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Opinion

Ted-Cruz-Texas-Super-Tuesday

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz gives his Super Tuesday speech on March 1, 2016.

Mitt Romney’s speech against Donald Trump is not likely to win many converts. Romney’s remarks will just further vindicate and entrench Trump supporters.
Romney, though a good man, is quintessentially GOP establishment and has shown, by his speech, that he still doesn’t understand the role he and his colleagues have played in bringing about the Trump surge.

During campaign season, these guys always seem to get it. They profess to understand how destructive President Obama’s agenda is, but once they’re elected, they lose their will to fight, which makes many conservatives believe they didn’t believe their own rhetoric in the first place.

I know, Republicans tell us that the GOP leadership has done all it can to stop Obama but there’s only so much a congressional majority can do. That’s also what they said about congressional minorities when they were a minority.

Regardless, they haven’t presented their case to the American people with conviction during the past seven years, except in the runup to elections. They didn’t point out Obama’s evil intentions and often denounced those who did. They didn’t rally around Ted Cruz, Mike Lee or a handful of others who tried to stymie Obama. Instead, they chose to ridicule and marginalize these fighters.

Even to this day, the establishment fails to understand the legitimate concerns millions of Americans have over illegal immigration. Establishment types arrogantly and unfairly slander border hawks as nativists, suggesting their opposition to open borders is race-based.

It’s not about race; it’s about our national sovereignty, the rule of law, protecting jobs, protecting Americans against criminal elements and jihadis, and stanching an invasion of people who will further burden our welfare state — not assimilate, not embrace the American idea — and vote almost solely Democratic.

A sovereign nation must control its borders and encourage immigrants to assimilate and embrace the unique American experiment. But Democrats are for flooding the borders for all the wrong reasons, and large swaths of the Republican establishment have affirmatively aided and abetted them.

We’ve watched as Republicans have allowed many of Obama’s budgets to sail through under the radar, on the pretense of just waiting for the next election. Our guys don’t even talk about entitlement reform anymore, though they were telling us just a few years ago that we were about to go bankrupt.

The Republican Party has been so tone-deaf to these real concerns that some Republican voters are furious enough to have chosen a wildly flawed solution in Donald Trump. One person on Twitter said she is so disgusted she is going to vote Democratic for the first time in 40 years.

It is tragic that true conservatives, however, are being lumped in and punished for the betrayals of centrist Republicans. Trump supporters are adamant that no elected official escape the blame. Their solution is to burn the house down and rebuild it around Trump, even though they can’t be sure what he’d do when elected.

People wonder why they would turn to someone like Trump. The GOP, after all, has stood for moral principles, manners and adult behavior, and Trump seems to exhibit none of those things. In many ways, he is the opposite of conservative principles, in demeanor, lifestyle and his personal conduct in the campaign.

But in their disgust at the Republican establishment, they are throwing out true conservatives and also certain conservative principles and values, as if all of conservatism has been tainted by a party that betrayed its base.

How else does it make sense that even valid, troubling criticisms of Trump seem to help him more than hurt him?

I think it’s because this disaffected class of voters wants someone unorthodox enough to break the rules, someone brash enough not to be deterred by the niceties that have prevented establishment Republicans from distinguishing themselves from Obama in bold colors rather than pale pastels. They’re seem not only not offended but invigorated by someone who’ll hurl profanities and refuse to apologize even when he owes an apology, because they think it’s going to take someone like that to resist pressure to betray them once he’s elected.

And though the establishment has finally awakened to the intensity of the discontentment among the party rank and file, it still doesn’t believe the angst is legitimate. The establishment is still in bitter denial and wouldn’t support a person advocating many of Trump’s ideas even if he were a paragon of moral rectitude.

If establishment Republicans were the least bit repentant about their betrayals, truly believed in the conservative principles embodied in their party’s platform and were realistic about stopping Trump, they’d quit posturing and unite behind Ted Cruz.

For the way to defeat Donald Trump is not to deny him a majority and steal the nomination from him at the convention; that really would be the end of the party. It is to embrace the closest thing to a Reagan conservative since Ronald Reagan, before it’s too late. But truth be told, they probably hate Cruz worse than they hate Trump.

I wish Trump supporters would consider this when they wrongly lump Cruz in with the establishment, and I wish they’d simmer down long enough to recognize that Cruz represents the answer to their complaints far more than Trump — and with none of the baggage.

If the GOP Establishment truly believed in

World

North-Korea-Nuclear-Test

South Koreans watch a TV news program showing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s New Year speech at the Seoul Railway Station. (Photo: Associated Press)

Kim Jong-un, the dictator of North Korea, has issued the order to ready the regime’s nuclear weapons for use at a moment’s notice, the official state news agency reported Friday.

Kim also ordered ready the North Korean military in an order to prepare forces to carry out pre-emptive attacks. Kim called the current situation very precarious but necessary in “the face of a growing threat to enemies.”

On Thursday, North Korea fired six short-range projectiles into the sea off its east coast, according to South Korean officials. The move came just hours after the U.N. Security Council approved what is being called the toughest round of sanctions on Pyongyang in two decades. The resolution was a response to its recent nuclear test and long-range rocket launch.

The firings also came shortly after South Korea’s National Assembly passed its first piece of legislation on human rights in North Korea. In 2014, a U.N. commission on North Korea released a report detailing human rights abuses, including the establishment of socialist-style political prison camps that were allegedly detaining upwards of 120,000 people.

In February 2014, another U.N. reported called for an international criminal investigation into human rights violations by the oppressive-leftist North Korean regime. The three-member panel has found evidence of myriad crimes, such as “extermination,” crimes against humanity, against starving populations and a widespread campaign of abductions of individuals in South Korea and Japan.

The three-member panel, which was headed-up by retired Australian judge Michael Kirby, took the most significant step and made the most significant attempt to investigate evidence of severe and repeated human rights violations in the leftist, despotic regime. The report concluded that the testimony and other evidence it received “create reasonable grounds … to merit a criminal investigation by a competent national or international organ of justice.”

North Korea has not issued an official response to the new U.N. sanctions. But citizens in its capital, Pyongyang, interviewed by The Associated Press said Thursday they believe their country can fight off any sanctions.

“No kind of sanctions will ever work on us, because we’ve lived under U.S. sanctions for more than half a century,” said Pyongyang resident Song Hyo Il. “And in the future, we’re going to build a powerful and prosperous country here, relying on our own development.”

China, which had previously threatened to block any human rights violation in 2014, is the North’s closest ally. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Beijing hoped the U.N. sanctions would be implemented “comprehensively and seriously,” while hoping no harm would come to ordinary citizens.

Meanwhile, the North Korean projectiles were fired from the eastern coastal town of Wonsan and traveled on a course roughly 100 to 150 kilometers (60 to 90 miles) before landing in the sea, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.

Kim Jong-un, the dictator of North Korea,

Uncategorized

2016 Michigan Democratic Primary

147 Delegates: Proportional (March 8, 2016)

(Please Note: 147 total delegate votes – 85 district / 28 at large; 17 Pledged PLEOs; 17 Unpledged PLEOs)

[election_2016_polls]

Polling Data

[wpdatatable id=41]

A whopping 130 of 147 delegates to the Democratic National Convention are pledged to Democratic candidates based on the voting results of the Michigan Democratic Primary.

In the Wolverine State, there is a mandatory 15% threshold required in order for a candidate to be allocated National Convention delegates at either the congressional district or statewide level.

[ssbp]

2016 Michigan Democratic Primary 147 Delegates: Proportional (March 8,

Polls

Marco-Rubio-Donald-Trump-Ted-Cruz

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, left, billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump, center, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, right, at the Republican debate hosted by CNN ahead of Super Tuesday. (Photo: AP)

Despite relentless attacks and more than $50 million in ads, Donald Trump still crushes Sen. Marco Rubio in his own home state, according to a new poll. With little left to lose, Sen. Rubio launched full-throated character attacks on Mr. Trump during the last Republican debate hosted by CNN, which continued throughout the days leading up to and after Super Tuesday.

But the impact, if at all, is minimal and appears to have had a negative affect on the voters in the senator’s backyard.

A One America News Network poll conducted by the nonpartisan research firm Gravis Marketing (PPD Pollster Scorecard: B+) found Mr. Trump leading his closest rival Sen. Rubio 45% to 25%, with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz pulling in 15% of the primary vote. Dr. Ben Carson, who dropped out of the race on Wednesday, trailed with 5% of the vote, while Ohio Gov. John Kasich jumped to 10%.

Gravis Marketing Poll Florida Republican Primary

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side Hillary Clinton comfortably leads socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Sunshine State, 58% to 42%.

The leading candidates on both sides have a clear advantage in early and absentee ballot voting, according to reports and polling. An election official told PPD that a whopping 44% of the absentee ballots on the Republican side came from voters that did not vote in 2012, a clear sign Mr. Trump has the edge.

“One of the biggest challenges Sen. Rubio faces is his precipitous decline among self-identified conservatives and tea party voters,” said Richard Baris, the senior political analyst who aggregates and analyzes data for the PPD Election Projection Model. “For every moderate that he gains he loses multiple voters in the very bloc who elected him to the U.S. Senate.”

The Florida Republican primary, a Winner-Take-All contest on March 15 with 99 delegates, is a must-win state for Sen. Rubio. The junior senator has won only the Minnesota Republican caucus and has been trailing Mr. Trump in Florida since July, when the real estate mogul pulled ahead of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. The prevailing conventional wisdom held that a winnowing field would allow Sen. Rubio to catch Mr. Trump, but that is no longer supported by the data.

“Mr. Trump now defeats Sen. Rubio easily by an average 14 points one-on-one,” Baris said. “The results of the Gravis Poll aside, our interviews at PPD just haven’t seen the impact from the concerted assault in the race, at all. In fact, the new attack version of Sen. Rubio is viewed far less favorably by conservatives and, while those might not be the voters the campaign is targeting, Florida is not Virginia. It’s a closed primary and Sen. Rubio is in deep trouble.”

Mr. Trump leads Sen. Rubio on the PPD average of Florida Republican primary polls by 19.8%.

The survey of 751 Florida Republican Primary voters and 514 Florida Democratic Primary voters has a margin of error of ± 3.6% for Republicans and 4.3% for Democrats, both at the 95% confidence level. The poll, which may not total 100% due to rounding, was conducted using automated telephone calls (IVR technology) and online responses. The results are weighted by relevant voting demographics.

Despite relentless attacks and more than $50

Video

[brid video=”29354″ player=”2077″ title=”Watch Donald Trump Endorse Mitt Romney for GOP Presidential Candidate”]

On Feb. 2, 2012, roughly a week after Newt Gingrich destroyed him in South Carolina, Mitt Romney praised Donald Trump on the economy and his success. In Las Vegas only two days later, Gov. Romney was hoping to gain an edge in the Nevada Republican caucus, which Trump won this cycle with more votes than the entire 2012 combined. But the real danger was Romney’s pole position going into Super Tuesday.

Yet, during a speech Thursday on friendly Utah University territory, Romney slammed Trump as a “phony” and a “fraud” that doesn’t have a successful business record.

Why are we posting this? The intent isn’t only to show hypocrite Mitt, a two-time loser who has no business telling anyone Republican voter how to vote in their state, but also to explain that even losers still owe the puppet master. If any voter is deluded enough to think Republican power brokers are concerned about conservatism or the party–enough to parade out a New England liberal to talk about political philosophy–and not the status quo that feeds, you now have more food for thought.

Looks like Trump was wondering the same thing.

On Feb. 2, 2012, roughly a week

Economy

post-office-service-sector-reuters

(PHOTO: REUTERS)

The Non-Manufacturing Report On Business (NMI), the Institute for Supply Management’s gauge of U.S. service sector growth fell to 53.4 from 53.5 in January. Still, the NMI beat the median forecast, which called for a sharper decline to 53.2. Economic activity in the non-manufacturing sector grew in February for the 73rd consecutive month, as readings above 50 even if they fall indicate contraction.

Readings below 50 indicate contraction.

The 14 non-manufacturing industries reporting growth in February—listed in order—are: Accommodation & Food Services; Management of Companies & Support Services; Real Estate, Rental & Leasing; Utilities; Construction; Finance & Insurance; Transportation & Warehousing; Professional, Scientific & Technical Services; Public Administration; Health Care & Social Assistance; Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing & Hunting; Educational Services; Information; and Wholesale Trade. The three industries reporting contraction in February are: Mining; Arts, Entertainment & Recreation; and Retail Trade.

ISM® NON-MANUFACTURING SURVEY RESULTS AT A GLANCE
COMPARISON OF ISM® NON-MANUFACTURING AND ISM® MANUFACTURING SURVEYS*
FEBRUARY 2016
Non-Manufacturing Manufacturing
Index Series
Index
Feb		 Series
Index
Jan		 Percent
Point
Change		 Direction Rate
of
Change		 Trend**
(Months)		 Series
Index
Feb		 Series
Index
Jan		 Percent
Point
Change
NMI®/PMI® 53.4 53.5 -0.1 Growing Slower 73 49.5 48.2 +1.3
Business Activity/Production 57.8 53.9 +3.9 Growing Faster 79 52.8 50.2 +2.6
New Orders 55.5 56.5 -1.0 Growing Slower 79 51.5 51.5 0.0
Employment 49.7 52.1 -2.4 Contracting From
Growing		 1 48.5 45.9 +2.6
Supplier Deliveries 50.5 51.5 -1.0 Slowing Slower 2 49.7 50.0 -0.3
Inventories 52.5 51.5 +1.0 Growing Faster 11 45.0 43.5 +1.5
Prices 45.5 46.4 -0.9 Decreasing Faster 2 38.5 33.5 +5.0
Backlog of Orders 52.0 52.0 0.0 Growing Same 2 48.5 43.0 +5.5
New Export Orders 53.5 45.5 +8.0 Growing From
Contracting		 1 46.5 47.0 -0.5
Imports 55.5 46.0 +9.5 Growing From
Contracting		 1 49.0 51.0 -2.0
Inventory Sentiment 62.0 61.5 +0.5 Too High Faster 225 N/A N/A N/A
Customers’ Inventories N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 47.0 51.5 -4.5
Overall Economy Growing Slower 79
Non-Manufacturing Sector Growing Slower 73

* Non-Manufacturing ISM® Report On Business® data is seasonally adjusted for Business Activity, New Orders, Prices and Employment Indexes. Manufacturing ISM® Report On Business® data is seasonally adjusted for New Orders, Production, Employment and Supplier Deliveries.

** Number of months moving in current direction.

The Non-Manufacturing Report On Business (NMI), the

Economy

jobs-search-station-reuters

Job Search Station (Photo: Reuters)

The Labor Department reported on Thursday that weekly jobless claims rose by 6,000 to 278,000 last week, higher than the median forecast. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims falling to 271,000 week ending February 20.

A Labor Department analyst said there were no special factors influencing last week’s claims data, and no state was triggered “on” the Extended Benefits program during the week ending February 6. Claims for Oklahoma were been estimated for the report, and the prior week was unchanged at 272,000.

The four-week moving average–which is widely considered a better measure of labor market trends as it irons out week-to-week volatility–decreased by 1,750 to 270,250 last week. That’s the lowest level since late November even as the weekly jobless claims number increased.

Weekly jobless claim, or the number of Americans filing for first-time unemployment benefits at the state level, have now been below the 300,000 threshold for 52 straight weeks. While this is historically associated with healthy labor market conditions and, is the longest period since the early 1970s, the number of long-term unemployment Americans is an underreported factor. Because a large number of Americans are simply not eligible to receive unemployment benefits anymore, the situation appears somewhat brighter than it truly is.

Weekly Jobless Claims Report Data

There were 14,541 former Federal civilian employees claiming UI benefits for the week ending February 6, an increase of 575 from the previous week. Newly discharged veterans claiming benefits totaled 15,365, a decrease of 368 from the prior week.

The highest insured unemployment rates in the week ending February 6 were in Alaska (4.7), West Virginia (3.6), New Jersey (3.4), Montana (3.3), Pennsylvania (3.2), Illinois (3.0), Rhode Island (3.0), Wyoming (3.0), Connecticut (2.9), Massachusetts (2.8), and Puerto Rico (2.8).

The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending February 13 were in Wisconsin (+387), Minnesota (+106), New Mexico (+77), the Virgin Islands (+-4), and Kentucky (+-22), while the largest decreases were in Pennsylvania (- 3,739), Illinois (-2,349), Texas (-2,342), New York (-1,984), and Tennessee (-1,651).

The Labor Department reported on Thursday that

Opinion

Donald Trump Holds Campaign Rally In Dallas

DALLAS, TX – SEPTEMBER 14: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets supporters during a campaign rally at the American Airlines Center on September 14, 2015 in Dallas, Texas. More than 20,000 tickets had been distributed for the event. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

Just as Donald Trump did a Super Tuesday stomp on the Republican establishment, the establishment showed why it deserved the rough treatment. The Republican Senate leadership yet again announced its refusal to consider anyone President Obama nominates for the Supreme Court until after the presidential election.

It is the job of the U.S. Senate to hold hearings on, and then accept or reject, the president’s choice. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said they will not take on the work — while showing no inclination to forgo their paychecks.

Talk about “takers.”

Yes, talk about “takers.” That’s how Mitt Romney described Americans benefiting from Medicare, Social Security, Obamacare and other government social programs during his failed 2012 run for president. Never mind that most of the “takers” have also paid for some of what they have received.

Working-class Republicans have finally rebelled against the notion that everything they get is beneficence from the superrich — and that making the superrich super-duper-rich would drop some tinsel on their grateful heads. They were done with quiet protest and ready to take down the Republican bastille, stone by stone. And the angrier Trump made the establishment the happier they were.

The Bastille was the symbol of France’s Old Regime. The storming of the prison in 1789 kicked off the French Revolution.

Republican disrupters from Newt Gingrich on down liked to talk about a conservative revolution. They didn’t know the first thing about revolutions. This is a revolution.

Back at the chateau, Republican luminaries were calmly planning favors for their financiers. They assumed their party’s working folk would fall in line — out of both hostility to Democrats and through hypnosis.

So you had Jeb Bush amassing an armory of campaign cash over bubbly and hors d’oeuvres at the family estate in Maine. You had Marco Rubio devising a plan to do away with all capital gains taxes — the source of half the earnings for people making $10 million or more. You had Ted Cruz concocting a plan to abolish the IRS. (Without the IRS, only the working stiffs would be paying taxes, the money automatically deducted from their paychecks.)

Not much here for the alleged takers, who actually see themselves as “taken from.” Unlike the others, Trump wasn’t going after their benefits. He even praised Planned Parenthood, noting it provides a variety of health services to ordinary women.

Trump would be a disastrous president, of course. But he knows how to inspire the “enraged ones.” In the French Revolution, the enraged ones were extremists who sent many of the moderate revolutionaries to the guillotine. (The enraged ones also ended badly.)

As the embers of Super Tuesday still glowed, The Wall Street Journal published the following commentary by one of its Old Regime’s scribes:

“To be honest and impolitic, the Trump voter smacks of a child who unleashes recriminations against mommy and daddy because the world is imperfect,” Holman Jenkins wrote. Take that.

No responsible American — not the other Republicans and certainly not Democrats expecting strong Latino support — would endorse Trump’s nasty attacks on our hardworking immigrants. But large-scale immigration of unskilled labor has, to some extent, hurt America’s blue-collar workers, and not just white ones.

Democrats need to continue pressing reform that is humane both to immigrants already rooted in the society and to the country’s low-skilled workforce. Do that and the air comes whooshing out of Trump’s balloon.

Back in Washington, the Republican leaders will probably continue to avoid work on this issue or a Supreme Court nominee or anything else Obama wants. They should enjoy their leisure. After Election Day, many may have to look for real jobs.

The working-class has finally rebelled against the

Opinion

hillary-clinton-united-nations-march-10-2015

Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks to the reporters at United Nations headquarters, Tuesday, March 10, 2015. Clinton conceded that she should have used a government email to conduct business as secretary of state, saying her decision was simply a matter of “convenience.” (Photo: AP/Seth Wenig)

Surely, Hillary Clinton hopes for the happy conclusion to the maddening string of primaries and caucuses that have exhausted her. Surely, she hopes to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party this year. And surely, she hopes to be elected president. These hopes are realistic probabilities in her own mind.

But if she is hoping for the end to her legal woes, that is a false hope — and she knows it.

The relentless barrage of bad legal news for Clinton, which has been relegated to below-the-fold stories because of the primary news position of the presidential primary contests, must keep her and her lawyers up late at night. While her husband has been arguing with military veterans at her political rallies and while Marco Rubio and Donald Trump have been mocking each other’s body parts, a series of curious developments has occurred in the Clinton email scandal.

It is fair to call this a scandal because it consists of the public revelation of the private and probably criminal misdeeds of the nation’s chief diplomat during President Barack Obama’s first term in office. Clinton’s job as secretary of state was to keep secrets. Instead, she exposed them to friend and foe. The exposure of state secrets, either intentionally or negligently, constitutes the crime of espionage. For the secretary of state to have committed espionage is, quite simply, scandalous.

We are not addressing just a handful of emails. To date, the State Department has revealed the presence of more than 2,000 emails on her private server that contained state secrets — and four that were select access privilege, or SAP. The SAP emails require special codes in order to access them. The codes change continually, and very few people in the government have the codes. SAP is a sub-category of “top secret,” and it constitutes the highest level of protected secrecy, for the utmost protection of the government’s gravest secrets. It is unheard of for SAP-level data to reside in a non-secure, vulnerable venue — yet that is where Clinton caused four SAPs to reside.

Clinton’s allies in the State Department have perpetrated the myth that the 2,000 emails were recently upgraded to reflect their secret contents. That is untrue. The emails possess secret status by virtue of their contents, not because of any markings on them. Clinton had a legal obligation to recognize state secrets when she saw them, no matter their markings or non-markings. On her first day on the job, she swore under oath that she recognized and understood that legal obligation and she promised to comply with it. She did not comply.

This past weekend, the newly revealed emails showed that Clinton emailed about the location of drone strikes. By their very nature, such emails contain state secrets. They contained state secrets when she received them; they contained them when she sent them; and they contain state secrets today.

Also this past weekend, Gen. Michael Hayden, formerly director of the CIA and of the National Security Agency, stated on CNN that it is a near certainty that the Russian government and others had access to Clinton’s non-secure server and all it contained.

Lawyers familiar with the terminology of state secrets will refrain from using the word “classified” to describe the emails that contained state secrets, even though Clinton repeatedly does that. The word “classified” is not a legal term; rather, it is derived from the verb “to classify,” and it means that the classification process has been completed.

Since nothing is marked “classified” — the legal markings are “confidential,” “secret” and “top secret” — Clinton has been materially misleading the public and the FBI when she claims that she never sent or received anything “marked classified.”

By saying that, she wants us to believe that in more than 2,000 instances, she failed to ascertain the presence of state secrets in emails she received or sent. No voter but the most hardened supporter, no federal prosecutor, no FBI agent and no juror will believe that.

The FBI investigation process is coming to its logical conclusion, and the judge who ordered the State Department to release all of Clinton’s emails also has ordered that her top State Department aides submit to oral depositions — examinations under oath before trial — in the Freedom of Information Act litigation brought by Judicial Watch against the State Department.

He directed the Judicial Watch lawyers to ascertain whether there was a conspiracy in the secretary of state’s office to violate federal law. If those lawyers find evidence of such a conspiracy, they may then seek the oral examination of Clinton herself.

This search for a conspiracy will take Clinton down the road to perdition — to the end of her hopes. Along that road are instructions to a subordinate to divert all her government emails through her private server. On the side of that road are emails instructing her aides to remove “secret” markings from documents and resend the documents to her via a non-secure fax machine.

On that road are emails revealing the names of secret undercover intelligence assets, the locations of North Korean nuclear facilities, the transcripts of telephone conversations among foreign intelligence agents, and the travel plans of then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens in the days before he was murdered.

Democrats who indulge in Clinton’s false hopes will do so at their peril. Don’t they want to know of her potential status as a criminal defendant before they complete their nominating process? Or do they, like her, think that they can just hope that all this will go away?

Judge Andrew Napolitano: If Hillary Clinton hopes

Opinion

Trump-Rubio-Cruz-SC-GOP-Debate-Getty

Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz (L) and Marco Rubio (R) applaud as fellow candidate Donald Trump is introduced during the CBS News Republican Presidential Debate in Greenville, South Carolina, Feb. 13, 2016. (Photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)

The worst political blunder of all time, according to scientist Freeman Dyson, was the decision of the emperor of China in 1433 to cut off his country from the outside world. In the wake of that decision, China lost its position in the forefront of human achievements and fell behind, over the centuries, to become a Third World country.

Before the end of this month, the United States of America may break that record for the worst political blunder of all time. Professor Dyson attributed the Chinese emperor’s blunder to “powerful people pursuing partisan squabbles and neglecting the long-range interests of the empire.” That can be our path to disaster as well.

After the results of “Super Tuesday,” we find ourselves with front-runners in their respective parties who each could, as President of the United States, take the decline of America under the Obama administration, even further down, to a point of no return.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was in charge of the foreign policy that destroyed governments in Egypt and Libya that were no threat to America’s interests or allies, and plunged both countries into a turmoil from which only Egypt managed to rescue itself, while Libya has become another hotbed of terrorist activity.

Yet Secretary Clinton is running on her “experience” — even though it is an experience of unmitigated disasters for America, around the world. Her e-mail scandals and lies are important mainly as symptoms of her utter disregard of anything other than her own financial and political interests.

While Hillary Clinton seems, for all practical purposes, to be unstoppable in her quest for the Democrats’ nomination, Donald Trump is by no means inevitable on the Republican side. But he may become unstoppable after the next round of primaries, especially if he wins in winner-take-all states.

Most of Trump’s wins in various state primaries have been achieved without winning a majority of the votes. Yet these wins can create an impression of great victories, even when most Republican voters voted against Trump. The fracturing of the majority vote among numerous other candidates is the key.

What prevents the anti-Trump majority from coming together in support of one candidate who can defeat Trump? Only the kinds of narrow political squabbles that ruined China.

Senator Ted Cruz has the best track record against Trump, having beaten him in three states, even with the majority vote split among several candidates. But the Republican establishment would prefer Senator Marco Rubio, who has won only one state and is trailing in the polls in his home state of Florida.

Perhaps most important of all, there are signs that — if push comes to shove — the Republican establishment would prefer Trump himself to Ted Cruz.

Why? Because, despite Trump’s reckless rhetoric and shallow reasoning, he is a deal-maker who will not let principles stand in the way of anything that promotes the ego of Donald Trump.

Senator Cruz, on the other hand, has repeatedly defied the Republican leadership in the Senate. Whatever the merits or lack of merits of his actions in particular cases, he has clearly shown himself not to be one of those who go along to get along.

Former president Jimmy Carter has criticized Senator Cruz for not being “malleable.” No one was more “malleable” in the face of America’s enemies than Jimmy Carter, both when he was president and after he left office, and cozied up to Communist dictators in Cuba and North Korea. We don’t need that kind of malleability in a President of the United States.

Even if we accept the criticism of Senator Cruz’s political enemies and critics that he is “opportunistic,” that charge loses some of its sting if he becomes President of the United States. What greater opportunity is there for him at that point? Becoming a great president, which is certainly what this country needs.

Perhaps a political near-death experience thus far will sober up both Cruz and his opponents into a realization that their cooperation is the only thing that makes sense for the country.

But politicians do not always do things that make sense for the country, whether in 15th century China or 21st century America. But we will know the answer to that question by the end of this month. And generations yet unborn may have to live with the consequences of that answer.

Thomas Sowell: Before the end of this

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