RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the most bizarre presidential election cycles in living memory just got a whole lot weirder

The Trump phenomenon has entered a phase of slow descent for now, paving the way for another outsider candidate to rise. Dr. Ben Carson is almost certainly a man of a more measured temperament and moral fortitude than Trump. Also, unlike Trump, Carson’s accomplishments are due solely to his aptitude, capacity for industry, and intellect. As exemplary men of achievement go, the GOP is far better served by Ben Carson’s rise to the forefront of the pack of Republican presidential candidates than they are by Trump’s ascendancy.

That is not to say that Ben Carson is qualified to serve as President of the United States. He is not. Though he is a lettered and brilliant man, Carson has not demonstrated competency or an understanding of the contours of policy that a modern commander-in-chief must fully grasp. As early as March, Carson was probed by radio host Hugh Hewitt on a range of issues related to foreign affairs. It was then that Americans learned that the pediatric neurosurgeon preferred to view the Middle East’s myriad ethno-geographic conflicts through the lens of Biblical scripture and was unclear on the fact that the Baltic States had been members of the NATO alliance for over a decade. In the months that have passed, the candidate has not boned up on the granular details of policy and process.

This week, Carson was stumped by a question on Cuba policy and confessed that he was unfamiliar with the U.S. asylum policy commonly referred to as “wet foot, dry foot.” That is, when Cuban migrants manage to make it onto U.S. soil, they are provided the opportunity to access expedited refugee status. Carson revealed that he had never heard of that policy. Earlier, he contended that Medicare and Medicaid were plagued by “half a trillion dollars” in losses due to fraud. “If true, that would be almost 50 percent of our total spending on the two programs,” the Washington Post’s James Downie noted. “The real number is somewhere between 3 and 10 percent.”

The day after being sworn in as secretary of State, Hillary Clinton signed a Sensitive Compartmented Information Nondisclosure Agreement that laid out criminal penalties for “any unauthorized disclosure” of classified information.

With the intelligence inspector general finding several instances of Clinton and her aides sending classified emails over a private, unsecured server, it will be interesting to see how Clinton tries to wiggle out from under this one.

Washington Free Beacon:

Clinton received at least two emails while secretary of state on her personal email server since marked “TS/SCI”—top secret/sensitive compartmented information—according to the U.S. intelligence community’s inspector general.

The State Department said in September that Clinton’s private email system, set up at her Chappaqua, N.Y., home, was not authorized to handle SCI.

The Democratic presidential frontrunner defended her unauthorized possession of SCI and hersending of emails containing classified information by claiming that the information was not marked as classified when it was sent or received.

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.