RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Hill this morning broke what could be a very big news story, if anyone is willing to follow up on it. As is often the case with these kinds of stories, it bears watching if the reporting falls apart somehow, but as of yet, it seems there’s almost no pushback out there. You can see why Democrats would not be eager to talk about this one:

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews….[Federal agents] obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

This was back during the period when the Obama Administration and Secretary Clinton were touting a “reset” of relations with Russia; it was years before Obama mocked Mitt Romney’s concerns about the Russian threat with his famous “the 80s called” sneer. Yet, it now appears that the Obama Administration knew a lot more than it let on,

leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial nuclear ambitions.

The first decision occurred in October 2010, when the State Department and government agencies on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States unanimously approved the partial sale of Canadian mining company Uranium One to the Russian nuclear giant Rosatom, giving Moscow control of more than 20 percent of America’s uranium supply…In 2011, the administration gave approval for Rosatom’s Tenex subsidiary to sell commercial uranium to U.S. nuclear power plants in a partnership with the United States Enrichment Corp. Before then, Tenex had been limited to selling U.S. nuclear power plants reprocessed uranium recovered from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons under the 1990s Megatons to Megawatts peace program.

“The Russians were compromising American contractors in the nuclear industry with kickbacks and extortion threats, all of which raised legitimate national security concerns. And none of that evidence got aired before the Obama administration made those decisions,” a person who worked on the case told The Hill, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by U.S. or Russian officials.

At a minimum, as Noah Rothman notes, the involvement of key members of the current Trump-Russia probe in conducting this investigation will play right into Trump’s hands in his campaign to discredit the investigation, and Democrats thus far seem likely to just circle the wagons against any further inquiry for that reason as well as how this reflects on the Clintons, Eric Holder, and the Obama Administration’s Russia policy. But the national security implications run deeper than that, and as Ed Morrissey observes, Congress ought to dig in further to see what else it wasn’t told:

House Intelligence chair Mike Rogers claimed to the Hill that no one ever mentioned the case at all to him, despite already-extant concerns over the Uranium One deal on Capitol Hill.

If you’re going to do Muhammad Ali–type activism, you’d better have Muhammad Ali–type talent. That is the ultimate lesson of the Colin Kaepernick saga.

The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, who has been without a team this season, announced this week that he will file a grievance against the NFL. Collusion, he claims, can be the only explanation for his unemployment: the league and its owners, fueled by President Trump’s “partisan political provocation,” have schemed to blackball him in violation of the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the NFL and the players’ union.

Kaepernick appears to be within his CBA rights to file the grievance, and to do so personally — i.e., to challenge the league and its owners on his own, rather than through the NFL Players Association. But unless some of the owners and league officials have said or written idiotic things in meetings, emails, text messages, and the like, the collusion suit should be a loser. There is no need to collude against a player who is not an obvious net-plus (in terms of performance and popularity) for any particular team.

To take the easy part first, Kaepernick’s invocation of Trump is just an atmospheric. The player had been out of the league for months before the president recently began inveighing against the form of protest Kaepernick initiated — “taking a knee” during the pregame playing of the national anthem. No player has been cut or suspended in the wake of the presidential outbursts, which markedly increased the number of players protesting. Trump has crystallized the public anger over the protest as only his bully pulpit can, but he has had no impact on the status of Kaepernick or any other player.

So let’s talk Colin Kaepernick.

To be clear, as a lifelong football fan (who continues to love the game, however soured I am over the infusion of leftist activism in what used to be an oasis from politics), I can attest: Kaepernick is certainly good enough to make an NFL roster — or at least he was when last seen on the gridiron. His problem is that he is not a great player. Indeed, he is now a mediocre player. Mediocre players cannot afford to have his kind of baggage.

I happen to have been in the stands to see Kaepernick’s first pro touchdown, scored against my New York Jets (a streak of lightning captured in this YouTube clip, a minute and a half in). He was a dynamic but flawed talent when he burst on the NFL scene as the 49ers’ second-round pick out of the University of Nevada in 2011: a breathtaking runner with a strong arm, though not a particularly accurate one. In his rookie year, he was used sparingly (almost exclusively in running situations) by coach Jim Harbaugh. But the Niners were an excellent team (they got to but lost the NFC championship game in Kaepernick’s first season), and Harbaugh — a former pro QB — ran a system maximally suited to Kaepernick’s strengths.

Kaepernick got his break when the starter, Alex Smith, got injured in 2012. He made the most of it, getting the 49ers to the Super Bowl, where they lost to the Baltimore Ravens despite his capable performance. The next year, as the undisputed starter, Kaepernick led the Niners to the conference championship game again, but they lost to the Seattle Seahawks, no small thanks to two killer interceptions Kaepernick threw in crunch time.

Still, he had had an impressive run of success. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the high-water mark of his career. Kaepernick was rewarded with a big contract. As with many big NFL contracts, the dollar amount, $126 million over six years, sounds impressive. Only $13 million was guaranteed, though. In such deals, if the player fails to perform up to standard, he runs a high risk of being cut. The high per annum pay counts against the team’s salary cap if the team decides to keep the player at the contract rate. (That’s why football players can be pressured to accept salary cuts, something that never happens in, say, Major League Baseball, where the money is guaranteed throughout multi-year contract terms.)

Alas, 2014 was a stormy year: Kaepernick struggled and the team finished 8–8, missing the playoffs for the first time in many years. Harbaugh had a falling out with Niners brass, ultimately moving on to the University of Michigan, his alma mater (and Jay Nordlinger’s!). The 49ers have been a mess ever since.

The next year, 2015, was a disaster for Kaepernick, who played poorly, was benched, and eventually missed most of the second half of the season with a shoulder injury that required surgery. The Niners collapsed, finishing 5–11, and the new coach was fired.

The 2016 season, during which Kaepernick began his kneeling protest, was even worse: Kaepernick was a second-stringer on a team that finished an NFL-worst 2–14. Signs of a lost season were in the air before it even started: Kaepernick expressed an interest in being traded after the 49ers hired Chip Kelly. This is consistent with Kaepernick’s activism: On Kelly’s prior team, the Philadelphia Eagles, LaSean McCoy, a star African-American player who had been traded, slanderously claimed Kelly had gotten rid of “all the good black players” on the Eagles. By mid-season, Kaepernick had reworked his contract, with the 49ers allowing him to opt out and become a free agent. Meanwhile, the season went so badly that the Niners fired Kelly.

Three years ago, Susan Rice, Obama’s obsequious national security advisor and the one who infamously blamed the Libyan consulate outrage on a YouTube video, noted on ABC News that Bowe Bergdahl “served the United States with honor and distinction,” and further stated that Bergdahl “wasn’t simply a hostage; he was an American prisoner of war captured on the battlefield.” Three years later, Rice was forced to choke on her words. Her absurd comments represented the zenith of mendacity, and for an administration primarily known for deceitfulness, spin and echo chambers, that’s saying something.

On Monday, Bergdahl pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. The latter charge could mean life behind bars for the deserter while the former carries a five-year term. Bergdahl deserted his post in June 2009 sparking frantic search and rescue efforts to retrieve him. He was later captured by the Taliban. Some within the military, citing a surge of more accurate targeting of U.S. soldiers following his capture, believe that he provided the enemy with information on U.S. Army troop movements.

Bergdahl’s pre-sentencing trial date begins on October 23. Three service members who were wounded by hostile fire while searching for him will likely testify. Two of those wounded sustained permanent life-altering injuries. Navy SEAL Jimmy Hatch now walks with permanent limp thanks to a Taliban bullet to the leg. Hatch’s comrade, Army National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Mark Allen, wasn’t so “lucky.” He took a bullet to the head while searching for the deserter and is now permanently confined to a wheelchair and unable to talk.

Rice’s skewed characterization of Bergdahl’s military service record wasn’t simply drivel spewed by someone speaking out of abject ignorance. Rather, her comments were a sad reflection of her ex-boss’s convoluted mindset where things such as morality, decency and integrity played second fiddle to ideologically-driven, political expediency. Obama had always wished to close the Guantanamo facility and the Bergdahl exchange was an expedient way for him to dump five hard-core terrorist detainees.

But the exchange, which carried a hefty price tag of nearly $1 million, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, left the administration facing two potential powder kegs with severe legal, political and security implications. Obama and his sycophants, including Rice and Ben Rhodes, therefore embarked on a campaign of deceit aimed at garnering sympathy for Bergdahl.

The release of the detainees without giving Congress adequate notice violated the law and posed a legal hurdle for the administration. Under the National Defense Authorization Act, a law passed by Congress and signed by Obama, the administration was required to provide notice to four Senate and four House committees at least 30 days prior to the release of Taliban detainees from Guantánamo. But notice was only given by phone on the actual day of the exchange, which occurred on May 31, 2014. Consequently, the chief counsel for the Government Accountability Office determined that the Pentagon had illegally spent the money used to facilitate the prisoner exchange.

As he had done countless times before (and after), Obama dismissed this legal transgression saying that he had consulted with the Justice Department beforehand and was assured that the manner in which the prisoner exchange occurred was perfectly legal. In other words, Obama consulted his echo chamber, which provided him with the necessary political cover. A similar scenario was to unfold two years later when the Obama administration paid the Iranian regime protection money and provided it with $1.7 billion as ransom in exchange for the release of four American hostages unlawfully imprisoned by the Islamic Republic.

While America’s adversaries have been increasing their defense budgets and the power of their armed forces, the United States has been doing the opposite.

Although the Senate and House Armed Services Committees passed a bill for 2018 that would exceed President Trump’s defense budget request, there is still the problem of the 2011 Budget Control Act, which caps defense spending at an extremely low level. Modernization has been curtailed significantly.

Unfortunately, there remains a widely held assumption that unless tax reform is “revenue-neutral,” deficits will increase. The trouble with this assumption is that although revenue-neutral tax reform may make the system more efficient or fair, it neither increases government revenue nor generates additional investment in the private sector. The purpose of the new tax-reform plan is to do both: increase revenue and spur economic growth at the same time.

One crucial aspect of the new tax reform bill, unveiled by President Donald Trump and the “Big Six” group of Republican tax negotiators at the end of September, is the potentially positive effect it will have on the US defense budget, which is sorely in need of an increase.

The assertion made by former President Barack Obama during his final State of the Union address in January 2016, that the United States spends “more on our military than the next eight nations combined,” bolstered the belief that America’s national-security needs are beyond being met. However, as a recent Heritage Foundation report reveals, such claims, which have led to the conclusion that the United States allocates an excessive amount to the defense budget, are “disingenuous,” as they “give no consideration to the decisions driving defense spending or the factors contributing to costs across national economies.”

As the Heritage Foundation points out, although “the U.S. military remains the largest and most capable in the world… [t]he security environment in which in which the U.S. military is expected to operate has grown increasingly complex, and national defense resourcing warrants more than a solitary sentence of discussion.”

America’s major military adversaries, Russia and China, pay their soldiers, sailors and pilots far less than America pays the members of its own forces, which enables Moscow and Beijing to spend more on weapons and research. In addition, unlike the U.S., Russia and China are not transparent about their defense spending at best, and lie about it at worst, with the former reportedly “cooking its defense books,” and the latter publishing nothing about its nuclear weapons program. In addition, while America’s adversaries have been increasing their defense budgets and the power of their armed forces, the United States has been doing the opposite. As former US Senator James Talent wrote in 2013:

“…[T]he picture isn’t pretty. Congress and the president [Obama] will probably agree to increase defense spending by a small amount, but they will probably also take money away from future defense budgets. This will allow them to say that they have increased defense spending while in reality the wholesale unraveling of American power will continue.”

In addition — according to USAF Maj Gen Garrett Harencak — during decades of a “procurement holiday,” America failed to upgrade its nuclear-deterrent capabilities.

This is the bad news. The good news is:

“For the first time in nearly 35 years, the United States is back on track to modernize its entire nuclear deterrent. After previously approving the building of 12 new Columbia class submarines and a new B-21 nuclear-capable bomber, the United States has selected two contractors to compete to build the next land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) nuclear deterrent. This would be the first new land-based ICBM since the Peacekeeper missile was deployed in 1986 and completes a nuclear modernization effort plan promised by the administration.”

Contrary to the Left’s favorite narrative, any Russia scandal has always been worse for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump. Recent revelations confirmed this Tuesday, and even implicated the special prosecutor at the center of the Trump-Russia investigation, former FBI director Robert Mueller.

In 2010, the Obama administration approved a controversial deal giving Russian company Rosatom partial control of Canadian mining company Uranium One (and with it 20 percent of U.S. uranium), just as Russians paid former president Bill Clinton for speeches and Hillary Clinton was secretary of State. To make matters worse, the FBI had already gathered evidence of Russian corruption in the U.S. but kept it secret just when it would have mattered most, The Hill reported Tuesday.

A confidential U.S. witness working in the Russian nuclear industry helped federal agents gather financial records, make secret recordings, and intercept email starting in 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised U.S. trucking company Transport Logistics International, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Officials also acquired documents and an eyewitness account corroborating earlier reports that Russian officials had routed million of dollars into the U.S. to benefit the Clinton Foundation just as Hillary Clinton served on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which endorsed the Uranium One deal.

This racketeering scheme was allegedly conducted “with the consent of higher level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds,” The Hill reported.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) did not bring immediate charges upon learning of the corruption in 2010, but kept investigating the matter for nearly four more years, leaving the American public and Congress in the dark.

Knowledge of Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil would have been vital to preventing the disastrous 2010 Uranium One deal, but it also might have prevented a lesser known approval in 2011. That year, the Obama administration approved a request from Rosatom’s subsidiary Tenex, allowing it to sell commercial uranium to U.S. nuclear power plants (in addition to reprocessed uranium from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons sold under the Megatons to Megawatts program).

“The Russians were compromising American contractors in the nuclear industry with kickbacks and extortion threats, all of which raised legitimate national security concerns,” a person who worked on the case told The Hill. “And none of that evidence got aired before the Obama administration made those decisions.”

Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Trump-Russia investigation, was at the helm of the FBI from 2001 until 2013, so it seems likely he was culpable in keeping this investigation secret — at the very time when it would have been most pivotal for U.S. national security.

A man who may be responsible for allowing tremendous Russian corruption on U.S. soil to continue — and even intensify — during the Obama administration is now leading the investigation into potential Russian connections involving the man who ran for president against Obama’s legacy. Conflict of interest, much?

Before the Obama administration approved Russia’s acquisition of more than 20 percent of America’s uranium supply, the Federal Bureau of Investigation found Russian racketeering involved.

This shocking news is in a must-read investigation by reporters John Solomon and Alison Spann in The Hill on October 17.

“Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow,” sources told Solomon and Spann.

But acting FBI investigators at the time – including then-U.S. attorney Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller, the man Rosenstein would later choose to investigate possible Russian collusion that helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election – apparently did not share this information about Russia with key members of Congress.

Solomon, Spann, and The Hill might win a Pulitzer Prize for their excellent investigative reporting…if it incriminated Republicans. But since it instead found potential wrongdoing by Democrats, the mainstream media will either ignore or find fault with it.

This investigation points to important issues it does not spell out, so we shall use it as a stepping stone to touch on three of them:

1. The new investigation clearly indicates that Mueller and Rosenstein knew of Russian millions paid to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s foundation. This foundation served as a slush fund that paid for some of her political activities and subsidized her campaign staff before 2016.

This is a priori evidence of Russian influence in American politics – in the form of more than $145 million funneled by Russia to the Clintons. Ms. Clinton ran for president in 2008 and was clearly positioning herself to run again in 2016.

Yet Mueller persists in not investigating Ms. Clinton as a suspect in his fishing expedition that seeks some crime of “election collusion by Russia,” yet to be found, committed only by President Trump. Can Mueller continue stonewalling after this new evidence?

In her latest reinvention, Hillary Clinton has emerged from the woods transformed into a self-styled Cassandra. She travels from sound stage to sound stage, reminding the public that her 2016 loss was not her fault and the Russians who undid her once-promising political career are coming again. This newest reboot is remarkable if only for its extraordinary immodesty. Few have done so much to undermine the fortunes of their ostensible allies, but Hillary Clinton is not done yet. Her vendetta has now led her to sabotage the so-called “Resistance’s” last, best hope for cutting the legs out from under the Trump administration: Robert Mueller’s probe into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.

Nearly ten months into his presidency, Donald Trump has not stoppedcampaigning against Hillary Clinton—a fact the Clinton surely appreciates if only for the otherwise undeserved relevance it bestows upon her. When asked about the Mueller probe and the charge that his campaign “colluded” with Moscow generally, Trump is fond of deflecting to the Clinton family’s dealings with Russian entities in both a private and governmental capacity. That distraction tends to inspire yawns and rolls of the eyes, but not today. On Tuesday, The Hillrevealed that FBI and court documents allege that the Clintons, the Clinton Foundation, and the Clinton-led State Department under Barack Obama do not have clean hands when it comes to dealings with Moscow.

The Hill reporters John Solomon and Alison Spann’s inquiry found that the FBI began investigating an effort by the Russian government to infiltrate the American nuclear materials industry as early as 2009. “Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States,” they reported.

These reporters were privy to documents revealing the scope of the FBI’s operation, which was extensive and supported the allegation that Moscow had “compromised” a Uranium trucking firm. All of this took place before the Russian energy firm Rosatom secured its first 17 percent stake in the American nuclear materials extraction company Uranium One in 2009. A year later, Rosatom won a majority stake in that company—a deal that had to be approved at the highest levels of the American government and which alarmed observers who fretted the national security implications of that kind of concession to Moscow.

Meanwhile, between 2009 and 2013, the Clinton Foundation was the recipient of four suspicious tranches of donations totaling $2.35 million from Russian-linked sources including Uranium One’s chairman. Former President Bill Clinton personally received half a million dollars for one speech in Moscow from a Russian government-linked investment bank that was promoting Uranium One stock. While the Uranium One deal was under consideration by the Treasury Department, that bank’s analysts were talking up the value of that firm’s stock.

None of these donations were previously disclosed, despite the Clinton Foundation’s written pledge to disclose all donations it received while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State. If The Hill’s reporting is accurate, this is dirty money. Their report alleges that eyewitness and written accounts obtained by the FBI confirm that Russian officials were responsible for this influx of cash to the Clintons.

What’s odd about this account, though, is how sluggish the FBI investigation was.The Hill noted that, despite the evidence they had obtained by 2010, the bureau continued its investigation for another four years. In the interim, the Uranium One deal among others benefiting Moscow was approved and implemented by the Obama administration. Bizarrely, the relevant members of Congress were apparently not briefed about the extent of this probe.

Federal appeals judge Alex Kozinski has noted that abusive behavior by prosecutors is reaching “epidemic proportions.” That epidemic will get worse after Tuesday’s ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals absolving prosecutors for using false information to put David Ganek’s hedge fund out of business.

A three-judge panel, led by prosecutorial soft-touch Reena Raggi, overturned a lower court ruling and found that prosecutors and FBI investigators have immunity from Mr. Ganek’s suit seeking damages. The court ruled that immunity applies even though prosecutors falsely claimed Mr. Ganek had traded shares based on what he was told was inside information.

An FBI informant in fact testified that he had never told Mr. Ganek the information had been illegally obtained, and an FBI agent corroborated that testimony. Yet the FBI and prosecutors included the false claim in an affidavit to obtain a warrant for a highly publicized raid on Mr. Ganek’s firm. Mr. Ganek was never charged, but the negative publicity forced him to roll up his Level Global fund in 2011.

Prosecutors deserve some measure of immunity lest they be sued every time they lose a close case. But immunity should not be impunity, and Judge Raggi’s opinion all but provides it by refusing to let Mr. Ganek’s suit proceed to gather evidence about whether prosecutors knew the information was false.

Her opinion says this doesn’t matter because the search warrant against Mr. Ganek’s firm would have been justified even without the false information. Yet the trial judge looked at the same facts and concluded the opposite. Judge Raggi’s ruling means in practice that there is no mechanism for an innocent person like Mr. Ganek to seek redress if a claim is a lie, and no legal remedy.

This is incentive for prosecutors to think they can get away with lying as long as they have other evidence to dress up a warrant. Never mind that in this case the warrant was used to justify a raid on an innocent party and destroy his business.

The Ganek raid and smear were typical of former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara’s method in his assault on Wall Street. The smearing continued even during the oral argument at the Second Circuit. Sarah Normand, an assistant U.S. Attorney, accused Mr. Ganek of participating in “a scheme with regard to many, many pieces of inside information from many public companies.”

This was long after her office had decided not to charge Mr. Ganek. But instead of remorse or an apology, Ms. Normand doubled down on prosecutorial innuendo.

Mr. Ganek could appeal, but the Supreme Court is unlikely to take a case that hangs on such a factual dispute. The Justice Department could discipline the prosecutors for spreading false information, and it ought to investigate whether it was a lie, but Justice is an insider’s club. The only real check on prosecutorial abuse are judges willing to enforce standards of honesty. Judge Raggi has set a standard that will encourage more dishonesty.

The familiar cultural order of the last half-century is crumbling — partly because of larger forces beyond its control, partly from self-inflicted wounds, and partly because of the chaos following the election of the outsider Donald Trump.

NFL, Go to Hell?

In the early 1950s, the National Football League was small, poor, and not America’s pastime. It may soon become that way again — if it is lucky.

Since Colin Kaepernick opened the lid of the NFL’s Pandora’s box, the demons just keep flying out. The result is decreased viewership and attendance and the tarnishing of a multibillion-dollar brand.

To save their NFL investment, some networks now try to avoid airing the pre-game national anthem altogether. The alternative is to show dozens of confused and pampered multimillionaire athletes kneeling in defiance. The cameras only selectively scan the stadium crowd and detour around empty seats. ESPN talking heads glance sideways at one another in hopes that colleagues will cool their accustomed virtue-signaling social-justice rants that are as hypocritical as they are incoherent — rants that cost them viewers and maybe their own jobs.

The NFL in truth was living on borrowed time — a strangely anachronistic gladiatorial spectacle exempt from the nitpicking of a therapeutic society. Not anymore.

The rich white owners are in no need of antitrust exemptions or public subsidies. But they might require a diversity officer to make the franchises look more like America.

The players claim racism while also assuming that they are excused from the traditional liberal antidotes to disproportionate racial representation. Weirdly, the athletes apparently think that a league in which 75 percent of the players are African-American reflects a time-honored commitment to merit. That might be true, but it is a logic that has never done Asian-American students much good when fighting de facto quotas that limit their merit-based representation at marquee universities.

The NFL is becoming as violent as boxing or martial arts, but with thousands, not hundreds, of athletes suffering head trauma. Participation is falling off in its de facto farm and minor leagues in high schools and colleges, on the theory that a smack in the head might end up later as a tremor in the hand.

The old idea that Americans set aside their Sundays for friendly get-togethers, free of weekly political spats and depressing news, has been ruined by the constant editorializing of the players.

Yet they are unable to articulate a consistent gripe other than confusing the First Amendment rights with workplace rules that all Americans abide by. If the League successfully mandates that its paid employees cannot express their gratitude by wearing a small decal on their helmets to honor the dead of 9/11 or slain policemen, then certainly the NFL can also ask its employees to stand for the national anthem.

In sum, there are so many things wrong with the NFL that far from being a national pariah, Colin Kaepernick is likely to be sainted for convincing the nation that we had plenty of reasons beyond his own self-indulgent narcissism not to watch professional football at all.

The Democratic Party, as it did after Hubert Humphrey’s close loss in 1968, seems still to be misdiagnosing its 2016 defeat.

Democrats see too little identity politics rather than too much as their trouble, and thus are redoubling on what has been slowly shrinking the party into coastal enclaves.

Promoting Black Lives Matter and open borders, promising free tuition and tax hikes, opposing fracking and pipeline construction, pushing single-payer health care and an ever-expanding transgender agenda as well as abortion—these are not majority positions. Neither will embracing Hollywood, the media, or the NFL protests win over voters. Thinking (or hoping) that President Trump will implode, quit, be jailed, sicken, die, or be impeached is not an agenda.

Trump Compared to What?
When Trump promises to restore Christmas nomenclature, to build a border wall, or to bark back against the NFL, he bets that 51 percent of the voting public is likely on his side. Trump’s tweets may be cul de sacs. And they may diminish the traditional stature of the presidency, but they are rarely on the wrong side of public opinion.

The same holds true when in suicidal fashion he alienates those of his own party, many of them seemingly essential to his legislative agenda. Yet what is the logic of temporizing Republican senators who recently got reelected by blasting the Iran Deal, open borders, and Obamacare—apparently on the premise that their posturing votes would never really matter, given the likelihood of a liberal vetoing president? So far a Bob Corker, Jeff Flake or John McCain has not proven that he is more popular in his own state than is Donald Trump.

The issue is never just Trump’s outbursts or tweets in isolation but, rather, the comparisons between them and his targets. Again, attacking NFL players may not be presidential, but Trump’s pushback is often judged by many voters on the basis of its intent—in other words, an effort to oppose the growing trend of multimillionaire athletes refusing to stand for the National Anthem. If we have never seen a president stoop to fight with the NFL, we have also never seen the NFL kneel to self-destruct by offending millions of its fans. If the president cannot defend a national tradition of standing in honor during the National Anthem, who else could?

Pollsters, pundits, and the media have vastly underestimated how many in America loathe multimillionaire celebrities, pampered athletes, and triangulating politicians—the usual targets of Trump’s invective.

Reactive Not Preemptive
Take a sampling of Trump’s most infamous tweets and adolescent outbursts—attacks on Bob Corker’s height, referencing Rex Tillerson’s IQ, the creepy description of blood oozing from a supposedly irate Megyn Kelly, or deprecating the capture and imprisonment of John McCain—and the common denominator is not just puerility and cruelty, but also retaliation. All had first attacked Trump and sometimes quite viciously. Corker had claimed that Trump’s White House was chaos, a reality show, and in danger of prompting World War III—a virtual charge that Trump was nuts. Anonymous sources accused Tillerson of calling Trump a moron or, at least, implying it—and the secretary did not explicitly deny the charge, although he deplored the climate in which such accusations were made. Kelly hijacked her own debate question and turned it into a scripted rant about Trump’s alleged misogyny. McCain arrogantly wrote off Trump’s supporters as “crazies”—a forgotten precursor to Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables.”