Why it was wrong for Pubs to nominate and elect DJT instead of an actual conservative - today's edition

The current Exhibit A is a doozy:

Here’s a transcript of what Trump said:

So we’re going to talk and we’re going to see what we can do. We’re getting very close. But, for the country, we have to have healthcare and it can’t be Obamacare which is melting down. The other side is saying all sorts of things before they even knew what the bill was. This will be great if we get it done and if we don’t get it done it’s just going to be something that we’re not going to like and that’s ok and I understand that very well. But I think we have a chance to do something very very important for the public, very very important for the people of our country that we love.

It is like Trump learned how to talk about healthcare from his experience with the Miss Teen USA pageant. This sort of language is what students use to pad out an essay when they haven’t done the required reading. It’s embarrassing. It’s worse than President Obama mispronouncing “corpsman” or saying “57 states” in an exhausted stupor. This isn’t just a clumsily worded statement. It’s an admission that he has no vision whatsoever for America’s healthcare system and he’s delegated it to the woefully inadequate GOP leadership in congress.

Some will say this is taken out of context, but this sort of incoherent word salad is typical for Trump when discussing healthcare going all the way back to the campaign. He has no real opinion on perhaps the most important issue people sent him to Washington to deal with. He always speaks in vague generalities. Obamacare bad. Health care good. We’ll provide great health care. You’re going to love it. Trust me.

Since he has no idea why a free-market approach is the only alternative to the "A"CA and the single-payer arrangement that the "A"CA's collapse is going to lead to , he has no idea how to support and expand the core of Republican Senators who understand that. Instead, what his little pow-wow and the above blurt from it wind up doing is perpetuating the moral cowardice to which a great many other Senators are falling prey.

Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Carly Fiorina or Bobby Jindal would have proceeded from an insistence on a free-market approach. Any of them would also have been proactive about conveying that - via television, social media, in-person appearances, all the venues Trump likes to use - to the American public, and would not have become mired in snits with dinosaur-media outlets.

We've been fair here at LITD. When developments for the good-move side of the ledger have occurred, they've been duly noted and applauded. But this is perhaps the biggest issue of all. It was one thing for Squirrel-Hair to rant (accurately) about the "A"CA's failure during the campaign season, but it's ringing a little hollow at this late date, since all he's doing about it is facilitating disarray.

And this is the juiciest opening the Freedom-Haters could ask for. They can make single payer look like the obvious way to proceed, since Pubs, even when political manna is served to them on a silver platter, don't seem to be able to hit their backsides with a yardstick.

And she's Hillionaire's most trusted confidante

Huma had too many claims on her attention that day, I guess:

Emails released on Monday show that Hillary Clinton’s top State Department aide, Huma Abedin, left classified government information that needed to be burned in the front seat of her vehicle.

“Favor” is the subject of Abedin’s July 20, 2009 email to Lauren Jiloty, Clinton’s personal assistant. Judicial Watch obtained the records and hundreds more pages of Abedin emails as part of its ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department.

“I’m going to have ambassador ride on next drive,” wrote Abedin. “There’s a bunch of burn stuff in the pocket of my front seat.”

"Can u put in trunk?” she asked.

Jiloty told Abedin she would.

Doesn't exactly burnish this crew's national-security credentials, does it?

Hillionaire in a nutshell

The editors at NRO note that the point of Hillionaire's speech last night was to "reintroduce herself."

They provide their own take on what that is about:

 . . . if you need a reintroduction to Mrs. Clinton, we will oblige: She is an opportunist without anything resembling a conviction with the exception of her unwavering commitment to abortion, a “public servant” who along with her husband grew vastly wealthy exploiting her political connections and renting access to everybody from Goldman Sachs to Vladimir Putin, a petty, grasping, vindictive, meretricious time-server whose incompetence and dishonesty have been proved everywhere from Little Rock to Benghazi.

They take a look at the specifics into which she delved, such as they were:

To the extent that she ventured down from the lofty heights of moral preening and celebrating herself as a semi-divine agent of History, she mostly cleaved to her familiar list of free stuff and a proposal for punitive tax hikes on unpopular individuals, companies, and industries. Maybe there are some rubes out there who think that this will result in tuition-free college for “the middle class,” as though shifting around costs made things less expensive. (How’s that working out for your health care?) Her strategy on the Islamic State? Same thing we’ve been doing, but with an added “We will prevail!”

Hardly the recipe for restoring post-America to its former status as the United States of America.

Hillionaire's impossible task: happy-talking the current state of post-America

Great Ben Shapiro piece at NRO on how the last eight years - the era of the Most Equal Comrade - have forced the Freedom-Haters - particularly Hillionaire - to drag the delegates at their convention into an escapist realm of identity politics and we're-making-America-great-by-imposing-social-justice nonsense.

It's one of those I-could-easily-excerpt-the-whole-thing pieces. For purposes of the point I want to make here, we'll take some segments out of sequence. Let's start with just what it is about the MEC era that has left Hillionaire unable to be candid about what will be facing the next president:

Barack Obama has been a highly unsuccessful president by any objective measure. His foreign policy has led to the single most explosive rise in terrorism since the empowerment of al-Qaeda in the late 1990s by Hillary’s husband. His last two years have been plagued by a national increase in violent crime, particularly murder in major cities. The economy has continued to stall under his redistributionist, anti-capitalist watch.

And the Democrats have paid the price. The media that built Obama into a godhead for racial progress couldn’t abandon Obama; instead, they kept happy-talking their way through an increasingly dystopian America. So did Obama’s fellow Democrats. The result: massive Republican gains at the state and local level, and historic elections in 2010 and 2014 in Congressional races. 

The media still can’t escape the Obama trap. When Donald Trump rightly pointed out a series of problems facing America at home and abroad, ranging from rising crime and economic malaise to the rise of jihadism, the media and the Obama administration responded by pooh-poohing Trump’s critique. No, they said, Trump’s wrong: Everything’s hunky-dory. He’s just being too “dark.”

Except he isn’t.

And Americans know that.

Hillary knows it too, but she’s stuck in a bind. 

Now let's back up and look at what Shapiro points out as Hillionaire's most pressing problem in regard to her own character and personality:

But Bill Clinton’s wife is one of the least empathy-driven candidates in the history of politics. She’s manipulating, cynical, and nasty. She’s instinctively defensive, brutally cutting, and utterly cold. 

The polls show it. This week’s CNN poll demonstrated that 68 percent of Americans consider Hillary dishonest, and 54 percent think she’s running for personal gain. 

This is why there's such a push in Philadelphia this week to "humanize" her.

The only thing she has going for her in this regard is that nobody really thinks of Squirrel-Hair as a warm-hearted, other-centered fuzzball, either.

But like kids in a dysfunctional family, the post-American cattle-masses have no higher standard to wish for, as evidenced by voting patterns, social-media comment threads, and the sewage that spews forth in university classrooms, and the spiritually grotesque creatures we choose to make into celebrities.

But back to my original point, Hillionaire is not the most credible dispenser of happy talk in a year like 2016. All candidates have challenges, and that's hers.

The utterly mad unicorns-and-rainbows worldview of your overlords

CIA chief John Brennan - are you ready for this - says he is opposed to spying.

Um, I kind of thought that was his agency's core function, its raison d'être.

Oh, wait! That's right! That would be making the transgendered feel comfortable!

Medicaid expansion: how bad an idea?

Two state directors of Americans for Prosperity - representing states in which the legislatures had the good sense to shoot down Medicaid expansion - provide a rundown in today's WSJ of how things have turned out in states that went ahead with it:

Consider the experience of the states that did expand Medicaid. “At least 14 states have seen new enrollments exceed their original projections, causing at least seven to increase their cost estimates for 2017,” the Associated Press reported in July.

The AP says that California expected 800,000 new enrollees after the state’s 2013 Medicaid expansion, but wound up with 2.3 million. Enrollment outstripped estimates in New Mexico by 44%, Oregon by 73%, and Washington state by more than 100%.

This has blown holes in state budgets. Illinois once projected that its Medicaid expansion would cost the state $573 million for 2017 through 2020. Yet 200,000 more people have enrolled than were expected, and the state has increased its estimated cost for covering each. The new price tag? About $2 billion, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Enrollment overruns in Kentucky forced officials to more than double the anticipated cost of the state’s Medicaid expansion for 2017, the AP reports, to $74 million from $33 million. That figure could rise to $363 million a year by 2021.

In Rhode Island, where one-quarter of the state’s population is now on Medicaid, the program consumes roughly 30% of all state spending, the Providence Journal reports. To plug this growing hole, Rhode Island has levied a 3.5% tax on insurance policies sold through the state’s ObamaCare exchange.

Even Ohio, whose Republican Gov. John Kasich is running for president on a platform of fiscal responsibility, finds itself in a Medicaid bind. State spending on the program has grown by $5.8 billion since 2011. The Ohio Department of Medicaid projects that by 2017 spending will total $28.2 billion—a 59% increase during Mr. Kasich’s tenure.

In what universe its it a sane idea to take a citizen's money, run it through the DC bureaucratic filter, send it back to the state where the citizen lives, run it through that bureaucratic filter, invite too many fellow citizens to belly up to the trough to get some of it, and expect anybody's health to get cared for?

The Most Equal Comrade truly must want Western civilization to be conquered by jihadists

How many Syrian fighters has the MEC regime trained to fight ISIS?

60.

You have to ask why

Why is post-America not taking the most effective course in fighting ISIS?

The United States has blocked attempts by its Middle East allies to fly heavy weapons directly to the Kurds fighting Islamic State jihadists in Iraq, The Telegraph has learnt. 

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Some of America’s closest allies say President Barack Obama and other Western leaders, including David Cameron, are failing to show strategic leadership over the world’s gravest security crisis for decades. 

They now say they are willing to “go it alone” in supplying heavy weapons to the Kurds, even if means defying the Iraqi authorities and their American backers, who demand all weapons be channelled through Baghdad. 

High level officials from Gulf and other states have told this newspaper that all attempts to persuade Mr Obama of the need to arm the Kurds directly as part of more vigorous plans to take on Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant(Isil) have failed. The Senate voted down one attempt by supporters of the Kurdish cause last month. 

The officials say they are looking at new ways to take the fight to Isil without seeking US approval.

Not only is post-America taking inadequate measures on the supply-of-arms front, they're behaving likewise with regard to the air campaign.

The US has also infuriated its allies, particularly Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf states, by what they perceive to be a lack of clear purpose and vacillation in how they conduct the bombing campaign. Other members of the coalition say they have identified clear Isil targets but then been blocked by US veto from firing at them. 

“There is simply no strategic approach,” one senior Gulf official said. “There is a lack of coordination in selecting targets, and there is no overall plan for defeating Isil.” 

Something to think about in this week of the greatest homeland threat since September 2001.

When the regime needs to have something stupid said, it gives the assignment to Suz

Now national security advisor Susan Rice has tweeted that the "US-Israel security relationship is stronger than it ever has been.

Cue the laugh track.

Except that it's really rather serious:

Having the National Security Adviser become a standing joke is not a good idea, for the nation and for the Obama administration. This reveals deep desperation. And a political operative who is so far out of her depth that she imperils the nation in a job with serious responsibilities.

But consider that the regime is full of such types from top to bottom.

Our bumbling overlords

Yesterday, the message gong out via the regime's propaganda arm was that Turkey was going to let post-America use its bases to fight IS.

Not so fast, says Turkey.

Chuck Hagel should scare the living daylights out of you

The man is the US Secretary of Defense, and he actually said this about the failed mission to rescue Foley and other American hostages of the Islamic State:

“This operation was a flawless operation, but the hostages were not there."

The rest of what he had to say at his presser was nearly as disastrous and pathetic.