RUTHFULLY YOURS

Leave it to Hillary Clinton to hammer almost 50 million citizens whom she aspires to govern.

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right?” Clinton declared Friday as Barbra Streisand and other self-congratulating guests tittered their approval at a $6 million Manhattan fundraiser. “They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”

Surging Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has energized his recently sputtering campaign and now enjoys 43 percent support in today’s RealClearPolitics survey average (vs. 46 percent for Clinton). Thus, among Trump’s current share of America’s 220 million eligible voters, Clinton just threw half of them — roughly 47 million people — under her motorcade.

After triggering a torrent of criticism, Clinton stated, “I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong.”

Of course, this is no apology.

I very much regret that Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey died in January. However, I do not apologize for this, as I did not kill him. So, Clinton’s “regret” represents nothing more than her sorrow that she gave herself a throbbing political headache.

And if she got “half” wrong, then — what? — 47 percent of Trump’s supporters are hateful bums? Is it 45 percent? If Clinton has another number in mind, she should specify it.

Clinton’s remarks completely conform with the liberalism that she shares with top Democrats — from K Street to Sunset Boulevard.

As they see it, hordes of the great unwashed live in “flyover country.” They are not educated or elegant enough to have reached Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, New York, or — the most elevated place of all — Washington, D.C. So, enlightened people like Hillary and her supporters must make decisions for these benighted souls. Thus, Washington should tell these people what to do, every day, all day long. These unsophisticated monsters need adult supervision and, by God, Hillary and her minions will provide it!

In an address this afternoon in Baltimore, Trump denounced Clinton’s terminal elitism with particular passion, eloquence, and even a common touch. Most important, he astutely connected Clinton’s odious personal attitude to her public behavior.

Trump told the National Guard Association that he was “deeply shocked and alarmed this Friday to hear my opponent attack, slander, smear and demean [the] wonderful, amazing people who are supporting our campaign.”

Hillary Clinton’s health had long been an issue, but chiefly amongst those who have long maintained she is unfit in more than a physical sense to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Her latest episode has makes it a mainstream fixation
I’d wager that everyone reading this knows about Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film Rashomon. Even if you haven’t seen it, you know the story—or at least you know the story of the story: that the Japanese director told the same tale from several points of view. The story the woodcutter told was not the story the bandit retailed, which was not what the wife said, which was not what the dead samurai, through the courtesy of a medium, propounded.

I said that Rashomon told the same story from different perspectives. That’s how the film’s distinctiveness is usually summarised. In fact, Kurosawa was more radical. He told several different stories on the same set with the same characters so that disparate narratives appear like facets on a unifying jewel whose existence is stipulated but unreal.

Less well known is that Kurosawa, through the same medium that brought us the samurai’s version of events, has weighed in on the upcoming American presidential election. The transmission is garbled in places and the denouement is lacking, but the fragments that exist make for an engaging montage. I am pleased to be able to share a precis of the great director’s hitherto unknown tableaux with you now.

Scenario One: Reverberations in the Echo Chamber. All unfolded as was foretold from the beginning. It was always going to be Hillary Clinton in 2016. The campaign of Bernie Sanders, we now can see, was just a distraction, mildly irritating to team Clinton, but no match for the zeitgeist, which the first female president of the United States has clearly embodied.

On the other side of the aisle, it was Snow Don and the sixteen dwarves, Sleepy, Grumpy, Happy, Dopey, and the rest.

The dwarves were euthanised one after the next, much to the surprise of the punditocracy. (Aside from your host: I certainly shared in that surprise.)

This is Kurosawa, not Disney, however, and so the poisoned apple was not proffered by Evil Queen Hillary but was brought along by Donald Trump himself in his lunch pail. He ate it in public, for all to see, and then exploded, in slow motion, as Hillary scooped up an astonishing victory almost as robust as what Ronald Reagan enjoyed in 1984.

There was some drama along the way. There was, for example, the Dukakis Feint. In mid-August, it was pointed out by some observers that, back in 1988, Michael “Tank Commander” Dukakis was seventeen points ahead in the polls against George H.W. Bush. As all the world remembers, Dukakis then went on to trounce Bush in the election, served two terms, and helped prop up the tottering Soviet Union for another twenty years while … Oh, wait: that was from a rejected script.

What actually happened, as all the world really does remember, is that Dukakis (who?) imploded in a surrounding sea of titters after his appearance, avec combat helmet, atop an Abrams M1 tank. He hasn’t been heard from since. Is he still with us? I frankly do not know. I’ll look it up when I finish this column.

WHAT GALLS HERE BESIDES THE RIDICULOUS IDEA THAT WE CAN “RIDE OUT” A CLINTON PRESIDENCY IS THE TITLE “NEVER TRUMP FOR DUMMIES”….SO WE ARE NOT JUST “DEPLORABLE” WE ARE ALSO “DUMMIES”…..RSK

Q: How can you call yourself a conservative columnist when you’re rooting for Hillary Clinton in this election?

A: Because Donald Trump is anti-conservative, un-American, immoral and dangerous.

Q: And Hillary Clinton is a conservative who personifies all that we hold dear as Americans and has a terrific record in government?

A: Not at all. She’s conventionally liberal, politically opportunistic and ethically challenged.

Q: And you support her?

A: I wish it weren’t so. But what’s the choice?

Q: The choice is a Republican candidate who may disagree with Wall Street Journal orthodoxies on trade and immigration but otherwise wants to cut taxes and regulations, strengthen defense, appoint conservative judges, and take advice from people like Mike Pence and Paul Ryan.

A: You seem to think we elect a policy menu. My fundamental objection to Mr. Trump is that he is unfit, as a person, to be president.

Q: Oh, please. I’ll grant he’s a bit rough around the edges, but that’s because he’s a nonpolitician. He’s also a brilliant businessman who made billions of dollars.

A: I might believe that claim if he would release his tax returns, or if six of his businesses hadn’t gone bankrupt, or if he hadn’t been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, or if he didn’t routinely shortchange his suppliers or stiff his charities. blah, blah, blah…….DON’T BOTHER TO READ ANY MORE….

“There are those who would say of Hillary’s involvement in radical politics, “Aw, she was just a kid.” But she wasn’t just a kid. She was a middle-aged woman of 40 when sponsoring the hard left from her perch at the New World Foundation. Moreover, she has not, as far as I know, publicly repudiated or even distanced herself from the views or activism described in this article, and her husband’s presidential campaign was the perfect occasion to do so. There is no reason she ought to be forgiven, when she hasn’t repented. Especially since she is right now doing her utmost to drive her husband’s campaign into her own corner of the Democratic party, where the liberal left and the radical left meet.”http://spectator.org/64728_wests-rude-houseguests/

At the Democratic debate last Saturday night, Hillary Clinton was caught in a political blunder — she brought up her radical days as a ’60 student activist. As it happens, there was a lot more where that came from, as Daniel Wattenberg’s seminal piece from the 1992 campaign captured for all time. She was in short never one to go soft. Again, from the August 1992 American Spectator.

Hillary Clinton has been likened to Eva Peron, but it’s a bad analogy. Evita was worshipped by the “shirtless ones,” the working class, while Hillary’s charms elude most outside of an elite cohort of left-liberal, baby-boom feminists — the type who thought Anita Hill should be canonized and Thelma and Louise was the best movie since Easy Rider. Hillary reckons herself the next Eleanor Roosevelt. But, standing well to the left of her husband and enjoying an independent power base within his coalition, Hillary is best thought of as the Winnie Mandela of American politics. She has likened the American family to slavery, thinks kids should be able to sue their parents to resolve family arguments, and during her tenure as a foundation officer gave away millions (much of it in no-strings-attached grants) to the left — including sizable sums to hard-left organizers. She is going to cause her husband no end of political embarrassment between now and November — and who knows how long afterward.

By the morning of June 5, four top Clinton campaign aides — David Wilhelm, George Stephanopoulos, Eli Segal, and Stanley Greenberg — had had enough of Susan Thomases and Harold Ickes, two ultra-liberal campaign aides who had fastened themselves to Hillary. According to a Clinton insider, the four had concluded that “Susan Thomases is running this campaign with Harold Ickes through Hillary,” and gave Bill Clinton this ultimatum: “Either [Thomases] goes, or we’re all going and she can run the campaign.” Ever the Conciliator-in-Chief, Clinton managed to avert a mass resignation by the top echelon of his campaign staff. “They papered all this over for the time being, but it won’t last,” says the insider.

Thomases, a New York lawyer, is “the most doctrinaire liberal or old-line thinker around” the campaign, says a Clinton adviser. “Someone who just doesn’t get any of the reform/New Covenant message.” Ickes, son of Roosevelt’s New Deal Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, is anathema to many centrist Democrats who rallied early to the Clinton candidacy. In 1988 he was Jesse Jackson’s convention manager. In 1972, he was a key delegate selector for George McGovern, bending party rules to disestablish traditional Democratic constituencies — middle-class and socially conservative — in favor of student, feminist, and minority activists. A Clinton insider calls him “the most evil man on the face of earth,” adding: “He has done more single-handedly to destroy the Democratic party than anyone else.”

The immediate cause of the threatened walk-out was a national poll that the four, along with Frank Greer, had worked on with Thomases. When, despite opposition from Thomases, the others prepared to run the poll, Thomases complained to Hillary. The latter interceded with her husband, and the poll was killed. But the poll was small potatoes compared to the strategic coup that Hillary and her allies pulled off in blocking the move of Clinton’s campaign headquarters from Little Rock to Washington, a move many considered inevitable after Clinton’s victory in the New York primary. In Little Rock, lines of authority are fuzzy, and Hillary’s temple dogs roam free. By keeping the campaign in Little Rock, they simultaneously froze out ideological adversaries linked to the centrist, Washington-based Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and a group of seasoned national campaign professionals. “Hillary’s probably the only person in this campaign who wanted it to be in Little Rock. The DLC crowd and the centrists — all of Washington — have basically been left high and dry,” says a campaign source.

An influx of senior political talent would have left Mrs. Clinton’s politically inept allies licking envelopes — Thomases is the political genius who guided Bill Bradley, a New Jersey institution since his All-America days at Princeton, to a 50-47 re-election squeaker over underfunded, unknown challenger Christine Todd Whitman in 1990. And moving the campaign to Washington would have meant more conventional wife-of duties for the gaffe-prone Hillary. “You bring it to Washington and the first thing you do is you get the Tom Donilons, the John Sassos, and all the grown-ups involved with real experience. They’re going to —number one — kick out the Thomaseses and the Ickeses,” explains an insider. “Number two, they’re going to put Hillary in a very different position in the campaign.”

Hillary Clinton’s unfavorable poll ratings have risen as high as 29 percent in recent months. “Negatives” of 40 percent are generally fatal for a candidate; for a new-to-the-national-scene wife of a candidate, negatives in the 30 range are disastrous. The image of Mrs. Clinton that has crystallized in the public consciousness is, of course, that of Lady Macbeth: consuming ambition, inflexibility of purpose, domination of a pliable husband, and an unsettling lack of tender human feeling, along with the affluent feminist’s contempt for traditional female roles.

Cheered on by the media, abusive and personal invective have dominated the campaign. But beneath the mud-slinging, the election is really about issues that are critical – policies that will shape the country over the next one or two decades. To the extent these topics get ignored, we the people are the losers.

There are dozens of issues facing the electorate: public school education; the economy; the Supreme Court; immigration; race relations; inequality; political correctness; national security; the war against Islamic terror and extremism; cyber-attacks; disintegrating democracies in Latin America; and relations with Russia, China, Iran, Israel and Europe. This essay will focus on the first two problems: public school education and the economy.

This is not to trivialize other issues. A Democrat victory in November will assure that the Supreme Court becomes more activist – with relativism subsuming universal moral truths, and the bending of the Constitution to fit an interpretation that suits current mores. Immigration has been elemental to our success as a nation; but we need a policy that promotes legal immigration and that relies on secure borders. While it is unrealistic to deport eleven million illegals, we cannot allow criminal aliens to remain, nor should we permit sanctuary cities to take the law into their own hands. Does anyone believe that United Health and Aetna dropping out of ObamaCare markets will be positive for the pricing of health insurance? Or that a single payer will allow for better and less expensive healthcare? Sadly, our first African-American President has presided over worsening race relations. National security remains a priority. The next President needs to be forthright with the American people about Islamic terrorism and how long the war against it might last. She or he needs resolve and leadership. We cannot back away from our responsibilities and commitments. The world is fortunate that the strongest nation on the planet is one with democratic principles and free market capitalism.

However, education and economics are fundamental to success in all endeavors. A democratic republic requires an educated electorate. Similarly, we cannot do all we want, or be all we would like, without a robust economy based on free market principles. When children graduate from high school without basic groundings in English, math, history, science and geography, we assign them to lives of deprivation. When our economy is seen principally as a source of revenue to government, and when regulation is biased toward the large and the favored, we find ourselves on the path to diminished economic returns.

The most highly regarded indicator of high school competence is the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years tests half a million 15-year-olds in math, science and reading, in 70 countries and educational jurisdictions including the other 34 OECD nations. Results for the 2015 tests will be released in December, but the ones for 2012 showed American students lagging in achievement. They ranked 17th in reading, 20th in science and 27th in math – essentially unchanged from tests taken twelve years earlier. The problem is not our children – the success of Basis charter schools in Arizona and Success Academy charter schools in New York show the capability of minority and impoverished students. The problem, in one word, is unions. Union leaders are more interested in expanding membership than in producing qualified graduates. Non-teaching administrative jobs have proliferated. In most cities and towns, public schools are monopolies. Unions don’t want school competition, especially from those that hire non-union employees, which is why they fight charter schools and voucher programs with such intensity.