RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dear Reader (including those of you who think we need a president who would leave the whole world blind, which would be inconvenient since e-mail newsletters in braille are technologically complicated),

It looks like the Trump body snatching virus I wrote about last month is spreading again. For a moment, after Wisconsin, it seemed like it might be going into remission. Nope, it’s actually spiking.

Last night the New York Post endorsed Donald Trump. After I criticized the editorial on Twitter, a Trump supporter tweeted at me “No Goldberg, you are wrong. Support the front runner and stop trying to burn the party. Unite it.”

This lover of unity and champion of party loyalty goes by the Twitter handle “TrumpOrRiot.” In all of the bilious argy-bargy and venomous folderol I’ve heard the last few months, nothing so economically encapsulates Trumpism more than calls for unity from a maroon who self-identifies as someone who thinks rioting is the only righteous alternative to his dashboard saint’s victory.

On the drive in to my office this morning, I heard Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn, one of the wisest and gentlest souls I’ve ever encountered, describe Trump as a “good and honest man” and “quite brilliant.” A few minutes ago on Twitter, the great semi-retired editorialist Don Surber said to me, regarding Trump, “You will come around. Others may not because they are childish.”

No. Just, no.

I won’t. Indeed, the only childishness I see are the masses of beer-muscled goons and sycophants stomping their feet over the object of their man-crushes.

The Trump Calculus

If a president Trump does the right thing, I will say he did the right thing — because that’s my job. But I will never look at that fleshy pile of vanity, crudity, and deceit and say, “There’s a good and honest man.” Yes, yes, we all believe in redemption, so maybe he could have some Oval Office conversion, find a God that doesn’t consider profit maximization to be the key measure of a man’s soul, and become a good and honest man. Maybe the sudden bowel-stewing realization that he’s wildly unqualified for the job of commander-in-chief will arouse in him a humility never displayed in his gaudy romp across our airwaves.

But that’s not the way I would bet. (It’s also a bit of a moot point, since I’m convinced Trump would lose very badly against either Sanders or Clinton.)

New York Post Criticizes ‘Rookie’ Trump in Scary Endorsement By Tyler O’Neil

The New York Post made a surprise endorsement on Thursday night, but it wasn’t exactly logical. Indeed, the editorial board seemed to be suffering under the same delusions hardcore supporters of Donald Trump entertain.

The Post based its endorsement on the fact that Trump is an accomplished businessman, but that he is also a “rookie” when it comes to politics. They assume he will do a full about-face from the primary to the general. This not only explains Trump’s policy simplicity and angry eccentricities, it excuses them. As the New York Daily News’ Shaun King declares, this “is so sad it’s actually kind of funny.”

The editors of the Post not only expect Trump to change his positions, they advise him on how to do so.

Should he win the nomination, we expect Trump to pivot — not just on the issues, but in his manner. The post-pivot Trump needs to be more presidential: better informed on policy, more self-disciplined and less thin-skinned.

Yet the promise is clearly there in the rookie who is, after all, leading the field as the finals near.

Besides Trump’s astonishing success, the editors of the Post cannot name any concrete goals of his that they actually like. Oh, they find plenty of things they disagree with: pulling US troops out of Japan and South Korea, building a border wall, opposing trade deals without supporting free trade, and Trump’s coarse language and manners.

Nevertheless, Trump must be supported, because “he’s challenging the victim culture that has turned into a victimizing culture.” This is true, but how does it not apply to Ted Cruz? The editors “expect Trump to stay true to his voters,” but not to the positions or the personal style which attracted them in the first place.

Indeed, the publication goes so far as to call The Donald “an imperfect messenger carrying a vital message.” What is that message? It is “the best hope for all Americans who rightly feel betrayed by the political class.”

In the end, the Post trusts Trump because “he has the potential — the skills, the know-how, the values — to live up to his campaign slogan: to make America great again.” It ignores all evidence to contrary, much of which the editors themselves have mentioned in that very article!

This reminds me of something Jonah Goldberg wrote in National Review in March. The fact that Trump has attracted voters is treated as a justification for his outlandish proposals, even inviting comparisons to Ronald Reagan (who was also widely attacked in the media).

“Hated by the establishment, hated by the Left, Cruz is Obama’s nemesis. If he is elected, he will implement policies that unravel Obama’s legacy.If America opts for a demagogue, it will remain on its current trajectory.”

The US presidential race is President Barack Obama’s political legacy. Depending on who succeeds him, that legacy will either fade or become the new normal.
To understand what he has wrought, a good place to start is with the man running to Obama’s left: Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The socialist from Vermont knows how to play to the crowd. Sanders knows that the people captivated by his tales of avaricious bankers aren’t too keen on Jews either.
And as a Jew, he’s cool with that.

Sanders’s courtship of Jew-haters in a staple of his campaign. The depth of his efforts was made clear at the end of a campaign event at the Apollo Theater in Harlem last Saturday when an audience member got up and began spewing anti-Jewish slanders.

Sanders doesn’t have a problem telling bigots off. He did just that at another event when a questioner asked a question he deemed anti-Muslim. Sanders is an unstinting champion of gay rights and black rights. So if he wanted to tell off a Jew-hater, he could have done so easily.

In the event, the questioner rose and said, “As you know, the Zionist Jews – and I don’t mean to offend anybody – they run the Federal Reserve, they run Wall Street, they run every campaign.”

Weathering a chorus of boos from his fellow audience members, the questioner then asked Sanders, “What is your affiliation to your Jewish community?” Sanders could have told the questioner to take a long walk off a short pier. He could have told him he’d rather win without the support of bigots.

He could have used it as a teaching moment and told his audience that millions of Jews have been murdered because of the lies the questioner just repeated.

Instead, he called him “Brother” and told he needed to hide his hatred better.

Two rather anti Israel ants duking it out…..what a show…rsk
Israel and Palestine. This is perhaps one of the most contentious issues, globally — so much so that no presidential candidate for the United States has ever declared their support for the Palestinians. Until now.

Bernie Sanders sparred with Hillary Clinton in Thursday night’s Democratic primary debate on the subject of Israel and Palestine. Couching his message in his “100%” support for Israel, Sanders said the Palestinians needed to be treated with compassion and “dignity” for any progress to be made — and that America plays a big role in that. Clinton did not appear to agree.

“As somebody who is 100% pro-Israel, in the long run, and this is not going be easy … if we are ever going to bring peace to that region — which has seen so much hatred and so much war — we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity,” Sanders, who is himself Jewish and has spent prolonged periods of time in Israel, told the audience.

He was responding to moderator Wolf Blitzer’s question of whether or not Israel’s 2014 Gaza offensive was disproportionate in its retaliation. Sanders replied in the affirmative, a position he’s made known in the past.

“Israel was subjected to terrorist attacks [and] has every right in the world to destroy terrorism,” the Vermont senator said. “But we had in the Gaza area — not a very large area — some 10,000 civilians who were wounded and some 1,500 who were killed. Now if you’re asking me … ‘Was that a disproportionate attack?’ The answer is I believe it was.”

Just hours before these remarks, Sanders suspended Simone Zimmerman, in charge of his campaign’s national Jewish outreach, for making distasteful remarks about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Facebook — Zimmerman also aspersed Clinton in her posts.

The Zionist or Israel lobby in the upper echelons of American power has silenced many on the issue of Israel and Palestine. It is “one of the most potent advocacy groups in Washington, D.C.,” the Independent explained in 2013, after Chuck Hagel, during his Secretary of Defense confirmation hearing, reneged on his comments that Congress was intimidated by the lsrael lobby.

Why won’t Bernie Sanders stop attacking Israel? That’s the question some Jewish supporters are asking as the troubled campaign continues alienating Jews while pandering to haters of the Jewish State.

For the longest time it was all but impossible to get Bernie to even admit he was Jewish. His campaign conducted no outreach to Jewish groups while aggressively pursuing outreach to Muslim groups such as CAIR. CAIR is an anti-Semitic Islamist group with known ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

In New York, the Sanders campaign seemingly had to bow to reality and actually reach out to Jews.

But instead the Sanders campaign set out to offend and alienate Jews in New York, as it had done to Jews all over the country, by selecting an anti-Israel activist who had defended Muslim anti-Semitism.

Simone Zimmerman, formerly of J Street, had made a name for herself by harassing Jewish charities that help people in Israel. Zimmerman had defended BDS and opposed Israel’s campaign against Hamas, saying, “We think it’s important to understand the context of occupation”.

She had allied with JVP, a hate group, to oppose fighting anti-Semitism on campus. JVP has described the murder of Jews as “resistance” and the Jewish community as the “enemy”.

Zimmerman’s first attempt at outreach to Jewish supporters ended in disaster with a shouting match at a Jews for Bernie event. But Jews for Bernie is run by Daniel Sieradski, another opponent of Israel, who distributed a meme during the last war with Hamas which asserted that “That’s why Palestinians are fighting back.” Sieradski had claimed in the past that the real threat wasn’t Hamas whose leaders “just want to make life better for their people”, but Jewish “ethnic exclusivity”.

When Sarah Palin first came on the scene as the surprise vice presidential pick of the McCain campaign, she was a breath of fresh air. As she gave her address at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, many Tea Party activists who were themselves political neophytes from humble backgrounds heard themselves in her folksy Alaskan twang. It was this sort of kinship which prompted so many to defend Palin against attacks from the political establishment. She was us. We were her. An attack on her intelligence was an attack on ours. We knew implicitly that the same people who looked down their noses at her would just as soon scoff at us. So we circled the wagons.

Oh how times have changed. Over the years since, Palin has devolved into a self-parody that fulfills the caricature her critics once crafted. In a new interview with the Associated Press, she demonstrates as much in remarks regarding the Republican presidential nomination process.

From U.S. News and World Report:

Voters will “rise up” in opposition if Republican power brokers try to take the presidential nomination away from Donald Trump or Ted Cruz at the GOP convention this summer, Sarah Palin said Thursday in a wide-ranging interview.

The 2008 vice presidential nominee told The Associated Press that GOP voters have the right to decide the party’s nominee and will rebel if House Speaker Paul Ryan or some other “white knight” is chosen at a contested convention. Ryan said this week he will not seek or accept the nomination.

Palin said voters know better than to be fooled by party leaders.

“How dare they?” Palin asked, denouncing “arrogant political operatives who underestimate the wisdom of the people.”

It takes an immigrant like me to parse the poison that Bernie Sanders is peddling to the naive youth of this country. It takes someone who has experienced socialism’s failures firsthand—as I did, initially as a small child, later as a young adult—to see why Sen. Sanders is succeeding: We elders, immigrants and native-born alike, have failed to teach our children and grandchildren about the economic history and false promises of the myriad forms of socialism that infest our world.

More than 75 years ago, I landed at Ellis Island as a 6-year-old child. My family had fled the despotism of National Socialism that had been foisted onto the gullible (albeit literate) German people. We were far from the only victims of collectivism. As all of us know but some refuse to admit, collectivism destroyed the economies of places like China, Russia and Cuba, and ruined the lives of millions of people.

Nine years after I arrived in America, the new state of Israel came into existence, making Jews like me both proud and curious. When I was 18, imbued with idealistic fervor, I decided to help the young nation grow and prosper by working the soil. Off I went to further the goals of social justice by joining a kibbutz, or communal farm. There the painful reality of the maxim Karl Marx popularized, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” hit home.

As an example of kibbutz ideology: Does it make sense for a person running the washing machines in the laundry to be receiving exactly the same pay and living benefits as someone who might be the community doctor after going to medical school? That may sound like an extreme example, but the same principles apply throughout the economic structure of a collectivist economy. Unlike Chinese or Russian collectivism, Israel’s was voluntary—but insane nonetheless.

I left Israel three years later, in 1954, because I was an American citizen and the time had come for me to serve my country. I was drafted and inducted into the U.S. Army. After two years of active duty, stationed back in my native Germany, I realized that my future lay in the capitalist U.S., not in Israel.

I came to see that I needed a college degree to get ahead in the competitive society of my home country. Because I had to work during the day to support myself and my family, I attended classes in the evening, taking eight years to get a bachelor’s degree in finance and an M.B.A. While going to night school, I got my first Wall Street job. CONTINUE AT SITE

First, there was Jim Gilmore. Then, there was Ben Carson. Now, there’s John Kasich. This Republican nomination cycle boasted a bumper crop of candidates with delusions of grandeur. Two of them, at least, had the sense to pack it in.

Not the governor of Ohio, who has already been mathematically eliminated from securing the Republican nomination outright. At present, John Kasich has won only one state (his home state) and four — count ’em: four — non–Buckeye State counties. He hasn’t won a delegate since March 15. And one week after Ohio, he came in fourth in Arizona in a three-man race, losing by 23,000 votes to Marco Rubio, who by then had dropped out.

What’s the opposite of momentum?

RELATED: Why Won’t John Kasich Go Away?

With Republicans preparing for a string of states likely to prove friendly to Donald Trump — New York, Trump’s home state, votes next Tuesday, followed a week later by the “Acela Corridor” (Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, and Maryland) and Pennsylvania — this might seem like Kasich’s time to shine. He’s a moderate man for moderate states, right? Maybe not. A new PPP poll has Kasich up on Cruz in New York by just five percentage points (25 to 20), and a recent Fox News poll has Kasich leading Cruz by just two points — and both of them lapped by Trump.

Meanwhile, one gets the impression that Kasich isn’t even trying to win. The governor failed to file a full slate of delegates for the Maryland primary, meaning that even if Kasich wins the state, he won’t be able to claim all of its delegates. At RedState, Moe Lane wrote in March: “There’s no really good way to say this, so I’ll just be blunt: Depending on where you live in Maryland, you will be provably throwing away your vote if you vote for John Kasich” (the emphasis is his).

And recall: This is the same candidate who didn’t collect enough signatures to get on the ballot in Illinois or Pennsylvania. (The only reason his name appeared in Illinois is that no candidate challenged him; and in Pennsylvania, the Rubio camp dropped its challenge.)

If Kasich’s “strategy” is unclear, so is his ultimate aim. Maybe he thinks he can win at a contested convention, that 1,237 delegates come to their senses in Cleveland and spirit him to the nomination on the basis of his generally favorable polling against Hillary Clinton in hypothetical head-to-head matchups. The GOP nomination might be “a bizarre process,” as Kasich said on CNN earlier this week. But it’s not that bizarre.

Cosmopolitan published an interview on Tuesday that I think was with Hillary Clinton — although I can’t be completely sure, seeing as her answers sounded more like they had come from a robot than an actual human being.

I’m not exaggerating. This interview was so boring and so unproductive that Cosmo clearly struggled to even come up with a headline for it. After all, the one that it went with — “Hillary Clinton Responds to Bernie Sanders’ Remark That She’s ‘Condescending’ to Young People” — was not even really accurate.

Sure, Hillary was asked about the remark, but she didn’t exactly answer. In fact, she exactly didn’t answer, responding with “Well, he’s criticized me for so many things in the last week, I’m not going to respond to his comments.”

Then — just like a perfectly functioning machine — she swooped in with a preprogrammed political talking point:

“I will say this,” she said. “I’m excited that so many young people are involved in this campaign.”

“I think it’s great if they support me, if they support Senator Sanders, the fact that they are committed to being part of the political process is a great development,” she added.

Whoa . . . so Hillary’s thoughts on this are, in essence: I like young people. It is good for young people to like politics. It is good. Hot take, Hil!

Her answer to a question about a controversial skit she performed this weekend with Mayor de Blasio that featured a joke criticized by some in the media as racist was equally (read: not at all) insightful:

“He has addressed it, and I will really defer to him because it is something that he’s already talked about.”