RUTHFULLY YOURS

A new report tallying the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States from the beginning of the year through the end of September found a 67 percent surge compared to last year.

The Anti-Defamation League audit found the greatest increases in schools, with jumps in bullying and vandalism seen from grade school through college.

A bump in anti-Semitic incidents was also recorded after the August “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., at which one counterprotester was killed when a suspect photographed earlier in the day with white supremacists ran his car into a group of demonstrators.

In the first three quarters of the year in 2016, there were 779 reported anti-Semitic incidents, including 29 cases of assault, 322 cases of harassment and 428 cases of vandalism.

In the first three quarters of this year, harassment reports more than doubled: there were 1,299 reported anti-Semitic incidents, including 12 cases of assault, 703 cases of harassment and 584 cases of vandalism.

ADL CEO and national director Jonathan A. Greenblatt said he was “astonished and horrified” by the steep rises in anti-Semitic incidents.

“While the tragedy in Charlottesville highlighted this trend, it was not an aberration,” Greenblatt said in a statement. “Every single day, white supremacists target members of the Jewish community — holding rallies in public, recruiting on college campuses, attacking journalists on social media, and even targeting young children.”

Greenblatt said many school incidents go unreported. “We are deeply troubled by the rising number of anti-Semitic incidents, bullying, and hate in our nation’s schools and we don’t think the statistics paint a full picture of what is happening,” he said.

In Healdsburg, Calif., in May, students taunted a sixth-grade boy with swastikas and lighters, telling him he would burn “like they did in the Holocaust.” In Radington Beach, Fla., in March, a Jewish student was taunted with Holocaust memes and a classmate drew a swatiska and concentration camp prison number on his arm. In Longmont, Colo., in April, a Jewish high school student who had been the target of anti-Semitic slurs for weeks was assaulted.

After Charlottesville, where white nationalist demonstrators carried Nazi imagery and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” the daily average of 2.36 anti-Semitic incidents rose to 4.3 per day.

The ADL’s global index of anti-Semitic sentiment around the world found in 2015 that 10 percent of Americans, or some 24 million Americans, hold anti-Semitic views, with even distribution across gender, age groups and religion. Thirty-three percent polled on a number of canards said Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, 16 percent said Jews have too much power in the business world, 16 percent said Jews have too much power in international financial markets, 20 percent said Jews talk about the Holocaust too much, and 14 percent said people hate Jews because of the way they behave. CONTINUE AT SITE

Virginia’s gubernatorial race was rocked recently by a commercial, paid for by the Latino Victory Fund, depicting a white man trying to run down a group of nonwhite children with his pickup truck. As a black boy and a girl wearing a hijab walk on a peaceful sidewalk, they hear the roar of a turbocharged engine, and a companion yells, “Run!” The truck, flying the Confederate battle flag, and bearing a don’t tread on me Gadsden-flag license plate in front, is otherwise unadorned, except for a gillespie for governor bumper sticker, as its driver aims to slaughter the innocent kids. Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate in what has become a national bellwether campaign, is presented as the standard-bearer for white racist political violence.

Just a few days after the ad aired, of course, a Muslim terrorist from Uzbekistan drove a truck into a walkway of pedestrians and bicyclists in Manhattan. Sayfullo Saipov was devoted to the triumph of the Islamic State and the preservation of its vanishing caliphate. The Latino Victory Fund’s anti-Gillespie commercial would have been more accurate if its pickup-truck driver had turned out to be the dad of the little hijabi girl running for her life.

The ad was pulled after yesterday’s attack. “We knew our ad would ruffle feathers,” said Latino Victory Fund president Cristóbal Alex, as if congratulating himself. Alex didn’t address the cognitive dissonance that his commercial would surely evoke in any informed viewer, or the inversion of reality that is the hallmark of leftist political rhetoric about immigration and the jihadi threat. The Virginia governor’s race has focused heavily on the immigration debate, with Gillespie—who holds positions somewhat to the left of the national Republican Party on amnesty and reform—taking a firm stance in favor of enforcement against illegal immigrant gang members, including MS-13, which has a strong presence in Virginia. Democratic candidate Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam has focused his campaign on the blue suburbs of northern Virginia, reaching out especially to the state’s expanding Asian population.

Casting electoral politics as the old, white America versus the new, vibrant, multiethnic America is a seductive strategy for Democrats, who can’t resist looking at actuarial charts and population graphs that show a nonwhite-majority electorate by 2050, at the latest. But as Hillary Clinton’s disastrous 2016 campaign demonstrated, politicians must be elected by today’s voters, not tomorrow’s. The “inevitability” strategy backfires, in part because white voters generally don’t like being told to expedite and celebrate their coming demise.

The strategy also backfires because rhetoric about the wonders of unfettered immigration meets the reality of horrible terrorism committed by immigrants or their children. The Latino Victory Fund—whose very name suggests ethnic triumphalism—tried to cast even mild immigration-restrictionist sentiment as white supremacism, and to depict Charlottesville murderer James Fields as the typical Gillespie voter. But the reality of terrorism in America is that it is widely and correctly associated with political Islam.

New York City is an incredibly diverse place.

Here, an Uzbek Muslim immigrant in on a visa diversity lottery can run over Argentinian tourists, an Egyptian-Palestinian Muslim can shoot a Danish musician on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, Saudi Muslims can fly planes into the World Trade Center killing people from 77 countries, an Afghan Muslim can plant pressure cooker bombs in Chelsea, a Lebanese Muslim can open fire on a van of Jewish students and a Pakistani-Kuwaiti and Iraqi Muslim can bomb the World Trade Center.

Truly, diversity is our terror.

Nationally, the perpetrators and plotters of Islamic terrorism in just the last ten years have included Pakistanis (San Bernardino, Garland, UC Merced), Chechens (Boston Marathon bombing), Afghans (Orlando shootings), Somalis (Portland Christmas Tree bomb plot, Minnesota mall stabbing, Ohio State Car Ramming, Columbus Machete Attack), Palestinians (Fort Hood, Chattanooga recruitment shootings) and Iraqis (Bowling Green plot).

That’s a whole lot of diversity. And it’s killing us.

What do an Uzbek and an Algerian have in common that makes them both want to kill people in New York City? Their native countries are thousands of miles apart and they don’t even share a common language or culture. They do however share a common religion that tells them to kill non-Muslims.

Diversity is a strength of Islamic terrorists. It unites Chechen-Avar mutts like the Tsarnaev brothers who set off a pressure cooker bomb in Boston with the Nigerian ‘Underwear Bomber”, and the Palestinians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Somalis, Egyptians, Iraqis, Saudis, Lebanese, Syrians, Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians and Afghans bombing, stabbing, ramming and shooting their way across America and Europe.

Islam unites Muslims from around the world around the high purpose of killing non-Muslims.

Muslims don’t get along with each other. That’s why there are Sunnis fighting Shiites in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. It’s why Al Qaeda, ISIS and assorted Islamists were fighting each other in Syria. But what they’re fighting over is who gets to kill, conquer and enslave the rest of the world. They’re pushing and shoving each other to be the first in line to bring terror and death to the entire planet.

Their diversity has a common purpose. Our diversity is expressed in our victimhood.

Brits die in New York and Americans die in London. Italians and Germans are wounded in Barcelona. Spanish citizens, Italians and an Israeli woman fall victim to an attack in Berlin. A German teacher and two students die in a terrorist attack in Nice. Americans die in Paris, in London and in Jerusalem.

But that’s where our diversity ends. It doesn’t unite us. Instead it divides us.

American and European governments threaten to sanction Burma for fighting Muslim terrorism. The White House pressures Israel to make concessions to Palestinian Islamic terrorists. The British, Canadian and German governments criticize the White House for a Muslim travel ban. We back our Islamic terrorists and the Russians back theirs. Argentina, where most of the victims in the New York terror attack came from, conducted a government cover-up of Iran’s role in the AMIA bombing.

This is what our diversity looks like. Instead of standing together and forming a common front against a civilizational enemy, we sell each other out to show our Islamic foes that we’re really on their side.

And hope they kill us last.

“The last thing we should do is start casting dispersions on whole races of people or whole religions or whole nations,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio insisted. “That only makes the situation worse.”

Since Robert S. Mueller has pursued President Trump’s people so aggressively, we need to go back to the letter which appointed him as special prosecutor. It told him to look for signs of coordination between Trump’s campaign supporters and the Russian government. But that’s not all it said. The overarching purpose of Mueller’s appointment was “to ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”

The distinction matters. There’s nothing wrong with seeking a rapprochement with the Russians. Sure, I know they’ve been beastly. But those are precisely the kinds of people you want to rein in, and the best way of doing so is by opening up a dialogue with them. There are deals waiting to be made with them, good for them, good for us, good even for the Ukrainians and Syrians.

If thinking like that is a crime, then I have to plead guilty. With my wife and Bob Tyrrell, I helped draft Trump’s major campaign speech on foreign policy, which he delivered at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel on April 27, 2016. In it, we had inserted some language signaling a willingness to reach out to Russia. “We can see how the rapid expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia might have troubled it, how it might have been taken as a threat,” we wrote. That line, perhaps too fawning, didn’t make it into the speech as delivered, and what was substituted was “Some say the Russians won’t be reasonable. I intend to find out.”

So are there foreign policy thought crimes now? Have foreign policy differences been criminalized? That’s what you’d think, reading the Washington Post on Tuesday morning. “Trump Official Urged Russian Outreach,” blared the headline. Well, how bout dat? Cash me outside.

Suppose next that, unlike me, the Trump official tries to broker a meeting with Russian officials, as George Papadopoulos did. But if you want a rapprochement with Russia, just how would you go about doing that, except by taking to Russians? Papadopoulos also wanted the trove of Hillary Clinton emails the Russians supposedly had. These were emails that she had illegally withheld, and that would have gone to the question of Russian interference in the election. Except nothing happened. Papadopoulos was a naïf who believed he was dealing with Putin’s niece when a casual perusal of Wikipedia would have told him that Putin doesn’t have a niece. As a private citizen, Papadopoulos did try to reach out to Russian officials, and in theory that would be a breach of the 1799 Logan Act, but that’s a dead letter. No one has been prosecuted under it, and it’s openly broken by people from both parties. Such as Obama. So they didn’t charge Papadopoulos with that.

So what did they get Papadopoulos for? The crime of talking to the feds without a lawyer at his side. They charged him with the crime of making a false statement about something which, had he told the truth, would not have been a crime. That’s how they nailed Martha Stewart, and that’s the crime to which Papadopoulos pled guilty.

And just what were the lies? Papadopoulos told the FBI that he had met a British academic and “Putin’s niece” before he joined the campaign. It turns out that he met them only after he did so. The FBI says that impeded their investigation, but can anyone explain why it might have made a difference? If you’re looking for coordination, the timing doesn’t matter if the discussions with the foreign nationals were ongoing, as they were.

Reform in Washington is always difficult, but at the Environmental Protection Agency it’s also dangerous. Since the Trump Administration took office, the agency has investigated more than 70 credible threats against EPA staffers, with a disproportionate number menacing Administrator Scott Pruitt and his family. The EPA responded by beefing up his security detail, but Mr. Pruitt’s political opponents are now trying to hold these warranted precautions against him.

Mr. Pruitt has received more than five times as many threats as his predecessor, Gina McCarthy. These include explicit death threats. Some have referenced Mr. Pruitt’s home address. Federal law enforcement has determined that some of those threatening Mr. Pruitt are likely capable of carrying out acts of violence. EPA security has already caught suspects prowling around the administrator’s neighborhood.

Mr. Pruitt would doubtless prefer the absence of threats to the presence of security. But his critics have suggested he’s part of the problem. Mr. Pruitt is a “pallid, oily anti-environment corporate shill,” SFGate columnist Mark Morford wrote last week, and “when you send death threats to the world and all who live on her, the world will, quite naturally, send them right back.”

Reps. Peter DeFazio (Ore.) and Grace Napolitano (Calif.) have called for the inspector general to launch an investigation into Mr. Pruitt’s security measures. The expenditures “constitute potential waste or abuse of taxpayer dollars,” they wrote in an Oct. 4 letter. The duo also claimed that “there is no apparent security threat against the Administrator to justify such a security detail or expenditures.”

But the EPA inspector general’s office—in addition to the agency’s criminal enforcement division and protective service—recommended 24/7 security for Mr. Pruitt based on the unprecedented threats. A lean team of agents share the responsibility for safeguarding Mr. Pruitt, and their salaries will cost taxpayers roughly $2 million a year. The EPA’s other safety precautions include a $15,780 upgrade of the card-access system in EPA offices.

Mr. Pruitt didn’t invent these threats, and Cabinet members shouldn’t have to fear violence as a price of public service. When the federal government protects Cabinet members from those who would harm them for doing their jobs, it is protecting American democracy.

President Trump’s declaration that opioid abuse is a public-health emergency is sparking debate about addiction. Tragically, myths and misinformation are blocking the path to preventing more deaths.

Start with the causes of the opioid crisis. On “Face the Nation,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, chair of Trump’s opioid commission, blamed over-prescribing doctors. “This crisis started not on a street corner somewhere. This crisis started in the doctor’s offices and hospitals of America.” That’s untrue, Governor.

It contradicts scientific evidence and lets drug abusers off the hook. At least three quarters of opioid-pill abusers and almost all heroin addicts got hooked without ever having been prescribed pain medication for an injury or illness, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Emergency-room records show only a fraction — 13 percent — of opioid-overdose victims began taking drugs because of pain, according to the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine. The media feature many stories about patients who needed pain killers and later became addicts, but these are exceptions, not the rule.

Experimenting with opioids — whether heroin or pills — is almost always a choice. A bad choice. Young adults account for 90 percent of first-time abusers. To protect the next generation from making that mistake, Trump proposes a “massive advertising campaign to get people, especially children, not to want to take drugs in the first place.” The liberal media mock Trump’s proposal as a throwback to the 1980s, but in fact he’s on the mark.

For decades, popular music has glamorized drug use. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel pays lip service to tackling tough political issues, but his guest line-up this week includes Ty Dolla $ign, whose music videos showcase drug use.

Trump’s offering an alternative message. History proves it can work. In 2012 and 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ran hard-hitting and graphic ads against smoking, with ex-smokers talking about their own lung disease, cancer, and other miseries. The ads cut smoking among youth and convinced 400,000 smokers to quit for good.

Trump’s campaign should be just as terrifying. Show hospitalized teens with their arms amputated because of infections from heroin needles and brain-damaged overdose victims in nursing homes.

Warning about opioid abuse sounds like a no-brainer. So why do activists like Kassandra Frederique and Dionna King of the Drug Policy Alliance deplore “the persistent stigma of drug use”? As if we’re not supposed to hurt addicts’ feelings. With drug overdose deaths at record highs, that’s misguided.

You no longer see smoking in movies or on television. Stigmatizing cigarettes worked. So why de-stigmatize opioids? We can help those already hooked without doing that.

Christie calls addiction a “disease.” It’s true that some people succumb to it more than others. But new research suggests the disease metaphor could be hurtful. Addicts who believe they have the free will to quit have a much higher success rate than those who think of themselves as diseased, according to new research from the University of Minnesota and Florida State University. Quitting Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s isn’t possible, but getting off drugs is.

Harvard professor Gene Heyman insists addicts can choose to stop using drugs once “the penalties for excessive use become overwhelming,” such as losing their job or kids.

In these willfully ignorant, fiercely partisan times, let’s recall that we fought our bloodiest war to end human bondage. Almost three-quarters of a million Americans died in a complex struggle that began to right an inexcusable injustice.

Now we’re re-fighting our Civil War with neo-Stalinist, fact-purging propaganda that makes cartoon villains of the dead. We rush to tear down statues of men we refuse to understand. We rob one group of citizens of their heritage to please another.

And the president’s chief of staff cannot state facts about our history without triggering mob-rule outrage from those who could not even tell you when the Civil War was fought.

Yes, slavery was the catalyst of our Civil War. Without slavery, sectional disagreements would have remained, but none would have brought us to make war on ourselves. Still Trump chief of staff Gen. John Kelly’s televised remark that “the lack of an ability to compromise” provoked our Civil War was also accurate. Despite repeated attempts by Northern states to find a political compromise, nothing satisfied Southern firebrands.

There’s much more to it, though. While slavery brought us to fratricidal war, that doesn’t mean everyone who wore a Confederate uniform fought for slavery. Quite the contrary. Rare was the Rebel soldier who owned a slave (as usual, the rich often stayed home).

Let’s judge the dead as we’re admonished to judge the living: as individuals. As a student of the Civil War since childhood, it astonished me when the media reacted to Kelly’s statement that Robert E. Lee was “an honorable man” as if Kelly had praised Pol Pot.

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Robert E. Lee was, in fact, a man of flawless honor in his times. He abhorred secession and viewed slavery as doomed. But when Virginia seceded from the Union, this hero of multiple wars felt compelled — as Kelly honestly noted — to defend his state, his family and friends. It was, for him and others, an anguished choice.

Nor was Lee alone in detesting secession. Many of the West Point-trained officers who became Confederate generals strongly opposed it. Jubal Early argued bravely against it. Thomas J. Jackson, soon to be known as “Stonewall,” preferred continued unity and peace.

Now students who have never taken a course in American history demonstrate to tear down statues of Jackson, a man who, before the war, defied his neighbors to start a Sunday school for blacks; who broke Virginia law by teaching slaves and free blacks to read; and who saved slaves from being sold into the Deep South. (Virginians, such as General-to-be Robert Rodes, were appalled by the treatment of slaves in the Cotton Belt.)

Jackson continued sending regular donations back to that Lexington, Va., Sunday school until he died of wounds.

The Leftist progressive movement has adopted the binary victim/oppressor social structure of cultural Marxism. White males are the identified oppressors and everyone else is their victim. Classical Marxism identifies the oppressors as the bourgeoisie (owners of production) who exploit the proletariat (the workers). The metric of classical Marxism is economics. Cultural Marxism is a departure because it relabels the players in the drama and defines culture as the metric of exploitation.

Cultural Marxism dominates the Leftist Democrat Party and explains their radical political platform that is taking aim at the established Judeo-Christian values which define American culture. The family, the Church, patriotism, traditional definitions of race, gender, and sexual identity are oppressive and must be dismantled and replaced with romanticized notions of one globalized world without political borders, country borders, sexual borders, or any other defined boundary.

Here is the problem. Classical Marxism and cultural Marxism both seek to replace an existing order with collectivism – they are selling their own idealized form of secular heaven on earth. The naive social justice warriors who sign onto this Leftist fantasy are too childish to examine the reality of the offer. They believe the fantasy of a Marxist paradise but the reality they are embracing is the state of powerless infancy – complete dependence in a world without boundaries and borders.

Critical thinking is the objective analysis of facts to form a judgment and is the foundation of rational thought. Critical thinking is dependent upon accurate information – it relies upon objective reality. The ability to remain in objective reality is threatened when fiction/fantasy (subjective reality) is presented as fact. It is impossible to make an informed decision without an accurate source of information.

Truth in lending laws exist to provide consumers with informed consent. Surgical consent forms and pharmaceutical labels equip patients with information to make informed decisions about their health. Product labeling, food labeling, Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), are all attempts to provide consumers with accurate information to make informed decisions. Laws and labels acknowledge the existence of conflicts of interest and are attempts to level the playing field. What about conflicts of interest in politics? News? Social media?

Let’s consider the current reporting of the horrific jihadi attack in NYC on 10.31.17. Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, an Uzbeki national admitted into the United States through the deadly “diversity” visa program, rented a truck and drove down the Hudson River bike path deliberately murdering and maiming innocent Americans. He murdered eight people injured dozens more then exited his vehicle shouting “Allah Akhbar!”

Predictably leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio (a cultural Marxist) refused to use the words Islamic terrorism or jihad and instead disingenuously called the attack a “cowardly act of terrorism.” “We know this action was intended to break our spirit. Our spirit will never be moved by an act of violence and an act meant … to intimidate us.” Similarly leftist cultural Marxist Governor Andrew Cuomo told the nation that this was the action of a “lone wolf,” and that “there is no evidence to suggest a wider plot or wider scheme.” REALLY? These two Leftist political responses are prime examples of the subjective reality that the Left is selling to America.

There is no such thing as a lone wolf. The term lone wolf is a misleading political misnomer – jihadists do NOT act alone – they are part of a worldwide Islamic ideological war against the West that seeks to destroy Western culture and replace it with Islam and sharia law. Politicians who are unable or unwilling to accept this unpleasant reality are unfit to serve. Americans need leaders with the ability to identify and act upon the threat. America needs objective reality. Saying you are safe and being safe are not the same thing. America needs leaders without a political conflict of interest.

In our digital age, we need a new word to describe the person we have unequivocally witnessed committing mass murder. To call Sayfullo Saipo a “suspect” is misleading – only one person was in the driver’s seat of the truck that sped down the west side highway, running over cyclists and pedestrians, ultimately killing eight and wounding at least eleven. He is seen on video exiting the truck after crashing it into a schoolbus, waving weapons and getting shot. Or, to be consistent, must we call the policeman the “suspected shooter”, compounding the lunacy of not spelling out what our eyes have seen. The only thing that remains unknown is under which category of slaughter Saipov will eventually be found guilty, but reading and hearing all the reporters continually refer to him as “the suspect” is a dishonor to the victims and their loved ones.

The other phrase we need to lose is “or the terrorists will win.” When multiple people die and are maimed in a savage attack, terrorists have won. Celebrating at a parade will not diminish the sorrow and agony of the victims’ survivors nor should it relieve any of us of whatever guilt we accrue by turning a blind eye to the obvious. Our police department prides itself on its outreach program to truck rental companies in the tri-state area, alerting them to the need for background checks on possible terrorists who want to turn trucks into murder weapons. This modus operandi has succeeded in killing 130 people and injuring close to 200 since 2016. Well, an immigrant from Uzbekistan walks into Home Depot in New Jersey with a swarthy complexion, a full bushy beard, a Muslim name of Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, requesting a short term rental of a truck – what was missing from this profile that dissuaded the dispatcher from informing the counter-terrorism division that had done the outreach? Either John Miller, head of this division, has over-estimated its efficacy or we have been so brainwashed by the media that legitimate suspicion and profiling are considered Islamophobic. Perhaps the person who handled the rental was more anxious about his being called that than about the chance of a terrorist incident. That possibility should make us all ashamed that we have abandoned logic in favor of what began as an Islamic public-relations campaign after 9/11.

Profiling is not an act of discrimination; it is the means by which law enforcement aims to anticipate and minimize future criminal acts. It is based on analysis of past acts and behavior and is analogous to what a smart doctor does when she takes a history of your family background. If you are black and have a higher risk of sickle cell anemia, you don’t call your doctor racist for factoring that into her diagnosis. If you are Jewish, you get tested for the brca gene for breast cancer as an act of precaution, not prejudice. If 3,000 New Yorkers were killed on 9/11 in the name of Allah, we can never be called Islamophobic for worrying that other jihadists abound with similar motives. Sadly, some of our movers and shakers have succeeded in shaming us for this understandable , appropriate anxiety.

Finally, why didn’t our governor and mayor initiate a somber few minutes of silence at the outset of the Halloween parade to acknowledge the tragedy that had occurred less than a mile away. Grandstanding that we need to carry on with our jollity or the terrorists will win ignores a more powerful message. The terrorists don’t win when we remember our humanity, exhibit grief at senseless violence and show our compassion for innocent victims in our own home town.

After months of getting themselves worked up about hearings featuring a hero once accused of rigging the election for Donald Trump and Don Jr.’s inability to sniff out Nigerian prince emails, spectators of the Russia game have finally gotten what they wanted: indictments.

Unfortunately, the indictments of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business partner Richard Gates have nothing whatever to do with “collusion,” however broadly defined. Politically speaking, we have learned nothing except what we already knew: namely, that a shady businessman who briefly worked for the Trump campaign is, in fact, a very shady businessman indeed, one who has just pled not guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent on behalf of the Ukrainian puppet government and not declaring all of his income derived from his essentially pro-Kremlin lobbying.

Dot connectors will, of course, continue to connect dots. It could be that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is hoping to secure testimony from Manafort or Gates that will give him the dirt he needs to bring more appropriate charges. It could be that he already has that information and is just waiting for goodness knows what occasion. At the very least, obsessives will say, the hiring of Manafort indicates — these comments almost write themselves — a very serious lack of judgment on Trump’s part. You don’t say? The man whose idea of a feel-good national unity speech following an act of domestic terrorism was to suggest a degree of moral equivalence between the KKK and its opponents has horrible instincts, often fails to think things through, is a bad judge of character, etc.? Gosh.

Even George Papadopoulos’ guilty plea is no smoking gun. The former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign admits that he lied about email exchanges with a shadowy figure known as “the professor” who had promised Russian “dirt” on Clinton. But as far as we can tell, his communications with Dr. Dirt went nowhere. Papadopoulos also made vague references in his emails to “meetings” with Russian officials that probably did not end up taking place, which seems important only if you ignore the fact that presidential candidates, especially after securing their parties’ nominations, routinely meet with foreign leaders, even heads of state.

The most significant thing about Monday’s Mueller bonanza is that it reminds us what is wrong with these hysterical wide-ranging special prosecutor investigations that take place in public. Whitewater went on for nearly a decade before it concluded in 2003. Does the fact that Bill Clinton lied about sleeping with Monica Lewinsky prove that he and Hillary and the McDougals broke the law in the course of their real-estate dealings in the late ’70s? If you ask enough people enough questions about enough topics, sooner or later you’re going to catch somebody in a lie. Monday’s revelations don’t in themselves mean anything other than that Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department is keeping Mueller on a very long leash.

It needs to be shortened. The purpose of the investigation is to determine whether the presidential campaign of Donald Trump knowingly colluded with the Russian government in the hope of altering the outcome of the 2016 election, not to see whether any person even loosely connected with the former could be found guilty of any crime, including perjury. The resignation of Tony Podesta from the prominent lobbying group he founded in the wake of Manafort’s indictment suggests that we are getting very far afield indeed.

There are many problems with the Mueller probe, not least its show-boating obsession with keeping its business in the newspapers, but the biggest one is that its parameters were never well defined. What would count as actual collusion? Idle language is thrown around about people having “ties” to Russia or being “Kremlin-connected.” How do you define “Kremlin-connected”? What would be the broad equivalent in the United States from Russia’s perspective? A former congressman? Anyone who does business on K Street having a meeting? Defense contractors? Given the country’s autocratic structure, there are very few living Russian nationals of any wealth or distinction who are not “Kremlin-connected.”