RUTHFULLY YOURS

Odd news that maybe isn’t so odd: A presidential straw poll conducted by a libertarian student group found that the most popular candidate among its members was Donald Trump. Second place: Bernie Sanders.

Young libertarians for elderly socialists: Not as strange as it sounds, or unprecedented.

Fifty years ago, the libertarian (he’d have said “anarcho-capitalist”) economist and political analyst Murray Rothbard dreamt of a grand coalition between far Left and far Right, whose members and interests, he believed, might be unified momentarily and perhaps more than momentarily by opposition to the Vietnam War. This was an error and led him to some ghastly places (thrilling to the stirrings of David Duke and culpable indulgence of Holocaust deniers) and into associations from which the liberty movement has never recovered.

What might drive a young libertarian into the “revolution” that Sanders proclaims? One thing is the ongoing Rothbardian bent in libertarian foreign-policy thinking, and Sanders is the only candidate in the race who isn’t entirely hostile to non-interventionism on the Ron Paul model. On lifestyle-libertarian issues — marijuana, stance toward religious traditionalists and their institutions — Sanders is the libertarians’ man, in practice. Sanders is energetically anti-libertarian on questions of trade and immigration, but a nontrivial number of self-professed libertarians have abandoned those issues or reversed themselves on them, “libertarian” now being used with unfortunate looseness to mean “right-wing populist who does not wish to be identified with Mitch McConnell’s party.”

We also are seeing the poison dividend of the bank bailouts.

Free-marketeers and free-traders must of course be realists about big business and its interests to the extent that we live in the real world, but for a generation, the working assumption was that the party of capitalism and the party of capitalists were if not the same party then largely on the same side, give or take an ethanol subsidy or in-house fight about intellectual property. The bailouts changed that.

The sort of libertarians who might have followed Rothbard into the sweaty precincts of David Duke’s political thinking have always had some uneasiness about the (Jewish) international bankers who terrified Henry Ford, and you’ll generally find them in possession of a copy of The Creature from Jekyll Island, the ur-text of Federal Reserve conspiracy theory. The spectacle of a small number of financial institutions throwing the world into an economic crisis through their fecklessness and rapacity and then demanding sweetheart loans amounting to trillions of dollars to see them through — a drama in which the banks were both the hostages and the hostage-takers — brought new life to the dry bones of 1930s conspiracy theories.

With Hillary Clinton and the party machinery back on track to a now-tarnished coronation, it’s worth assessing what Bernie Sanders’s campaign accomplished. I still can’t take the Vermont Socialist himself seriously, not with Larry David as his doppelgänger. But the Sanders phenomenon—embraced by a strong majority of liberals between the ages of 17 and 50—deserves attention.

Reporters have exhaustively plumbed the habitats and mental states of “the Trump voter.” Sen. Sanders’s supporters, by contrast, have floated through the primaries in a mist of keywords—millennials, college students, young professionals, actresses, “white people.”

One has to ask: Are they all actually socialists? I doubt it.

It’s no surprise Donald Trump in his New York victory speech about the “corrupt” Republican Party called Sen. Sanders a fellow “outsider.” The two great disrupters are remarkably similar, a kind of Tweedledon and Tweedleburn on trade and a “system” that’s “broken” and “failing” their supporters.

If one word attaches to the Sanders camp, it is “change.” But change what?

This isn’t meant to deride their desire for change, which is undoubtedly authentic, but only to ask how it’s possible that so many under-50 liberals have settled on Bernie Sanders as a change agent after living daily through more than 87 straight months of a Democratic president elected on a platform of “Hope and Change”?

As to Mrs. Clinton, President Obama’s presumed heir, The Wall Street Journal poll this week finds “just 22% of registered voters give her high marks for being able to bring real change to the country.”

What, exactly, is Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or even Bernie Sanders supposed to deliver that an infinity of politicians and public officials before them haven’t already delivered?

If change has any concrete meaning for Sen. Sanders’s supporters, it must have something to do with what the government or public sector does. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton won New York’s primary Tuesday, which means that barring an act of God or FBI director Jim Comey—they aren’t the same—she will be the Democratic nominee for President. So Democrats should be alarmed by the former first lady’s rising unpopularity.

The latest evidence comes in the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll taken April 10-14. A regular feature of this survey asks voters about their “feelings toward” certain individuals or institutions—whether they are very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative or very negative. In April the poll found Mrs. Clinton hitting a dubious new record of 56% who have somewhat or very negative feelings toward her. Only 32% have a positive view.
ENLARGE

Opinion Journal Video

Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot analyzes the latest WSJ / NBC News Poll on the New York state presidential primary. Photo credit: Getty Images.

As striking is the negative trend over the last three years. In Jan. 2013, not long after she left President Obama’s cabinet, her net negative was 25%. As the nearby chart shows, her unpopularity has since climbed with only occasional exceptions. She broke through negative 40% in the middle of last year, and she hit negative 50% in February. In April a remarkable 42% had a very negative view of the woman Democrats are counting on to hold the White House. CONTINUE AT SITE

#MakeAmericaGRATEAgain.

Donald Trump’s victory speech lacked a popular fixture of most of his boisterous campaign rallies–pejorative nicknames for his rivals.

The GOP front-runner, fresh off a victory in New York’s primary, traded in “Lyin’ Ted” for the more cordial “Senator Cruz.” He also referred to John Kasich with his “governor” honorific, despite having repeatedly chiding him in the campaign for sticking around in the race while he’s mathematically eliminated from winning the nomination before a contested convention.

But he still trumpeted his huge victory over both rivals.

“As you know, we’ve won millions of more votes than Sen. Cruz, millions and millions of more votes than Gov. Kasich,” Trump said at his victory rally at his Trump Tower in New York.

“We expect we are going to have an amazing number of weeks because these are places [with future primaries], they are in trouble.”

In his 1944 opus “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” the philosopher Johnny Mercer provided some bracing imperatives that, rightly understood, explain why I am supporting Ted Cruz for the presidency of the United States.

“You’ve got to accentuate the positive,” Mercer argued.

Eliminate the negative

Latch on to the affirmative

Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.

Quite right. These imperatives, while not quite categorical, are sufficiently compelling to command our attention. Ted Cruz is the only candidate who accentuates the positive, who latches on to the affirmative.

1. Executive power. Even many ardent supporters of President Obama have been taken aback by his style of governance, which has increasingly relied on two extra-constitutional expedients: a) executive diktat and b) regulatory hypertrophy.

Regarding the first: Every president, on taking the oath of office, promises to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution and “faithfully execute” the laws. But Barack Obama has conspicuously failed to do this. Item: When enacting some provisions of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) turned out to be politically inexpedient, Obama simply declined to enforce them, “legislating,” as one report put it, “from the White House.” Item: When the state of Arizona sought to enforce immigration laws that were on the books but that Obama did not like, he ordered Border Patrol agents to ignore the law. This is just the beginning of a very long list.

Regarding the second: the Obama administration has vastly expanded the prerogatives of such agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency (just one example), which presides over a budget in excess of $8 billion and a workforce of more than 15,000. Increasingly, this alphabet soup of regulatory agencies, whose minions are unelected and essentially unaccountable to the public, impedes economic growth and harasses citizens with a burdensome regimen of bureaucratic paperwork and often pointless oversight. As Hayek noted in The Road to Serfdom, a low-level government bureaucrat wields much more power over our lives than a billionaire who might happen to be our neighbor or even our employer, for he comes bearing the coercive power of the state.

Ted Cruz is the only candidate, Democrat or Republican, who understands and is prepared to address the twin dangers of executive overreach and the stealth statism of regulatory bloat.

You are always hearing, even from those who do not support him, that Ted Cruz is “a constitutionalist.” In other words, he believes that the governance of this country should be guided by that amazing, 8000-word document the Constitution of the United States. At the center of the Constitution are two ideas: 1) that power should be dispersed and decentralized and 2) the People are sovereign. It is sometimes forgotten that the Constitution is essentially a prophylactic instrument, designed to protect the people from the state. The Founders were careful to frame a government in which the executive exists to execute, not to make the laws. That is why the first thing you come upon, in Article I, is a discussion of Congress, into whose hands the Founders intended to invest the essential law-making power of the government. There is some irony, perhaps, that Ted Cruz wishes to assume the office of the president in order to circumscribe the power of that office. But the fact that something is ironical need not detract from its truth. Barack Obama is the fulfillment of a long process of power consolidation in the hands of the president. He has not governed so much as he has ruled, partly by fiat, partly by intimidation. I believe that Ted Cruz would reverse that decades-long process whereby the president of the Untied States mutated into a sort of imperial bureaucrat. His ambition to limit the scope of presidential ambition would alone be sufficient reason to support Ted Cruz.

Donald Trump says he wants to unite the Republican Party, but he keeps acting as if he’s mounting a hostile takeover. He’s now threatening to blow up the party’s July convention because he and his campaign were too lazy or inept to understand the 50 state nomination rules.

That’s the story behind Mr. Trump’s complaints that the party’s nominating rules are “rigged” against him. “It’s a crooked system. It’s 100% corrupt,” the front-runner howled on Sunday following a Friday op-ed on these pages making the same claims. He added on Sunday that he hopes a contested GOP convention in July “doesn’t involve violence.” Thanks for the warning.

Mr. Trump is upset that he’s being outhustled in winning delegates, and that he may fall short of the 1,237 he needs to win a majority in July. His latest embarrassment came at the Wyoming state convention on Saturday as Ted Cruz won the 14 delegates up for grabs. Mr. Cruz was the only candidate to show up in Casper, where he added to the nine (of 12 available) delegates awarded last month at county meetings. Mr. Trump, who said he didn’t want to “waste money going to Wyoming,” now claims Mr. Cruz won thanks to “party bosses.”

This is the same line the New Yorker leveled at the Colorado GOP, which also uses county and state conventions (rather than a popular vote) to elect delegates, and which recently awarded Mr. Cruz a delegate sweep. Yet both state processes were transparent and well known to all campaigns since last year.

In Wyoming’s case, “every presidential candidate for the last 40 years has managed this process and has worked through this process and has followed the process,” state GOP Chairman Matt Micheli told Fox News. Having failed to organize well enough to compete on these open terms, Mr. Trump is inventing complaints that such caucuses are “voterless.” CONTINUE AT SITE

At the beginning of January 2016, an organization called NORPAC—a lobby whose mission is to support candidates and sitting members of Congress “who demonstrate a genuine commitment to the strength, security, and survival of Israel”—invited its members to “an exclusive and intimate” cocktail reception for Hillary Clinton for people willing to pay $2,700 per individual or $5,400 per couple.

The invitation included a synopsis of Hillary’s credibility vis-a-vis Israel, stating that she had “been a supporter of the US-Israel relationship for many years…and, as Secretary of State, she had stood up against Israel’s enemies….”

Then, NORPAC promptly betrayed its pretense of impartiality by stating: “Please join us in support of Secretary Hillary Clinton for President and share your concerns about the US-Israel relationship with her at this pro-Israel event.”

Of course, all of this hype was pure fiction, but fully embraced by the leftwing Jews who have essentially abandoned genuine Judaism for the Social Justice causes embraced by the Democrat party, causes that make them feel like “good” people—everything from the redistribution of wealth (aka Communism) to saving the environment (from the colossal hoax known as climate change) to equality for women (except when it comes to speaking out against the vile abuses of Sharia law, the mass rapes by Muslims in Europe, and the rapacious behavior of one Bill Clinton) to the Holy Grail of leftism, abortion, which amounts to the de facto approval of the over fifty-eight-million infants murdered by this gruesome procedure since it became the law of the land in 1973.

But the subject here is not the magical thinking of leftists or the suicidal ideation of liberal Jews. Rather, it is to correct the decades-long fantasy that Hillary Clinton is even remotely supportive of Jews, Israel, Zionism, in fact anything to do with Jewish life.
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE…

“Amahl and the Night Visitors” is a one act opera by the late composer Gian Carlo Menotti….rsk
George Clooney: Political Fundraisers “Ridiculous,” Dollar Amounts “Obscene” George Clooney: Political Fundraisers “Ridiculous,” Amounts “Obscene”

“The Sanders campaign, when they talk about it, is absolutely right,” Clooney told NBC’s Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd in an interview taped today and airing tomorrow morning on the Sunday Beltway show. “It’s ridiculous that we should have this kind of money in politics. I agree completely.”

Clooney and wife Amal co-hosted first dinner in San Francisco Friday, with the second planned for tonight in the couple’s L.A. home. The sold-out events pulled in an estimated $15 million combined – on par with the record-breaking event that the Oscar winner hosted for President Barack Obama back in 2012 achieved.
“Yes. I think it’s an obscene amount of money,” Clooney told Todd. “I think that, you know, we had some protesters last night when we pulled up in San Francisco and they’re right to protest. They’re absolutely right. It is an obscene amount of money”:

Republicans still haven’t learned. In the autopsy of the 2012 presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee concluded that the party needed to “improve its efforts to include female voters” and “represent some of the unique concerns that female voters may have.”

But the top two Republican presidential candidates — Donald Trump and Ted Cruz — have the lowest favorability ratings in the field among women. If nominated, Cruz would probably perform the same as Romney, whereas Trump would probably lose the women’s vote by the biggest margin in 50 years.

Trump recently tweeted, “Nobody has more respect for women than Donald Trump!” This is hard to believe. More than 3 million people have seen the anti-Trump ad in which women repeat real quotes about women from Donald Trump, such as “bimbo” and “fat pig.” Trump described Megyn Kelly as having “blood coming out of her wherever” and mocked Carly Fiorina’s appearance by saying, “Look at that face.” He tweeted a picture of Melania Trump next to Heidi Cruz, as if potential first ladies are contestants in a Miss Universe pageant. And when asked whether women should be punished in the event that abortion became illegal, he suggested that they should be.

Women aren’t amused. Seven out of ten women (67 percent) have an unfavorable view of Trump, and only 26 percent view him favorably, according to a national Quinnipiac survey from late March. Other polls have his unfavorability ratings among women even higher, at 74 percent.

Cruz has capitalized on Trump’s missteps by not making similar misogynist gaffes (admittedly, this is a low bar). He also recently hosted an event — “The Celebration of Strong Women” — in Madison, Wis., featuring his wife, his mother, and none other than former competitor Carly Fiorina. “All issues are women’s issues,” said Cruz, in one of his most humanizing events of the campaign.

This is a very encouraging development, but Cruz too has a steep hill to climb with women voters. Three in ten women surveyed had a favorable view of Cruz (29 percent) and nearly half had an unfavorable view of him (46 percent), according to the same Quinnipiac survey from late March.

Not that the GOP’s leading candidates do particularly well with male voters. The majority of men (54 percent) view Trump negatively, and nearly half (48 percent) view Cruz negatively. But the favorability gap is more pronounced with women, especially for Trump.

Indeed, Trump’s gender gap (measured by the net favorable rating among women minus the net favorable rating among men) is larger than any remaining candidate’s, according to Gallup.

Bernie Sanders, with the regularity of a steam engine, has pounded away for months at the injustice, the wickedness, even the racism of “income inequality.” If ever there was a Johnny one-note on the American political scene, he is it. Yet almost nobody, and least of all his hapless opponent Hillary Clinton, has thought to call into question the ethical validity or inflammatory character of the covetousness this political slogan urges upon the public, with a recklessness that has visited untold calamities upon Europe. (Among politicians, Charlie Rangel of New York did have the temerity to say, “OK, income inequality… But does he [Sanders] have anything else to say?”) Has religious illiteracy now reached the point in America where the Tenth Commandment has been so entirely forgotten that the most blatant repudiations of it go unnoticed? Here it is, for the sake of those who have forgotten (or never knew):

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.” — Exodus 20:17.

This last of the ten commandments, as Biblical commentators have often observed, differs from previous “negative” ones in that it prohibits not an action (murder, adultery, theft, false witness) but a state of mind—covetousness—that is at the root of most sins against our neighbors. No doubt John Stuart Mill, a far more literate liberal than Bernie Sanders, had it in mind when he complained that “’thou shalt not’ preponderates unduly over ‘thou shalt’” in Biblical morality.

The ethical wisdom of this commandment has all too often been demonstrated by the way in which covetousness expresses itself in the murderous character of “negative” politics, which directs the wrath of the covetous against a particular group. In Sanders’ typical stump speech, it is usually “Wall Street” or “the one percent.” In the rhetoric of the “Occupy Wall Street” and other “Occupy…” mobs that Sanders admires, it gets a bit more specific about attaching a name to “the one percent.” But most specific of all is Noam Chomsky, whom Sanders has praised as “a very vocal and important voice [sic] in the wilderness of intellectual life in America…a person who [sic] I think we’re all very proud of.” Chomsky, who has publicly endorsed his friend Sanders for the Democratic nomination, has strong views about just which group of Americans should be named as the chief target of an aggressive campaign of class warfare against “the rich and privileged” whom Sanders is daily berating. “Antisemitism,” Chomsky has declared, “is no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but 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.” To this does covetousness very often lead. Is it even remotely possible that Sanders doesn’t know?