RUTHFULLY YOURS

In yet another demonstration of his unsuitability for office, Donald Trump extolled the wearing of burqas and niqabs at length at his rally in New Hampshire earlier this week.

The comments, delivered in Trump’s typical yuk-it-up tone, are so ridiculous that they’re worth printing in their entirety:

We want it where the women over there don’t have to wear the you-know-what. [Trump gestures across his face with his hand, an apparent reference to burqas and niqabs.] And then I said, “Oh, well that makes sense, that’s nice.” Then I saw women interviewed. They said, “We want to wear it. We’ve worn them for a thousand years. Why would anyone tell us not to?” They want to! What the hell are we getting involved for? In fact, it’s easier. You don’t have to put on makeup. Look how beautiful everyone looks. Wouldn’t it be easier? Bwah. Right? Wouldn’t that be easy? I tell ya, if I was a woman, I don’t want to . . . bwah, “I’m ready, darling, let’s go.” It’s true!

Trump’s apology for the burqa (which covers a woman’s entire body, leaving only a small area of mesh to see through) and niqab (which veils a woman’s entire face except for her eyes) is worrisome not only because of its implicit misogyny; for a man who aspires to lead the world’s most powerful nation, it reveals incredible ignorance about the Muslim world.

For starters, it’s worth noting that the burqa and niqab are embraced by only a tiny minority in the Muslim world, according to a recent survey from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, which conducted polling in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey.

Unless you’re a pretty hardcore architecture nerd, you’ve probably never heard of Hermann Eggert. He was a turn-of-the-century German architect who designed the 1913 town hall in Hanover and, perhaps most important, Frankfurt’s wondrously efficient Hauptbahnhof, the busiest train station in Germany. It handles some 450,000 passengers a day, not too far behind Paris’s Gare du Nord, Europe’s busiest train station.

The Europeans love their trains, but as station managers, they face nothing like the Japanese challenge: Shinjuku Station in Tokyo sees some 3.6 million souls pass through its doors on an average day — more than the entire sum of daily passengers on the London Underground. Shinjuku Station, even more so than Frankfurt’s Hauptbahnhof, conforms to the famous, frequently cited, and even more frequently ignored advice given by Metro de Madrid boss Manuel Melis Maynar on the subject of building efficient transit systems: “Design should be focused on the needs of the users, rather than on architectural beauty or exotic materials, and never on the name of the architect.”

Never? Well . . .

As we come to an end of another grim week in politics, two views of how Campaign 2016 is going from Team Bush:

First, the dean of the consultant-industrial complex, the man who gave us Presidents McCain and Romney** and is now seeking to make it a hat-trick as head of Bush’s SuperPac; Mike Murphy explains why Donald Trump doesn’t matter:

He’s dead politically, he’ll never be president of the United States, ever. By definition I don’t think you can be a front-runner if you’re totally un-electable. I think there’s there an a-priori logic problem in that.

So that’s great news for Jeb. Because if you discount the front-runner, and the runner-up to the front-runner, and Cruz and Rubio and whatnot, then the real front-runner is Jeb, who’s totally electable even if no actual electors want to elect him. Why is that?

We see Feb. 1 to March 15, 45 days, as our period to seize the nomination and get in front—and there are a lot of states and a lot of congressional districts and a lot of targeting to that. One of the reasons we’ve worked so hard and Jeb, frankly, has inspired so many people to donate to us is so we have the resources to pursue that campaign. Most of these other guys are all running on spec. We’re at a point now where we’re significantly funded for those 45 days, cash in the bank today. Nobody else is in that situation in this race. Nobody’s close…

For most of these guys, it’s: Well, lightning’s going to strike, Jindal-mania is going to hit the New Hampshire primary, I’m going to win and I’m suddenly going to turn around a ton of money and then I’m going to run the momentum all the way through March. Here’s the problem with that: let’s say it’s the 10th of February, you have won the New Hampshire primary two days ago. You’re only 20 days out so you should be on the air already…

Bill Clinton in his two successful races for the White House in 1992 and 1996 won overwhelming majorities among Jewish voters, with margins not seen since the election of Lyndon B. Johnson over Barry Goldwater in 1964 or of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to his third and fourth terms in 1940 and 1944. Since 1992, the Jewish vote has slowly become more competitive between the two major parties, approaching a 2/3 versus 1/3 split between Democrats and Republicans. The 2016 presidential race is likely to offer a choice between Hillary Clinton, who does not appear to have the same tight hold over Jewish voters that her husband did, and a Republican with far stronger pro-Israel credentials.
The early debates and campaigns for the nomination in both parties have been revealing for the issues that seem to matter to partisans on each side, and those that do not. With regard to United States relations with Israel, the topic has been almost entirely absent from discussion on the Democratic side. Democrats, and especially those on the Left who increasingly dominate the Democratic Party, are far less supportive of Israel or strong American-Israel ties than previous generations of Democratic presidents or leaders — such as Harry Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, Bill Clinton and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

It was inevitable that Bernie Sanders would be accused of sexism sooner or later.

His day came over the weekend. At the signature Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, Hillary Clinton hit the Vermont senator for saying in the first Democratic debate that “all the shouting in the world” wouldn’t keep guns out of the wrong hands. According to Clinton, Sanders had directed a notoriously sexist insult at her — although not one of the 15 million people watching at the time had noticed it.

“I haven’t been shouting,” Clinton intoned, “but sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting.” What Clinton’s plaint lacked in plausibility, it made up for in bad faith.

Shouting has not typically been considered a loaded term. Sanders didn’t say “screeching.” He didn’t say “nagging.” In fact, he had been saying that shouting is ineffectual in the gun debate long before he was entangled in an argument about gun control with Hillary Clinton.

There can be no doubt now: The U.S. economy is struggling, inequality is on the rise and too many Americans feel uncertain about their future.

On the campaign trail, I have met many of these men and women, who sit at the kitchen table each week, straining to stretch their dollars from shrinking paychecks. Families who can’t save for retirement with near-zero interest rates. Young parents who are being crushed by their student debt. Shop owners who can’t get a loan because their community bank went out of business.

We’ve had more than six years to watch the left’s prescriptions in action and the verdict is in: They don’t work. Under President Obama, the economy has been hobbled. The 73,000-page tax code is too complex to navigate without an army of accountants. The administration has added $7 trillion in new federal debt, and has doubled down on environmental regulations that crush business owners and farmers while raising energy prices.