RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

“Hillary Clinton took me through Hell.”

Those were the words of a woman who was raped and beaten into a coma when she was twelve years old. Instead of helping that twelve year old girl, Hillary Clinton aided her rapist. She falsely accused the abused child who would never be able to have a family of her own after the assault of “a tendency to seek out older men”. Then Hillary Clinton was recorded on tape laughing at how her client had failed a lie detector test while relishing describing how she had gotten him off.

Tonight’s Democratic National Convention theme was “A Lifetime of Fighting for Children and Families”. But this was how Hillary Clinton’s “fight” for children and families really began. And Tuesday’s highlight was an address by a career sexual predator whom she covered up for and whose victims she smeared.

That sexual predator was her husband, Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton put even more women through hell than Hillary did. And he isn’t done just yet. Amid the freakshow of the Carter mummy phoning in, the mothers of criminals, random mildly famous celebrities, the Sandernista walkout and Howard Dean doing the scream that ended his career one more time, the other Clinton took the stage.

In an evening featuring discussions about sex trafficking, the highlight was a sexual predator. In an evening that featured 9/11 victims, the highlight was the man who left America vulnerable to 9/11 and refused to take out Osama bin Laden.

And Bill being Bill, the lying didn’t take too long to get started.

Bill Clinton told the hooting and yapping DNC audience that Hillary Clinton wanted to help child abuse victims. But a child rape victim back home knows the truth and we know the truth. He got up on stage and lied again about the Children’s Health Insurance Program, one of those things which, like bringing peace to Northern Ireland and landing under fire in Bosnia, Hillary Clinton can’t stop lying about.

In Bill Clinton’s new version, Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch didn’t exist and Hillary Clinton got it all done.

But the Clintons always have a thousand new versions of every lie that they tell. And Bill’s entire speech was one big lie. The version of Hillary Clinton that he describes, an obsessive crusader for children who is also a devoted wife and mother has only one tiny problem with it. It’s an expert work of fiction.

On Friday, Hillary Clinton’s choice of Tim Kaine as her running mate projected confidence. By Monday, it looked more like overconfidence.

For more than a month, Mrs. Clinton and her allies have been running campaign ads in battleground states, and Mr. Kaine, a senator from one such state (Virginia), is a potential plus in nearly all of them. His bilingualism could enhance her appeal among Hispanic voters in places like Florida and Colorado. His Roman Catholicism could help her in swing states with large Catholic populations such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. As a former governor of Virginia, Mr. Kaine brings executive experience and regional appeal in adjacent North Carolina, a state that Barack Obama carried in 2008 and that could be in play again this cycle.

Tapping Mr. Kaine also demonstrated that Mrs. Clinton was looking past Election Day. The senator has been a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and is respected on both sides of the aisle, which could come in handy if Democrats win the White House but not control of the House and Senate. Mrs. Clinton wanted someone with a centrist reputation who could increase her appeal among independent voters and disaffected Republicans who can’t stomach Donald Trump.

But for the Kaine choice to be met with minimum blowback, at least two preconditions had to be met. First, supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist who dogged Mrs. Clinton all the way to this week’s Philadelphia convention, had to be sufficiently appeased. Second, Mrs. Clinton had to convince throngs of liberal activists obsessed with racial and ethnic diversity that her choice of a white male was not a snub. This is where Team Clinton may have become too confident. CONTINUE AT SITE

Many have weighed in on whether Donald Trump’s agendas — to the extent that they are different from what are now ratified Republican policies — are crackpot, unworkable, or radical: e.g., building a wall to enhance border enforcement (“And make Mexico pay for it!”), renegotiating trade deals with China, promoting Jacksonian nationalism rather than ecumenical internationalism, suspending immigration from Middle East war zones (after Trump dropped his call for complete Muslim exclusion), and disparaging an Eastern-corridor elite that derives privilege from the intersection of big politics, money, and the media.

No doubt, some of Trump’s flamboyant invective is isolationist, nativist, and protectionist. Certainly, we are in the strangest campaign of the last half-century, in which members of Trump’s own party are among his fiercest critics. In contrast, the ABC/NBC/CBS Sunday-morning liberal pundits feel no need to adopt NeverHillary advocacy. They apparently share little “Not in my name” compunction over “owning” her two decades of serial lying, her violations of basic ethical and legal protocols as secretary of state, her investment in what can be fairly termed a vast Clinton pay-to-play influence-peddling syndicate, and the general corruption of the Democratic primary process.

Amid the anguish over the Trump candidacy, we often forget that the present age of Obama is already more radical than most of what even Trump has blustered about. We live in a country for all practical purposes without an enforceable southern border. Over 300 local and state jurisdictions have declared themselves immune from federal immigration laws — all without much consequence and without worry that a similar principle of nullification was the basis of the American Civil War or that other, more conservative cities could in theory follow their lead and declare themselves exempt from EPA jurisdiction or federal gun-registration laws. Confederate nullification is accepted as the new normal, and, strangely, its antithesis of border enforcement and adherence to settled law is deemed xenophobic, nativist, and racist.

To understand the sheer scale of the Democratic national-security collapse, ponder this horrible fact: In the 2012 presidential election, for two months the key debate was whether the murder of four Americans in Benghazi meant that President Obama was exaggerating his success against al Qaeda. In 2016, the news cycle has already moved on from the murder of 49 Americans in Orlando six weeks ago.

It’s moved on in part because of terror attacks that have killed more than 100 men, women, and children in France, Germany, and Turkey. In the last two months, terrorists have used guns, axes, knives, bombs, and even a truck to snuff out the lives of innocents in great cities on three continents. In the last year, jihadists have killed or injured Americans in Tennessee, California, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

Terror has become the new normal. We can’t dwell on the Chattanooga shootings because San Bernardino happened. We can’t dwell on San Bernardino because Orlando happened. In Europe, we can’t dwell on Paris because Brussels happened. We can’t dwell on Brussels because Istanbul happened. We can’t dwell on Istanbul because Nice happened. We can’t dwell on Nice because Munich happened.

And to think, last week the media actually mocked Republicans for emphasizing the terror threat. Yet the media is only following President Obama’s lead. This is a man, after all, who minimizes terrorism so much that he’s fond of describing bathtubs as a greater threat than ISIS.

Meanwhile, Jihadists are laughing all the way to the bloody bank. Grant them safe havens, and they’ll use their resources to recruit, train, and inspire the next wave of jihadists. Open borders to migrants, and they’ll infiltrate the ranks of refugees. Treat any concern about terror as “Islamophobia,” and they’ll exploit the resulting complacency and political correctness.

Deeply divided Democrats spent the first day of their unruly convention here desperately trying to reassure everyone that their fractured, out-of-touch party is united heading into the November election.

The chaotic convention begins after a hotly contested primary season and as signs emerge that Republican Donald Trump could be cruising to victory in November. Famed statistician Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight said if the election had been held yesterday, Trump would have had a 57.5 percent chance of winning the presidency versus Clinton’s 42.5 percent. According to Silver’s “Now-cast” model, Trump would win the battleground states of Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

“Don’t think people are really grasping how plausible it is that Trump could become president. It’s a close election right now,” Silver tweeted July 22.

Bernie Sanders supporters made their displeasure known, booing and interrupting speeches for hours. They even booed and chanted “Bernie” during the opening invocation.

Their fanatical devotion makes sense. As Jamie Weinstein of the Daily Caller astutely observed a few hours later on Fox News Channel, to his followers Sanders is more like a religious figure than a politician.

In the early part of the first day of the convention, loud boos rang out over and over again when Hillary Clinton or running-mate Tim Kaine’s names were mentioned. Sometimes the boos drowned out the speakers. Some angry Bernie Sanders supporters taped their mouths shut to protest how the party treated their candidate. At other times, the noise generated by Sanders delegates shook the Wells Fargo Center.

In Philadelphia the official theme of Day One was “United Together,” which ought to set off alarm bells.

The statement about party unity, it turns out, was aspirational, not factual. Monday was a down-and-dirty, raucous affair. Delegates sat through seven hours of speeches, live music, and videos extolling the virtues of Clinton and ridiculing Trump. Throughout the home base of the Philadelphia Flyers, 76ers, and Soul, there are “all-gender” bathrooms. Delegates displayed smartalecky signs reading “love trumps hate.”

Protesters arrived in seemingly greater numbers than at the GOP convention in Cleveland last week. They were angrier and more physically aggressive than in Cleveland. More than 50 of them associated with something called Democracy Spring were detained by police and issued citations for disorderly conduct. Some held a sit-in at an entry point to the convention site while others climbed barricades erected for crowd control.

And inside the convention hall the knives were out for those who resisted the so-called revolution led by Sanders, a self-described socialist.

As the City of Brotherly Love roasted in 100-degree heat, Democrats unceremoniously dumped the administrative head of the party, Democratic National Committee chairman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. She had been booed by fellow Democrats at events leading up to the convention — and for good reason.

In Hillary’s term at State, wealthy crooks, influence-seekers and tyrannical governments rushed to donate millions to the Clinton Foundation, its spin-offs, Bill Clinton personally or vague combinations of all/any of them. Figuring large on the donor list, Australia’s taxpayers.
Australian governments’ $85 million aid to the Clinton Foundation is a bit surprising, given that ex-President Bill and presidential candidate Hillary are synonyms for financial and personal sleaze. That total sum was paid by both Coalition and Labor governments over the past decade. Coalition and Labor have also despatched and committed $460m to the Clinton-affiliated Global Partnership for Education, chaired by our ex-PM Julia Gillard. Abbott’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop threw Gillard’s show a lazy $140 million of taxpayer money in 2014, no questions asked. That aid was in the teeth of Gillard’s lusty presidential campaigning for Hillary against Trump.

Ostensibly charitable, the Clinton Foundation is the centerpiece of the couple’s amassing of a vast personal fortune. Bill was president from 1993-01. Hillary was Secretary of State for Obama from 2009-13.

In Hillary’s term at State, every variety of wealthy crook, influence-seeker and tyrannical government rushed to “donate” millions to the Clinton Foundation, its spin-offs, Bill Clinton personally or vague combinations of all/any of them. Lots of those crooked donors later scored disgrace, convictions and/or gaol on unrelated matters. Amid the sleaze, of course, the Clinton Foundation did manage to do some genuine charity work.

The Australian’s Greg Sheridan reported last February that the Coalition and Labor governments aided the Clinton foundations by more than $75 million in the past decade. The aid was via partnerships with the Clintons’ outfit as ‘technical implementing partner’. There are still three deals involving the foundations aiding Indonesia, PNG and Vietnam. Australia appears to be the biggest single foreign-government source of Clinton Foundation funds, he said. Annual aid has ranged from $6.5 million to a peak $10.3 million in 2012-13, the final Labor year.

However, Sheridan and/or his US source overlooked $10 million in a direct donation by a Rudd government entity to the Clinton Foundation in 2009-10. Rudd in 2008 set up the Global CCS Institute for research into carbon capture and storage with $100 million of taxpayer money. “The Institute provided AU$10 million to the Clinton Foundation to support the work being conducted through the Clinton Climate Initiative to accelerate key ‘early mover’ CCS projects around the world,” the Institute said.

According to the ABC, Rudd’s little venture actually involved a further commitment of $215m, at the rate of $100m a year. Other countries were supposed to tip in money too but by 2012 that amounted to a tiny $4.5m from the US and EU. The Institute itself had no idea what to spend its money on, actually complaining to the ABC that “the Rudd Government funding was too much, too soon.” After two years, Rudd’s institute had spent $7.4 million on travel and meetings, $11.3 million on contractors and consultants, and almost $6 million on administration. It had donated only $37m to carbon capture projects around the world but had $145m sitting idle in the bank. The $10 million thrown to the Clinton Foundation appears to be part of the institute’s desperate attempts to spend its piggy bank. Carbon capture of course has proved to be a total turkey.