RUTHFULLY YOURS

Shortly after the Orlando attack, which left 49 dead and 53 others wounded, I predicted on my Facebook page that “despite the fact that the shooter pledged his allegiance to ISIS before launching fire, the FBI will spend weeks searching in vain for a motive. Experts will hypothesize that the shooter was disaffected, bored, insane or unemployed. It will be anything except Islamic terrorism. The whole thing will be a big mystery.” I further added,

In no time at all, the President, the government agencies and the media will be lumping in ‘homophobia’ with “Islamophobia”, and “hate”, “extremism”, “terrorism” and “violence” like they are all the same thing. Shortly thereafter (or perhaps simultaneously) the emphasis will be the hate, not Islamist ideology, and because right wingers are so hateful, the focus will be on right wing extremists who “hate” and are “Islamophobic.” And of course, Trump will be thrown in there somewhere.

It didn’t take long to prove my prediction true.

During his speech following the Orlando jihadist attack, President Obama intimated that Islamophobic speech used by Donald Trump and other Republicans is the cause of terrorist attacks. Pointing his finger at “politicians who tweet” and are “loose and sloppy” with their language, the president asserted that “this kind of mindset is dangerous. Look where it gets us.” Criticizing those who criticize him for refusing to use the phrase “Radical Islam,” President Obama insisted that “there’s no magic to the phrase Radical Islam. It’s a political talking point. It’s not a strategy.” He went on to say that “arguing about labels has all just been partisan rhetoric in the fight against extremist groups.”

Democratic presidential hopeful, Hilary Clinton, mirrored the President’s language almost verbatim, prompting a CNN reporter to ask Josh Ernest, White House spinmeister. whether the talking points were coordinated. Though he denied it, the similarity is hard to deny. Clinton proclaimed that Donald Trump thinks there are “magic words, once uttered [which] will stop terrorist from coming after us. Trump, as usual, is obsessed with name-calling….. It matters what we do more than what we say.”

ISIS is on the rise, Islamic terrorist groups have been gaining ground worldwide, Islamist ideology is spreading in the West, and ISIS-inspired attacks have arrived on the shores in the Free World including America. Ignoring these facts, the president insisted that America is safer than it was eight years ago. Yet, just days later, CIA Director John Brennan testified to the contrary, asserting that America is facing the biggest threat to national security that we have seen in years.

The mainstream media have been hysterical this week in their response to Donald Trump’s revocation of the Washington Post’s campaign press credentials in response to coverage and headlines so unfair that the paper went back and changed them. Yet those same media outlets remained silent in 2008 when the Obama presidential campaign booted 3 major newspapers that had been writing unfavorably about the campaign off its press plane. Joe Concha of Mediaite remembers what happened 8 years ago, and contrasts the media response in the two instances:

The year was 2008. The candidate had a big lead in the polls going into election day. And in a preview of how petulant he would be act as Commander-in-Chief as it pertains to his treatment of the press, Barack Obama decided he didn’t like what three newspapers were writing about him, so he kicked its reporters off his campaign plane.

As Concha points out, the Obama campaign claimed that there sinply wasn;t enough space, instead of being honest, as Trump has been, about the unfavorable coverage being the rootof the matter. Somehow, on the Obama plane there was room for Glamour, Ebony, and Jet, but no room for the Dallas Morning News, New York Post or Washington Times.

The contrast in the treatment of Trump and Obama is stunning:

Chris Cillizza in 2016 on candidate Trump’s decision with the Post: “Barring reporters from public events because you disagree with what they write is a dangerous precedent.”

Chris Cillizza in 2008 regarding the same situation with candidate Obama: (Crickets)

Slate in 2016 on Trump’s decision: Trump’s Washington Post revocation “marks an unprecedented escalation in his war” against media.

Slate in 2008 regarding the same situation with candidate Obama: (Crickets)

I like and admire Ben Sasse very much but on Trump I am with my favorite American Senator….Tom Cotton….rsk

Over the weekend, Mitt Romney showcased two of the party’s brightest national prospects, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton and Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, at his annual Experts and Enthusiasts summit in Deer Valley, Utah. The pair sat on stage before a crowd of about 300 attendees, the vast majority of them depressed and disconsolate about the rise of Donald Trump, for a discussion moderated by former Romney adviser Dan Senor. Their appearance was intended not only to highlight them as future leaders of the GOP, but to convey the message that the party has a bright future beyond Trump.

“If there is ever hope for the future of our nation it rests with Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse,” says David Parker, an investment banker and Romney friend who attended the weekend’s conference. “These guys are young, brilliant, extremely articulate.”

If only it were that simple. For Romney, the choice of Cotton and Sasse was an interesting one: As some of the earliest shadowboxing for the party’s 2020 nomination kicks off, the two rising stars have staked out essentially opposing positions with respect to Trump. Cotton believes the billionaire developer represents a populism the GOP should and must incorporate, while Sasse sees him as a grave, existential threat to the future of conservatism.

Two years ago, the New York Times noted the obvious similarities between the two men: Both are Harvard graduates from relatively humble backgrounds, and both worked as management consultants — Cotton at McKinsey, Sasse at UBS and then at McKinsey — before running for office. Both were elected to the Senate in 2014, Cotton at the age of 37, Sasse at the age of 42.

But they’ve parted ways on Trump, and the divide has already had political consequences for each of them. If Sasse has become the poster boy for the anti-Trumpers, Cotton was, until recently, himself something of a hero to the small but influential group of conservative intellectuals — journalists, donors, and political operatives — driving opposition to the presumptive GOP nominee. The Weekly Standard gushed in a 2011 article that there is “an ease about his manner that masks his intellectual prowess and the courage that marked his service.” The magazine’s editor, Bill Kristol, compared him favorably to Bill Clinton. In the House, Cotton led the fight against the Gang of Eight bill and cast a vote against the farm bill, an act virtually unheard of for an Arkansan. He made national headlines in his first days as a U.S. senator when he penned an open letter to the Ayatollah Khamenei in an attempt to scuttle the Iran deal.

And then he chose to stay silent on Trump.

According to Sarah Westwood, the great investigative reporter at the Washington Examiner, fewer than half of the projects undertaken by the Clinton Global Initiative since 2005 have been completed. A CGI report

… showed fewer than half of those commitments have been completed since 2005, with roughly a third underway and more than 200 others “stalled” or “unfulfilled.”

Further detail on the already failed (as opposed to merely incomplete) commitments comes from Adva Saldinger of Devex:

Between 2005 and 2015 there were 3,452 commitments made through CGI. Of those, according to the newly disclosed report, six percent were “unfulfilled,” or failed.

But that number might not tell the whole story. An additional 11 percent of commitments in the report — and excluded from the analysis — are labeled “unresponsive,” which means that no progress has been reported in more than two years. It’s likely that some, or perhaps most, of those commitments also didn’t succeed, though impossible to determine due to a lack of information. A further 2 percent of commitments are stalled.

One thing the CGI always succeeds at is the glittery gatherings of elites at its meetings, such as the current gala underway in Atlanta, June 12-14.

For all the glitz, the CGI’s trajectory is downward. Westwood notes:

According to the report, the Clinton Global Initiative received an all-time low number of commitments in 2015, the year Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign and drew a deluge of negative attention to the Clinton Foundation’s work.

The Disaffected. Will stay-home so-called establishment Republicans outnumber renewed Reagan Democrats, Tea Partiers, and conservative independents, some of whom likely sat out 2008 and 2012, but who now are likely to vote for Trump? The latter energized group will probably continue to support Trump even if he persists in his suicidal detours like the legal gymnastics of Trump University, or if he keeps repeating ad nauseam the same stale generalities he has served up throughout his campaign.

And will the ranks of the #NeverTrump holdouts, despite claims to the contrary in the spring, thin by autumn, should Trump change a few of his odious spots and become a more disciplined candidate? Will his populist message be recalibrated to appeal to minorities who, albeit less publicly than their white counterparts, resent illegal immigration and its effects on the poor and working classes, are angry about record labor nonparticipation and elite boutique environmentalism, and appreciate tough, even if crazed, El Jefe talk in place of politically correct platitudes?

If Trump comes up with a detailed, even if clumsily delivered, conservative agenda, and if a now-die-hard-leftist Hillary Clinton continues to deprecate and caricature the entire conservative tradition, will he who seems a buffoon in June prove preferable in November to ensuring a 16-year Obama–Clinton regnum?

Anti-Hillary vs. Anti-Trump. Will Sanders holdouts roughly approximate the number of Republican #NeverTrumpers? For now, it would be more socially acceptable for a Sanders supporter to vote for Hillary than for an anti-Trumper to give in and vote for Trump. Voting for Hillary would not entail the social and class costs for a Sanders supporter that voting for Trump would for a Republican of the “not-in-my-name” Romney or Jeb Bush wing. The Wall Street Journal is more likely to show repugnance for the idea of finishing the wall than an advocate of Sanders’s 70 percent top tax rate is to reject Hillary’s less radical, though radical enough, idea of upping the current 39.5 percent top rate. An oddity of the campaign is that the Republican establishment applies a higher standard to its own candidate than it has applied to either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, who, with a modicum of research, can be proven to have matched Trump, slur for slur.

Criminality. No one knows at this point whether Hillary will be indicted or, if she is not, whether her exemption will trigger outrage in the FBI ranks that will garner headline notoriety even in the liberal media. Almost daily, yet another detail in the e-mail scandal emerges that reinforces the narrative that everything Hillary has said so far about her e-mails has been demonstrably false. More importantly, the Clintons, especially post-2000, became a near-criminal enterprise. Almost weekly over the last few months, we have learned of a new wrinkle to the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play syndicate. Bill Clinton was apparently, at $4 million a year, the highest-paid “chancellor” in the history of American higher education, for steering toward the scandal-plagued Laureate “University” millions of dollars in business from the State Department, which was run by his wife. Because the Clintons became so rich so quickly, and without any apparent mechanism other than leveraging government service, there is a two-decades reservoir of scandals that is largely untapped — suggesting that Balzac’s aphorism should be amended to read in the plural, “Behind every great fortune there are plenty of great crimes.”

The Obama Matrix. Pollsters are still trying to calibrate to what degree Hillary will recapture Obama’s record minority registration, turnout, and block voting — and whether such pandering will in turn spike the white-male anti-Hillary vote to record levels. There is something foreign and uncomfortable about Hillary’s faux-accented performances; perhaps her shrill obsequiousness will strike at least some minority voters as a sort of elite white and repugnant condescension. No one likes a transparent suck-up, especially by someone whose past record of honesty and character is so disreputable. Conventional wisdom suggests that the supposed “new” demography will allow Hillary to replicate the Obama coalition, but that assumes that minority voters, who supposedly vote along ethnic and racial lines, are comfortable with Hillary’s tastes and with her disingenuous career, and will vote as they did in 2008 and 2012, more than making up for new white-working-class converts to Trump.

The mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub that claimed 50 lives has once again revived the question of how the authorities could have missed warning signs from a perpetrator.

The FBI first became aware of Omar Mateen in 2013 when he made comments to coworkers “alleging possible terrorist ties.” The feds interviewed Mateen three times in connection with his remarks — which may have assumed more than casual importance in light of his employment by a security company that guards government buildings, and Mateen’s ambitions to become a police officer.

Mateen was later removed from a terror watchlist after it was determined that he had broken no laws. The rest is history.

It joins abundant precedent. The father of the so-called underwear bomber warned by U.S. authorities of his son’s intentions to attack America, but they fell through the cracks.

The Russian government warned U.S. authorities the Boston Marathon bombers were radical Islamists more than a year and a half before they killed many and maimed more. As with Mateen, the feds found that no laws were violated. The brothers were sent on their way until they reappeared with a blast.

The Pentagon failed to recognize numerous signs that Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan was up to no good and communicating with terrorists.

The extensive arsenal, recent Middle East travel, and correspondence with Islamist extremists of Syed Rizwan Farook did nothing to alarm the FBI before he and his wife massacred 14 people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino.

The famous complaint of Admiral David Beatty at Jutland — “something is wrong with our bloody ships today” — surely must apply to the State Department after 600 requests for security upgrades from the Benghazi consulate failed to rouse Secretary Clinton to action. When asked how she could fail to see a telegraphed punch, Clinton could only say: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

The most disturbing aspect of recent terror attacks is that the authorities were taken by surprise each time despite advance warning. This serial failure undercuts the administration’s claim to competence.

This is something the non-expert public understands. Suppose someone came to you claiming he was a brain surgeon. Even if you were not a doctor but had questions only a brain surgeon could answer correctly, you could evaluate the “brain surgeon” by giving him one exam and another to the cleaning person in the hallway. If they scored the same, you would begin to suspect the brain surgeon might be fake.

If the cleaning person continually outscored the “brain surgeon,” a rational employer would consider hiring that person as head of surgery, which possibly explains the rise of Donald Trump.

The administration’s demand for more gun control crucially rests on the claim of competence. CONTINUE AT SITE