presidential hopes.

Other Republicans have refused to bow and scrape before the ethanol industry — John McCain wouldn’t do it in 2000, but he didn’t compete in Iowa. Cruz, in contrast, has staked an enormous amount there. His campaign could have been engineered in a lab for Iowa: He is an evangelical who is a hard-liner on immigration and has organized relentlessly on the ground. The only dissonant note is his opposition to the so-called Renewable Fuel Standard that is a government prop for the industry. Cruz’s stand against it is an act of reckless courage.

The Renewable Fuel Standard requires that ethanol is blended into the nation’s gasoline, and in ever-increasing amounts. The mandate increases the price of gas while doing nothing for the environment. Even former boosters like Al Gore have given up on ethanol as a green wonder fuel. It does much less than advertised to reduce carbon emissions once the entire process of producing it is taken into account.

At sixty-eight years old, Hillary Clinton is very old and very tired. This week, she’s slogging along the campaign road, her media minions in tow, trying to convince the gullible among Iowa’s likely caucus-goers that she’s not part of the Democratic establishment.

Everyone knows, especially Clinton, that this is her last shot at the presidency. The greatest obstacle to her nomination is not Bernie Sanders. It’s the FBI’s long-term investigation of her conduct as secretary of state.

The FBI is investigating two aspects of Clinton’s conduct while she was secretary of state: first, the handling of classified information — up to and including top secret/special access program information — on her private email system; second, the possibility that Clinton, as secretary of state, sold American foreign policy to the highest bidder who wanted to contribute to the Clinton Family Foundation or pay Bill another $500,000 for a twenty-minute speech.

To begin we have to recognize the obvious: that her private email system was set up for a corrupt purpose, namely to ensure that she had control over all the communications she sent or received as secretary of state. We know that she tried to erase tens of thousands of emails to the State Department for their review, an act in furtherance of the corrupt purpose. The FBI has probably recovered most or all of them. Keep that in mind as you read what follows.

By establishing her non-government system, Clinton intended to thwart the government’s ownership of her in-the-line-of-duty communications and to keep the emails under her control at all times. From that fact, and the actions she took, arises the problem she has under the federal criminal law.

I’m not sure what is worse: Donald Trump bragging about paying off politicians, or the cheering by Republican-debate audiences when Donald Trump brags about paying off politicians. See, when I worked for the Justice Department, we didn’t just indict the slimy pols — from both parties — on the receiving end. We also indicted the deep-pocketed cronies who greased their palms, expecting top-shelf service in return.

Even if you’re not the queasy type, how nauseating to watch a crowd of people, many of whom would tell you they’re strong law-and-order conservatives, giddily applauding as a guy confesses that he’s the corrupter who makes the corruption work.

“I was a businessman,” Trump smarmed at a debate earlier this year. He was being pressed about the piles of dough he has deposited in Democratic coffers through the years — for his pals the Clintons (including the Clinton Ca-ching Foundation), Schumer, Reid, Pelosi, Cuomo, Rahm, and the rest of the gang.

“I give to everybody. When they call, I give.” Yup, although more to the progressives, to implement the very policies he now complains are destroying the country.

And why? Trump’s allocution continued:

“You know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me. . . . And that’s a broken system.”

Well, yeah, when you spend years breaking something, it tends to get broken.

EDITORIAL: Against Trump

Diagnosing the break might be thought the occasion for an apology, not a curtain call. But Trump gets the curtain call. And being Trump, he knows he’s on a roll and doubles down.

Rival Rand Paul needled, “You’ve donated to several Democratic candidates. You explained away those donations saying you did that to get business-related affairs. And you said recently, quote, ‘When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.’”

This is the point where the guy suspected of bribery, if he can afford a lawyer (or a million lawyers!), takes the Fifth . . . or at least whines, “You’re taking my words out of context!”

Not The Donald. He grins and squeals, “You better believe it.”