Jennifer Rubin on what seems to some like choosing sides in the Iran–Iraq War or a Vikings–Bears game:

On Meet the Press Sunday, Donald Trump said, “I mean, the biggest problem [Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.)] has, he’s a nasty guy and nobody likes him. Not one Republican senator, he works with them every day, not one Republican senator has endorsed Ted Cruz. I mean, when you think of it, that’s actually a shocking thing to believe. . . .” He’s got a point, and moreover, highlights why in their zest to get rid of Trump too many staunch conservatives are looking to the wrong alternative.

Cruz apologists say he is unliked in the Senate because he’s such a principled, devoted, sincere conservative. Oh, puleez. There are wonderfully principled conservatives — Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) come to mind. They are not backing him; no one in the Senate is. For some, it is because in a world of opportunists he is the worst of the worst. Whether exploiting the shutdown to claim only he was a true believer in getting rid of Obamacare or flip-flopping like a dead fish on national security matters so as to smear sincere advocates of a strong national security and ingratiate himself with anti-interventionists, his only principle is self-advancement. And in that regard, he’s not an alternative to Trump, but his twin.

Those who defend Cruz as an arch-conservative implicitly must argue he was not serious about certain issues (e.g., legalization of illegal immigrants, no ground troops to defeat the Islamic State). Only if he is disingenuous can he be a “real” conservative.

This is not simply a character flaw for Cruz, although it certainly is. (As a man motivated by unbridled self-interest Cruz undercuts his supporters’ critiques of Trump, whom they rightly slam for lack of intellectual consistency.) Cruz’s lack of inner core is an impediment to him besting Trump in the primaries. If the polls are correct — a big if — Iowa voters are discovering that sooner than others.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is certainly right to portray Cruz as “calculating.” In the year of the un-politician, Cruz seems the most politically calculating of them all. Voters looking for authenticity can certainly spot the man with two Ivy League degrees, a wife who worked on Wall Street and experience as a Supreme Court litigator as anything but the anti-elitist, anti-insider he claims to be. There is nothing wrong with being a highly educated man steeped in federal government service; what is wrong is pretending not to be. At least Trump is proud to be a gauche billionaire.

The reason why it is entirely logical for mainstream conservatives to reject him every much as they reject Trump is simple: He has Trump’s faults and more. Like Trump, he plays the xenophobe card. Like Trump, he peddles policy piffle. (End the IRS! Make the sand glow!) Like Trump, his understanding of foreign policy is daft. Distorted by his ideological lens, Cruz — like Trump — looks with admiration at strong men like Moammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.

But Cruz in some respects is worse on national security. He rejects the National Security Agency, conning the voters that its work amounts to listening into your phone calls. He’s voted to fund defense at lower levels than President Obama and voted against defense authorization in wartime because he wants to make sure American jihadists are not kept at Guantanamo Bay. (Why not?)

And Cruz — here is where experienced Washington hands and Trump both have it right — is entirely unable to work with others, inspire loyalty from colleagues and respect from adversaries. He defines gridlock and incivility. With Trump, he might be persuaded on pragmatic grounds to move on major legislation; Cruz never will because he derides consensus. In any argument, he believes whichever position he assumes is the only true and decent stance; all others are squishes, defenders of illegal conduct or whatever slur comes to mind. (Only President Obama is less gracious toward foes and less capable of forging agreement.) Cruz seems to lack a fundamental understanding that government is there to protect and improve the lives of citizens, not a forum for confrontation for confrontation’s sake. His zeal for discrediting opponents is unmatched by his concern for policy solutions to our serious problems.

If then, you are a hawk or a believer in functioning government or insistent that good character is a requirement for the presidency, Cruz is no better, and in some cases, worse than Trump. This is not an argument for Trump. One can say flatly, no conservative or other American should vote for Trump, who is so abjectly unqualified and unfit for the presidency. (Frankly if conservative intellectuals really wanted to stop Trump they would flat-out say they would not vote for him. Since they do not, one finds it hard to take their indignation over Trump all that seriously.) But neither is this to say Cruz is acceptable.  Republicans — insiders, mainstreamers, establishment types — whoever you are –do not need to be passive when faced with adversity.

No, it’s the perfect opportunity to reject Trump and Cruz. The United States does not need Trump’s brand of Caesarism, nor Cruz’s imperiousness. If one wants a reasonably consistent conservative, a responsible hawk devoted to serving others, engrossed by policy and effective at dealing with others, don’t expect Cruz to be any better than Trump. And Cruz isn’t even entertaining.

One of Donald Trump’s books is Trump: The Art of the Deal.

About “deals” and other things that sound better than they actually are, Thomas Sowell writes:

Those of us who like to believe that human beings are rational can sometimes have a hard time trying to explain what is going on in politics. It is still a puzzle to me how millions of patriotic Americans could have voted in 2008 for a man who for 20 years — TWENTY YEARS — was a follower of a preacher who poured out his hatred for America in the most gross gutter terms.

Today’s big puzzle is how so many otherwise rational people have become enamored of Donald Trump, projecting onto him virtues and principles that he clearly does not have, and ignoring gross defects that are all too blatant.

There was a time when someone who publicly mocked a handicapped man would have told us all we needed to know about his character, and his political fling would have been over. But that was before we became a society where common decency is optional.

Yet there are even a few people with strong conservative principles who have lined up with this man, whose history has demonstrated no principles at all, other than an ability to make self-serving deals, and who has shown what Thorstein Veblen once called “a versatility of convictions.”

With the Iowa caucuses coming up, it is easy to understand why Iowa governor Terry Branstad is slamming Trump’s chief rival, Senator Ted Cruz, who has opposed massive government subsidies to ethanol, which have dumped tons of taxpayer money on Iowa for growing corn. Iowa’s Senator Charles Grassley has come right out and said that is why he opposes Senator Cruz.

Former Senator Bob Dole, an establishment Republican if ever there was one, has joined the attacks on Ted Cruz, on grounds that Senator Cruz is disliked by other politicians.

When Senator Dole was active, he was liked by both Democrats and Republicans. He joined the long list of likable Republican candidates for president that the Republican establishment chose — and that the voters roundly rejected.

With both establishment Republicans and anti-establishment Republicans now taking sides with Donald Trump, it is hard to see what principle — if any — is behind his support.

Some may see Trump’s success in business as a sign that he can manage the economy. But the great economist David Ricardo, two centuries ago, pointed out that business success did not mean that someone understands economic issues facing a nation.

Trump boasts that he can make deals, among his many other boasts. But is a deal-maker what this country needs at this crucial time? Is not one of the biggest criticisms of today’s Congressional Republicans that they have made all too many deals with Democrats, betraying the principles on which they ran for office?

Bipartisan deals — so beloved by media pundits — have produced some of the great disasters in American history.

Contrary to the widespread view that the Great Depression of the 1930s was caused by the stock market crash of 1929, unemployment never reached double digits in any of the 12 months that followed the stock market crash in October 1929.

Unemployment was 6.3 percent in June 1930 when a Democratic Congress and a Republican president made a bipartisan deal that produced the Smoot–Hawley tariffs. Within 6 months, unemployment hit double digits — and stayed in double digits throughout the entire decade of the 1930s.

You want deals? There was never a more politically successful deal than that which Neville Chamberlain made in Munich in 1938. He was hailed as a hero, not only by his own party but even by opposition parties, when he returned with a deal that Chamberlain said meant “peace for our time.” But, just one year later, the biggest, bloodiest and most ghastly war in history began.

If deal-making is your standard, didn’t Barack Obama just make a deal with Iran — one that may have bigger and worse consequences than Chamberlain’s deal?

What kind of deals would Donald Trump make? He has already praised the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London which said that the government can seize private property to turn it over to another private party.

That kind of decision is good for an operator like Donald Trump. Doubtless other decisions that he would make as president would also be good for Donald Trump, even if for nobody else. …

After all these months, no coherent plans have emerged from the rhetoric of “The Donald” — just sweeping boasts about all the things he says he will achieve. But boasts about the unknown future are hardly reassuring.

However puzzling the fervent support for Donald Trump may be today, given how little basis there is for it, such blind faith is not unique in history. Other dire or desperate times have produced other charismatic leaders to whom desperate people have turned, with hopes of deliverance.

Trump is certainly different from establishment Republicans, but it that enough?

Things were appalling in 1917 Russia, when people turned to Lenin to try to get them out of a disastrous war abroad and a bitter economic situation at home.

The fact that Lenin was quite different from the czar who had led the country into catastrophe might have seemed promising to some people. He was also different from the ineffective Kerensky government that failed in its brief months in office. But the totalitarian government that Lenin established proved to be even worse than its predecessors.

The idea that someone quite different from those who led a nation into disaster can be expected to produce an improvement is a non sequitur that has seduced many people in many places and times.

Germany’s Weimar Republic was nobody’s idea of an ideal government but Hitler’s reign that followed was far worse in every way. Many Americans denounced the rule of the Shah of Iran, but he was never a worldwide sponsor of terrorism, like those who replaced him.

A pattern that would appear in many other places and times was one in which people’s hopes became focused on someone new, charismatic and with ringing rhetoric — but utterly untested for the job of governing a nation.

That is where we are today.

The Republican field of candidates has had a number of people with experience governing at the state level, so that they have a track record that we could scrutinize. But the media obsession with Trump has left little time for weighing the pros and cons of those governors.

Some of them have already had to withdraw before we learned whether their qualifications were good, bad or indifferent. This may be a misfortune for their political careers but it can turn out to be a disaster for the country, if it leaves the field open only to people whom we must judge solely on the basis of their rhetoric.

There are still some governors left in the running, but they are not among the candidates who have the highest support in the polls, where most have received the support of fewer than 10 percent of the voters polled.

Former governor Jeb Bush looked like the front runner at the outset, especially with his impressive amount of money in his campaign chest. But it is not nearly as easy to buy an election as some commentators seemed to think, so perhaps we can take some solace from the discrediting of that notion.

We might also take some solace from the support received by Dr. Ben Carson, despite the media-fed notion that conservatives are racists. Even after his brief time leading the candidates in the polls has passed, Dr. Carson remains the candidate with the highest favorability rating among Republican voters who were polled.

But there are few other things to feel positive about as the primaries approach. Common sense by the voters may be the best we can hope for. And that can save the day, after all. In fact, they may be all that can save the day.

Jonah Goldberg:

Jane Mayer of The New Yorker has a new book out: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. It’s mostly about those old devils, the Koch brothers.

Charles and David Koch are billionaires. They own a very big company. They also are very prominent philanthropists, giving hundreds of millions to cancer research, concert halls, and other worthy causes.

But what makes them hated and feared by progressives such as Mayer is their political work. They help fund some organizations and foundations, some purely educational, some partisan.

To listen to the Left, they are the closest thing we have to real-world James Bond villains. So what is their agenda? Is it to retreat to their orbiting harems, populated with fertile females, as they wipe out humanity below so that they can return to repopulate the planet? Or is to dupe the Russians and Americans into a nuclear squabble so that the Kochs can rule the ashes?

Well, here’s Mayer’s explanation of their dark and sinister ambitions. “What people need to understand is the Kochs have been playing a very long game,” she told NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “And it’s not just about elections. It started four decades ago with a plan to change how America thinks and votes. So while some elections they win and some elections they lose, what they’re aiming at is changing the conversation in the country.”

Dear God, it’s worse than I thought! They want to change the conversation! They want to persuade Americans to vote differently! The horror, the horror.

You might be forgiven for thinking that this is pretty much exactly what democracy is about. But no. For you see, only Hollywood, college professors and administrators, the ACLU, People for the American Way, the Human Rights Campaign, NARAL, Emily’s List, the Ford Foundation, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, MoveOn.org, the NAACP, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Steven Spielberg and, of course, publications such as the New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation and Mayer’s own The New Yorker are allowed to try to change conversations and argue for people to vote differently.

Ah, but those voices are open and honest — and progressive! — about it, while the Kochs are secretive, sinister denizens of the stygian underworld of “dark money” and the “radical right.”

Except for the fact that the Kochs have been out in the open for nearly a half-century. David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, which you might argue is a brilliant way to hide in plain sight, given how little attention the Libertarian Party gets.

Which brings me to that term “the radical right.” When racist idiots do idiotically racist things, we’re told that’s the radical Right in action. When Christian conservatives say Christian things, we’re told that’s the radical Right in action. When Donald Trump says he wants to ban Muslims from entering the country or build a giant wall, that earns him the radical-right label. When Ted Cruz says he wants to carpet-bomb the Islamic State, he . . . well, you get the point.

I have myriad problems with those usages of “radical right,” but let’s just stipulate for the sake of argument that this is the correct term in such circumstances. How, then, are the Kochs members of the radical Right? They are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass-incarceration” policies. They’ve never seized a national park at gunpoint.

They are members of the radical Right for the simple reason that they don’t like big government and spend money to make that case. Full disclosure: I’ve given paid speeches to some Koch-backed groups, despite the fact that I have my disagreements with the Kochs. They haven’t changed my mind, and I haven’t changed theirs. But the conversation continues.

And that’s their great sin. Liberals are constantly talking about how we need an “honest conversation” about race or guns or this or that. But what they invariably mean is, they want everyone who disagrees to shut up. (That’s why they hate Fox News, too.)

The best working definition of “right wing” today has almost nothing to do with the ideological content of what right-wingers say or do. A right-winger is someone who disagrees with the liberal narrative, has the temerity to say so, and dares to actually try to change the conversation.

“Manglement,” of course, is a derisive, deliberate mispronunciation of “management.” And the Washington Examiner reports:

President Obama is surrounded by a bunch of yes-men who don’t push back on Obama enough, according to the man who led the Pentagon during Obama’s first three years in the White House.

“He has centralized power and operational activities of the government in the White House to a degree that I think is unparalleled — [a National Security Council] staff of 450 people at this point,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday onMSNBC’s Morning Joe. “And yet, I think one of the great weaknesses of the White House is implementation of strategy, is difficulty in developing strategy and then implementing that strategy. And I don’t see the kind of strong people around the president who will push back on him.”

Gates’ comments reflect a widespread view that Obama’s team has diminished the importance of the various executive departments as policymakers, perhaps most notably the Defense Department team. And although Gates allowed that Obama accepted criticism from him, he suggested that the president doesn’t respect his own team.

“The president is quoted as having said at one point to his staff, ‘I can do every one of your jobs better than you can,’” Gates said.

Gates’ comments were consistent with the description of the National Security Council team that Chuck Hagel recently provided. Hagel faulted faulted National Security Advisor Susan Rice in particular for calling last-minute meetings that were unproductive and time consuming.

“We kept kind of deferring the tough decisions. And there were always too many people in the room,” Hagel told Foreign Policy in December. “I eventually got to the point where I told Susan Rice that I wasn’t going to spend more than two hours in these meetings. Some of them would go four hours.”

Gates suggested that other members of Obama’s senior team aren’t much better. While evaluating past and potential presidents, in the course of promoting his book A Passion for Leadership, Gates told the Morning Joe team that he wouldn’t want Vice President Joe Biden or Secretary of State John Kerry to run for president.

You can decide for yourself if Obama is incompetent at choosing people, or arrogant. Of course, that’s not a mutually exclusive choice.