RUTHFULLY YOURS

The end of liberalism is not an original thought, but it is a possibility. In 1969 (revised in 1979), Theodore J. Lowi, professor of government at Cornell, published The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States. He argued that government had become too big and that interest groups had caused Congress to cede responsibilities to unelected (and, in some cases, unaccountable) agencies. These agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), control more than a trillion dollars in annual expenditures – almost 25% of all federal spending. Ironically for Democrats, special interest groups have created another problem – they compete with unionized government, and the demands public-sector retirees exact from American taxpayers.

Today, global progressives see the end of liberalism in the rise of nativism, xenophobia and populism – manifested in decisions such as Brexit, the Republican nomination of Trump and the Colombia-FARC Accord. It is seen in the failure of the Arab Spring and the resurgence of Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China. Conservatives bemoan the unraveling of liberal values, which date to the age of enlightenment – the acceptance of anti-Western ideologies, cultural and moral relativism, and political correctness. The latter denies language from being used as it was intended – to accurately describe people, their actions and events.

I do not pretend to know if “liberalism” is at an end. What I believe is that big, activist government is being hoisted with its own petard. Promises have been made that will prove impossible to keep. Activist government was conceived in the belief that equality of outcomes supersedes that of opportunity. In the United States, “big” government was born during the New Deal, reached maturity in LBJ’s Great Society, and has come into senescence with ObamaCare and the CFPB; it is seen in the Administration’s videos: “Life of Julia” and “Pajama Boy.” The factors progressives cite allow them to ignore what seems an inevitability – that promises politicians made to those who elected them will not be possible to keep.

Donald Trump needs a unified Republican party in the homestretch if he is to have any chance left of catching Hillary Clinton — along with winning higher percentages of the college-educated and women than currently support him. But even before the latest revelations from an eleven-year-old Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump crudely talked about women, he had long ago in the primaries gratuitously insulted his more moderate rivals and their supporters. He bragged about his lone-wolf candidacy and claimed that his polls were — and would be — always tremendous — contrary to his present deprecation of them. Is it all that surprising that some in his party and some independents, who felt offended, swear that they will not stoop to vote for him when in extremis he now needs them? Or that party stalwarts protest that they no longer wish to be associated with a malodorous albatross hung around their neck?

That question of payback gains importance if the race in the last weeks once again narrows. Trump had by mid September recaptured many of the constituencies that once put John McCain and Mitt Romney within striking distance of Barack Obama. And because Trump has apparently brought back to the Republican cause millions of the old Reagan Democrats, various tea-partiers, and the working classes, and since Hillary Clinton is a far weaker candidate than was Barack Obama, in theory he should have had a better shot to win the popular vote than has any Republican candidate since incumbent president George W. Bush in 2004.

What has always been missing to end the long public career of Hillary Clinton is a four- or five-percentage-point boost from a mélange of the so-called Never Trump Republicans, as well as women and suburban, college-educated independents. Winning back some of these critics could translate into a one- or two-point lead over Clinton in critical swing states.

Those who are soured on Trump certainly can cite lots of understandable reasons for their distaste — well beyond his sometimes grating reality-television personality. In over-dramatic fashion, some Against Trumpers invoke William F. Buckley Jr.’s ostracism of John Birchers from conservative circles as a model for dealing with perceived Trump vulgarity. He is damned as an opportunistic chameleon, not a true conservative. Trump’s personal and professional life has been lurid — as, again, we were reminded by the media-inspired release of a hot-mic tape of past Trump crude sexual braggadocio. The long campaigning has confirmed Trump as often uncouth — insensitive to women and minorities. He has never held office. His ignorance of politics often embarrasses those in foreign- and domestic-policy circles. Trump’s temperament is mercurial, especially in its ego-driven obsessions with slights to his business ethics and acumen. He wins back supporters by temporary bouts of steadiness as his polls surge, only to alienate them again with crazy nocturnal tweets and off-topic rants — as his popularity then again dips. He seems to battle as much with GOP stalwarts as Clintonites, often, to be fair, in retaliation rather than in preemptory fashion.

The Republican Party headquarters in Hillsborough, North Carolina, was firebombed overnight, resulting in major smoke and fire damage. Somebody threw a bottle of flammable liquid through a front window of the Orange County Republican headquarters , setting supplies and furniture ablaze, Hillsborough police said. The side of an adjacent building was also spray painted with a swastika and the words “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else.”

Damage estimates were not immediately available but Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the state GOP, said, “The office itself is a total loss.” He called the bombing “political terrorism” and said “the only thing important to us is that nobody was killed, and they very well could have been.”

Violence has broken out at a large number of Trump rallies this year — the vast majority of which involved anti-Trump protesters assaulting Trump supporters.

N.C. Gov. Pat McCrory Sunday called the weekend firebombing of the GOP headquarters “an attack on our democracy.”

Via the Charlotte Observer:

“The firebombing of a local political headquarters in Orange County is clearly an attack on our democracy,” McCrory said in a statement. “Violence has no place in our society – but especially in our elections … I will use every resource as governor to assist local authorities in this investigation.”

Hillsborough Mayor Tom Stevens said, “This highly disturbing act goes far beyond vandalizing property; it willfully threatens our community’s safety … and its hateful message undermines decency, respect and integrity in civic participation.”

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has a storied history, but many organizations outlive their moral purpose and it’s now clear this one has. The civil-rights outfit has come down firmly on the side of trapping poor minority children in education failure factories.

On Saturday the NAACP’s national board voted to ratify a resolution adopted at its 2016 national convention calling for a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools. Considering the state of urban K-12 education, this is the equivalent of opposing Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The NAACP is so blinded by ideology that it is endorsing separate and unequal education for poor minority children for years to come.

The NAACP’s statement Saturday shows how out of touch its well-to-do board members are with American education. It calls for a ban on new charters until “charter schools are subject to the same transparency and accountability standards as public schools.”

Hello? Inner-city schools are the definition of unaccountable as they promote failure year after year. Charters should be held accountable, and some charter operators have done a poor job. But they can be and are shut down. The proof of charter performance are the long waiting lists in most cities to get in. Parents vote for charters with their feet when spaces are available.

The NAACP statement also wants a charter ban until “public funds are not diverted to charter schools at the expense of the public school system.” But charters are public schools, albeit without the union and tenure rules that retard student learning. A 2015 Stanford study found that urban charters on average provide 40 more days of learning in math and 28 days in reading than comparable traditional schools. The NAACP rejects this evidence of educational advancement in favor of bowing to the union desire for political control. CONTINUE AT SITE

James Comey presides over an FBI in revolt over his leadership, a former U.S. attorney tells The American Spectator, and pursues “paranoid, delusional, and vindictive” measures to prevent negative information leaking out to the public.

“I know that inside the FBI there is a revolt,” Joseph diGenova tells The American Spectator. “There is a revolt against the director. The people inside the bureau believe the director is a dirty cop. They believe that he threw the [Hillary Clinton email] case. They do not know what he was promised in return. But the people inside the bureau who were involved in the case and who knew about the case are talking to former FBI people expressing their disgust at the conduct of the director.”

The loss of faith in the bureau chief stems in part from a dishonest rendering of the decision not to indict Mrs. Clinton as unanimous rather than unilateral and in part from the bureau’s decision to destroy evidence in the case and grant blanket immunity to Clinton underlings for no possible prosecutorial purpose.

“There is a consensus among the employees that the director has lost all credibility and that he cannot lead the bureau,” diGenova explains. “They are comparing him to L. Patrick Gray, the disgraced former FBI director who threw Watergate papers into the Potomac River. The resistance to the director has made the agency incapable of action. It has been described to me as a depression within the agency unlike anything that anyone has ever seen within the bureau. The director’s public explanation for the unorthodox investigation are viewed by people in the bureau as sophomoric and embarrassing.”

Comey maintained in July that he came to the decision to recommend not indicting Clinton for the inclusion of classified material in 110 emails stored on a private server based on an “entirely apolitical and professional” investigation despite conceding that others in a similar spot would face “consequences” and that “evidence of potential violations” existed. He insisted then, “No outside influence of any kind was brought to bear.”

But agents trained to sniff out malfeasance smell something rotten here.

“When the director said that it was a unanimous decision not to recommend prosecution, that was a lie,” diGenova points out. “In fact, the people involved in the case were outraged at his decision, which he made by himself. When people realized that he was lying publicly about their role and when they knew he had approved of the destruction of laptops that were subject to congressional subpoena, that flipped the switch.”

Critics of the FBI and the broader handling of the case by the Justice Department remain skeptical over investigators’ ostensible belief in Clinton’s claim that she “lost” 13 Blackberry devices and did not understand that documents marked “C” meant confidential. Decisions to grant Clinton aide Cheryl Mills attorney-client privilege in a case involving her, to destroy her laptop and with it any evidence desired by Congress, and to limit the investigation’s search to documents from before January 31, 2015 to obstruct any possible obstruction of justice case against Mills also similarly baffled. Direct evidence of Clinton hiding public business on a private server (and thereby making it easier for enemy governments to see what the American government could not) and “bleaching” her hard drive after the story became public presented the FBI clear evidence of wrongdoing. But authorities sought to protect rather than prosecute the malefactors.