"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
by Smitty
Everyone’s getting their Twitter riffs on over this:
#ManEnoughforJohnson pic.twitter.com/3uskgF0Azg
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) May 26, 2016
Added my own little bit of doggerel in that AABCCB scheme that seems to work well:
I guess it’s all fun and games until Trump names Sarah Silverman for VP.
“Our elites are fixated on how disappointed they are with the tawdry public precisely because that allows them to avoid examining their own colossal failures.”
— Ace of Spades, 2011
Ed Driscoll quoted Ace in the context of reminding us how much liberals hate America, or at least that part of America where white heterosexual men work for a living. It was a strange thing to watch Thursday’s debate between the insurgent socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and the increasingly frantic former frontrunner Hillary Clinton, where the key issue seemed to be which one of them was more capable of destroying whatever fragments of American civilization might still be intact after Barack Obama concludes his eight-year effort to wreck the country.
Bernie’s plan has the virtue of simplicity:
That kind of agenda is perennially popular with the disgruntled moochers and radical fanatics who vote in Democrat primaries and, alas, Hillary has to play the unpopular role of the grown-up telling the kids they can’t have ice cream for breakfast. Trying to be the “mainstream” candidate in a Democrat primary is always a tricky exercise, as Hillary found out in 2008 when her decades of loyal service to her party’s anti-American policies were spurned in favor of the half-Kenyan upstart from Chicago. Despite all his bold promises, Obama hasn’t done all his supporters had hoped. There is still money in banks (“Loot them!”) and the rich still have most of it (“Plunder them!”) and there still isn’t as much free stuff as Democrat voters want the government to give them, namely everything.
The Democrat Party is the world’s most successful hate group. It attracts poor people who hate rich people, black people who hate white people, gay people who hate straight people, feminists who hate men, environmentalists who hate the internal combustion engine, and a lot of bratty college kids who hate their parents. However, the real secret of the party’s success is that it attracts the support of journalists who hate Republicans, and who therefore work tirelessly to convince the rest of us that we should vote for Democrats.
This is why I’ve decided to remain neutral — or at least, not to get too excited — about this year’s GOP primary campaign. During the 2012 campaign, I was flying and driving all over the place to cover the epic struggle for the nomination, only to end up with Mr. Inevitable, Mitt Romney, as the candidate. What’s the point, really? No matter who the Republicans nominate for president, the Organized Forces of Liberal Journalism will paint him as a greedy, cold-hearted, woman-hating racist. If the GOP nominated a Buddhist monk or a Latina lesbian, still the New York Times and NBC News would find a way to convince themselves that the Republican candidate represented everything liberals hate about America — the military, the police, Christianity, capitalism, the internal combustion engine and heterosexual white men who work for a living.
American journalism is a temple devoted to promoting a religious faith in which the only true virtue is voting for Democrats. Every four years, the media assume the role of latter-day prophets, whose mission is to warn us of the apocalyptic disaster that will befall the nation if a Republican is elected president. Switch your TV over to MSNBC for a few hours and you can see what this partisan zeal looks like when it is not filtered through the dishonest pretense of “objectivity.” It is important to realize that everyone employed in any position of influence by the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press is as fervently “progressive” as Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews. The editors of newspapers and the producers of network news distort or suppress any story that does not exactly conform to the pro-Democrat narrative.
When Islamic terrorists commit mass murder in San Bernardino, the media portray this not as a story about the dangers of radical Islam, but rather a story about the urgent need to infringe the right of law-abiding citizens to own firearms. No gun should ever find its way into the hands of a heterosexual white man who works for a living, according to liberal journalists who consider Republicans to be a greater danger than ISIS or machete-wielding Somali Muslim immigrants.
So the debate in Wisconsin between Sanders and Clinton was an exercise with the goal of determining which candidate could go farthest in blaming every problem in the world on banks (“Loot them!”), the rich (“Plunder them!”), white heterosexual men with jobs, and other Evil Forces of Social Injustice that the Republican Party is presumed to represent. The two Democrats disparaged each others’ records and character, but agreed entirely as to their basic goals. Whatever foreign policy issue or domestic problem they were asked to address, Hillary and Bernie always blamed the Evil Forces of Social Injustice, and promised to do everything in their power to punish the Republican wrongdoers responsible.
To say that Hillary Clinton was shameless in her pandering to Democrat voters is to understate the transparent desperation in her efforts to appease the kind of left-wing fringe kooks who take Rachel Maddow seriously. At one point, Hillary began ranting about the Koch brothers — who have replaced the Religious Right as the sinister bogeyman in liberal imaginations — and at another point she also twice used the clunky acronym LGBT in less than a minute:
“I am not a single-issue candidate, and I do not believe we live in a single-issue country. I think that a lot of what we have to overcome to break down the barriers that are holding people back, whether it’s poison in the water of the children of Flint, or whether it’s the poor miners who are being left out and left behind in coal country, or whether it is any other American today who feels somehow put down and oppressed by racism, by sexism, by discrimination against the LGBT community, against the kind of efforts that need to be made to root out all of these barriers, that’s what I want to take on. . . . Yes, does Wall Street and big financial interests, along with drug companies, insurance companies, big oil, all of it, have too much influence? You’re right. But if we were to stop that tomorrow, we would still have the indifference, the negligence that we saw in Flint. We would still have racism holding people back. We would still have sexism preventing women from getting equal pay. We would still have LGBT people who get married on Saturday and get fired on Monday.”
Leave aside any question of policy that may be involved here, because no one could imagine that Bernie Sanders is any less adamant than Hillary in opposing discrimination. Rather, let us ask, first, how significant is such discrimination in the grand scheme of things? And second, we may ask, why did she use this acronym? If Hillary had said “the gay community” and “gay people,” would anyone watching the debate have imagined that lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals were not also included in the generic category? The use of the acronym “LGBT” would seem to be an effort by Hillary to speak the jargon of hardcore activists and the sort of bratty college students who major in Gender Studies.
“Oh, she gets it!” was the reaction Hillary hoped her use of this acronym would elicit from young activists. “She’s inclusive!”
Being flattered and pandered to, being promised the sun, the moon and the stars by politicians oozing sympathy for you — Democrats have been running this three-card monte hustle for as long as anyone can remember. Once upon a time, William Jennings Bryan stirred the ignorant masses with his talk of mankind being crucified on a cross of gold, and all that Democrat noise about the Free Coinage of Silver didn’t really have anything to do with anything that made any difference at all to the lives of ordinary Americans. It was just so much half-mad demagoguery to stir up discontent among the rubes, and here were are in 2016, watching Democrats do the same thing they have always done. The only difference, really, is that we now have polls and consultants to tell Democrats which rubes to target with their shameless pandering. Exactly how much discrimination affects the daily lives of “LGBT people” is as irrelevant now as was the question of whether making silver coins legal tender would have any meaningful impact on the plight of farmers and factory workers to whom William Jennings Bryan was pandering.
Of course, back then, the voters to whom Democrats pandered were heterosexual white men who worked for a living, but the principle — dishonestly promising that the federal government will eradicate all the world’s woes — was the same, and the fools who believe Democrat rhetoric today are every bit as deluded as the struggling farmer who thought “Free Silver” was the solution to his problems in 1896.
The Bernie Sanders campaign is
the Occupy Wall Street movement,
but without girls getting raped in tents.— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) February 10, 2016
America Needs Hillary for President Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle.https://t.co/OEya0U233H
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) February 7, 2016
Top headlines at the Drudge Report, as of 6:30 a.m. ET today:
What does all this mean? At least two conclusions seem obvious:
Say what you will about Barack Obama, but you cannot deny the man has a certain charisma about him. Ever since JFK was assassinated, Democrats had been looking for a candidate like Obama, a charismatic figure as a vehicle to advance a liberal policy agenda. Bill Clinton’s presidency was marked by asterisks — he never got a majority of the popular vote — but Obama won by decisive majorities in 2008 and 2012.
For better or worse, therefore, the Democrats are now Obama’s party, and the fracture in this year’s primary campaign is the result. Bernie Sanders is Obama without charisma. Hillary Clinton is who she has always been, and she has never had any charisma. What the Democrats are betting, really, is that they won’t need charisma in November. Their ideal scenario would be for the Democrats to nominate Hillary, Jeb Bush to get the Republican nomination and Donald Trump to run a third-party populist campaign, so that the Clintons can slither back into the White House on a 43-percent plurality the way Bill did it in 1992.
The underlying problem for Democrats is that their desperation to capture and hold the White House has cost them scores of seats in Congress and state legislatures, and the number of Democrats among governors have been decimated. Democrats now represent the Left on a nationwide basis, which means they represent New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Miami, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle and other major urban centers. Democrats represent government employees, including employees of the liberal-controlled public school system, and Democrats also represent recipients of government benefits, including college students dependent on financial aid.
Democrats are generally the party of all who live at taxpayers’ expense. Democrats are hostile to the interests of those who work for a living in the private sector. Democrats hate America, because Democrats hate capitalism, hate the traditional family, and also hate God. Democrats are the party of abortion clinics and unwed motherhood. Democrats are the party of Hollywood, the New York Times, and the feminist blogosphere. Democrats are the party of dopeheads and atheists, vegetarians and pacifists, homosexuals and hedonists. Democrats are the party of blue-haired hipsters and tattoo-covered slackers. Democrats are the party of the emotionally wounded and the mentally ill, the party of “victims.”
Having collected all these disparate anti-American interest groups into a nationwide anti-American coalition — a phenomenon that was apparent as early as the 1972 McGovern campaign, and replicated in the 1988 Dukakis campaign — the Democrats were able to win the White House in 2008 and 2012 without making any real concession to the part of the American electorate that is Christian, patriotic, and happily married.
Elections have consequences, and living in the Obama Age means that we no longer live in America. We now live in Anti-America.
Obama promised that America would be fundamentally transformed and he has accomplished what he promised, which is why Bernie Sanders was able to rally the Kook Coalition to beat Clinton in the New Hampshire primary by a 22-point margin. As crazy as Hillary Clinton is, she isn’t quite crazy enough to represent what the Democrat Party has become in the Obama Age. Insanity is now public policy, and the paranoid rage of maniacs is a political force to be reckoned with in the wake of our fundamental transformation. The crisis of the Hillary Clinton campaign is therefore an omen of America’s impending doom because, even if the Democrats lose the next election, what can we expect the next time the Democrats win an election? How many more Democrat presidencies can the nation endure before it finally descends into total depravity and madness? The collapse of American society into violent chaos, anarchy and civil war is by no means a far-fetched scenario.
Be afraid, America. Be very afraid.
Polls forecast a defeat for Clinton tonight:
Donald Trump continues to lead the Republican race in New Hampshire on the eve of the vote, the final CNN/WMUR tracking poll finds.
On the Democratic side of the race, it remains Bernie Sanders’ primary to lose, with the Vermont senator holding a 26-point lead over Hillary Clinton. . . .
In the Democratic race, Sanders tops Clinton 61% to 35%, an uptick for Sanders since the last update to the tracking poll . . .
The prospect of a double-digit defeat in New Hampshire for the former Secretary of State has sent a shock wave through the Democrat Party establishment. Clinton has “underperformed,” as one analyst said on CNN this morning, and it is clear that the youth vote for the 74-year-old Sanders reflects both a negative judgment of Hillary as well as support for Bernie’s far-left agenda. Because the Democrat establishment considers Sanders “unelectable,” the prospect of his winning the nomination has caused murmurs of a third-party campaign by liberal former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Meanwhile, Team Clinton is trying to put the wheels back on the Hillary bandwagon:
Hillary and Bill Clinton are so dissatisfied with their campaign’s messaging and digital operations they are considering staffing and strategy changes after what’s expected to be a loss in Tuesday’s primary in New Hampshire, according to a half-dozen people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Clintons — stung by her narrow victory in Iowa and shocked by polls showing her losing by as much as 20 percent here — had been planning to reassess staffing at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters after the first four primaries, but the Clintons have become increasingly caustic in their criticism of aides and demanded the reassessment sooner, a source told POLITICO.
The talk of shake-up echoes what happened in 2008 — when Clinton was on the verge of sacking her campaign manager and several top communications officials — before her surprise win in New Hampshire bailed out her beleaguered staff. Over time, however she slowly layered over top officials, essentially hiring old hands — like Hillaryland stalwart Maggie Williams and pollster Geoff Garin — to run the campaign while the previous staffers were quietly relegated to subsidiary positions.
It’s not clear whether that will happen again, but several people close to the situation said Clinton would be loath to fire anyone outright and more inclined to add new staff.
“The Clintons are not happy and have been letting all of us know that,” said one Democratic official who speaks regularly to both. “The idea is that we need a more forward-looking message, for the primary — but also for the general election too. … There’s no sense of panic, but there is an urgency to fix these problems right now.”
Yeah, “no sense of panic,” but they’re losing to the 74-year-old Sanders, an extremist kook from the fringe. The Clintons are discovering that a Cult of Personality doesn’t work if voters don’t like the personality at its center. Meanwhile, one of the ghosts of Bill’s past is rattling her chains:
One of the women who has accused former U.S. President Bill Clinton of sexual assault says she has agreed to work for an anti-Clinton political group being formed by a former advisor to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Kathleen Willey, a former White House volunteer who says Bill Clinton groped her in an Oval Office hallway in 1993 when she came to him tearfully seeking a paid job, said she had agreed to become a paid national spokeswoman for a group being created by Roger Stone.
Stone, a Republican strategist, said the group would become active should Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton’s wife, win the Democratic nomination in the 2016 race for the White House. . . .
“This gives me more of an opportunity to get this message out to young voters who weren’t even born or don’t even remember what happened and to the women who have suffered,” Willey told Reuters.
Willey said she will give interviews and speeches and appear in political advertisements to ensure the accusations remain part of the political discourse during the election campaign.
“They’re going to be confronted every day, on radio, on television, on billboards,” Stone told Reuters, referring to the Clintons.
How can feminists be against “rape culture” and for Clinton?
Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright criticized for 'shaming' women who don't back Clinton https://t.co/RBSQFuvtvT pic.twitter.com/nws5VBMBoc
— People Magazine (@people) February 9, 2016
Let’s begin with something that should be obvious, but which has seldom been stated explicitly: There is no objective reason for the recent upsurge of radical feminism in the United States. However bad sexism is today, it is not worse than it was five years ago or 10 years ago. In fact, there is abundant evidence that women in American today face much less discrimination than at any previous point in our history.
The only reason we have so many young American women identifying themselves as feminists in 2016 is because of partisan politics.
Four years ago, Democrats exploited an entirely fictional “Republican War on Women” narrative that enabled President Obama to win re-election with the largest “gender gap” ever recorded by Gallup. And with Hillary Clinton expected to be the Democrat nominee in 2016, the liberal propaganda machinery has been promoting the feminist brand in every way possible. Far beyond the narrow limits of what we usually think of as “politics,” and extending to the entertainment industry, university classrooms, the public school system and every other means of communicating ideas, feminist messages are being promoted by liberals with a frenzied energy that we can expect will crescendo to a shrieking climactic paroxysm of rage between now and November.
And this is all just partisan politics. There is no “rape epidemic” on our nation’s college campuses, nor has there been any increase in “harassment” or “objectification” of women to explain the incessant chatter about these subjects emanating from so many clamorous feminist voices. This is not a conspiracy, but rather a liberal consensus.
Democrats have decided that a revival of radical feminism is necessary to elect Hillary Clinton, and so we cannot escape it.
Evidence of what this is really about is not difficult to find. Consider the case of Emma Sulkowicz, the “Mattress Girl” whose false rape accusation led to Paul Nungesser’s lawsuit against Columbia University. Once the facts of the case were described in the Nungesser v. Columbia complaint, everybody with two eyes and a brain realized Sulkowicz is just crazy, vindictive and dishonest. The only difference between Sulkowicz’s case and the University of Virginia rape hoax is that Nungesser is a real human being, whereas “Haven Monahan” can’t file a lawsuit because he is a fictional character created by the deranged liar Jackie Coakley. However, because the “campus rape epidemic” theme is such a major part of the Democrat Party’s 2016 campaign agenda, partisan propagandist Julie Zeilinger returns to Sulkowicz’s discredited fable:
Beyond “Mattress Girl”: The Case for a More
Complex Campus Sexual Assault Media Narrative
It’s not often that an undergraduate thesis lands a student on the cover of New York magazine. But that’s what happened to Emma Sulkowicz, whom most people equate with the media-created shorthand “mattress girl,” in 2014.
In “Carry That Weight,” her performance art thesis at Columbia University, Sulkowicz examined her own experience with sexual assault. The piece, and the media storm that followed, quickly positioned her as a public figure and face of the broader campus sexual assault movement.
(Note the admission that this is an organized political “movement.”)
The media coverage, however, “didn’t make it clear that I was a human too, and not just a hero that could change the world,” Sulkowicz told Mic. “There was the expectation that I would give a speech at every rally, [that] I would perform for everyone and say stuff. But that’s a big expectation to have for just one person.”
The extensive media coverage of sexual assault has been both advantageous and detrimental for the campus sexual assault movement. Most coverage of rape and sexual assault hasn’t fully reflected the nuances of survivors’ and activists’ lived experiences, which studies confirm are still widespread. One 2015 Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll that found 25% of college-aged women report having experienced “unwanted sexual incidents” at school, and a new 2016 study revealed a similar finding.
(These tendentious surveys have been debunked, but never mind . . .)
Advocates have long understood the importance of media coverage and its unparalleled ability to amplify their messages, provide education and connection for survivors, hold authorities accountable and, ideally, prevent sexual assault.
But media narratives about survivors have often perpetuated and reflected how the broader culture sees and understands survivors: a single story and a perfect victim. More often than not, high-profile survivors and activists are presented as a neatly packaged, but ultimately incomplete, narrative. . . .
You can read the whole thing. The bottom line is that, after it became apparent that Sulkowicz was lying, and after the UVA rape hoax was exposed, it became more difficult for professional liars like Julie Zeilinger to get the kind of media coverage that previously helped promote the phony “campus rape epidemic” narrative.
"The campus rape epidemic does not exist." — @HeatherMacDona #tcot
https://t.co/DWmd09pfhh pic.twitter.com/XREkakPvn7
— JEB DELENDA EST (@rsmccain) January 27, 2016
To anyone with a modicum of common sense — a category that excludes feminists — there was never any credibility to the claim that female students were routinely subjected to sexual violence by the kind of brainiac nerds with high SAT scores and perfect GPAs who attend elite universities like Columbia (annual tuition $51,008).
This was the telltale clue about the whole “rape culture” narrative, really. Whereas common sense suggests that sexual violence would be more common at low-ranking state universities or community colleges, the loudest complaints about an alleged “epidemic” of sexual assault were instead made by women attending schools like Yale, Brown, Oberlin and Occidental. That is to say, this narrative originated with highly privileged young women on elite campuses where “social justice” activism is a way of life. While it is usually impossible to know the truth of any particular case — typically these are “he-said/she-said” incidents, involving alcohol and with no corroborating evidence — the overall picture is clear enough. On no campus do the actual reports of sexual assault come anywhere near the “1-in-5” statistic widely publicized by feminists. Even stipulating the feminist claim that 88 percent of campus assaults are never reported, extrapolations based on actual reports would only reach about 1-in-40, as a worst-case-scenario estimate.
Every rape is a tragedy, of course, but there is no “epidemic” on America’s university campuses and the current feminist obsession with “rape culture” is simply a matter of political opportunism.
Shorter @juliezeilinger: We Must Learn to Tell Less Obvious Lies.
@PHCommando @DateOffCampus @g56yu @Oneiorosgrip pic.twitter.com/JLptDUh1y7
— JEB DELENDA EST (@rsmccain) January 26, 2016
"Feminists lie about rape, because feminists lie about everything." https://t.co/Bz2jkT4rvR pic.twitter.com/7yHcza6Xfe
— JEB DELENDA EST (@rsmccain) January 27, 2016
The hypocritical dishonesty of feminists becomes further apparent in their habitual silence about the subjugation of woman and endemic sexual violence in the Muslim world:
Persecution watchdog groups are raising awareness for a Christian Pakistani girl who was killed earlier this month after she and her friends rejected the sexual advances of drunken Muslim men . . .
The British Pakistani Christian Association reported last week that the incident occurred on Jan. 13, when three young Christian girls, Kiran (17 years), Shamroza (18 years) and Sumble (20 years), were approached on the streets at night by four allegedly drunk Muslim men in a car. The girls rejected the lewd advances of the men, which caused them to turn violent.
“How dare you run away from us, Christian girls are only meant for one thing, the pleasure of Muslim men,” one of the men reportedly said.
The men then crashed their car right into the girls, causing Shamroza to break several ribs and Sumble to break her hip. Kiran, however, was lifted up from the ground on the hood of the car, and driven until the car suddenly stopped, throwing her rapidly to the ground, where she cracked open her head and suffered internal bleeding, leading to her death.
A German university city with a Green party migrant-supporting administration has banned refugees from several nightclubs following complaints from females of sexual harassment and theft.
Women have allegedly complained to managers of clubs in Freiburg, southwest Germany, about being fed date-rape drugs and being accosted in toilets.
Another woman claimed she had been raped while a bouncer was allegedly stabbed by a migrant. . . .
According to local media reports, the problem extends to six discos in the town.
‘No more entry for asylum seekers,’ was the headline in the weekend edition of the newspaper Badische Zeitung. . . .
One woman, aged 46, told the Badische Zeitung she had been in the White Rabbit in December when a large group of African men had come and ‘bothered’ guests.
‘I was surrounded and marginalised while dancing,’ she said. ‘The situation was full of male violence. I felt threatened.’
On that night two bouncers eject five men from the premises for harassing another woman who complained she had to run a ‘gauntlet’ of men on the club stairs.
Dietmar Ganzmann, operator of the El.Pi student disco, said he had decided only to allow a certain number of refugees entrance on any given night, and no more. . . .
Peter Bitsch, operator of the discotheque Kagan, confirmed that many women no longer feel safe in the clubs when there are large numbers of migrants in them.
Police were at a refugee camp trying to find a 10-year-old boy who had been raped ‘multiple times’, when a swarm of Muslim refugees attacked, causing the police to flee.
The Daily Mail reports that the camp was located in Västerås. Staff in the centre tried to remove the boy but were stopped by the mob of asylum seekers. . . .
The incident took place last Wednesday and is just now getting media attention. It’s hard to keep track with all the rapes in the world’s rape capital.
Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said on Monday that more police are needed in order to deal with the influx of asylum seekers.
So while liars like Julie Zeilinger solicit media assistance in an attempt to resuscitate the mythical “campus rape epidemic,” they continue ignoring a real plague of sexual violence committed by Muslims, and the American feminist movement is dedicated to electing Hillary Clinton, who by abandoning Americans at Benghazi demonstrated that it is her policy to surrender to the encroaching menace of Islamic violence.
by Smitty
Shall not eight years of the personal pronoun pumping pipsqueak have been enough? The price of Her Majesty’s election, despite being the least suitable person since Barack Obama, may become apparent:
While at a rally in Decorah, Iowa, on Tuesday, a reporter asked Clinton what she thought about nominating President Obama to the highest court.
“Wow, what a great idea, nobody has ever suggested that to me,” Clinton said.
Ho Lee Focaccia with turkey, avocado and mayonnaise, Batman. If the thought of listening to that anti-Constitutional jackwagon on the SCOTUS bench, getting paid to lift his leg against all we hold dear until he decides he’s bored and retires, isn’t enough to galvanize conservatives into action (and I mean more than mere blog posts) then I daresay we deserve the abuse.
It’s clear that our country is mismanaged by a homo bureaucratus infestation, where the motto is “fail upward”, but enough is enough.
via Instapundit
The Democrat Party is a criminal protection racket:
If you are a Democrat, the safest place in the world to be is under the authority of other Democrats. Lois Lerner, the criminal who used the Internal Revenue Service as a political weapon on behalf of the Democratic party, was never going to be charged, or even disciplined, by her overseers in the IRS or at the Department of Justice. After pulling one of the worst Gestapo stunts in modern American history, she’s receiving a nice, comfortable pension, and those who enabled her crimes were given fat bonuses. There was no way that Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch was going to charge Lerner — what do you imagine the odds are that they’ll discover their integrity in the matter of Hillary Rodham Clinton, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee?
(Hat-tip: Maetenloch at Ace of Spades HQ.)
The battle for Iowa seems to be coming down to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz vs. Donald Trump. Of course, there are likely to be five candidates still in the race after the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses, but the debate Thursday highlighted the clash between Cruz and Trump:
Donald Trump and Ted Cruz clashed Thursday in their sharpest — and most personal — encounters of the campaign season.
“I guess the bromance is over,” Trump told CNN’s Dana Bash after the debate.
The 2.5-hour event sponsored by Fox Business Network was filled with testy exchanges between the seven candidates on stage. Cruz and Trump are battling for first place in Iowa with less than three weeks until the state’s caucuses, though the businessman has a commanding lead nationally. And with pressure mounting for someone to emerge as an establishment alternative to Trump and Cruz, sparks flew between Marco Rubio and Chris Christie.
The much-anticipated Trump vs. Cruz showdown took a few minutes to materialize — but when it did, it packed a punch.
Cruz forcefully responded to Trump’s accusations that he isn’t eligible to be president because he was born in Canada — a controversy that Trump has only recently embraced.
“Back in September, my friend Donald said he had his lawyers look at this in every which way,” Cruz said. “There was nothing to this birther issue.”
He added: “Since September, the Constitution hasn’t changed. But the poll numbers have.”
Yes, the poll numbers have changed in Iowa, and also nationally. If you look at the Real Clear Politics average, the big story of the 2012 Republican campaign so far has been the collapse of Jeb Bush, who was averaging 17.8% nationally in July, but is now only 4.8%. The Bush campaign has raised more than $24 million, so what happened? To paraphrase the Beatles, money can’t buy Bush love:
Concerns about the impact of money on politics assume that if you buy enough ads you can elect anybody. If that were true, Jeb would be the frontrunner. Instead, he’s running way behind other candidates who, in different ways, have done a better job of addressing voters’ concerns.
It turns out that addressing voters’ concerns is more important than slick TV spots. And that means that the only campaign finance “reform” we need is for candidates (and donors) to quit tossing money at consultants and instead to speak to the American people about what the American people care about.
If nothing else comes from Jeb’s candidacy, that’s a valuable lesson indeed.
(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Bush is heading toward a humiliating defeat in Iowa — no better than fourth place, and perhaps fifth or sixth — and his highly paid staff should be busy writing an eloquent concession speech: “Spend more time with my family,” blah blah blah. Meanwhile, on the Democrat side, Hillary Clinton may be approaching her own humiliation at the hands of Bernie Sanders:
Hillary Clinton has lost most of her lead over Bernie Sanders in the race to win Iowa’s Democratic presidential caucuses, a new Iowa Poll shows.
Clinton, who has been the favorite all along, now leads Sanders by just 2 percentage points in The Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll. That’s down from 9 percentage points a month ago.
Clinton is now the top choice of 42 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers, compared with Sanders’ 40 percent, the poll finds. The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
As recently as early November, Clinton had a 30-point lead over Sanders in the RCP average of Iowa polls, but there has been a sharp shift in the past month. In early December, a Quinnipiac poll of Iowa Democrats showed Hillary leading Bernie by 11 points, but the latest Quinnipiac poll in Iowa has Sanders leading 49-44. News flash: People don’t like Hillary Clinton. Her own husband doesn’t like Hillary Clinton.
Hillary losing to Bernie in Iowa, but what difference at this point does it make? https://t.co/pJc40dYWED #tcot #p2 pic.twitter.com/Vw9j7NK1pA
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) January 15, 2016