RUTHFULLY YOURS

A Good Joke About Political Murder When it’s okay — and not okay — to joke about killing political candidates.

A few years after his failed presidential campaign, John Kerry went on Bill Maher and joked about killing President Bush.

After Maher riffed that Kerry could have gone to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone, Kerry replied, “Or, I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.”

There was no media outrage. The event is remembered only on conservative websites.

And barely even there.

At least back when Kerry had joked about the assassination of Dan Quayle, he had been forced to briefly apologize for it. But less than a decade later the media bias had become so pervasive that joking about murdering Republican politicians had become so socially acceptable that it wasn’t even worth mentioning.

We are talking only about Republican politicians of course. That is why the media reacted with hysterical outrage to its latest manufactured Trump scandal. Not only did Trump not say what the media has accused him of saying, but the media has no problem when Democrats openly called and call for the assassination of Republican presidents and presidential candidates.

During Trump’s candidacy a fine roster of media folks covering the gamut from the New York Times to VICE to the Nightly Show have joked about killing Trump or about his assassination. Anyone objecting to that sort of good clean progressive fun would have been a humorless spoilsport.

Trump’s remark however is being denounced in the press as everything from a threat to sedition.

What did Trump actually say? When you go to the tape, it turns out that he said nothing.

The entire thunderstorm of outrage is based on taking Trump’s back and forth speaking style, radically different from those of ordinary politicians, and then removing the context of his discussion about the Second Amendment. The only thing Trump did was suggest that maybe there would be another option beyond the Supreme Court for protecting the Second Amendment. The crowd does gasp and laugh, but Trump offers no sign that he’s delivering a joke or saying anything at all subversive. As is so often the case, others were projecting their own expectations on Trump. Trump didn’t even notice their reactions.

If you believe the media and pundits, Trump’s recent gaffes and Hillary’s bounce in the polls spell disaster for the Republicans come November, even though we’re still ten weeks from the election. The Republican NeverTrump (NT) crowd are particularly vociferous, mixing schadenfreude and hysteria in equal measures. Whether it’s his comments about NATO or his spat with the Democrat parents of a soldier killed in battle, Republican dudgeon has reached stratospheric heights we’ve rarely seen from them in the case of Obama or Hillary.

Make no mistake, Trump’s habit of defending his elevated self-regard rather than hammering Hillary’s record of failure is politically unwise, though we’ll know that for sure only after the election. So far, every gaffe seems to delight his supporters, if only because of the outsized criticism it evokes from the maligned Republican “establishment,” which continues to be hell-bent on proving that they do exist and they do find more in common with the Democrats than with their own party’s base. When have you heard any Democrat other than Pat Caddell go after Hillary with the same gusto as the NT folks attack Trump?

What I find more fascinating is the inconsistency of Trump’s Republican critics. The Donald’s crude rhetoric apparently disturbs them more than Hillary’s long catalogue of policy mistakes and abuse of power. As PJ Media’s Richard Fernandez suggests, too many Republicans are content to be the hapless Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters, while the Republican base wants to see a real basketball game played by the same rules for both teams.

Take Trump’s criticism of the Khan family, whose son died in Iraq in 2004. Mr. Khan delivered a blistering attack on Trump at the Democratic Convention, the substance of which had nothing to do with his son’s death. After Trump predictably gave a scorched-earth response, we heard lectures about the inviolability of parents who have lost children in combat, how their sacrifice should always be respected, and how only a boorish narcissist would say things that disrespect their loss. Even if those parents were at the Democrat Convention solely to deliver a vicious partisan attack on the other party’s candidate, one should show forbearance.

He endorses Hillary on her Russia stance — which he publicly opposed.
Just last Friday, former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell opined in the pages of the New York Times: “I ran the CIA. Now I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton.” He added that Donald Trump “may be a national security threat” due to his connections with Russia.

But just last November on Face the Nation, Morell was in favor of Trump’s approach.

So what does Morell really believe?

Here is the NYT tweeting about Morell’s op-ed, followed by Monday’s interview with CBS where Morell said he wanted to “scare Assad” and kill Russians:

He ran the CIA. Now he’s endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. https://t.co/MAbSD4DFBO via @nytopinion pic.twitter.com/T0UYEJGz52

“When we were in Iraq, the Iranians were giving weapons to the Shi’a militia, who were killing American soldiers,” Morell told “CBS This Morning” co-host Charlie Rose.

“The Iranians were making us pay a price. We need to make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. We need to make the Russians pay a price.”

He went on to explain…

Trump says the election is rigged. It’s even worse than you imagined.

Donald Trump gaslighted the left when he suggested the upcoming elections may be “rigged.” The usual comic trove of Democrats posing as academics, journalists, and civil rights groups pounced on Trump. It’s a revived “Southern strategy” that tars “Democrats as cheaters,” wailed Rutgers professor Lorraine Minnite.

Democrats as cheaters? You mean Democrats like Wendy Rosen, Melowese Richardson, and Lessadolla Sowers?

Whether Trump was correct or not depends on the meaning of “rigged.” If “rigged” means a group of Democrats sit in central command and control the output of voting machines from outer space, then no, the election isn’t rigged.

But what Democrats are really doing is far more dangerous, far more diffuse, and far harder to fix than a conspiracy to control voting machines.

The integrity of our elections is suffering from a coordinated, multi-million dollar attack on multiple fronts. It’s far more complicated than one centralized high-powered conspiracy to “rig” the election. A more sophisticated understanding of what is happening is essential to combat the real threat to our elections.

Here are five ways that the integrity of elections are under attack:

A year ago, in August 2015, this column called “The Donald” the Democrats’ Trump card. It is hard to imagine any other Republican candidate who could rescue a thoroughly discredited Hillary Clinton from a devastating defeat in this year’s election.

Now 50 prominent Republicans with foreign-policy and national-security experience have taken the unprecedented step of publicly and collectively announcing that they cannot vote for Donald Trump because they believe that he would be “the most reckless president in American history.”

Why? Not only because he has “demonstrated repeatedly” that “he has little understanding” of the nation’s “vital national interests,” but because “Mr. Trump has shown no interest in educating himself.”

Indeed, Donald Trump has shown little real interest in anything besides Donald Trump.

His response to these criticisms has been completely predictable. Trump has not even tried to answer the charges or to assure the American people on something as important as their survival and the survival of this nation. Instead, there is the standard Trump tactic of launching unsubstantiated charges against his critics.

Even if all his charges against his critics were 100 percent true, that is no assurance to the American people on the vital issues they raised — and for which there are innumerable examples of Trump’s own words and deeds to make people worry about what he would do in the White House.

Donald Trump cleaned up one of his messes, endorsing the re-election of fellow Republicans Paul Ryan, Kelly Ayotte and John McCain. On Monday, he laid out a tax plan that GOPers are genetically predisposed to embrace.

This assures us that Mr. Trump is not crazy in any clinical sense—incapable of changing his approach and adapting to feedback from the environment.

It only semi-assures us on another question. At least part of Mr. Trump is serious about being president—or, anyway, about mounting a campaign that won’t rebound disastrously on the GOP.

Those who marinate in the hyperbole of the moment found Mr. Trump’s bickering with the parents of a slain American soldier of a different order of personal dysfunction, recklessness and political tone-deafness than his threats against Jeff Bezos, his attack on Judge Curiel, his fake buddy act with Putin, etc.

In fact, the back and forth with the Khans was distressingly normal compared with these other episodes. The Khans launched an unquestionably partisan attack (which does not mean it lacked substantive validity) in the most partisan of venues, a Democratic convention.

For once the personal and political were united in one of the Donald’s miscarriages. He may have been motivated by a personal slight but he wasn’t politicizing the nonpolitical for personal or business reasons.

Mr. Trump is still an outside chance to win the presidency. Those commentators who spend all their effort pronouncing him unacceptable—and consigning to reputational hell any who quibble—are letting down their fans. For voters the problem is a multidimensional one.

If Mr. Trump isn’t crazy, unstable or irrational, then he’s merely unpresentable. A Hillary presidency may be preferable if Mrs. Clinton’s only path to presidential achievement is through a Republican Congress. But a possible outcome is all the levers landing in the hands of Democrats who believe nothing is wrong with America that more regulation and redistribution can’t fix. Read the Washington Post’s chilling account of how her campaign gestated Mrs. Clinton’s “detailed and complicated economic policy agenda.” Try not to think of Ira Magaziner’s health-care task force in 1993.
In contrast, Mr. Trump’s campaign has been a promise to make America great again—not a laundry list. It’s reassuringly likely that his most ill-advised and headline-grabbing policy pronouncements mean nothing. That’s a plus.

He tells an excitable part of the electorate what it wants to hear, on guns, trade and immigration. When you tell the public untruths, in Mr. Trump’s understanding of business, that’s marketing.