RUTHFULLY YOURS

The attacks on Trump supporters at a rally in San Jose last week were another example of the left’s violent assaults on free speech and association. Before the election there is likely to be more thuggery, as an emboldened left lets slip their dogs of war to foment disorder to continue Obama’s aim to “fundamentally transform” America. As the long history of political philosophy teaches, this undermining of law by violence is an important sign of democracy’s impending doom.

Over 2100 years ago, the Greek historian Polybius described how democracy dies:

So when [the rich] begin to hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits, they begin to seduce and corrupt the people in every possible way, and thus ruin their estates. The result is that through their senseless craving for prominence they stimulate among the masses both an appetite for bribes and the habit of receiving them, and then the rule of democracy is transformed into government by violence and strong-arm methods. By this time the people have become accustomed to feed at the expense of others, and their prospects of winning a livelihood depend upon the property of their neighbors, and as soon as they find a leader who is sufficiently ambitious and daring . . . they introduce a regime based on violence.

It takes only a few revisions reflecting the modern world to see how closely Polybius’s analysis describes how the ideology and policy of the progressives are degrading America’s democratic republic.

First, the progressives have “seduced and corrupted” the people not, like the aspiring tyrants of old, by spending their own money, but by redistributing the property of other citizens via the 16th Amendment, which instituted the federal income tax. Over the next century the funds appropriated by the IRS have financed the “bribes” for the people: the various social welfare programs and transfers that relentlessly have escalated in number, scope, and cost––in 2014 these programs ate up two-thirds of the federal budget.

These transfers have indeed “stimulated” both the “appetite” of the people for even more government programs, and the “habit” of receiving them. That is why today the biggest problem facing our economy––the unsustainable entitlement spending that threatens in decades to gobble up every dollar collected by the feds––got only cursory attention in all the speeches of the presidential candidates from both parties. Indeed, the Democrats want to create even more programs and spend even more money on these “bribes.”

Looking at the morning paper last Monday gave me a start, and not just because color photos of a wild-eyed Hillary Clinton with a pasted on smile still shock. The Washington Post headline screamed that Hillary had won the Democratic nomination, with stories following on the “historic” achievement. What’s this? I thought – did I sleep for three days? Is it Wednesday, with the results from the California primary already in?

The Post along with the rest of the mainstream media anointed Clinton the winner without giving poor Bernie Sanders a last-gasp West Coast chance. And, generally speaking, what critical analysis there was about Hillary’s sudden historic victory assumed that it was created by unallocated superdelegates to pre-empt a possible Sanders victory in California. That is almost certainly true. The other thing Clinton and her supporters in the media want to do by anointing her as early as possible is to pre-empt Hillary’s other nemesis, the FBI.

There was never much doubt that Hillary would win the nomination even if Sanders pulled out a victory in California. So whatever damage control the early victory announcement produced would have been cosmetic in any event. However, with respect to the FBI’s ongoing investigation of Clinton’s home-brewed email server, the stakes are far higher and the early claim of victory more significant. The FBI is investigating likely violations of federal laws governing official record-keeping, maintaining classified information, evidence-tampering, obstruction of justice, and possible pay-for-play bribery through the Clinton foundation. Prosecution of any one of these infractions could reroute Hillary’s march to the Oval Office into a penitentiary.

Hillary knows that actual prosecution by the Obama administration’s Justice Department is a very long shot, even assuming that the FBI refers charges. Nonetheless, the mere referral of charges by the FBI to Justice would damage her campaign and increase doubt among a voting public that already overwhelmingly regards her as dishonest.

What FBI director James Comey intends is perhaps the greatest conundrum in Washington these days. Is he playing Hamlet to Hillary’s Claudius, introspective, doubtful, and unwilling to strike the killing blow? Is he just being a careful apolitical policeman? Or is he a political hack who will do what’s best for Jim Comey? Perhaps it’s a bit of all three. Whatever the truth, it is in Hillary’s best interest to discourage Comey as much as possible. Her early claim to be the Democrat nominee serves that purpose.

If Comey is an honest policeman, the best time for him to have acted was before Hillary claimed the nomination. Then he would only have been referring charges against another – albeit notorious – private citizen. After the nomination, Hillary becomes not only the standard bearer of one of America’s two great political parties, but a “historic” figure as the first woman to do so. As such, it behooved both Hillary and her backers in the media to reach that point ASAP.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Democratic Party’s platform drafting committee tussled over whether to use the word “occupation” in addressing the Israeli-Palestinian issue, reflecting divisions between the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton camps that could play out at the convention.

The Democratic National Committee held two days of open hearings this week in Washington, D.C., on the platform, inviting experts to testify. The hearings, which will also take place in other cities, got underway the same week that it became clear that Clinton had secured her position as the party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

Much of the back and forth Thursday afternoon, when the committee considered foreign policy, was about whether the committee should describe Israel’s presence in the West Bank as an “occupation.”

Sanders, the Independent senator from Vermont who remains in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, appointed five members to the 15-member committee, including three who have advocated for Palestinian rights in the past: Cornel West, a philosopher who backs for the boycott Israel movement; James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, and Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn. Clinton appointed six committee members.

West said during the hearing that the party’s platform should include the word “occupation,” suggesting that to do otherwise would mean being “beholden” to American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC staffers were in the room, as were staffers from other pro-Israel groups, including J Street.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal revealed that the FBI’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information was zeroing in on “a series of e-mails between American diplomats in Islamabad and their superiors in Washington about whether to oppose specific drone strikes in Pakistan.” The Journal noted that the e-mails were “vaguely worded” and sent within the “often-narrow time frame” when State Department officials had an opportunity to object to CIA drone strikes.

Before we go on, let’s revisit Clinton’s words from August 26, 2015. Back then, she declared that, “I did not send classified material and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified, which is the way you know whether something is.”

This was a classic Clintonian defense, resting as it did on a largely irrelevant straw man – if she did not receive information “marked” or “designated” classified, and such designations are “the way you know” something is classified, then she never knowingly mishandled classified information. Yet as I (and many others) have pointed out before, Clinton’s actual legal obligation was to safeguard marked and unmarked classified information, and to fulfill that obligation she would necessarily have to know the classification of everything she handled, whether it was marked or not.

That isn’t always a particularly difficult task. When it comes to drone strikes and many other sensitive issues, it is remarkably easy to determine whether information is or should be classified. And as you read the Journal article, it becomes quite clear that all parties knew drone-strike information was classified, yet they were doing their best to evade classification requirements for the sake of speed and convenience.

The picture the Journal paints is appalling. For example, in one instance an ambassador sent a “short, cryptic note” just before Christmas indicating a drone strike was imminent, triggering a conversation among Clinton advisers “over the next few days, in which it was clear they were having the discussions in part because people were away from their offices for the holiday and didn’t have access to a classified computer.” (Emphasis added.)

No doubt it’s inconvenient to disturb Christmas festivities for the sake of national security, but the idea that classification rules should be bent to accommodate holiday plans is absurd, and it mocks the sacrifice of countless service members and other members of the national-security establishment who actually observe the rules. To substitute the use of classified computers for unsecured communications using ad hoc vague wordings as some form of primitive code is dangerously amateurish and very likely criminal.

You can set your watch by it: Whenever a scandal arises or intensifies in the scandal-plagued Obama administration, alarms go off calling for a “special prosecutor,” and I am constrained to respond (see, e.g., here) that this well-intentioned idea is a bad one. So it is with what even the Obama White House now concedes is the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton.

Here at National Review, Dan McLaughlin renews the call for President Obama to appoint a “special prosecutor” to take over the criminal investigation of the former secretary of state and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Echoing the Transom’s Ben Domenech, he contends that Obama’s endorsement of Clinton’s candidacy, announced on Thursday, is somehow a game changer.

While I have great respect for both of these thoughtful commentators, I could not disagree more. Special prosecutors are unconstitutional if truly independent, and counterproductive if not so. They are a poor excuse for avoiding the Constitution’s remedy for corrupt public officials: impeachment and disqualification. Moreover, it is simply not true that Obama’s endorsement of Clinton meaningfully ratchets up his conflict of interest; that conflict was already profound because we have known for months that Obama is implicated in Clinton’s lawlessness.

Any Prosecutor Appointed by Obama Would Not Be Credibly Independent
To their credit, Messrs. McLaughlin and Domenech avoid the fatal error usually made by “special prosecutor” enthusiasts — the error that explains the scare quotes around the term. When commentators call for a “special prosecutor,” they usually mean an independent prosecutor — as in: independent of the executive branch. As we shall see, however, such an office would be unconstitutional, because prosecution is an executive function.

McLaughlin and Domenech concede that this is a problem but convince themselves that it can be gotten round if President Obama, in a display of great integrity, appoints a credible lawyer who, though technically subordinate to the president, would be given de facto independence to conduct a thorough, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may investigation. It would be hard to fathom a suggestion more removed from reality.

Obama has not only presided over a Justice Department so corrupt and politicized it would make the Nixon administration blush. He is, to repeat, complicit in Mrs. Clinton’s misconduct (a point we’ll cover in a bit). It is simply preposterous to believe that, after governing lawlessly for seven and a half years, Obama would suddenly transform into a pillar of rectitude who unleashes a credible, truly independent investigation of Clinton that could cost his party the presidency while besmirching his legacy.

In an infamous remark that made her seem both a naif and a snob, the New Yorker magazine movie critic Pauline Kael said in 1972, after the presidential election: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon.” Although I would sooner have my thumbs removed than vote for Donald Trump, I do know four people who claim that they are going to vote to make him president of the United States.

One is intellectually sophisticated, a product of Yale and the Harvard Law School, the author of many books. Economistic in his thinking, he tells me that he plans to vote for Mr. Trump because after eight years of economic slump under President Obama, he believes that the Republican soon-to-be-nominee and self-acclaimed successful businessman will shake things up. Two other of the Trump backers I know are themselves businessmen, happy Philistines both, who are not in the least put off by the essential Trump coarseness, the absence in him of the least tincture of culture, historical knowledge or humility. My last Trump voter is a man with experience of his own in politics, who worked in the George W. Bush administration and who so deeply loathes the Clintons, mari et l’épouse, that he would vote for a randy mongoose before voting for Mrs. Clinton.

But these are only four voters out of the more than 13 million who bestirred themselves to vote for Donald Trump in the nation’s primary elections. How to account for these millions? Progressives easily enough account for them as racists, fools, thugs, H.L. Mencken’s booboisie, but to a much higher power of ignorance than even Mencken himself, no slouch when it came to contempt for the common people, could have imagined. This interpretation of Mr. Trump’s supporters is, somehow, too easy, and too self-congratulatory.

Something deeper, I believe, is rumbling behind the astounding support for Mr. Trump, a man who, apart from his large but less than pure business success, appears otherwise entirely without qualification for the presidency. I had a hint of what might be behind the support for him a few weeks ago when, on one of the major network news shows, I watched a reporter ask a woman at a Trump rally why she was supporting him. A thoroughly respectable-seeming middle-class woman, she replied without hesitation: “I want my country back.” CONTINUE AT SITE

“The uncomfortable truth for the political class is that in so far as Trump exploits hatred, the principal object of that hatred is not Hispanics, Muslims, women or homosexuals. The hate is aimed squarely at the political class itself. The anger welling up around their ankles is the product of exasperation towards politically correct, morally arrogant, know-it-all, condescending urban sophisticates—people in other words just like themselves.The dominant political and cultural fault line—from Washington to Warsaw to Wangaratta—is not the divide between Left and Right, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, workers and employers, or the haves and the have-nots. It is between insiders and outsiders. It is a clash between the cosmopolitan, socially liberal values of the tertiary-educated elite and the pragmatic, socially conservative outlook of the rest of society.”

The populism that inflicted Clive Palmer on Canberra and has now secured Donald Trump’s presidential nomination is not driven by cheap bigotries, as those it targets would have us believe. Rather, it is a clash between a dominant, insular elite and everyone else