RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bill Clinton on Tuesday portrayed his wife as a “change maker” whose life has overflowed with good intentions and commitment to others. No one can spin a yarn like Bill, and for the believers it was a touching portrait. But if it’s true, why do the polls show that 68% of Americans don’t trust Hillary Clinton? That has to do with the rest of the story, which is how the Clintons have used politics to enrich themselves and retain power.

Nowhere is this clearer than at the words you didn’t hear Mr. Clinton speak: the Clinton Foundation. This supposedly philanthropic operation has become a metaphor for the Clinton business model of crony politics. The foundation is about producing a different kind of “change.”

No doubt the foundation does some charitable good, but this is incidental to its main purpose of promoting the Clinton political brand. Since its creation in 1997, the nominal nonprofit has served as a shadow Super Pac, designed to keep the Clintons in the national headlines, cover their travel expenses, and keep their retinue employed between elections.

The payroll has included Huma Abedin, who drew a State Department salary even as she managed politics at the foundation and is now vice-chairwoman of the Clinton campaign. Dennis Cheng raised money for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 bid, then became the foundation’s chief development officer and now leads Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 fundraising. Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s chief of staff at State, sat on the foundation board. And don’t forget Sid Blumenthal, the longtime Clinton Svengali who was secretly advising Mrs. Clinton at State while drawing a foundation salary. This may not be illegal but the charity here is for the Clintons’ benefit.
The funding for this political operation has come from nearly every country and major company in the world. These contributors have the cover of giving to charity, when everybody knows the gifts are political tribute to a woman determined to be President. Donations to a charity aren’t governed by the same caps or restrictions as those that go to a traditional Super Pac. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren somehow overlooked this in their Monday night riffs against money in politics. CONTINUE AT SITE

A lot can still happen at the Democratic convention, but nothing is likely to matter as much as Hillary Clinton’s look and tone, what she says—or perhaps more important—what she doesn’t say as she takes the stage Thursday night. Donald Trump, a man of iron predictability, faced no such test last week and delivered no surprises.

Not that there weren’t some striking moments in the glum enterprise that concluded in Cleveland, among them Melania Trump’s quickly famous speech. Also the contribution of Chris Christie, who functions periodically as the governor of New Jersey. Mr. Christie used his speaker’s spot to conduct a lengthy mock trial of Mrs. Clinton distinguished mainly for its unremitting tone of hysteria. It was a spectacle many Americans may remember should Mr. Christie become, as he apparently hopes, attorney general under Mr. Trump.

The Republican presidential candidate has one obvious advantage over Mrs. Clinton: He has never been in a position to absorb, as she has, the language, reflexes, certitudes, and high principles ready to be deployed on all occasions that are peculiar to the world of the Obama administration.

Not that Mr. Trump isn’t capable of embracing certain of the president’s views on America, first revealed in 2009 during Mr. Obama’s now-famous trip abroad to see heads of state and express regret for America’s offenses, known to history as the Obama apology tour. Those views of America as a nation in decline, virtually without allies, emerged ever more conspicuously during the president’s first term.

Last week Mr. Trump lashed out at NATO, then went on to argue that the U.S. shouldn’t be interfering in the business of other nations. And that we had so many failures of our own at home: Ferguson, the killing of police—so much. Who are we to tell the butchers and mass murderers of the world what to do?

Unlike Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump doesn’t know Obama-speak and doesn’t need deprogramming. He hasn’t absorbed the language that Americans recognize well after eight years. They have heard through all these years the nostrums, the reflexive high-minded oratory, that have come with every terror attack. They can hear it all over again in Mrs. Clinton.

Never was this clearer than in the days following the terrorist assault in Nice, when she described the attack as cowardly and vowed that we would never allow terrorists to undermine our egalitarian and democratic values. Such assertions always feel, and are, strangely off the point, which is the horror of the atrocity that has taken place.

If only we could get to know the real Hillary Clinton.

Unveiling the Hillary we supposedly don’t know has been the perpetual, elusive goal of Clinton’s handlers for decades, with the Democratic convention in Philadelphia the latest stab at it.

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook hopefully maintained that a lot of Americans simply “don’t understand” Hillary’s devotion to others, and the convention aims to give them this “fuller picture.” Or as a CNN headline put it, “Hillary Clinton prepares to reintroduce herself to America.”

Again. Hillary has made more reintroductions than should be allowed for a person who has never gone away.

Political writer Jonathan Rauch has a 14-year rule that posits no one is elected president more than 14 years after winning election as a governor or senator (the traditional jumping-off points for the presidency). Elected to the Senate from New York in 2000, Hillary is technically only a couple of years past this benchmark for staleness — except this doesn’t do justice to how long she has been around, and especially how long it feels she’s been around.

Bill Clinton announced his campaign for president in October 1991. Hillary has been with us ever since. During that campaign, Bill famously told us we’d get two for one. It’s been more than 14 years since she vouched for Bill Clinton on 60 Minutes after the allegations of an affair with Gennifer Flowers surfaced (1992), tried to remake American health care (1993), wrote the book It Takes a Village to soften her image (1996) and vouched for Bill in yet another sex scandal (1998).

It has been more than 14 years just from one Hillary scandal with a wholly implausible explanation (her amazingly lucrative cattle trades that were first reported in 1994) to another (her private server as secretary of state that was first reported in 2015).

Faced with a GOP nominee like no other in modern political history, the Democrats have a problem: They lack the words to describe him. Donald Trump is a unique threat to American democracy? That’s how they describe every Republican nominee. He’s divisive, racist, and plutocratic? Ditto.

The Democrats have cried wolf so often that they don’t know how to effectively attack Trump, an actual beast growling at the door. Doubt me? Consider this infamous NAACP campaign commercial from 2000. The ad is directed at that notorious racist monster George W. Bush. Its voiceover is done by Renee Mullins, daughter of murder victim James Byrd:

On June 7, 1998 in Texas my father was killed. He was beaten, chained, and then dragged three miles to his death, all because he was black.

So when Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate-crime legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.

Call Governor George W. Bush and tell him to support hate-crime legislation.

We won’t be dragged away from our future.

The images accompanying Mullins’ narration were dark and disturbing, showing the back of a pickup truck with chains leading off the screen. A radio version of the ad was even more vivid, with Mullins describing her father’s death: “I can see skin being torn away from his body. I can hear him gasping for air. I can feel the tears in his eyes.”

It’s horrifying stuff. And reading or hearing it could easily give you the impression that Bush let white supremacists get away with murdering a black man. In reality, two of the three perpetrators in the Byrd case were sentenced to death, and one was sentenced to life in prison.

The NAACP flogged Bush with the most inflammatory language imaginable. Never mind that the hate-crime legislation at issue could not possibly have punished Byrd’s killers more, because they were already receiving the law’s ultimate penalty. There was an election to win, and that meant boosting black turnout. If that meant painting Bush as a monstrous racist, so be it.

Such inflammatory dishonesty is a common Democratic campaign tactic. Remember this, from “Uncle” Joe Biden in 2012?

Yep, Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney — was going to put black Americans “back in chains.” Even worse, Romney would kill those same Americans without compunction:

Dear Mainstream Media and Democrats: It’s your turn. Now that Donald Trump has been formally nominated, the formal responsibility to stop him passes from the Right to the Left, from Republicans to Democrats and the journalists who amplify their values.

You’re going to find it a very tough slog. And it’s your own damn fault.

During the primaries, the task of exposing the true nature of the Trump takeover fell disproportionately to a few conservative magazines, columnists, renegade radio hosts, and behind-the-scenes activists. We all failed. There will be plenty of time for recriminations and “we happy few” speeches later. (If you detect a note of bitterness on my part, I’m not being clear enough: I contain symphonies of bitterness.)

We failed in part because the mainstream media were having too good of a time to help. Last spring, Stop Trump operatives told me they brought damning stories to mainstream outlets. The response was usually: “We’re not interested in covering that — right now.”

By May, Trump had already received roughly $3 billion worth of free media, thanks to ratings-hungry TV networks. CBS chief Les Moonves summarized it well at an investor conference in February: Trump’s rise “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Many in the media were so willing to put clicks and ratings before country because the conventional wisdom was that Trump would fade or implode eventually. Why not gawk at the spectacle? And if Trump did get the nomination, many journalists calculated, all the better. What fun it will be to watch Hillary Clinton destroy Trump and Trump destroy the GOP.

Only slowly have the media come around to the realization that Trump is an actual threat, but now it may be too late because they have a serious “cry wolf” problem. Millions of Americans firmly believe that journalists are water carriers for the Democrats and will tune out much of what they have to say about Trump now that he’s the nominee.

You can start the timeline as far back as the World War II era. In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt told the country that if Republicans were returned to power, “even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.” The press nodded along.

In 1964, CBS News’s Daniel Schorr claimed that Barry Goldwater’s planned post-convention vacation in Europe was really an effort to coordinate with “right-wing Germans” in “Hitler’s one-time stomping ground.”

In recent years, as the distinctions between news and opinion, analysis and advocacy, reporting and click-baiting has blurred, the problem has only gotten worse.

Every election cycle, the GOP nominee is smeared as a racist by the Democrats or the press — or both. Representative John Lewis of Georgia trades in a bit more of his hard-earned moral authority each time he insinuates that the GOP nominee is like George Wallace or wants to bring back Jim Crow, and political columnists relinquish a bit more of their claim to objectivity each time they let his comments pass without condemnation or criticism.

George W. Bush revived for the Left the paranoid style in American politics, and if you google “John McCain, racist, 2008” you’ll see he was lazily demonized too.

Most presidents, before and after holding office, are offered multifarious opportunities to get rich, most of them unimaginable to Americans without access to influential and wealthy concerns. But none have so flagrantly circumvented laws and ethical norms as have Bill and Hillary Clinton, a tandem who in little more than a decade went from self-described financial want to a net worth likely over $100 million, or even $150 million.

The media had been critical of former president Jerry Ford’s schmoozing with Southern California elites, with Ronald Reagan’s brief but lucrative post-presidential speaking, and with George W. Bush’s youthful and pre-presidential windfall profits from his association with the Texas Rangers. And all presidents emeriti glad-hand and lobby the rich to donate to their presidential libraries, but with important distinctions. One can argue that Jimmy Carter sought donations to his nonprofit Carter Library and Center out of either ego or a sincere belief in doing good works. The same holds true of the libraries of the Bushes and Reagan. No president, however, sought to create a surrogate nonprofit organization to provide free private-jet travel for the former first family while offering sinecures to veteran operatives between campaigns. The worth of both the Clinton family and the Clinton Foundation (augmented by a recent ten-month drive to raise $250 million for the foundation’s endowment) is truly staggering, and to a great extent accrued from non-transparent pay-for-play aggrandizement.

What, then, makes the Clintons in general, and Hillary in particular, so avaricious, given that as lifelong public officials with generous pensions and paid expenses they nevertheless labored so hard to accumulate millions in ways that sometimes bothered even friends and supporters? Wall Street profiteering aside, why, while decrying soaring tuition and student indebtedness, would Hillary Clinton charge the underfunded University of California, Los Angeles, a reported $300,000 — rather than, say, $50,000 — for a 30-minute chat?

Protestors outside the Democrat National Convention burned an Israeli flag, chanting “intifada” and “go home, F*** Hillary!”

Byron Tau of the Wall Street Journal tweeted pictures from the crowd of protestors.
Byron Tau

✔ @ByronTau

Protesters are burning an Israeli flag now in front of the secure perimeter and chanting “intifada”

Other protestors were holding signs in support of Bernie Sanders.

US media reported that nearly 2,000 demonstrators, predominantly supporters of Sanders, marched on the convention to vent their anger over recent controversies that have embroiled the Democratic party.

Fox News reported that police had detained dozens of people, however authorities said no arrests were made, but more than 50 people were cited for disorderly conduct.

“Trump’s critics continue to search for dubious reasons to justify sitting out the election or even voting for Hillary. There may be many reasons not to vote for Trump, but criticizing NATO isn’t one of them.”

The Never Trump crowd has found another example of The Donald’s disqualifying ignorance: comments he made about NATO. He has said that our contributions to NATO are “unfair,” that they are “costing us a fortune,” that we are “getting ripped off,” and that they are “getting a free ride.” By the way, Obama in his Atlantic interview also called the Europeans “free riders,” but I don’t recall a lot of sneering at the president for his “alarming” and “dangerous” remarks, as one critic put it.

Trump also implied that he would put the European NATO members’ feet to the fire about meeting the 2006 requirement that they spend 2% of GDP on their militaries, and suggested he would negotiate a new contribution schedule. Few NATO members have met that requirement, which is a violation of Article 3 that requires member states to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.” According to NATO’s own report, only five countries are estimated to meet the 2% requirement in 2016. France, Germany, Italy, and Spain­­––the first, third, fourth, and fifth largest economies in the EU––are not among them. The richest, Germany, is expected to remain at 1.19%. In contrast, the US will spend 3.9%. As Lord Robertson, NATO Secretary General from 1999-2004, put it, European nations are “military pygmies.”

Critics of Trump are technically correct to say that he exaggerates when he claims that the US pays the “lion’s share” of NATO funding. In fact, the US pays under a fifth (22%). But the complaints about European NATO members, which predate Trump by decades, take into account more salient deficiencies. “Common funding,” of which the US covers a fifth, is “used to finance NATO’s principal budgets: the civil budget (NATO HQ running costs), the military budget (costs of the integrated Command Structure) and the NATO Security Investment Programme (military capabilities),” according to NATO. In other words, mostly institutional bureaucratic infrastructure.

“Indirect spending” covers what each nation voluntarily contributes to an operation. NATO acknowledges the greater share the US spends on indirect spending: “there is an over-reliance by the Alliance as a whole on the United States for the provision of essential capabilities, including for instance, in regard to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; air-to-air refuelling; ballistic missile defence; and airborne electronic warfare.” We could also mention transport aircraft, cruise missiles, and other matériel that the European countries simply don’t have much of. For example, in the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya, there were 246 cruise missiles launched. The US fired 228 of them. At $1.5 million apiece, that adds up to $342 million taxpayer dollars spent to destabilize a country and get four of our citizens killed.

This discrepancy in indirect spending and military capability was already obvious in the 1990’s when NATO intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo to stop a vicious war. During the 1999 crisis in Kosovo, the Europeans had to make “heroic efforts” just to deploy 2% of their two million troops, according to the British foreign secretary. Historian William Shawcross writes of the bombing campaign, “The United States flew the overwhelming majority of the missions, and dropped almost all the precision-guided U.S.-made munitions, and most of the targets were generated by U.S. intelligence.”

So Trump’s complaints, as blustering and exaggerated as they may be, are legitimate. Operations conducted by NATO are overwhelmingly American funded and directed, and NATO is a diplomatic fig-leaf for American power.