RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bubba Bites Back

I guess we can start with Bill Clinton’s outburst against the Black Lives Matter crowd yesterday. Again, since the caffeine hasn’t even sunk in yet, let’s kick this bullet-point style. (I find transitions between paragraphs to be something of a burden these days. For instance, I wrote this piece on contested conventions for the Corner the other day in about 25 minutes. I let my research assistant Jack out of his kennel and told him, “Sniff for typos, boy. That’s a good boy.” He caught a bunch, but also said, “You don’t need to number your points. It reads fine without them.” He was right, of course. But that didn’t spare him a savage beating. I told him, “It puts the numbers back in, or it gets the hose again.”)

So where was I? Oh right Phoenix, Clinton, Black Lives Matter. I found the whole episode interesting for three however many reasons I come up with below.

1. Bill is doing something Hillary won’t: defend the Clinton record of the 1990s. Hillary’s happy to campaign on the gauzy nostalgia for the 1990s, when the gauzy nostalgia helps her. But the moment the politics change from taking credit to taking responsibility, she quietly slinks away like Joe Biden after farting at an arms-control summit. (“Look at Putin’s face! He thinks it was his translator! He’s gonna have that guy killed!”)

2. Unlike Hillary, who thinks her place in the history books is in front of her, Bill knows that 95 percent of his obituary has already been written. So he has a much more vested interest in defending his record. By moving to the left of her husband (where she was in the 1990s!) on economics, criminal justice, foreign policy, etc., Hillary slowly strips away the substance of Bill’s presidency. Take away the Balkan war, banking reform, etc., and what’s left of the Clinton legacy? Pretty much the fact that he singlehandedly turned the West Wing into a penile colony.

RELATED: Hillary’s Still Weak

3. Oh, at this point, I should also say Bill Clinton is right! The Black Lives Matter movement is not without its legitimate complaints and arguments — I’m in favor of some criminal-justice reforms. But they want to work from the assumption that there are no black bad actors in this story. It’s white supremacy all the way down. The problem with this is that even if white supremacy — whatever people mean by that — is the massive problem some lefties imagine, it still doesn’t excuse bad individual moral choices. Excuses don’t become explanations simply because you shout them. It’s a very weird corollary to social-justice logic. If you see everyone simply as representatives of groups — white oppressors and black victims — you withdraw the moral agency from individual actors on both sides of the equation (which, technically speaking, is racist). White people become agents of oppression and morally culpable even if they’ve done nothing wrong. Black criminals who prey on innocent black people become victims, about whom no one can say an unkind word.

4. One fun consequence of all this is that Bill very well could turn out to be a liability for Hillary, which would be kind of hilarious given that Hillary would be just another left-wing activist lawyer were it not for her husband. She rode her Arkansas mule all of the way to the White House gates only to see the sign reading, “No Mules Allowed.”

RELATED: Hillary’s Democratic Party Is What an Actual ‘Establishment’ Looks Like

5. There’s an old cliché that we become more conservative as we get older. The social science on all this is more mixed than you might think, depending on what you mean by “conservative.” There’s definitely a tendency for people to become more curmudgeonly as they age. That’s certainly my experience. I find myself yelling at clouds a lot more than I used to. But that’s not what’s going on here. Bill Clinton is probably a good deal more liberal than he was 20 years ago. The problem is the Democratic party is a lot more liberal than it was 20 years ago. Bill’s locked-in to his positions (See item No. 2) and that means he’s sliding rightward on the ideological spectrum.

Times Change

P. T. Barnum did not actually say, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The maxim endures nevertheless, and if ever anything showed why, it is the chimerical immigration plan Donald Trump has managed to turn into a front-running presidential bid. On Tuesday, Trump shared that plan’s centerpiece with the Washington Post: his strategy to force Mexico to pony up the $5 to $10 billion he insists will be enough to build 1,000 miles of towering, impregnable wall.

The squeeze-thy-neighbor gambit hits the Trump trifecta: it is at once vain, authoritarian, and asinine.

After ten months, The Donald’s stand-up routine has descended into self-parody: As the Myrmidons sing along, Trump first brays that he “will build the wall” (which, incidentally, would have no bearing on visa overstays, who account for nearly half of the illegal-alien population). Then, he vows to get Mexico to foot the bill, as if there were honor in extorting a poor but reasonably amicable neighbor into paying the vital border-security costs of a profligate superpower in whose budget $10 billion barely qualifies as a rounding error. (Compare, e.g., Trump’s promise to do nothing about unsustainable entitlements that are bankrupting the economy.)

Yet, absent from most of his speeches to the ardent faithful — and from his campaign’s position paper, with which he seems unacquainted — is the vow he reserves for more progressive audiences and media interviews: He will readmit most of the 11 million illegal aliens (as he puts it, “the good ones”) with legal status after he wastes considerably more than $10 billion to chase down and deport them.

RELATED: Donald Trump and the Return of Right-wing Statism

That is, while portraying himself as the scourge of illegal immigration, Trump is actually proposing amnesty of the “touch-back” variety occasionally championed by open-borders advocates. In Trump’s plan, deportation is not a security measure; it’s a laundering scheme.

Mind you: That position paper of his laments “the influx of foreign workers [from illegal immigration],” which “holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans — including immigrants themselves and their children — to earn a middle class wage.” Which sentiment is hard to square with an amnesty plan that, by Trump’s own reasoning, will hold down salaries, keep unemployment high, and make it difficult for poor and working-class Americans to earn a middle-class wage.

Oh if that were only true…maybe some New Yorkers…those that elected Chris Gibson, Elise Stefanik, Peter King, Lee Zeldin, (9 out of 27 Representatives are Republican)but how about those who have reelected Rangel, de Blasio, Cuomo and so many representatives who run on a fusion ticket with Working Families Party a far left group……?rsk

The polls say that Donald Trump is set to sweep New York with more votes than in any previous primary of this election cycle. How on earth is this possible? It must be a mistake. New Yorkers know this man well, better than the residents of any other state, better than those of us who do not watch reality television shows. They see him around town in all the best places. They have seen him on the covers of the tabloids all the time. They know better than the rest of us that he is a self-promoting double-dealer, a three-times married man who revels in demeaning women, especially if they cross him or he is ready to move on to the next one. They know that he has exactly No knowledge of the Constitution, foreign policy, the military, education, terrorism, law-making, law-breaking, etc. He is a man of great wealth who does, and has always done, what he wants, when he wants, how he wants, and to whom he wants. He suffers no consequences when he does these things badly, unlawfully, or cruelly. His money has, for his entire life, set him apart from the lives of most Americans. He has gold-plated toilets when millions of citizens worry about how to repair their own necessary appliances they consider luxuries.

How can New Yorkers who so enthusiastically support his candidacy for the presidency put aside his obvious narcissism and megalomania? He viciously attacks his opponents unjustly, and with unnecessary personal venom. Not one of his opponents has been spared. He likened Dr. Ben Carson to a pedophile, over and over again, then pretended to defend him against Ted Cruz when it was CNN that reported Carson’s departure from Iowa. He called Marco Rubio all manner of sordid, childish names. He eviscerated Jeb Bush at every opportunity. He insulted Carly Fiorina’s appearance, as he has countless other women. And what he says about Cruz only reveals who he fears the most. For good reason. Cruz has actually read the Constitution, and he remembers it. He knows it by heart.

New Yorkers, especially those in Manhattan, are smart people; they have to be to live there, to afford to live there. They have the best of everything: theatre, music, food, living spaces, close access to airports and faraway places and the money to travel. Do they, in their heart of hearts, really think Donald Trump has the right stuff to be the President of the United States? They cannot possibly think that. They know better.

As the odds rise of a contested Republican presidential convention, Donald Trump’s and Ted Cruz’s camps are insisting that one of them must be the nominee. The Trump argument is that even if he falls short of the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination, denying it to him at the convention would amount to antidemocratic theft. Mr. Cruz appears to think that finishing second means finishing first if the guy who beat him can’t win on the initial convention ballot.

Eric O’Keefe is here to say: whoa. The veteran Republican grass-roots activist sees a contested convention as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the delegates of a private political party to assert their power. The results of the GOP primaries are hardly representative of the party’s will, Mr. O’Keefe says, because state parties have been wrecked by domineering state legislatures. Why should Republicans bow down, for instance, to the results of state-mandated open primaries that allow liberal and independent voters to bum-rush what is supposed to be a private poll?

“There’s nothing that special or even good about the government-run primary process,” Mr. O’Keefe says. Relishing the opportunity for Republican delegates to stand up for themselves, he is gearing up a campaign to educate and encourage them to exercise their prerogatives at the convention and to ignore specious insistence that they follow some imaginary obligations.

“The delegates have been going to conventions for years and treating them like Super Bowl parties because there was nothing else to do,” he says. “But this year they have the opportunity to practice a great national tradition, to exercise their legal, historical right to defeat a man who opposes most of what they believe in, and instead nominate a candidate who represents them.”

As you might suspect, the “man” Mr. O’Keefe referred to is Donald Trump.

“I hate bullies, and of late I’ve come to hate them more,” Mr. O’Keefe says. “Trump means institutionalized bullying. Tyranny grows from ambitious people grabbing whatever levers of power are available.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Senator Ted Cruz’s victory in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary cements him as the clear, conservative alternative to Donald J. Trump. The Texas Republican trumped the New York real-estate mogul, 48 percent to 35. This landslide confirms Cruz, not Governor John Kasich (R., Ohio), as the life boat for GOP voters who wisely worry that the high-decibel tycoon’s juggernaut would sink beneath the waves next November — to the applause of women, Hispanics, immigrants, the disabled, and millions of others whom he has frosted.

Cruz now should crank up the volume on campaign 2016’s best idea: a 10 percent flat tax that is perfectly timed as smart policy and smart politics.

Cruz’s Simple Flat Tax Plan would:

Collapse today’s seven personal-income-tax rates into one: 10 percent.

Offer taxpayers a $10,000 standard deduction and a $4,000 personal exemption.

Keep the Child Tax Credit and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Exclude from tax the first $36,000 in income for a family of four.

Dump thousands of tax loopholes, but save the charitable deduction and home-mortgage write-off up to $500,000 in principle value.

Replace today’s corporate tax. As the Wall Street Journal crisply explains: “Businesses would deduct capital purchases immediately and pay a 16 percent rate without deducting wages.”

Allow corporations to deploy domestically some $2.4 trillion in profits dormant overseas after paying a one-time, 10 percent repatriation tax.

Create Universal Savings Accounts for up to $25,000 in tax-deferred, annual, heritable deposits.

Win or lose, the Sanders campaign has its story. Bernie Sanders is the authentic candidate; the unapologetic progressive who pushes the left’s agenda without worrying about offending anyone.

Bernie doesn’t pander. Just look at him glaring into the camera, angrily delivering the same “smash capitalism” stump speech and then waiting for the local college students to take selfies with him. You may disagree with him. But he’s authentic, a curmudgeon who says whatever he really thinks.

And if you believe that, there’s a bridge in Bernie’s old Brooklyn neighborhood you can buy.

The left is not an authentic political movement. It values dogma, not passion. What it sells is the appearance of passion and the hollow illusion of self-expression while pushing a rigid agenda.

The real story of the Bernie Sanders campaign is not that voters reward authenticity, but the illusion of it. Obama beat Hillary because he seemed more authentic. But he was just better at pandering to the left while appearing to be natural and rehearsed in a way that you have to rehearse a lot to achieve.

Bernie Sanders has thrived by abandoning whatever made him authentic and becoming a robot reciting dogma in a voice borrowed from Larry David. Hillary Clinton never had a soul, but Bernie Sanders sold his in the hopes of beating her. And he got a bad deal on his soul because he can’t even seem to do that.

Originally Bernie Sanders was an independent who held unconventional views on some issues and wasn’t tied down to the Democratic Party and its widely loathed identity politics. Instead he could just do his old time Wall Street Socialist shtick and score populist points with angry voters without having to pander to every group and cause in the progressive politically correct spectrum of stupidity.

This was the Bernie Sanders who told Ezra Klein that he opposed open borders because it “says essentially there is no United States” and “would make everybody in America poorer.”

“You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?” Bernie barked.

Liberal heads exploded. Bernie tried to defend his views and then surrendered. A few months later, he was calling for amnesty for everyone, even illegal immigrants who had already been deported, without securing the borders, and attacking Hillary Clinton for being too hard on illegal aliens.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described socialist who is running for the Democratic Party presidential nomination against Hillary Clinton, has made utterly irresponsible accusations against Israel that would make Palestinian propagandists proud.

During an interview Sanders conducted with the editorial board of the Daily News on April 1, Sanders accused Israel of “indiscriminate” attacks against “innocent” Palestinians in Gaza. As a result, he said, “a lot of innocent people were killed who should not have been killed.”

Without citing any basis for his claim, Sanders stated his recollection that “over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza.” The Daily News checked the figure online, which turned out to be about 2,300 killed, and 10,000 wounded. Even those figures are questionable with regard to actual civilian casualties if they rely on United Nations sources. The UN’s sources included the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, which is run by Hamas’s very own Mufiz al-Makhalalati.

Israel’s former ambassador to the United States Michael Oren was unsparing in his criticism of Sanders’ outlandish assertions: “He accused us of a blood libel. He accused us of bombing hospitals. He accused us of killing 10,000 Palestinian civilians. Don’t you think that merits an apology?”

Hillary Rodham Clinton says Bernie Sanders is not qualified to be president. Senator Sanders says Mrs. Clinton is not qualified to be president. Both of them are correct, but there’s a bit more to the question.

Mrs. Clinton is a lifelong political grifter who poses as a feminist champion while riding on the coattails of her husband, an old-fashioned intern-diddling patriarchal chauvinist who just happens to have been the most gifted politician of his generation before his decline to his current diminished state. Like that of Michelle Obama, Mrs. Clinton’s so-called career in the private sector and in activism rose in neatly incremental tandem with her husband’s elevation through the ranks of political office. If you believe Mrs. Obama was being paid three-hundred grand-plus for vaguely defined administrative work or that Mrs. Clinton’s legal and cattle-futures-trading careers thrived without their patrons taking notice of the vast political power accumulated by their husbands, you are a naïf.

Mrs. Clinton over the years did successfully exploit her marriage to a powerful and vile man into two notable positions of her own: senator from New York and secretary of state. As a senator, she was — at best — undistinguished, merely punching the clock as she prepared to run for the presidency. Unfortunately for her, an equally ambitious nobody senator from Illinois was following the same program, and he is a better politician than she is. As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton was catastrophic: Our allies were alienated, our enemies emboldened, our diplomats abroad slaughtered like livestock. Our national reputation is in tatters and our international prestige greatly diminished, thanks in no small part to her incompetence and that of the president she served.

Of his many outrageous campaign statements, perhaps Donald J. Trump’s most important ones concern his would-be role as president of the United States.

When told that uniformed personnel would disobey his unlawful order as president to torture prisoners and kill civilians, Trump menacingly replied “They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse, believe me.” Responding to criticism by the speaker of the House, Trump spoke like a Mafia don: “Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well, but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him. And if I don’t? He’s gonna have to pay a big price.” Complaining that the United States’ international standing has declined, Trump promised to make foreigners “respect our country” and “respect our leader” by creating an “aura of personality.” Concerning the media, which he despises, Trump said, “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

He encourages participants at his rallies physically to assault critics and has offered to cover their legal fees. He has twice re-tweeted an American Nazi figure. Only under pressure did he reluctantly disavow support from David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. [He kept a copy of Hitler’s collected early speeches, My New Order, by his bed. He called on followers to swear allegiance to him, evoking Hitlergruß-like salutes.]

In these and other ways, the Republican presidential candidate breaches the normal boundaries of American politics. He wants the military, the congress, foreign governments, the press, and ordinary citizens to submit to his will. His demands, and not some musty 18th-century documents, are what count. Trump presents himself as billionaire, master dealmaker, and nationalist who can get things done, never mind the losers and the fine print.

We read over and over again how Donald J. Trump is running a campaign against “the establishment” in the Republican Party. The term sounds horrible and dangerous. But when you seriously think about it, the Republican Party “establishment” has one purpose—to maintain the party as a viable opposition vehicle to the plans of the Democratic Party. This is what a two-party political system should be about. Without two major political parties, America’s democratic form of government collapses and the United States becomes a socialist one-party state. The Trump candidacy threatens to destroy the two-party system.

Trump and his allies have made the term “establishment” into a dirty word. But Trump, an outsider with a history of supporting the other party, is trying to stage a hostile takeover of the GOP. The apparent plan is to make the Republican Party into a carbon copy of the European far-right “populist” parties that serve Russian interests. Some of these, like the National Front of France, are Russian-funded.

Interestingly, Donald J. Trump has a cordial relationship with the Moscow establishment headed by Vladimir Putin, but despises the Republican establishment in the U.S. For example, Trump has nothing but contempt for Mitt Romney, who ran against President Obama in 2012. For all his faults, Romney at least recognized the dangers posed by Russia. By contrast, Trump talks about a strategic alliance with Putin.

Putin’s network of shell companies and tax havens has recently been exposed in the so-called Panama Papers as a method by which he protects billions of dollars in personal wealth. One has to wonder whether Putin also maintains a global network of agents and sympathizers to make sure the Free World wilts in the face of Russian military aggression in Europe and the Middle East. One would have to be naïve to think no such network exists. Indeed, Trump is clearly a part of it, for he attacks NATO and various U.S. allies, including South Korea and Japan, and receives the open support of the Kremlin and its agents. Foreign intervention in an American presidential campaign has never been this blatant.

Supporters of Trump, who despise the Republican Party establishment, don’t like to talk about Trump’s ties to the Moscow establishment. This blindness has made it possible for Putin to strike gold, in the geopolitical sense, through Trump’s success in the Republican Party. It’s Trump’s foreign policy vision, such as it is, that could mean the demise of the Republican Party as a political vehicle for those who offer a realistic analysis of the military dangers posed by Russia and China. It’s true that Trump talks about China, in the sense that its economic power is a threat, but he is mute on the Russia-China military alliance in foreign affairs and the threat that it poses.

It is significant that Trump gets along better with Putin and his comrades than with “fellow” Republicans. That could be because he has mostly been a Democrat throughout his business career and has sought business deals in the former USSR and Russia. He calls Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and others in the GOP the worst of names, including liar, and yet Putin is considered by Trump to be a strong leader doing a good job for Russia. Trump even apologizes for the regime’s murder of journalists and political dissidents.