RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bernie Sanders caused the Panama Papers. Bernie of Vermont didn’t do it by himself, of course. The world’s most famous socialist, and Hillary Clinton’s albatross, had a lot of help. Spare me the crocodile tears over the immorality of tax avoidance. Panama is an indictment of government greed.

After World War II, the governments of the West established tax regimes to support the reconstruction of their nations. Six decades later, that tax machinery, which runs the social-welfare states in the countries Bernie Sanders cites in every campaign stop as a model for America, has run totally amok—an unaccountable, devouring monster. Billionaires aren’t the only ones who run from it.

Most governments, including ours, overtax their citizens to feed their own insatiable need for money. Then the legal thieves running the government and their cronies, unwilling to abide the tax levels they created, move their wealth offshore to places like Panama. Arguably, all the world’s people should be able to move their assets “offshore” to escape governments that are smothering economic life and growth, which has stalled in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Speaking of crocodile tears, Barack Obama spent Tuesday bragging that corporate tax inversions are akin to Panama Papers’ tax avoidance. Mr. Obama said “corporations,” another swearword invoked by Bernie Sanders at every stop, are “gaming the system.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Ted Cruz won the Wisconsin Republican primary tonight, making it much more difficult for Donald Trump to win the GOP nomination before the convention in July (indeed, he now needs the same percent of remaining delegates as Bernie Sanders does to win the Democrat primary). As the results were coming in, The Donald released a pitiful, nasty statement unworthy of a presidential candidate.

Look up “sore loser” in the dictionary, and you’re likely to find the Trump campaign statement after Wisconsin. Yes, it is that bad. Don’t believe me? Fine, here it is in all of its glory:In one statement, Trump denounced Cruz as a liar(no surprise there), a “puppet,” and an establishment “Trojan horse.” Furthermore, The Donald accused Cruz of coordinating with Super PACs and being “totally” controlled by them. A Tea Party conservative might find it ironic that Trump compares Cruz (once nearly universally hated among GOP elites) to the “establishment,” declaring that he had “the entire party apparatus behind him.” It is true that more moderate Republicans such as Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham, and Jeb Bush have supported Cruz, but the Texas senator is still a far cry from an “establishment puppet.” These are less the arguments of a confident challenger and more the complaints of a spoiled child. Some have characterized such comments as “extreme whining,” not without merit. Trump also complained about being treated unfairly on other occasions, especially by Fox News. Here’s a newsflash: Presidents do not get treated fairly. If you really want to win this thing, you need to accept that.Compare this statement with Marco Rubio’s concession speech, or don’t. After all, it’s impossible to compare petulant whining with dignified withdrawal.

Donald Trump panicked the foreign policy establishment when he said NATO is obsolete and ill-suited to fight terrorism. By saying that, and adding, “We can’t afford to do this anymore,” Mr. Trump drew gleefully harsh responses from Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Cruz said, “Donald Trump is wrong that American should retreat from Europe, retreat from NATO, hand Putin a major victory and while he’s at it, hand ISIS a major victory.”

Mrs. Clinton’s claim to the presidency rests on her experience as secretary of state. If you read her memoir, “Hard Choices,” you’ll inevitably conclude that although she went nearly everywhere and conferred with almost everyone in power, by her own recitation she never persuaded anyone to support any American position or undertaking. On the basis of that non-expertise, Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Trump’s position on NATO “would reverse decades of bipartisan American leadership and send a dangerous signal to friend and foe alike.” She would, of course, leave NATO undisturbed on its current course.

At the risk of injecting facts into politics, we need to understand what NATO has become and why, before we can try to fix it or consign it to the ash heap of history.

Mr. Trump’s assertion that NATO isn’t constituted properly to deal with terrorism is correct but irrelevant. NATO was designed in the 1940s to deal with the postwar threats of Soviet aggression, not with the then-unforeseen terrorist threat. We cannot forget that after Sept. 11, 2001, NATO — for the first time — invoked Article 5 of its charter, the collective defense provision that states an attack against one member is an attack against all. Many NATO members, including Poland, Britain and others, sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, joining our wars against terrorism.

Midway through historian G.P. Baker’s biography of the Roman general and master politician Sulla (139-78 B.C.), I came across the following two sentences: “There are some systems which naturally take control out of the hands of good men. There are even some which necessarily put it in the hands of bad ones.” Baker’s observation took my mind away from Rome and back, where it was not eager to go, to the current presidential campaign. How did it come about that we have five such unimpressive contenders for the presidency of the United States? Is there something in our system of electing candidates that makes inevitable the rise of the mediocre and even the exaltation of the vulgar?

Difficult to find anyone who talks about the presidential primaries with any enthusiasm. Even yellow-dog Democrats and academic feminists can’t get much worked up for Hillary Clinton. The young are apparently taken with the socialist fantast Bernie Sanders—but then, being young, they don’t realize he is nothing more than a digitally remastered 1930s replay.
On the Republican side, John Kasich talks endlessly about his own accomplishments—he balanced the national budget, he worked splendidly with those across the aisle when in Congress, in Ohio he has done everything but wipe out ISIS—in a manner that, though he seems unaware of it, is off-putting even to voters who want to like him. Ted Cruz is the very model of the contrast gainer: He looks good, that is, only in contrast to Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump’s vulgarity is nonpareil—and by his vulgarity I don’t mean his profanity merely, but the vulgar quality of his speech, his thought, his very sentiments. So low have things fallen owing to Donald Trump that lifelong Republicans have told me that, in a Trump-versus-Clinton election, they are likely to hold their nose and vote for Mrs. Clinton. CONTINUE AT SITE

Donald Trump has denounced the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as being “obsolete,” and has called for sharply reducing U.S. commitments to the alliance that has been the bulwark of American security since World War II. While Trump’s apologists have attempted to explain these remarks as a mere “bargaining position” to try to get Europeans to increase their military expenditures, the Donald’s announcement of the appointment of Carter Page as one of his principal advisers argues for a far more straightforward and alarming interpretation of his statements.

Carter Page is an out-and-out Putinite. A consultant to and investor in the Kremlin’s state-run gas company, Gazprom, Page has a direct financial interest in ending American sanctions against the company. Not only that, but Page is tight with the Kremlin’s foreign-policy apparatus and has served as a vehement propagandist for it.

In February 2014, thousands of Ukrainians braved police gunfire to rise up and overthrow the corrupt Putin stooge Viktor Yanukovych, who had been president of Ukraine for four years. Yanukovych, breaking his pledge to take Ukraine on the path to freedom offered by the European Union, had decided to surrender the country to the Moscow-run “Eurasian Union” instead. Within weeks, the Kremlin responded by sending troops to invade the Ukrainian province of Crimea, and then, in April, it seized Donetsk, Lugansk, and other parts of eastern Ukraine as well. Under the terms of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in return for Ukraine’s giving up its nuclear arsenal, the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom were all bound to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

It is curious how people romanticize evil and insanity. The habit, I believe, is born of naiveté, or at least inexperience. The college student who prances about in a T-shirt bearing the image of Che Guevara, for example, has no idea of what a malignant figure Che was, how treacherous, how cruel, how murderous. He sees only a handsome “freedom fighter” swaddled in the gauze of exotic Latin flamboyance. The grubby reality escapes him entirely.

The knotty French philosopher Simone Weil saw deeply into this phenomenon when she observed that “imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” Weil understood the converse as well: “Imaginary good,” she wrote, “is boring, real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Something similar can be said about sanity, what David Hume rightly extolled as “the calm sunshine of the mind.” Madness seems like an adventure only if you do not have to contend with it.

But what if you do? Many people, I believe, are beginning to ask themselves that as the glow of novelty deserts Donald Trump and he stands more and more revealed for what he is: an astonishingly ignorant, narcissistic bully and braggart. A populist demagogue whose closest fictional model might be P. G. Wodehouse’s Mosley-esque character Roderick Spode, while the Italian clown, TV personality, and political activist Beppo Grillo might provide the closest real-life analogue.

No one, as far as I know, has compared Trump’s populist rallies with the “vaffanculo” (“f*** off”) rallies that involved more than two million Italians and catapulted the erstwhile clown to the eccentric center of Italian political life. It would be a useful exercise.

The Beppo Grillo analogy was suggested to me by “The revolt of the public and the rise of Donald Trump,” a remarkable essay by Martin Gurri, a former CIA intelligence officer and author of the (equally remarkable) “The Revolt of the Public And The Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.” It is often said that Donald Trump gives voice to the disenchantment of people with the Washington establishment. It would be more accurate, Gurri suggests, to say that he is the embodiment of the decadence or collapse of a political consensus that no longer enjoys our allegiance. “A meticulous study of Donald Trump’s biography, statements, and policy ‘positions,'” Gurri writes: