Paul Ryan came away with a deal that is reasonable given the circumstances, and certainly one that enhances his national stature even though some  ”shutter-the-government-again” conservatives will be unhappy with the deal and with Ryan.  There is a lot to dislike in the deal –and Ryan made clear on Greta last evening that he does indeed dislike much of the deal– but the alternative is far worse.  The deal is best understood as the third act of the effort that will culminate in the repeal of Obamacare and the restoration of America’s place in the world beginning in 2017.

Act One was led by Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio and all the others who supported the shutdown over Obamacre successfully branded the GOP as the arch-opponent of the disaster that is Obamacare, but  having done so once it need not do so again.  It was a hard process on the party, with everyone claiming the other side was too stupid to understand obvious things about divided government and the electorate.  In fact, the shutdown followed by Act 2, the collapse of the roll out of Obamacare,  have left the GOP with the political high ground heading into 2014, and with a real possibility of  securing a Senate majority which will the House and Senate not only to duel with the president over the budget and legislative agenda with a complete hand, it will also allow then Majority Leader McConnell to block all of the president’s judicial nominees under Harry Reid’s new rules, including any SCOTUS nominee.

If the GOP wins the Senate, is a very big “if,” and though my ActRight.com list to the right has eight possible Senate pick-ups already lined up for your support, the news of a primary challenge to the very able Texas Senator John Cornyn, a very good conservative and GOP Senate Whip, is not the sort of news that improves takeover chances.  Rather, the primary challenge from Congressman Steve Stockman will oblige Cornyn, a prodigious fundraiser for others, to divert time and resources to his own Senate re-election campaign though he will, in the end, comfortably win the primary.  Time and money will have been lost.  It won’t be fatal to the overall effort to win back the Senate, but it won’t be helpful either.

The best thing for conservatives to do right now is stand with John Cornyn and note his long and very sound voting record, his strong stances on defense, taxes, spending and judges and pivot their attention and energies to races like those of Tom Cotton around which the entire conservative movement can unite, not divide.

Arthur Brooks made it through the snows of D.C. to the radio studios yesterday and he will be back in for me today and perhaps Chairman Ryan will join him to discuss the budget deal in detail.  There is much to discuss, much to dislike, but much to applaud, and all told it is a step in the right direction and another chapter in the book titled “2014,” this one with a happier sub-conclusion than that which followed the shut-down chapter.

Obamacare, America’s place in the world and rebuilding its military strength, spending reform, and the national debate over Common Core will define the 2014 elections.  (On this last issue conservatives especially must get very smart very quickly.) The GOP has staged a  huge comeback on the generic ballot and has a strong card of conservative challengers for the Senate (with more coming as the map expands in places like Colorado and Oregon).  The focus must remain on that which unites the party –and the country– which is the disaster of Obamacare and the consequences of the Obama-Hillary-Kerry foreign policy follies.

On this last note, Slate’s Dave Weigel notes what I have been arguing for months: That Hillary’s tenure at State leaves defenders and MSMers speechless.  He even missed one of the better Hillary-related exchanges, with lefty talker-and-comic Pete Dominick.  But I am glad that he noted it, even though he thought it a stumbled-upon strategy of engagement with Hillary’s record.  It wasn’t, even though the discovery of the complete inability of journalists to come up with plausible talking points in her defense was very much a surprise.  I have been asking people since the attacks in Benghazi what Hillary did that night and why she never called Greg Hicks back, and for much longer have been pointing to the collapse of America’s standing in the world that occurred on her watch.  A post below chronicles the push-back from the Clinton old guard, but one hopes Weigel will pick up the questions: What did Hillary accomplish while at State, and why didn’t she call Hicks back that night?  ”What difference at this point does it make?” isn’t an acceptable answer to either question.

I like AEI’s president Arthur Brooks.  I really do. He is an inspiration to me and to everyone who has read The Road to Freedom or heard him speak.  (I have a section on Arthur’s impact on conservatives in my new book The Happiest Life.)

I didn’t mean to go off on vacation and leave him as a guest host for his first full week on the job in the middle of the Obamacare meltdown, the Ukrainian counter-counter revolution and the budget deal-making by Paul Ryan (which while drawing some fire looks in outline to be about as good as the GOP could hope for, and vitally necessary as far as defense spending is concerned.)

I thought it would be a nice, slow December week which he could fill with AEI scholars and his natural exuberance and broadcasting ability.

But the week is exactly the opposite of what I expected and Arthur is in the guest host chair after a grand total of one day’s experience.

That’s like the Indians starting Danny Salazar in their one-game play-off this past October.  (I’m sure Arthur will do better than DS did.)

Anyway, many thanks (and apologies) to Arthur for filling in this week, and to Congressman John Campbell who will be sitting in next week while I am in South America. (Memo to world: Rio is definitely “NOT READY” for 2016.)

I have to think AEI’s top thinker is getting daily reports on the massive Obamacare fail underway, like this Fox News report on the loss of access to favored hospitals, and this stunner, first reported on Saturday by the Los Angeles Times but now seeping into other MSM, of CoveredCA’s incredible violation of the privacy of tens of thousands of online would-be subscribers to Obamacare.

Look for MSM to doggedly pursue CoveredCA.com’s Peter Lee for a copy of the legal opinion he says he received authorizing this massive breach of user privacy.  Well, maybe not.

But Arthur will have the latest on all of Obamcare’s many collapsing facades even as he keeps an eye on Hillary’s latest legacy –Putin’s push to reclaim Ukraine

The Hillary Advance(d) Guard

“So Secretary of State Clinton, how did your much-reported travels help Ukrainian democracy take root and establish itself so that the inevitable Putin-push for domination of the former Soviet Republic could be resisted?”

Just another of a hundred questions Hillary won’t get asked by her pals in the Manhattan-Beltway media elite preparing for the Restoration as her advance guard.

When in fact any sort of criticism of their leader surfaces, the old guard quickly forms up and open fires on dissenters.

Take Michelle Cottle, who labored diligently to defend the Clintons from her posts at the Washington Monthly and the New Republic in the ’90s.  Now she’s carrying the Clinton torch at the Daily Beast.

In Cottle’s star-struck eyes, I’m a “radio bomb-thrower” engaged in a pre-emptive war on Hillary for raising with RNC Chairman Reince Pribeus the inevitability of Hillary’s nomination in 2016 and the need for the RNC to start preparing for it.

Imagine Cottle’s fury as she read Politico Magazine’s oh-so-mild dig at the do-nothing, hear-nothing, see-nothing former SecState by Susan Glasser:  ”Was Hillary a Good Secretary of State? And Does It Matter?”  To Cottle and her fellow Clinton fangirls Glasser must just be another bomb-throwing assassin waiting to do whatever it takes to stop the ascension of the rightful occupant of the White House, 2017.

And poor Maggie Haberman and young Pete Dominick.  Both were guests on my show and both threw what Cottle must conclude were their own bombs at Hillary.

Haberman was my guest on October 28.  The full transcript is here. Here’s the extended exchange with her because Haberman is a fine reporter and, unlike, Cottle, hasn’t been part of the Team Clinton Annex in the Fourth Estate for 20 years:

HH: What is her biggest achievement as secretary of State?

MH: I think that the folks around her believe that among the biggest achievements was, and you’ve seen this pointed to a lot, was the amount of travel time she logged. They felt very good about the Chinese dissident, and how the disposition of that case went in 2012. I think that what they, and what most people are prepared for is a lot of questions about the aftermath of Benghazi, and I think there was a 60 Minutes piece about that, that went out yesterday. I think there’s going to be a lot more of that. I think that this is where the fact that most people believe she is running, but she has not set up a team of any kind in any meaningful way, potentially becomes problematic, because if her folks believe that they have something to say in response to that and they’re not, they’re sort of letting time slip away from them.

HH: But pause for a moment with me on the achievement side.

MH: Sure.

HH: Articulate further. What is it that people say is her achievement? That she logged a lot of miles? What, is she running for George Clooney’s role in Up In The Air?

MH: (laughing) That has been certainly one of the focuses that her folks have talked about. They’ve also talked about how she ran a functional effort at State. Look, I think that when you hear from her world about what her accomplishments were, I think that they genuinely believe that she had made progress in terms of how America was perceived. People can agree or disagree with that. I think that that is obviously been coming into question now, and this is again something I think she’s going to have to talk about more. She’s clearly aware of that, but she’s not saying much about it so far, on the NSA issue. It’s very, very difficult for a former Obama administration official to run a sort of smoke and mirrors campaign on foreign policy. She’s going to have a very hard time doing that.

HH: Well, I know all the critiques, because I’m a conservative talk show host. So I know what all the vulnerabilities are.

MH: Right.

HH: I’m just curious as to what they think her strengths are, other than, you know, frequent flyer miles.

MH: Look, they think that she was an effective diplomat. They think that she was good at helping America’s image globally. They have a couple of cases like the case of the Chinese dissident where they think that State played a very effective role. She was among those who was pressing for more action in Syria of a restricted type earlier on than what you saw the Obama administration ultimately do this year. But you know, look, she was not, she certainly was not part of the team that, say, was dealing with Israel. She was not integral in that way, and so I think for some of the issues that are the hottest right now, globally, she was not a key factor in them.

HH: So a Chinese dissident? That’s it?

MH: Well, I think we will see what they issue as her biggest strength as secretary of State. That has not been a case they’ve been emphasizing so far. You’ve, I’m sure, read the New York Magazine piece, like everybody else, where they talked about again, her time as secretary of State which was largely mechanical, at least in the focus of that piece, and how they thought she had run an effective effort. Everything with Hillary Clinton gets looked at through the prism of how she manages whatever team she’s running, and that’s been where a lot of the focus has been.

HH: Well, it’s very interesting to me, though, as you report early on, they are going to try, Team Clinton is going to try and give you the talking points, which they hope then enter into the bloodstream, and into the circulatory system of Washington, D.C. that is Politico, and then out through the rest of the country. And what I’m hearing you say is they’ve got a Chinese dissident.

MH: No, I think, but I think that when you’ve asked me off the top of my head what are some of the things that her folks have pointed to over the last two years, that has certainly been one of the cases.

HH: Anything else, Maggie?

MH: Yes, there are others, but I’m just not coming up with them at the moment, but, and I’m not trying to avoid the question.

HH: Oh, I know you’re not. I just don’t think there’s anything there. I think, actually, her biggest problem is that there is no there there. She occupied the State Department, and there’s nothing to show for it. I guess there’s this Chinese dissident, but I’m, that’s not, that’s not a name that’s tripping off of my tongue right now. Do you know his name?

MH: I think that, no, at the moment, I actually cannot think of his name. I think that they’re, I think this is going to be an ongoing problem for her. I think that showing sort of a body of work at State is going to be something that she’s going to be pressed to do increasingly, and I think that running sort of a shadow campaign through paid speeches and free speeches over the course of the next year, I think is going to not cut it eventually, not just for conservative critics, but I think on the left. I think she’s going to have a problem.

HH: But doesn’t this sort of underscore the major problem? Here I am, a conservative critic, and I know the critique. And you’re a mainstream reporter, and as far as I know, you have no ideology. You’re one of the people at Politico that I don’t put on the left or the right, you’re just down the middle.

MH: Yeah.

HH: And neither of us can come up with any claim that she has to having succeeded at anything, and they are not able, they didn’t spin you, because they’ve got nothing to spin you with. It’s like the washing machine’s broke.

MH: Well, we’ll see. I mean, I think we need to see what they ultimately come up, to be fair. I think that since she’s not yet running, I think looking at how they present her and present what she did there is an open question.

HH: They’ll come up with something. What I’m getting at is, how long have you been with Politico, five years?

MH: Four years, three and a half years.

HH: Okay, so almost her entire tenure at State, and I’ve been on the air since 2000. And I can’t think of anything, and I’m giving you the floor. If you can come up with anything for her case, lay it out there. Just from the top of mine, it should be front shelf, right?

MH: It certainly is not, there is not a giant list that I think people can point to.

HH: There is no list.

MH: There are a couple, and I think there’s a couple of reasons for that like I said. With the major issue of dealing with Israel, she was not front and center. And she certainly received criticism early on in terms of how the U.S. dealt with Russia. I think these are all going to be issues that she is going to have to address, and I suspect she is going to get asked about them repeatedly, and by many, many outlets.

HH: I mean, it’s just a big, we’re done, but go around the bullpen at Politico and ask them what did she do, and it’s going to be a giant whiteboard, and there’s not going to be anything on it, Maggie.

MH: I like the invocation of whiteboard, though.

Young Pete Dominick, by contrast, isn’t even MSM.  He’s a rising comic and talker, and his knock down of Hillary was even more pointed and complete.

So many bomb-throwers and so few Cottles.  The old guard of Clinton protectors  –indeed much older and far fewer in number than in 1992–have lost many from their ranks, with some having scamperd over to Team Obama, some like Huma Abedin have married their own kind of bomb throwers in Anthony Weiner, and some are just simply and finally gone, having moved on to their just rewards.  Hillary’s going to be 69 when the campaign concludes.  Her mentors are a little long-in-the-tooth to come to her aid. Her young advance guard from the pre-Clinton presidency days, well, very much not-so-young these days.

So Michelle and her dwindling band of Hillary acolytes are going to be working overtime rooting out all the Hillary haters who aren’t even Hillary haters, just watchers of a world that went south under her watch at State –in Iran, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and now Ukraine.

Hillary wasn’t just not a Kissinger working China to rebalance the world.  She wasn’t just a time-serving non-entity.  Hillary was a ghastly failure at protecting and defending American interests in the world, and all of her incompetence is terribly visible across the globe. “Re-set button” indeed.  Re-set to the Carter years without the spine.

As Iran marches to nuclear power status –as it did uninterrupted through Hillary’s tenure at State– and as images linger of the writhing dead in Syria who inhaled the chemical weaponry unleashed in a civil war begun on her watch,  perhaps “bomb thrower” isn’t the best imagery for the Clinton palace guard-in-waiting to use against critics of their once-and-future imaginary president.

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz tells us the president has a new pivot planned.

When you read this very careful disection of the realities of Obamacre from Tyler Durden at Zerohedge, you will know why the president wants to pivot, and pivot agaion and again and again.

Urban Meyer and all of us OSU fans would like to pivot from Satruday’s loss to MSU, but facts are stubborn things.  Alabama fans would like to pivot from Auburn.  St. Louis would like to pivot from Boston.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…

Steven Hayward previews the Democrats’ civil war in the aftermath of this fiasco, but that’s the least of the president’s problems.  This collapse has his name on it.  Forever.

It gets worse from here.  Every week will bring more and more horror stories. I am taking vacation now rather  than at year’s end and New Year’s beginning not just because I have a new book to promote beginning 12/31, because the whole horrific debacle will be on display 1/1/14 when millions aren’t covered and eventhe so-called “good exchanges” like CoveredCA.com are revealed as hundred million dollar frauds.

Obamacare.  The answer to a thousand future questions fromt he left that begin “Why don’t we try…”

Speaking of thr new book, may I suggest you send a few gift copies to the Democrats you know, perhaps even the president?  They are going to need it.