The post-Indiana Republican commentary UPDATED

Update: Exclusive: President Fox Apologizes, Invites Trump to Mexico 

 . . . "Earlier this year, Fox said that he would not pay for Trump’s “f*cking wall,” and called Trump ““Ignorant … crazy … egocentric … nasty … [a] false prophet.” Trump then called on Fox to apologize

"On Wednesday, he did so — in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News — and added that he wanted Trump to come to Mexico to see the border from the other side.

“ 'I apologize. Forgiveness is one of the greatest qualities that human beings have, is the quality of a compassionate leader. You have to be humble. You have to be compassionate. You have to love thy neighbor,” Fox explained to Breitbart News while sitting in the hotel of the J.W. Marriott in Santa Monica, California on Wednesday afternoon." . . .

Bobby Jindal will vote for Trump -- grudgingly   . . . And in a general election match-up with Hillary Clinton, Jindal said he'd get behind Trump." . . .
The Weaknesses that Doomed Ted Cruz  ". . . Cruz’s victory in Iowa was misleading, masking his identity as a candidate who would ultimately struggle to appeal beyond his core supporters. “His niche was always on the far right, being the most conservative guy,” says a top Republican strategist. 

News Analysis: Trump could beat Hillary Clinton with toned down rhetoric: experts

. . . "While Trump has a high negative rate -- the rate at which people dislike a candidate -- those of Clinton are nearly as high, as a number of Americans find her stiff and unapproachable, and see her as someone who does not understand the needs of ordinary Americans.

"But perhaps the most telling is that Clinton has failed to galvanize her party or excite her supporters in the same way as Trump has done.

"This has been shown by strong Democratic support for rival Senator Bernie Sanders, who put up a tough fight against Clinton over the past several months, despite Clinton just six months ago being considered a shoo-in for the nomination.

"Sanders is expected to stay in the nomination race longer after his win in Indiana Tuesday night.

"For a virtual unknown -- and a socialist at that, a philosophy seen by many as un-American -- to gain so much enthusiasm from voters demonstrates that Clinton is a weak candidate, many analysts believe." . . .

On the Democrat race after Indiana

Sanders embarrasses Clinton in Indiana   "It wasn't supposed to be as difficult for Hillary Clinton this time. The nominating process was going to be a coronation - a stately march to the convention and victory for the first woman president in history.

"But something happened on the way to the royal wedding; the radicals in the Democratic party found a candidate they could fully embrace. Every time Clinton seeks to end this endless contest for the nomination, up pops Bernie Sanders and his legions. So, following her huge victories in the east coast primaries last week, Hillary was expected to coast to victory in the decidedly un-radical state of Indiana.

"Such was not to be." . . .Rick Moran

Bernie Sanders wins Indiana's Democratic presidential primary

. . . "And while Clinton typically pulls urban and minority votes, Critchlow said Sanders decisive win in South Bend and Mishawaka precincts represents a change."

Trump vs. Clinton Is Terrible News for Fans of Free Speech and the First Amendment  . . . "And then of course there is Hillary Clinton's well-known view that federal authorities should be able to prevent her political opponents from distributing a documentary film that's critical of herin the days before a federal election. That particular issue was litigated before the U.S. Supreme Court in a little case called Citizens United v. FEC. Among other things, Citizens United featured Clinton and her pro-censorship allies squaring off against the American Civil Liberties Union, which supported Citizens United and its First Amendment right to distribute a documentary film about a political candidate in the United States of America.

"Now consider Donald Trump, who has effectively become the GOP nominee thanks to Ted Cruz dropping out of the race last night. Trump's hostility to constitutionally limited governmentis well known (Trump has even cheered Franklin Roosevelt's notorious internment of Japanese Americans). But Trump seems particularly antagonistic towards the First Amendment." . . .

#NeverHillary. Remember the Supreme Court, the ACLU-run Civil Rights Division and. . .

And I would add the EPA, that has a stranglehold on American business and homeowners. The Secretary of Defense, replacing the Democrats putting women and transsexuals in combat units. 

Mark Krikorian  "Donald Trump is unfit to be president. He’s a braggart and a liar. And a serial adulterer. He’s behaved shamefully during the primary campaign. He wouldn’t recognize the Constitution if he tripped over it in the street. He doesn’t know even the Cliff Notes version of any policy issue. The idea that the party of Lincoln and Reagan, Coolidge and Eisenhower, Justice Harlan and Senator Taft has nominated Trump is appalling.

"And I’m going to vote for him anyway.

"I condemn no one for deciding otherwise. There are plausible arguments for not voting for him in November – to repudiate him and his style of politics, to uphold conservative principle. Staying home, voting for a third party, or writing someone in are all honorable alternatives. (Actually voting for Hillary is not.) And if you think his defeat is literally inevitable, these are easier choices to make.

"But while his defeat is clearly likely, I do not think it inevitable. As president, Trump would not do half the things he’s promised his supporters, nor half the things his detractors fear. All the illegals aren’t going to be deported and the wall will be tied up in eminent domain litigation for years; likewise, he won’t nuke Belgium or seize the New York Times.

"But he would make appointments, and personnel is policy, more so than ever in the post-constitutional era Obama has ushered in. There are hundreds of posts that matter, but two stand out. The first is obvious: the Supreme Court. We have no real idea whom Trump might nominate, but he or she could not help but be better than Hillary’s choices.

"The second position is possibly even more powerful than the Supreme Court, albeit with shorter tenure: head of the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice. The division is Left’s most potent weapon in imposing its will on every city and town, every baker and florist, every church and synagogue in the nation. The current acting director is an ACLU lawyer – I don’t mean a lawyer who happens to belong to the group, but the ACLU’s actual Deputy Legal Director. Under President Clinton the Second, the ACLU would continue to wage lawfare against Americans on Americans’ own dime, irreversibly altering the fabric of our society. Whatever his manifold shortcomings, this would not be the case in a Trump administration.

"I would have preferred Cruz. He’s manifestly a better human being and would certainly have made a better president. But that’s over now. Either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is going to be sworn in as president in January. It’s not crazy to argue that Hillary would be less destructive in the long run, but it’s an argument I do not find persuasive.

"So my reluctant conclusion is this: Vote for the bloviating megalomaniac – it’s important.

The Worst of Both Sexes

Mona Charen
On Hillary:

Clinton uses feminism the way she has used people, ideas, and institutions throughout her long career — merely as instruments of her own advancement. When it’s convenient, she is the feminist role model. When her husband is being accused (accurately) of sexually harassing a cavalcade of women, she becomes the Wife Enforcer. The women who accused Bill Clinton were “trash,” she assured the world. Monica Lewinsky was a “narcissistic loony tune.”

. . . "Hillary Clinton delights in presenting herself as a feminist icon — but she is weighed down by the weaknesses of feminism and can boast few of the strengths. The weakness is her itchy trigger finger on accusations of sexism. She’s playing in the biggest of big leagues yet reaches for the sexism charge with dull predictability. If you criticize her cattle-futures deal, the Clinton Foundation, her e-mail server — anything — she or her minions will protest the double standard. One of her followers, Lena Dunham, published a list of words that ought to be forbidden when discussing Mrs. Clinton. They included “shrill,” “inaccessible,” and “difficult.”

On Trump, whom Charen calls a "lout":

Colleges presume young men guilty of rape even when both parties are drunk and irresponsible. Our schools and workplaces continue to provide material and psychological support to girls and women — even as women outpace men in education and income growth. The Democrats’ persistent recycling of the fraudulent “79” cents myth about women’s earnings angers everyone: 

"Trump is no more a manly man than Clinton is a feminist model. Both use the gender wars to advance their own bottomless personal vanity and ambition. Plague. Houses."

It’s Trump. Lets All Get Over It.

Thomas Lifson   "To the dismay of many serious conservatives, including many in our AT family, the Republican primary voters have spoken, and barring black swan events, Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee. . . . contemplate Trump’s upside potential -- for America, for conservatives, and for the Republican Party.

"Let’s face it: America has been locked into a downward spiral under the permanent grip that a corrupt system has had on power. Politicians bent on reform, representing voters demanding it, arrive in Washington, DC only to discover the impossibility of breaking the hold on the levers of governance of lobbyists, bureaucrats, and politicians in their pockets. Washington, DC thrives, becoming the richest city in the country, as most of the rest of the nation stagnates and declines. Businesses discover that it is far more important to cultivate government support than to innovate. Rent seeking becomes the path to riches." . . .

I agree; it is now incumbent upon us to support anyone opposing the Democrat Party and their suffocating political correctness, their balkanizing of American society, and their racialist victimizing.
Why aren't more voters sick of this destructive party with their smug talking TV heads? 
Lifson expresses a related opinion here"

. . .  "But thanks to decades of educational rot, the scandalous dumbing down of the public at the hands of teacher unions and progressives like Bill Ayers in the education industry, the voting public today does not respond as they did in the 1980s to eloquent rhetoric. " . . .

. . . "The fate of the Republic will be in either his hands or Hillary Clinton’s. Choosing between them requires no more than millisecond of thought.

"Trump is the chosen vehicle of the rebellion against a system that has failed us. If he is as smart as I think he is (and look at all the really smart people he has outsmarted), he will rise to the incredible challenges ahead for a reform presidency and a reformed GOP."

But I'd say Mr Trump will have to raise the intellectual level of his campaign:  Trump and Supporters Insult Our Intelligence  . . . "The fact is, Trump often makes profoundly stupid and manifestly false statements. These are the kind of statements that always offend the intellect of anyone who thinks analytically and is interested in the actual truth, regardless of who is saying them. If you are not offended by such, then by definition you simply have jettisoned any concern for truth and intelligence. That Trump runs afoul of both concepts is beyond debate." . . .

Trump and Sanders are merely symptoms of what is being lost. Far, far worse is on the horizon.

Victor Davis Hanson

Sleeping Dogs Are Waking

. . . "Yet the Obama era has reawakened ethnic chauvinism and multiculturalism in a way we have never quite seen before in recent American history. Who would have thought that in 2009, the racist firebrand, tax-delinquent, anti-Semite, former FBI informant, and conspiracist Al Sharpton would become the chief presidential advisor on race, or that the attorney general would refer to blacks as “my people” and the rest of the country as “cowards,” or that the president would urge Latinos to “punish our enemies,” or that something chauvinistic called “Black Lives Matter” would consider a corollary ecumenical “All Lives Matter” as racist, or that “white privilege” would be a slur hurled against the largely working white classes by mostly minority and white elites in academia, politics, journalism and the arts?

"Coupled with years of open borders, a failure to enforce immigration laws, hostility to integration and assimilation, and racial preferences in hiring and admissions, the Obama administration in just over seven years has nearly achieved its aims of racializing the American experience to such a degree that everyone must now belong to his particular tribe first, and begrudgingly remain an American a distant second." . . .

The Nihilism of Sanctuary Cities

PJ Media

"There are an estimated 300 or so jurisdictions -- entire states, counties, cities, and municipalities -- that since the early 1980s have enacted “sanctuary city” laws, forbidding full enforcement of federal immigration law within their jurisdictions.

"Most of these entities are controlled by Democrats in general and liberals in particular. Sanctuary officials feel that federal enforcement of the southern border is either unnecessary or immoral, and thus they have decided that there is no real crime in entering and residing in the United States unlawfully. While the majority of illegal aliens are no doubt law-abiding and have avoided public dependence, the pool of unlawful immigrants is so large at over 11 million that even small percentages of lawbreakers can translate into hundreds of thousands of criminal aliens.

"The liberal Migration Policy Institute conceded that there are over 800,000 illegal aliens with criminal records, nearly 700,000 of them with felony arrest records.

"Those numbers, of course, reflect only those who have been arrested and faced trial, not the unknown number who have committed crimes without being apprehended or charged. In some sanctuary cities, lawlessness among undocumented immigrants has reached epidemic proportions.' " . . .

The baggage election

terrellaftermath

Hillary Blames Fracking For ‘Tragedy’ In Coal Country…

Weasel Zippers

"Nothing to do with Obama’s policies.

"Via Washington Examiner:

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton on Monday blamed natural gas and fracking for the “tragedy” being experienced in coal country.

“It is a complicated problem,” Clinton said. “Some people want to make it all political, but there are market forces, there are global challenges, there’s also the upswing in fracking … which has proved to be a very serious competitor to coal.”

Clinton made the comments while touring through Kentucky, and later West Virginia, as part of a tour to demonstrate her plans for revitalizing Appalachia ahead of primary elections there later this month. Thousands of jobs have been lost by the coal industry in the last year, with a number of companies filing for bankruptcy protection in the Mountaineer State alone.

The shale boom has dramatically increased natural gas supplies, making the U.S. one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world. The increased supply has caused the price of natural gas to drop dramatically, causing more utilities to switch from using coal to using more natural gas to supply the nation’s electricity.[…]

She is using the stops to emphasize her plan to create a $30 billion “Marshall Plan” to revitalize and bring jobs to the region, making the comparison between helping coal country and rebuilding Germany after World War II.

Keep reading…

Full article here.

More Biden Failure in Iraq

Max Boot

"When it comes to Iraqi politics, Joe Biden seems to have the reverse­Midas touch: Everything he touches turns to muck. 

"Given the Iraq portfolio by President Obama, Biden made his mark in 2010 by putting the U.S. firmly behind the reelection as prime minister of the Shiite sectarian Nouri al Maliki even though Ayad Allawi, a non­sectarian leader, had won more votes. In charge once again during negotiations over the Status of Forces Agreement, Biden didn’t secure a treaty to keep U.S. forces in Iraq in 2011. The result: With the U.S. gone, Maliki’s sectarian vendetta was unleashed against Sunnis, leading them into the arms of ISIS. 

"Last Thursday Biden returned to the scene of the crime in a show of support for the new American Backed(sp) leader, Haider al Abadi, who replaced Maliki in September 2014. A senior official traveling with the vice president said the visit was a “symbol of how much faith we have in Prime Minister Abadi.”

" Within days, thousands of Muqtada al Sadr’s followers had overrun the seat of Iraq’s government, revealing Abadi’s impotence–and also the hollowness of a U.S. policy based on supporting him. " . . .

The primaries in living color

What to Expect in the Indiana Primary Tonight

PJ Media

. . . "The Hoosier State will bind 57 delegates on Tuesday: 30 delegates to the state-wide winner and 3 each to the winner in the state's nine congressional districts. Even a small win in Indiana translates into a large delegate win, and of the remaining states only California would net more delegates. In order to stop Trump from reaching the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination, Cruz (or John Kasich) would have to win Indiana or win California big.

"Conventional wisdom suggests that Indiana would be a great state for Cruz. The Hoosier State has the largest share of evangelical Protestants of any state yet to vote, at 31 percent (9 points higher than Wisconsin, Cruz's great triumph last month). In the 2012 Republican primary, voters toppled Sen. Richard Lugar in favor of Tea Party challenger Richard Mourdock (who then lost the general election due to an off-color pro-life comment). Like Wisconsin, Indiana has a robust population of well-educated, high-income conservatives.

"But those who know Indiana better have pegged it for Donald Trump." . . .