RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

A scathing inspector general’s report this week was just the first in what is likely to be a series of official actions related to her private server stemming from the FBI, a federal courthouse and Capitol Hill.

Clinton’s presidential campaign has failed to quiet the furor over the issue, which has dogged her for more than a year.

In the next few weeks — just as the likely Democratic presidential nominee hopes to pivot towards a general election — it will face its toughest scrutiny yet.

“All of that feeds into this overarching problem of public distrust of her,” said Grant Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University.

“To put it in slang terms, she’s got a pretty deeply held street rep at this point. This fits the street rep,” he added.

The State Department’s watchdog report was especially damaging, given the official nature of its source. The report claimed that Clinton never sought approval for her “homebrew” email setup, that her use of the system violated the department’s record-keeping rules and that it would have been rejected had she brought it up to department officials.

Clinton’s allies attempted to paint the office as partisan in the weeks ahead of the report’s release, but the effort failed to leave a lasting impact.

The list of New York’s legendary crime families — the Bonannos, Colombos, Gambinos, Genoveses, and Luccheses — requires this addition: The Clintons.

Hardly a day passes without Hillary, Bill, or one of their gang landing in hot water. The Clintons’ inner circle teems with people embroiled in scandal, under investigation, or heading into or out of jail.

In a report that surfaced Wednesday, the State Department inspector general pulverized Hillary’s claims that her outlaw e-mail server was perfectly legal. The report said that Hillary “did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”

When staffers warned that her private server was vulnerable to hackers, they were ordered “never to speak of the Secretary’s personal e-mail system again.” Indeed, in a January 9, 2011, e-mail, technology aide Bryan Pagliano wrote, “We were attacked again so I shut [the server] down for a few min.” And when then–deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin suggested that Hillary use government e-mail, she chose personal secrecy over national security: “I don’t want the personal being accessible.”

Earlier in this fiasco, Hillary said, “I’m more than ready to talk to anybody, anytime. And I’ve encouraged all of [my staffers] to be very forthcoming.” Those were mere words. In fact, the report states, “Secretary Clinton declined OIG’s request for an interview,” as did Abedin, then–chief of staff Cheryl Mills, former deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, and four others who served Hillary at State.

Meanwhile, as many as 49 FBI agents are exploring the criminality and possible intelligence damage wrought by Clinton’s Chappaqua server and the 2,115 classified e-mails it contained.

According to Forbes, the Clintons went from — as Hillary put it — “dead broke” in early 2001 to earning $230 million through 2014. This happened while she made between $145,100 and $174,000 annually as a U.S. senator from 2001 to 2009 and $186,600 as secretary of state through 2013.

What’s the Clintons’ secret? They seemingly wrap their fingers in fly paper — to grab as many Benjamins as possible.

While Hillary was at State, Bill was a speech-making machine. He charged up to $750,000 per appearance, often paid by Ericsson, TD Bank, the United Arab Emirates, and other entities with business before the State Department.

‘To Clinton’

We need to make “Clintoning” a thing. (I’d argue the same for Trump, but he brilliantly picked a last name that already means something. If I had his last name, every time I got into a whose-business-card-is-better contest — which is actually never — I’d slap mine down and shout, “That’s the Trump card, bitches.”)

The first problem is there are two Clintons. Back when it was really just Bubba out there, the term would be unavoidably sexual. I’m reminded of Michael Kinsley’s response when the Clinton White House was insisting Bill was simply Monica Lewinsky’s mentor. It went something like, “Yeah, right. I’m sure he mentored her senseless.”

I don’t mean to be unduly harsh — just duly harsh — but Hillary makes any of the limerick-quality double entendres unworkable. That’s particularly unfortunate because Rodham, her maiden name, is particularly well-suited for such associations. “Jeffrey Epstein’s plane was like a Caligulan entourage of Rodhamanites.”

Appetite All the Way Down

The amazing thing about Hillary and Bill Clinton is that they are united by no central idea, no governing philosophy that doesn’t — upon close inspection — boil down to the idea that they should be in charge.

Yes, I know. That’s not what they would say. They would argue that with the right experts in charge, the government can do wonderful things to help people. But what the government should do is constantly changing, according to both of them. Bill once declared, “The Era of Big Government is over.” He didn’t mean it. He certainly didn’t want it to be true. He just said it because that’s what he does: He says what he needs to say. I don’t approvingly quote Jesse Jackson all that often (though I do find myself saying, “Keep hope alive,” a lot these days), but I think he had it right when he said Bill had no core beliefs, he was all appetite.

Hillary, in her own way, strikes me as even worse in this regard. Can you name a single substantial policy that she hasn’t flipped on — or wouldn’t change — if it were in her political self-interest? Gay marriage? Free trade? Illegal immigration?

Strip away all of the political posturing and positioning, and their “philosophy” that government run by experts can do wonderful things should really be translated as “government run by us.”

Not too long ago Democrats were America’s pro-Israel party. Harry Truman recognized Israel moments after the Jewish state declared independence in 1948. JFK sold advanced anti-aircraft missiles to Jerusalem, ending a de facto U.S. arms embargo. Bill Clinton was famously close to the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

If that party isn’t dead, it’s close. This week Bernie Sanders named James Zogby of the Arab-American Institute and professor Cornel West to the party’s platform-drafting committee. The pair are expected to push hard for a more “even-handed” position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which in practice means denouncing Israel at every turn.

Mr. West offered a flavor of his even-handedness on Facebook in 2014 during Israel’s last war with Hamas. “Let us not be deceived,” he wrote. “The Israeli massacre of innocent Palestinians, especially the precious children, is a crime against humanity! The rockets of Hamas indeed are morally wrong and politically ineffective—but these crimes pale in the face of the U.S. supported Israeli slaughters of innocent civilians.”

Mr. Zogby has prominently endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, calling it “a legitimate and moral response to Israeli policy.” BDS has gained steam in recent years on college campuses, where Palestinian victimology plays well and students are easily misled about the causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

These views go well beyond the usual bounds of fair criticism of Israel. No other country—including a genuine occupier like China in Tibet—is being singled out for boycotts the way Israel is. The suggestion that Israel deliberately “massacres” innocent Palestinians is false based on everything we know about Israel’s military restraint and war practices. If Palestinians wanted to end Israel’s occupation, they could have taken the deal offered to them at Camp David in 2000 when Bill Clinton was President. CONTINUE AT SITE

At a press conference at the G-7 summit in Japan on May 26, President Barack Obama declared that world leaders are “rattled” by Donald Trump, “and for good reason. Because a lot of the proposals that he’s made display either ignorance of world affairs or a cavalier attitude or an interest in getting tweets and headlines instead of actually thinking through what is required to keep America safe.”

This statement is remarkable not only for its eccentric syntax and convoluted logic. Obama assumes that 226 million Americans eligible to vote this year should take note of the fact that his G-7 colleagues—Messrs. Hollande, Trudeau, Abe et al—are unnerved, shocked, or put off by the Republican candidate, and that this should influence their decision next November. It should not: the election is an American affair, and it is offensive to suggest otherwise. Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Jimmy Carter in 1980 could have made the same argument, yet for all their faults they sensed how impertinent it would have been to do so . . . but those were different times.

Obama’s statement is additionally irritating in view of the fact that three of his eight fellow-summiteers are unelected. Socialist Matteo Renzi is the third successive prime minister of Italy to be appointed through backroom deals in the country’s parliament; the last real “leader” to be elected to that post was Silvio Berlusconi, back in 2008. Luxemburger Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, was nominated by the European Council in 2014 and duly confirmed by the “European Parliament,” an institution chronically devoid of democratic legitimacy. In that same year, former Polish prime minister Donald Tusk was appointed president of the European Council by the Council itself.

All three belong to the postnational, globalist elite class, so it is normal that they support Hillary Clinton. It is equally unsurprising that Obama cherishes their opinions. It is scandalous, however, that he expects to cajole American voters into taking those opinions to heart when deciding on who should be their next chief executive. Does Obama seriously expect us to assume that his fellow-“world leaders” are “actually thinking through what is required to keep America safe”?

One of my better moments as a manager came early in my first job as editor of a small newspaper, one that, as it turned out, was still (in the early 21st century) using a DOS-based publishing system dating from the first Reagan administration. My deputy editor offered to set aside an afternoon to instruct me in the eccentricities of the old system, and assured me that I should be able to master it in a short time. I had the old system, DOS terminals and all, in the dumpster by the end of the day.

Training the staff to use a modern desktop-publishing system wasn’t easy — the median age of my staff was about 58, and many had never used a mouse before — but it got done. The process was helped along by my publisher, who, foreseeing that the necessary technological changes might meet resistance from the staff, offered some helpful advice: “Fire them all.” As it turned out, I had to fire only one of them.

Oddly enough, I’d faced a similar problem training young editors in India in the late 1990s. The Indian upper class today is very technologically sophisticated, but at the time, my trainees, who came almost exclusively from well-to-do families, had a significant handicap: Most of them did not know their way around a computer keyboard, because they’d always had servants to do their typing for them. In Delhi, you could find professional freelance typists working outdoors, in the shade of a tree, with a manual typewriter on a folding card table. If you needed to fill out an official document such as a lease, you just walked down to the corner and had it done.

Technological change is a part of cultural change, and vice versa. I am in my early forties; when I try to explain to a colleague in his twenties that there was no web when I was in high school, that e-mail was an exotic thing reserved to hardcore nerds, and that only very rich people had mobile phones, I get that look that says: “That’s funny, Grandpa! Tell me more about the Dark Ages!” I feel like I should be talking about how we walked to school in eight feet of snow, uphill both ways.

Technological change becomes more difficult as you get older and the decreasingly elastic brain resists learning new things. I might write that you know you’re middle-aged when you dread an operating-system update rather than getting excited about it, but I suspect that we are only a few years away from people wondering what an operating-system update is, as though you were talking about something truly ancient, like a card catalogue or a fax machine.

It takes incentives to get people to embrace change and to put out the effort to do the work necessary to accommodate it. In the case of my newspaper staffers, there was a little bit of carrot (at least some of them understood that the acquisition of current skills would improve their future job prospects), but it was mostly stick, the threat of losing their positions and having to look for other work.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is 68 years old and not known as a technological sophisticate, went to extraordinary lengths to set up an offsite e-mail operation in the toilet of some obscure mom-and-pop firm in what seems to be, even by the account of the remarkably gentle State Department report, a fairly straightforward effort to avoid ordinary oversight. The attorney and commentator Mark Levin, among others, has made a fairly persuasive case that this is illegal, a violation of the Federal Records Act, which contemplates up to three years in prison for anyone who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office.”

I seem to have been writing articles about conservatism all my life. Not quite, but almost. The first such article for which I was paid appeared in print in 1969 in the Swinton Journal (which, not at all coincidentally, was the first magazine I ever edited.) The article had the uninviting title “The Direction of Conservatism,” and in it I advocated educational vouchers, road pricing, flexible exchange rates, and many other good things from the handbook of classical liberalism. It had quite an impact too. When a second article on flexible exchange rates appeared (“Set the Pound Free” — I had a gift for headlines), Edward Heath, then Tory leader, forbade all the MPs in the parliamentary party from even discussing the topic in the future. Poor Ted. After that it was almost inevitable that as prime minister he would himself introduce floating rates, as he did in an early Euro-currency crisis.

From the Swinton Journal I jumped onto the Daily Telegraph as a parliamentary sketch-writer, producing four comic weekday columns on the previous day’s proceedings in the House of Commons, from 1972 to 1979. In that capacity and later ones, I lived through the Heath revolution (followed swiftly by the Heath counter-revolution), the (Enoch) Powellite revolution (aborted), the Thatcherite revolution (blocked and delayed by “the Wets” in numerous petty rebellions), the eventual establishment of the Thatcher Terror, its overthrow after a decade by notables from the Wet-Europhile leadership class, then the slow, grey disintegration of the party during the John Major interregnum, the long years of exile under the Blair-Brown usurpation, and, finally, Restoration! under the triumphant Tory banner of Modernization. And all that was before I arrived in America and National Review to encounter Buckleyites, Birchers, neos, paleos, tea-partiers, RINOs, and now Monty Trump’s Flying Circus.

So I’ve seen all the heterogeneous groups, hyphenated and unhyphenated, of the vast right-wing conspiracy (Anglosphere, Eastern division) – Heathites, Powellites, Thatcherites, Wets, Dries, permanent revolutionaries, consolidators, Majorettes and modernizers, and the pipes and drums of the Royal Cameronian Trimmers. Most of these people hated each other in relays, and they held wildly differing views on most important subjects. But they all managed to stay with relative cordiality in the same political party for all their political lives. Despite their bitter internecine quarrels, they kept buggering on (in the grand old phrase), and as a result the Tory party survived intact through it all, recovering from its disasters, rising to new successes under Thatcher, and falling to new disappointments under all the other leaders.

It is possible, as some predict, that its present civil war over the Brexit referendum will finally break the Tory party’s tensile unity. The history of Toryism is full of party splits, realignments, breakaways, and mergers. If the Tories split on this occasion, they will likely pause, regroup, and reunify (perhaps joining with UKIP), as they have done in the past, and as the Canadian Conservatives did under the redoubtable Stephen Harper. Great political parties and great movements of ideas sometimes die, but they rarely fade away. They are tough old beasts that fight from the stomach as much as from the head. And they certainly never die of anything as ephemeral as shame.

So give me a break! Stop yattering on about th­­­­e death of Republicanism or the terminal crisis of conservatism. They’re not even in the intensive-care unit. This is not their finest hour, perhaps, but they will survive.

But what will they survive as? Both Trump admirers (broadly defined) and Trump detractors (ditto) see Republican and conservative establishments reeling before a hostile takeover by an invasion of populist Vikings and Visigoths who have come from nowhere under the banners of “No Entitlement Reform” and “America First” nationalism. Peggy Noonan celebrates this; Jonah Goldberg will resist it just short of in perpetuity.

But the main truth here is that this invasion doesn’t come from outside. It is an invasion mainly of people who have been in the ranks of conservatism all along. It is understandable if most commentators haven’t fully grasped this, because the invasion is led by Donald Trump, who does come from outside both movement and party and who, as Camille Paglia noted in a very different context, makes a very fetching Viking (“bedecked with the phallic tongue of a violet Celtic floral tie . . . looking like a triumphant dragon on the thrusting prow of a long boat” — wow!). But the more we look at who votes for The Donald, the more they look like people who have voted Republican in the past. As Michael Brendan Dougherty, echoed by Ross Douthat, points out, they may belong disproportionately to the working and lower-middle classes, but they also belong to the Republican-voting sectors of those classes. (They were voting in GOP primaries, after all.) And if common observation counts for anything, it is the lower social end of the Republican electorate where conservative views are most often to be found (though less on finance, say, than on crime.)