RUTHFULLY YOURS

“As the people become ever more fed up with being treated as impediments and afterthoughts, the ruling elite will find themselves with only two options.They can stop telling people what to do, how to think, how to live and whom to accept as their countrymen. In short, they can stop acting like the soft despots they have become. Or the elite can double down. They can continue down the same path of growing and glorifying the state that has led to the present point of massive mistrust.If they choose to double down, all that lies ahead is more discontent. The world has changed. Typical partisan rifts no longer define the political universe. Any politics that turns a blind eye to the new reality is likely only to stoke a smoldering fire. Because as things now stand, the great unwashed have not yet spoken their full piece. And that should be enough to make any of the governing elite think twice.”

As election season rolls around, prepare to be subjected to near-endless analyses of how America has divided into red and blue camps. There will be hand-wringing about the growing rift and about how people on the left and the right barricade themselves in echo chambers, unwilling to engage with the other side except to cast aspersions and call names.

The pundits who will worry over these things will all have a point. But it won’t be the right point.

We forget that partisan rancor has been much worse in our history. The election of 1800, to pick just one example, demonstrates the point. One of Thomas Jefferson’s surrogates accused President John Adams of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Adams and his friends were arguably worse. Both sides threw thick mud for months.

So partisan rancor is nothing new, and it has rarely reached the depths seen in 1800. Yet, there is a lingering feeling that some kind of gulf is widening in the American electorate. But when future historians write about it, they will place the phenomenon in a global, not a particularly American, context.

Because what we perceive to be a widening gulf between the right and the left is really just the American manifestation of a global disease. And that disease is the widening gulf between the governing elites and their supporters on the one hand, and those they consider the great unwashed on the other.

The Trump and Sanders candidacies rode this wave in the United States, and there was sufficient anger on the part of the unwashed to lock one into the Republican nomination, and carry the other to within striking distance of the Democratic nomination. How palpable is the anger? Donald Trump may well become president of the United States of America for one thing, and he may win that office precisely because of his unwillingness to show a shred of class, not in spite of it. How better to differentiate himself from the spit and polished elites with their carefully constructed, globally acceptable, politically correct attitudes? For his part, Bernie Sanders was cut from the same cloth, though with a slightly higher thread count. He differentiated himself by playing the part of the aging, cranky member of the proletariat.

Supreme Court justices have gotten involved in partisan politics before. Charles Evans Hughes even ran for president. But he resigned from the court before accepting the 1916 Republican presidential nomination. (He returned to the court in 1930, when President Hoover appointed him to succeed Chief Justice William Howard Taft, himself a former president.)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg should have resigned before giving her latest interview, to the New York Times’s Adam Liptak. “Unless they have a book to sell, Supreme Court justices rarely give interviews,” Liptak boasts. “Even then, they diligently avoid political topics.” Ginsburg, he gently observes, “takes a different approach”:

These days, she is making no secret of what she thinks of a certain presidential candidate.

“I can’t imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Donald Trump as our president,” she said. “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be—I don’t even want to contemplate that.”

It reminded her of something her husband, Martin D. Ginsburg, a prominent tax lawyer who died in 2010, would have said.

“‘Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand,’ ” Justice Ginsburg said, smiling ruefully.

“She’d feel right at home there,” quips the New York Sun’s Seth Lipsky. “It turns out that New Zealand doesn’t even have a constitution.” Instead it has a series of statutes called the Constitution Act of 1986. Also New Zealanders drive on the left.

While we’re on the subject, Statistics New Zealand, a government agency, has “busted” the “myth” that the country has 20 sheep for every human inhabitant, a factoid that “adds weight to myriad sheep jokes,” as the Stats NZ website complains. In reality, “the sheep-to-person ratio has fallen and contrary to popular belief there are actually about six sheep per person, not 20.” The site is silent as to how Ginsburg’s immigration would affect the ratio.

Actually, her choice of country is the best thing about Ginsburg’s latest emanations. At least she departed from the tired trope of celebrities’ threatening emptily to move to Canada if a Republican is elected president. But a Supreme Court justice should not be expressing an opinion about an election, unless—as in the case of Bush v. Gore (2000), it becomes necessary for the court to resolve a legal dispute arising from it.

In parliamentary systems, party platforms are blueprints for governance. In the U.S., they reflect the preferences of each party’s base—the activists and interest groups to which the party must pay attention. Changes in party platforms from one election to the next reveal shifts in thinking and—even more—the balance of power within the base as new groups surge and established forces give way.

That is why the 2016 Democratic platform is so significant. The platform committee hasn’t made public the text that will be taken to the Democratic convention in less than two weeks. But at this stage, based on the July 1 draft and 82 amendments to its text adopted by the end of the final platform committee meeting in Orlando, Fla., we know with near-certainty what the platform will say—and what it means.

The party that Hillary Clinton will lead into battle this fall is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party. In important respects it is not even Barack Obama’s Democratic Party. It is a party animated by the frustrations of the Obama years and reshaped by waves of economic and social activism.

Not surprisingly, the document endorses a range of Hillary Clinton’s campaign proposals, including a massive infrastructure-investment program, new incentives for small business, expanded profit-sharing to increase workers’ earnings, a tax on high-frequency financial transactions, paid family and medical leave, an enhanced earned-income tax credit for young workers without children, access to computer-science education for all K-12 students, and measures to make college education more affordable.

Neither is it surprising that the draft incorporates some of Bernie Sanders’s key proposals—most notably, a $15 per hour minimum wage—and that it doesn’t take sides on issues that divided the party, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and a broad tax on financial transactions, where neither side would give way.

In other respects, however, the draft is truly remarkable—for example, its near-silence on economic growth. The uninformed reader would not learn that the pace of recovery from the Great Recession has been anemic by postwar standards, or that productivity gains have slowed to a crawl over the past five years, or that firms have been reluctant to invest in new productive capacity. Rather, the platform draft’s core narrative is inequality, the injustice that inequality entails, and the need to rectify it through redistribution.

Last night the JewishPress.com brought the news that a GOP subcommittee drafted and endorsed a pro-Israel plank that includes every single item on every (truly) pro-Israel wish list, thanks to the hard work of a few lawmakers such as South Caroline State Rep. Alan Clemmons and several pro-Israel organizations, including the Iron Dome Alliance.

But this morning brings more huge news: the full committee endorsed the pro-Israel plank with no changes. And the passage of that adamantly pro-Israel plank was met with a standing ovation by those in the room.

The Republican party ain’t what it used to be, or at least it doesn’t match the anti-Israel party portrait which so many people have tried to peddle.

And what of the Democrats? Jeff Ballabon, chairman of the Iron Dome Alliance, told the JewishPress.com that his coalition has made it very clear that they “would still love for Democrats to accept the same language and will attempt to persuade delegates in light of today’s success but ha[s] little optimism that it would be accepted.”

He said the coalition didn’t want this (strongly pro-Israel) policy to be tied only to one party, “this should be America’s policy,” but the enthusiasm with which the important language was met and embraced by the Republican platform committee speaks volumes.

While rumors have been swirling that the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC has been trying to stop the truly pro-Israel plank from getting out of the station, if they engaged in that effort, it failed.

And if AIPAC did not work to defeat this non-Two State language, it’s a whole new AIPAC world in which Israel is now in control of the best resolution of the various conflicts besieging the Jewish State, rather than bowing its head to dictates from the U.S. It also signals a change in the lobby’s stance regarding the disputed territories, which it has never strongly embraced.

Here is the language of the new Republican Party Platform on Israel:

In the first draft of the 2016 Republican-party platform, references to the two-state solution do not appear. CNN reports the “delegates drafting the Republican National Convention platform approved removing language encouraging a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians.”

An earlier draft had included support for “two democratic states” — the policy of recent Republican and Democratic administrations — but had removed a reference to Palestine included in the GOP platform four years ago. On Monday, the national security subcommittee of the Platform Committee approved an amendment dropping support of a two-state solution, according to four people who were in the room for the discussion. . . . “The U.S. seeks to assist in the establishment of comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East, to be negotiated among those living in the region,” the approved amendment said. “We oppose any measures intended to impose an agreement or to dictate borders or other terms, and call for the immediate termination of all U.S. funding of any entity that attempts to do so.”

The Democratic party platform supports a two-state solution, as it has previously.

What are we to make of this?

Support for a two-state solution has not always been American policy since Israel won the West Bank and Gaza in 1967’s Six-Day War. The initial assumption was that the West Bank would go back to Jordan, and Gaza to Egypt, as part of a “land for peace” deal that would be negotiated between Israel and each of those countries. When I worked in the Reagan administration, Secretary of State George Shultz was explicit in saying we did not favor the creation of a Palestinian state.

And after all, why would we? The Palestine Liberation Organization was led by Yasser Arafat, a terrorist and a thief. Who would want to give him a state? Well, Bill Clinton did. At Camp David in 2000, Clinton tried to broker an agreement between Israel and the PLO chief that would have handed him the West Bank and Gaza. But Arafat said no to Clinton and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.

Karl Marx, in a particularly dyspeptic moment, offered this description of what he dismissed as the lumpen proletariat:

“Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.”

Even Donald Trump’s critics would not go so far as to suggest that his voter base consists of vagabonds, pickpockets or even, ugh, “literati.” But for the longest time, the American media saw the Trump base as an “indefinite, disintegrated mass” of mostly angry, lower-middle-class white males. The early Trump adopters often looked like bikers, with or without jobs. The Trumpen proletariat.

This was the original Trump bedrock, the proles who could look past him saying that John McCain, though tortured for years by the Vietnamese, wasn’t a hero. Even now they’ll blink right by Mr. Trump’s remark this week that Saddam Hussein was “good” at killing terrorists (“they didn’t read them their rights”), despite the unhappy fact that Saddam was a psychopathic, blood-soaked torturer responsible for the deaths of perhaps a half million non-terrorist Iraqi citizens.

(Still, one may ask: When the day after her Comey pardon, Hillary Clinton proposes “free” tuition at public colleges for families earning up to $85,000 a year, and $125,000 by 2021, how come her campaign isn’t universally laughed and mocked off the map?)

The media originally looked upon the emerging Trump base with suspicion and distrust, regarding it as a volatile and possibly dangerous political faction but one that would slip back to the shadows as the Trump candidacy faded.

We are 10 days from the party conventions, and Mr. Trump sits, uneasily as always, close to the polling margin of error against the former Secretary of State, former U.S. senator and former first lady Hillary Clinton. The Trumpen proletariat turns out to be bigger than imagined.

In the nonstop conversation about the 2016 election, the question at the center of everything is whether one is a “Trump supporter.” But if it is true that in this election all the rules have been broken, couldn’t it also be true that Donald Trump has himself become a bystander to the forces set in motion this year? CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton on Wednesday accused Donald Trump of looting his casinos and pillaging Atlantic City, and that was the gracious part. If she’s going to criticize Mr. Trump’s business record, she should also have to defend the failure of Atlantic City’s model of progressive governance.

Democrats aim to rehash the story of how Mr. Trump loaded his casinos with debt and declared bankruptcy four times—stiffing creditors and workers while shielding himself personally—ad nauseam through November. “He doesn’t default and go bankrupt as a last resort,” Mrs. Clinton declared. “He does it over and over again on purpose.” She’s one to talk about incorrigible behavior.

While Mr. Trump may have contributed to Atlantic City’s downward spiral by oversaturating the casino market, it takes more than one man to raze a city. The businessman experienced a moment of lucidity—if only he could expand beyond 140 characters—when he fired back in a tweet that “Democrat pols in Atlantic City made all the wrong moves—Convention Center, Airport—and destroyed City.”

In 1976 New Jersey voters approved a referendum that legalized gambling in Atlantic City. The constitutional amendment required casino revenues to fund programs for senior citizens and disabled residents, but politicians have instead funneled the cash to favored projects and businesses under the guise of promoting development. Guess how that’s turned out?

A 1984 law required casinos to pay 2.5% of gaming revenues to the state or “reinvest” 1.25% in tax-exempt bonds issued by the state Casino Reinvestment Development Authority for state and community “projects that would not attract capital in normal market conditions.” Investment recipients have included Best of Bass Pro shop, Margaritaville and Healthplex.

A decade later, state lawmakers imposed a $1.50 fee (which has since doubled) on casino parking spots to fund Atlantic City transportation, casino construction and a convention center. In 2004 lawmakers added a $3 surcharge for casino hotel stays to finance new hotel rooms and retail establishments, which had the effect of promoting unsustainable commercial and casino development. CONTINUE AT SITE

There has already been a tsunami of commentary about FBI Director James Comey’s remarkable performance today. Director Comey informed the world that he would not recommend that criminal charges be pursued against Hillary Clinton in the matter of her mishandling of classified material on her hombrew email system. There is much disbelief and anguish about this, a lot of it to the point. I think that my friend Andrew McCarthy was particularly astute with his NRO column. The title sums it up: “FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook.”

Andy homes in on the gaping hole at the center of Director Comey’s argument. On the one hand, Director Comey allows that “there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information.” On the other hand, he found “no clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws.”

So, you might be asking yourself, what? As Andy points out,

Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust.

Director Comey admits all this, indeed, he took pains to lay it out carefully. But he concludes that because Hillary Clinton did not intend any harm by her negligent behavior, there were no grounds to recommend prosecution. “Our judgment,” he said, “is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

This makes no sense. Andy:

In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.

How are we to understand Director Comey’s conclusion? Some commentators — my friends James Robbins and Roger L. Simon, for example — argue that Director Comey’s withering assessment will in the end be more damaging than an indictment because he has pointedly drawn attention to Clinton’s recklessness and incompetence. “Did Comey,” Roger asks, “Actually Destroy Hillary Clinton by ‘Exonerating’ Her?”

My sad suspicion is that the answer is “No.” Why? Because that would only be the case if there were sufficient public outrage to call her to account. Is there?

Cast your mind back over the many, many scandals the Clintons have been involved in: Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, cattle futures, Monica Lewinsky, etc., etc. Has anything ever stuck? As far as I know, the answer is “No.” CONTINUE AT SITE