Netan-YAHOO!

Today on NRO

JONAH GOLDBERG: While the Left hypocritically questions Tom Cotton's patriotism, no one is disputing his letter's actual content. The Cotton Letter's Inconvenient Truth.

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: No, we should not lift the military sequester. The Other Army Green.

KATHERINE TIMPF: I thought Lena Dunham didn't care what people thought about her body. Lena Dunham Defending Exercise as Not 'Anti-Feminist' Is What's Anti-Feminist.

JOEL GEHRKE: Harry Reid's plying his old tactics on the human-trafficking bill. Even in the Minority, Harry Reid Is Trying to Run the Senate.

PHOTO ESSAY: Cartoon of the Day.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty, Conservative Journalist of the Year

March 18, 2015

Netan-YAHOO!

Don't let anyone spin you otherwise: This is a big win, and a surprising one. Sometimes the polls are off, and sometimes the exit polls are off.

Benjamin Netanyahu has won a fourth term as Israel's prime minister, with his right-wing Likud party seizing a decisive five-seat advantage in parliament over the main opposition Zionist Union party.

With 99% of the ballots counted, Likud is slated to control 29 of parliament's 120 seats to 24 for Isaac Herzog's Zionist Union, Israel Radio reported early Wednesday.

That advantage means Mr. Netanyahu, Israel's longest serving premier after David Ben-Gurion, will have little difficulty in forming a majority coalition based on right-wing nationalist and religious parties.

Yes, he won. He also more than covered the point spread.

Here's Micah Halpern, writing some tough truths about how the media sees Bibi Netanyahu in the New York Observer:

Contrary to what pundits and skeptics and newspapers projected, Bibi and his Likud did not take a savage beating, but rather trounced the opposition. There should be no doubt at this stage just how corrupt media coverage of this election, which captured headlines around the world, was. Someone started drinking the anti-Bibi Kool-Aid and everyone else sipped along. Everyone, that is, except for Israeli voters.

The end result of this election is not a condemnation of the polls and the pollsters but rather of the interpreters—the analysts and the pundits and those who supposedly understand what makes Israelis tick. Israelis haven't changed, the pundits just wanted them to change. Israel today, after the election that once again re-elected Benjamin Netanyahu to the position of prime minister, is the same Israel that it was yesterday.

In a classic example of the wishing-as-analysis genre, the New York Times concluded that the prime minister had really lost while winning: "Benjamin Netanyahu was poised to return to power. But there was a cloud over his apparent turnaround, the result of an increasingly shrill campaign that raised questions about his ability to heal Israeli's internal wounds or better its standing in the world."

No, you know who has a cloud over his head? President Obama, who made his views on Netanyahu abundantly clear. Obama's proposed deal with Iran was unpopular across the spectrum of Israeli politics, but a defeat of Bibi, the deal's most vocal critic, would have been seen as good news for the deal.

Of course:

The American nonprofit OneVoice Movement – under scrutiny by a U.S. Senate panel over possible links to a campaign to oust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – quietly filed paperwork that would allow it to engage in political activism after two leading Republican lawmakers questioned its use of government funds, FoxNews.com has learned.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., sent a letter Jan. 29 to Secretary of State John Kerry asking whether the group – as a recipient of almost $350,000 in recent grants from the Obama administration's State Department – had violated its tax-exempt status when it began backing the virulently anti-Netanyahu Victory 15 campaign in Israel earlier that month.

Just five days after the public dispatch of the Cruz-Zeldin letter, a "corporation service company" registered a new funding entity in Delaware called PeaceWorks Action, Inc. under a section of the tax code that still governs nonprofits, but allows them to engage in a limited amount of political activity. Listed under section is 501(c)4 of the tax code, PeaceWorks Action, Inc. is now featured on the OneVoice Website as one of OneVoice's funders, alongside PeaceWorks Foundation, whose name has long been present, and which holds 501(c)3 status like OneVoice itself.

Critics are likely to see the registration as tacit admission that it had indulged in political activity alongside V15, which itself has been advised by former Obama campaign aides, including his top field organizer, Jeremy Bird.

They should try the Hillary excuse, "I'm too important for the rules to apply to me."

My Tweets about how Bibi should have reacted to his victory are collected on Twitchy.

Why the Rush to Pick a Favorite in the 2016 Field?

Breitbart's Matt Boyle goes in to overdrive, insisting that Scott Walker is ensnared in a massive, race-changing scandal because his newly-hired strategist, Liz Mair, has . . . er, dual citizenship.* (Hey, if that's a big deal, what about Ted Cruz's former dual-citizenship status? What, is the senator some sleeper agent for the poutine menace? "The Manitoban Candidate"?)

This morning, Liz Mair departed Scott Walker's campaign -- presumably not because of her dual-citizenship status, but rather from the vocal whining from Iowa Republican-party officials over her previous mockery of the state's first-in-the-nation status. This is perhaps the first major mistake of Scott Walker's nascent campaign, with quite a few folks who know Mair incredulous that the guy willing to stand up to the unions in Wisconsin would knuckle under to the griping of state GOP officials.

It's March 18, 2015. We have ten months to go until anybody casts any votes that matter in the Iowa caucus tentatively scheduled for January 18. And yet somehow, some folks -- who aren't political professionals, and who don't have a financial or career incentive -- are energetically jumping onto candidate bandwagons and making their choice -- and attempting to derail other ones.

Where does this impatience in political junkies come from? I can see having favorites or guys you like already. If you follow politics -- and if you're reading this newsletter, it's a safe bet you follow politics -- you probably already have an opinion on Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and the other names being mentioned. You may have strong opinions already. But are you ready to pick your guy now? Do you feel like you know so much about all of the candidates already that you don't want or need to see anything else from this crop of candidates? No debates? No policy proposals? No watching them on the stump?

Maybe this impatience is a reflection of our impatience for the end of the Obama era. Hurry up and get it over with, so our country can get on the road to a real recovery.

It also may reflect that the rank-and-file Republicans aren't looking forward to the next ten months. Ten months of opposition-research dumps. Ten months of attack ads, and then candidates denouncing attack ads, and candidates insisting that they can't control the independent expenditure committees running the attack ads. Ten months of candidates making off-the-cuff comments while trudging through New Hampshire or Iowa snowdrifts, and the media treating those comments as major gaffes. Ten months of campaign staffers insisting that the other guy's poorly-worded off-the-cuff comment represents a giant game-changer that will swing a lot of votes, while their guy's poorly-worded off-the-cuff comment is an irrelevant nothing-burger. Ten months of arguing about whether a four percentage-point change in a poll represents momentum or just statistical noise. Ten months of Frank Luntz's focus groups of totally-objective, totally-undecided likely voters being treated as the Oracles of Delphi. Ten months of complaining about who gets invited to the debates. Ten months of complaining about who gets the most time to speak at the debates. Ten months of complaining about the questions at the debates.

These next ten months don't have to be an awful experience for all involved. We may know the basics of the big names running in 2016, but we don't know their life stories. We don't know every major factor and influence that made them into the people they are today. We don't know the details of when they've most been tested as a leader, and what they learned from it. We don't know what they regret and what they would do differently if they had a second chance. We don't know their agendas in detail. We have a general idea of how they would be as a leader -- i.e., Rand Paul isn't likely to invade any place -- but there's always room for more details -- details they may or may not want to share or elaborate upon.

Who knows? You may learn something you don't like about the guy you liked, and you may learn something you like about the guy you didn't like.

Those bandwagons aren't going anywhere.

*This is where I'm supposed to disclose that Liz Mair is a friendly acquaintance; even if I didn't know her, I'd still think that Boyle's investigative avenue is as dumb as a box of rocks.

ADDENDA: Lisa De Pasquale notes: "Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is the [Scott] Walker of the West. He's making all the right people angry. The central theme in his campaign was shrinking government. In a symbolic -- but also financially prudent -- gesture, he released his budget to the Arizona legislature on thumb-drives. It saved the state $8,000 and was a great way to start the conversation."

. . . For everyone who felt the need to tell me that Showtime's Twin Peaks series wasn't going to happen:

"Nothing is going on that's any more than any pre-production process with David Lynch," a source told Entertainment Weekly. "Everything is moving forward and everybody is crazy thrilled and excited."

Basically, it looks like David Lynch is just being David Lynch, which means saying a bunch of stuff that means nothing to anyone but him. That's not even an insult. David Lynch just operates on a different plane of human thought than most people, and that plane is somewhere I don't particularly want to visit. Probably has fantastic coffee, though.

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