RUTHFULLY YOURS

Inside the Beltway and along the Washington-to-Boston corridor, #NeverTrump has won the hearts and minds of conservative intellectuals and the high-toned media. The dissenters—yes, there are some—make a lot less noise.

But move away from the East Coast and it’s a different story. Out there, the conservative intelligentsia isn’t aligned against Donald Trump—quite the contrary. Roger L. Simon, the screenwriter, novelist, and former CEO of PJ Media, predicted last August that Trump would win the presidency. Nine months later, in May, he wrote that “it still holds true.”

“Like others, I want things to change .  .  . and Donald seems like the man with the courage and will to do it,” Simon writes. “He’s unafraid. He’s upbeat. He’s funny. He despises political correctness (as anybody with a brain does). .  .  . I can think of no greater antidote to Obama than a Trump presidency.”

Simon is only the most enthusiastic of the conservative highbrows not mired in the East who have grappled with the Trump phenomenon. Their views cover a wide range: from mere opposition to #NeverTrump to mildly pro-Trump to recognition of Trump’s strengths to disclosing they intend to vote for him.

Dennis Prager, the L.A.-based syndicated talk radio host and columnist, said when the presidential debates started “that if Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, I will vote for him over Hillary Clinton, or any Democrat for that matter.” Last week, he took on #NeverTrump conservatives.

He disputed their “conscience” argument. “I don’t find it compelling because it means that your conscience is clear after making it possible for Clinton or any other Democrat to win,” he writes. “But if you wish to vanquish the bad, it’s not possible—at least not on this side of the afterlife—to remain pure.”

The most sweeping and impressive appraisal of Trump appears in the spring issue of the Claremont Review of Books, written by its editor Charles Kesler, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University. Kesler, too, disses the #NeverTrump movement. “Conservatives care too much about the party and the country to wash our hands of this election,” he writes. “A third party bid would be quixotic.”

Two people are currently vying for the highest office in the world: one an alleged criminal with no achievements to her name during a lifetime of public disservice save for audaciously and adroitly “monetizing” her political capital; and the other a demagogic, narcissistic lothario with no apparent ideological principles but an unquenchable thirst for power and self-aggrandizement during a lifetime of public showmanship — one whose populist appeal stems largely from proposing politically incorrect policies (from which he has readily backed away when challenged).

One would think that such a contest might cause Americans to take pause and think through just how it is that in a nation of over 300 million people, either Hillary Rodham Clinton or Donald J. Trump will be the next steward of the republic.

Sure, one could make the case that Hillary and Donald are representative of 21st century America: Clinton as an identity politics-playing “victim” who has made an art of achieving higher and higher offices without accomplishment as is emblematic of our societal move towards politics over merit; and Trump as a reality TV star who has made millions of Americans part of the show, and who like many actors in the American economy has made his fortune off of an “asset-lite” strategy built on leverage and brand value.

But this cynical view aside, a rational response to Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump might entail asking some fundamental questions about politics itself — fundamental questions that are ignored in the day-to-day hurly-burly of a campaign in the era of social media.

There are three deeper questions for those who lament our current predicament:

Why is it that politics seems to reward most those who are so personally flawed and power-hungry?
Why do those who are so personally flawed and power-hungry seek out high office in the first place?
Given these political realities, would we not want to limit the power of the state and thus the appeal of public office to such people?

If you want to win election and stay in office, your singular goal is to ensure 50 percent-plus-one support at all costs.

In evaluating Hillary Clinton’s competence, a good place to start is to take a close look at her tour of duty as Secretary of State. Is the U.S. safer and/or held in higher regard around the world as a result of her efforts?

Perhaps it might be worthwhile to note why she got that appointment: Not because of either her acumen or experience. Rather it was Barack Obama extending the olive branch in order to bring a fractured Democratic Party together — fractured because of a very heated and divisive Democrat primary.

That said, even a cursory examination of her service in this position yields up a resoundingly negative answer to that question. As has already been frequently noted, her tour began with her screwing up the Russian reset button, and it ended with her Benghazi dereliction, leading to the death of 4 Americans. What happened in between these bookends, and what are the consequences of those happenings?

Let’s start with the Middle East, that boiling cauldron of infidel hatred. Syria, where, you may recall, President Obama drew a red line (apparently in invisible ink) should Assad use chemical weapons against the insurrectionists, is in chaos — after Syria did use chemical weapons and Obama failed to act on his red line. And now, long after Obama declared the importance of taking down the Assad government, Russia is in the country, providing support for Assad remaining in power (and thereby providing the Russians with a Mediterranean access).

Donald Trump seems to have offended almost every possible identity group. But the New York billionaire still also seems to appeal to the working classes (in part no doubt precisely because he has offended so many special-interest factions; in part because he was seen in the primaries as an outsider using his own money; in part because he seems a crude man of action who dislikes most of those of whom Middle America is tired). At this point, his best hope in November, to the extent such a hope exists, rests on turning 2016 into a referendum on class and a collective national interest that transcends race and gender — and on emphasizing the sad fact that America works now mostly for an elite, best epitomized by Clinton, Inc.

We should not underestimate the opportunities for approaching traditional issues from radically different perspectives. The National Rifle Association is running the most effective ads in its history, hitting elites who wish to curtail gun ownership on the part of those who are not afforded the security blankets of the wealthy. Why should not an inner-city resident wish to buy a legal weapon, when armed security guards patrol America’s far safer gated communities? For most of the Clintons’ adult lives, they have been accompanied by men and women with concealed weapons to ensure their safety — on the premise that firearms, not mace, not Tasers, not knives or clubs, alone would ultimately keep the two safe.

Fracking provides jobs and cheaper fuel; the elites of the Democratic party care about neither. Indeed, Barack Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu proclaimed their desire for spiraling gas and electricity prices. Boutique environmentalism is a losing issue for the Democrats. The very wealthy can afford to be more concerned for a three-inch smelt than for irrigation water that will ensure that there are jobs for tractor drivers and affordable food for the less-well-off. When Hillary Clinton talks about putting miners out of work, she’s talking about people she has no desire to see unless she needs their votes.

“I’m not a crook.”

In 1973 the sitting president, Richard Nixon, used these words at a news conference to deny allegations he had profited off his public service.

In 2016 an aspiring president, Hillary Clinton, as part of her campaign for the White House, is advancing an aggressive variant of the Nixon defense. It runs like this: Anything that isn’t criminal is permissible—and therefore none of it should be disqualifying for the Oval Office.

This has become the go-to argument for Team Clinton these days. Thus Maryland Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings was quick out of the box last week when the State Department’s inspector general released a damning report finding that then-Secretary of State Clinton had defied the department’s rules by setting up her private email server. Mr. Cummings, ABC News said, pointed out that the inspector general’s report “does not accuse Clinton of any crime.” The implication is that it therefore doesn’t matter.

Chalk it up as one legacy of the first Clinton presidency, which has prepared the way for the second. Because by refusing to resign after being caught out in an affair with an intern, President Bill Clinton successfully lowered the bar for would-be President Hillary.

In his fight to remain in office, Mr. Clinton’s argument was that because sex between two consenting adults—even between the president of the United States and a subordinate 27 years his junior—wasn’t a crime, it was nobody’s business but his and his family’s. In this brave new world, even perjury turned out not to be a crime when Bill Clinton did it, because it was about sex.

Today the No Crime/No Foul defense defines the case for Mrs. Clinton. And she and her defenders have been invoking it for years:

“There were no criminal violations involved here.” The speaker was Clinton Budget Director Leon Panetta in July 1993, putting forward the White House party line on the firing of seven people in the travel office, in which some had detected Hillary’s hand. Three years later, an internal memo would surface confirming Mrs. Clinton as the force behind the sackings.

“As far as even a breath of criminal activity by either the president and the first lady, it will turn out to be nothing at all.” This time it was White House counsel Lloyd Cutler in March 1994, dismissing the inquiry into the smelly Whitewater land deal. The remark came at the same time Mrs. Clinton was explaining to the press that she hadn’t been forthcoming about the details because she had been trying to protect her family’s privacy. CONTINUE AT SITE

Oh Puleez! The Clintons take the Olympic gold in chicanery, lying, and fraud…..you don’t have to like or vote for Trump…..but nothing beats Hillary for prevarication and poor judgement with respect to Israel (Max Blumenthal’s e-mails), trying to overthrow democracy in Honduras, resetting the button with Russia, Benghazi, blind spots on North Korea, and mum on global jihad….rsk
The other day I briefly caught sight of—who else?— Donald Trump, on—what else?—“The O’Reilly Factor,” talking about the Middle East. The presumptive Republican nominee was airing his opinion that we “should have never gone into Iraq, but when we got out we should have kept the oil.”

Kept the oil? Like, slipped it in our pocket on the way out?

This wasn’t the first time Mr. Trump has expounded on this theme, and frequent repetition has not made his views any more coherent. Mr. Trump says we ought to steer clear of the Middle East’s imbroglios—but then says we should seize its oil fields. He lambastes our allies as freeloaders and military nincompoops who throw down their arms at the first sign of danger—but then says he would expect these same allies to provide perimeter defense for the oil fields we’ve stolen from them.

Point out these contradictions to the candidate, and he’s likely to rejoin that you’re a loser who’s been wrong about everything and doesn’t understand the art of leadership. Point them out to his admirers and apologists, and they’ll say you’re missing the deeper point, which is that Mr. Trump is reflecting the anger of everyday Americans who want a pragmatist in the White House whose instinct is to put America first and negotiate the details later.

What you won’t get is a satisfactory response to the basic question: How, other than massively garrisoning the Middle East, does Mr. Trump propose to keep the oil?

There was a time when there was a price to be paid in American politics for evading questions. “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Sen. Howard Baker famously asked in 1973 of Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal. The country never got a believable answer from the White House, and Nixon resigned the presidency the following year.CONTINUE AT SITE

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, Bill Kristol doubled down on his betrayal of this country with a pair of tweets:

“Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate — an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance,” Kristol tweeted.

He also said, “Those accused of betraying GOP by opposing Trump can take heart from P. Henry 251 years ago today: ‘If this be treason, make the most of it!’”

This fatuous invocation of an American patriot to justify the betrayal typifies the arrogant disregard for political realities shared by all those involved in a defection that could produce even greater disasters than the Obama era’s 400,000 deaths by jihad and 20 million refugees across the Middle East.

A week earlier, a “Never Trump” diatribe appeared in National Review, written by Charles Murray. To summarize why “Trump is unfit outside the normal parameters” to be president, Murray cited these words by NY Times columnist David Brooks:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa … He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12.

This is a perfect instance of “Trump derangement syndrome,” the underlying animus that motivates Kristol and his destructive cohorts. Dismissing Trump as an ignoramus and a stunted twelve-year-old is the stuff of schoolyard put-downs, not a serious critique of someone with Trump’s considerable achievements. Yet this is typical of Trump’s diehard opponents on the right. Is Trump more unprepared than Barack Obama whose qualification for the presidency was a lifetime career as a left-wing agitator? And how did that work out? Despite the lacunae in his executive resume, Obama is now regarded as “one of the most consequential presidents in American history” by reasonably qualified experts.

Can Trump be reasonably criticized, and is he something of a loose cannon? Of course he can, and yes he is. But criticisms that focus exclusively on the candidate miss the larger reality of this election, which is not merely a contest between two candidates but a clash between two parties and constituencies with radically differing views of what this country is and should be about, and even more importantly about the threats we face and how to deal with them.

When I think about the slow and inexorable––but, of course, inevitable––political demise of Hillary Clinton, I am reminded of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men,” which ends with this haunting refrain:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Hillary’s whimper, it seems clear, will come with an impotently furious last gasp, as the noose that Barack Obama has placed around her neck tightens and tightens and tightens until all we hear is her spasmodic cough, a few hoarse protestations, and a final pitiful bleat––and not the ear-splitting assault of “that voice,” which I described in a previous article.

How could this happen to the woman who former Democrat House Ways and Means Committee Chairman and convicted felon Dan Rostenkowski called “the smartest woman in the world”?

No doubt it started at Wellesley College where Hillary, born to a family of Republicans and an avid supporter herself of the1964 arch-conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, as well as the president of the Wellesley College chapter of College Republicans, was irresistibly attracted to the writings of radical leftist Saul Alinsky, of Rules for Radicals fame, who she wrote her thesis about and also kept in close touch with for years after she graduated.

At her graduation in 1969, Republican Senator Edward Brooke delivered a stirring and enthusiastically received commencement address. Hillary––whose graduation speech followed––exhibited a shocking display of rudeness when she slammed the first black senator to be elected to the U.S. Senate. It would not be the last time she displayed a remarkable aptitude for alienating an audience.

At Yale Law School, she hooked her wagon to the star of fellow student Bill Clinton, and when the roguish good ole boy became governor of Arkansas, Hillary served 12 years as the state’s First Lady, racking up an impressive list of scandals of her very own. The short list includes:

A $100,000 windfall from cattle futures after a $1,000 investment (all the money she had in her account at the time).
The Castle Grande real estate scam.
Her role as attorney for the Rose law firm in what would become the putatively criminal Whitewater affair that would follow her to the White House.
The serial philandering of her husband in which she was either a willing collaborator or, as Donald Trump has said, an “enabler.”

THE SCANDAL QUEEN MOVES UP

Within months of taking up residence in the White House as First Lady of the United States, Hillary put her scandal expertise to work. In May 1993, she was accused of having a central hand in firing several long-time employees of the White House Travel Office in order to give the pricey travel business to her Hollywood pals. A couple of months later, in July 1993, White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster was said to have committed suicide, although the case for this murder has been made persuasively by, among others, Newsmax.com founder Christopher Ruddy, in his 1993 book, “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation.”

“Antisemitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That’s why antisemitism is becoming an issue.”

–Noam Chomsky, 2002.

“Over 99 percent of all new income generated in the economy has gone to the top 1 percent.”

—Bernie Sanders, 2016.

In mid-April of this year the exigencies of an impending primary election in New York, where he lagged far behind Hillary Clinton among likely Jewish Democratic voters, forced Bernie Sanders to suspend his national Jewish “outreach” coordinator—one Simone Zimmerman. It was revealed that her ostensibly warm Jewish heart had a very cold spot reserved for Israel. That he had appointed such a person to such a position in the first place was a true indication of where Sanders’ own sympathies lay. Any uncertainty about this was put to rest in a debate in Brooklyn where he said: “I believe the United States and the rest of the world have got to work together to help the Palestinian people.” He is now practicing what he preached.

No sooner did a desperate Hillary Clinton direct the head of the DNC to bestow upon Sanders five of the fifteen positions on the Democratic Party’s platform committee than he hastened to fill two of them with well-known Israel-haters, or what he calls “helpers” of the Palestinian people, and a third with a politician who is a convert to Islam and once recommended Louis Farrakhan as “a role model for black youth,” and “not an anti-Semite.” Sanders has in the past displayed unseemly envy and sycophantic admiration of foreign countries—the socialism of Sweden, the dictatorship of Nicaragua, the health care of Cuba, the charms of Yaroslavl as honeymoon site and sister city to Burlington, Vermont. But these appointments reveal not only his belief that the key to American foreign policy is the Arab-Israeli conflict, but that Israel’s “intransigence” is the cause of the manifold miseries of the Middle East—a view that even the State Department and its most dogmatic peace-processors have finally, albeit with great sadness, abandoned.

While the State Department’s own internal probe found former Secretary Hillary Clinton violated federal recordkeeping laws, it’s not the first time she and her top aides shielded her e-mail from public disclosure while serving in a government position.

As first lady, Hillary was embroiled in another scheme to bury sensitive White House e-mails, known internally as “Project X.”

In 1999, as investigators looked into Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and other scandals involving the then-first lady, it was discovered that more than 1 million subpoenaed e-mails were mysteriously “lost” due to a “glitch” in a West Wing computer server.

The massive hole in White House archives covered a critical two-year period — 1996 to 1998 — when Republicans and special prosecutor Ken Starr were subpoenaing White House e-mails.

Despite separate congressional investigations and a federal lawsuit over Project X, high-level e-mails dealing with several scandals were never turned over. And the full scope of Bill and Hillary Clintons’ culpability in the parade of scandals was never known.

To those well-versed in Clinton shenanigans, this all sounds distressingly familiar.