About an eon ago, David Brooks coined the memorable phrase “status-income disequilibrium.” It diagnosed modern elites, politicians in particular, whose jobs endowed them with power that dwarfed the attendant financial compensation. It would seem quaint to fret over SID today, grubby pols having turned the monetizing of “public service” into an art form for which the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation is the national museum.
Ah, but there’s a new SID in town. Those closely following the GOP presidential sweepstakes have doubtless noticed the haggard Beltway Republicans in its throes: Status-Influence Disequilibrium.
The condition was in evidence Tuesday night, as Donald Trump rolled up another series of primary victories. Bewildered GOP strategists groped for a silver lining, in chorus with commentators who wear establishment sympathies on their sleeves — and never more openly than when denying that there is any Republican establishment.
Solace was sought in the triumph of Ohio governor John Kasich, who managed to win his home state primary with less than 50 percent of the vote, denying Trump a sweep of the night’s five contests. The glow was not exactly like “feeling the Bern.” With this victory, Kasich ran his record to one win and 28 losses (in the Kasich spirit of Christian charity, I’m just counting states and ignoring losses piled up in D.C., Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and so on). As competitors go, Kasich is the ’62 Mets. Yet, Ohio became a ray of establishment hope: an aberrational win by a candidate already mathematically eliminated from contention somehow means the home team still has a shot.
Imagine if Senator Barack Obama, facing a possible presidential convention battle, had warned that if he didn’t get the nomination: “I think you’d have riots.” Then, to be statesmanlike and magnanimous, he added: “I wouldn’t lead it but I think bad things would happen.”
Conservatives would have exploded in justified indignation at this threat of civil violence, which they would inevitably understand as carrying a racial subtext. Even Al Sharpton has never been so shameless as to warn explicitly that if, say, this or that cop isn’t indicted or convicted there would be riots. Instead, the riot threat from Sharpton and other black activists remains merely implicit in the “No Justice, No Peace” agitation.
So what is the difference when Trump overtly threatens riots? His supporters, both in the grass roots and the commentariat, have ignored or brushed off his reckless warning. Is it because white people don’t riot? Actually, they occasionally do, as the intermittent store-smashing during the “No Global” protests of the 2000s showed. To be sure, industrial-strength riots over the last year and a half and over the last four decades were overwhelmingly black. And the professional white anarchists who vandalize Starbucks and McDonald’s outlets during anti-globalization rallies are a very different demographic than Trump’s supporters.
Is he chicken? Is he afraid?
His people will make excuses: it’s the smart thing to do. What if he accidentally flubs and stops momentum? Why take the chance?
I don’t buy it. He exited Fox’s forthcoming debate, formerly scheduled for next week, because he fears that Cruz, who is in second place in the GOP presidential race, will beat him. That’s the way it looks. In schoolyard terms, he’s running from a one-on-one, a mano-a-mano. That’s not the way to win respect – especially from the tough, politically incorrect base that seems to make up much of his support. I’m surprised they aren’t making a fuss. If Trump is going to kick butt in Washington and make America great again, what’s he doing backing down from mild-mannered Ted Cruz?
Cruz isn’t Hulk Hogan. He isn’t Albert Einstein.
The problem is, Cruz knows conservatism, has lived it, and has put his political life on the line for it. He’s also a champion debater, a lawyer who has argued in front of the Supreme Court, and a man who speaks from the heart – because he believes what he’s saying. Trump certainly speaks from the heart. But he doesn’t know the issues like Cruz? At best, he’s learning.
Whatever the reason, he won’t meet Cruz on the playing field. He’s backed out, canceled his appearance on what was to be the next Fox debate. This lack of courage on Trump’s part is a travesty. It’s a disservice to the very people he hopes to win and lead. Fear of making a wrong move on the debate stage is not the way a potential president of the United States should be thinking.
The Swedish municipality of Malmö, with only 318,000 inhabitants, is providing tens of thousands of dollars in tax revenues each year to organizations that spread extreme anti-Israeli messages.
Apelgårdsskolan elementary school in Malmö lends its premises on Sundays to an association called Framtidsföreningen [“The Future Society”]. The organization holds a Sunday school, where, among other things, maps are handed out to children where Israel has been removed, and schoolbooks are distributed in which “resistance” against Israel is celebrated. Framtidsföreningen has also received $4500 from Malmö’s recreational board since 2014.
That pro-Palestinian organizations will use tax-funded operations as a tool to spread hatred against Israel is a given. This means that organizations that spread hatred against Israel in Sweden in many cases have tax revenues at their disposal at several levels.
There are no effective lobbying organizations in Sweden that fight for the cause of Israel.
In recent years, aid that finances hatred against Israel has received much attention. Organizations such as NGO Monitor have shown time and again how European countries and international organizations provide financial support to projects in which the sole purpose is to spread lies about Israel and erode its legitimacy as a nation.
Back in 1992, I was having lunch with a bunch of disenchanted GOP friends. We were looking at October 1992 polls and desperately seeking something to get excited about. One guy said: “[Expletive deleted] Ross Perot.” He spoke for all of us!
I hope I’m not looking at October 2016 polls and saying, “[Expletive deleted] Trump!”
Go ahead and tell me that March polls are meaningless. Or that Megyn Kelly of Fox News hates Trump. Or whatever other excuse is going around these days.
The GOP will be running against the weakest candidate on the other side.
Let’s look at Clinton, according to Doug Schoen:
Mrs. Clinton appears to have a virtual lock on the Democratic nomination. She leads Bernie Sanders with 1,561 pledged and superdelegates to his 800 (though superdelegates can defect, as Mrs. Clinton found out in 2008). In the latest WSJ/NBC News poll she beats the GOP front-runner, Donald Trump, by 13 points. But dampening this good news for the Clinton campaign is a sobering reality: The candidate’s base of support is shrinking, and it may not be broad enough for her to win a national election. Mrs. Clinton retains the core of her husband’s presidential constituency, doing best among moderates—but in 2016 these are a diminishing portion of a Democratic base increasingly dominated by more-liberal voters. Bill Clinton drew support in large numbers from white men, independents and young people. Mrs. Clinton struggles with those groups.
Even among the ultimate Democratic Party voting bloc—blacks—she is showing signs of erosion both in support and enthusiasm for her candidacy. Since her 80% take of African-American voters in South Carolina and Mississippi in recent weeks, Mrs. Clinton has seen her black support in other states drop by about 10 percentage points. In Michigan, Mr. Sanders pulled in 30% of the African-American vote and broke even with Mrs. Clinton among black voters under age 45.
This trend continued on Tuesday: Mr. Sanders took 32% of black support in Missouri, 30% in Ohio and 29% in Illinois, highlighting a significant gap in Southern and Northern black support for the former first lady.
Mrs. Clinton is the weakest Democrat candidate since Governor Dukakis had the misfortune of running against V.P. Bush in 1988, or President Reagan’s third term.
Mrs. Clinton creates zero excitement, turnout is down, and supporters are scared that she will start coughing at a moment’s notice.
So why is she leading Trump by 13 points? Why is Trump down 6 in the RCP average?
The story of Mehmed Emin Pasha, born a Jew as Isaak Eduard Schnitzer and baptized as Eduard Carl Oscar Theodor Schnitzer, is a multiculturalist’s delight. This Jewish doctor who turned Christian, then Muslim, could be the cosmopolitan poster child, proof that we are all one and that distinctions don’t matter. But universalists beware; this pasha was no Zelig, fitting in chameleon-like at colorful historical moments. This shapeshifter adapted smoothly but stood out boldly, proving that the best way to contribute to the world is to root identities in particular cultures and act on core ideals.
Schnitzer was born in Oppeln, Silesia on March 28, 1840, into a German Jewish family that had already broken from the ghetto’s provinciality. Schnitzer’s father was a merchant, a proper German burgher wannabe. He embodied the Enlightenment delusion that we could, as John Lennon would sing, “all live together as one.” But Schnitzer’s father had made the classic Enlightenment deal with the devil. To become emancipated, to prosper, most Jews felt compelled to abandon much of Judaism—even though they would only be accepted marginally as Europeans.
When Isaak was 5, his father died and his mother ditched her people and purchased acceptance by marrying a Christian. Now baptized as a Lutheran, Eduard Carl Oscar Theodor Schnitzer grew up championing German nationalism as embodying Western humanism at its best. After studying at the universities of Breslau, Konigsberg, and Berlin, he became a physician, to use modern science to save lives.
Schnitzer was derailed temporarily when he failed to file his licensing paperwork on time and could not practice medicine. Ever-resilient, he left for Istanbul.
Arriving in Antivari in Montenegro along the way, he resumed his medical practice far away from German supervision. One of those annoying Europeans with a genius for language, he mastered Turkish, Albanian, and Greek, along with many of the standard Romance languages. This poly-lingual environment so suited him, he became the port’s quarantine officer, processing immigrants.
Always climbing, Schnitzer charmed his way into working for northern Albania’s governor, Ismail Hakki Pasha. In perhaps his creepiest move, Schnitzer returned to Germany in 1873, after his boss died, claiming the widow and children as his wife and kids. That arrangement ended abruptly, mysteriously, in 1875, leading to Schnitzer’s plunge into the Muslim world.
Merkel’s migration policy is causing security mayhem in Germany, where mostly Muslim migrants are raping and assaulting women and children with virtual impunity.
The AfD was founded as a Eurosceptic party in 2013 by German economists advocating the abolition of the European single currency, the euro, and opposing financial bailouts of profligate eurozone countries such as Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Since then, the leader of the AfD, Frauke Petry, has broadened the party’s initial focus on economics to immigration.
Other political and media elites are ramping up a months-long campaign to delegitimize AfD voters as: agitators, arsonists, far-right extremists, fascists, Nazis, populists and xenophobes.
Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has called on German intelligence to begin monitoring the AfD, presumably in an effort to silence critics of the government’s migration policy. Gabriel has called for Germany to take in even more migrants by airlifting them into the country directly from the Middle East.
“It cannot be that after such an election result, the answer to the electorate is: everything will go on as before.” – Horst Seehofer, the head of the Christian Socialist Union (CSU), the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria.
“I expect the chancellor clearly to admit: ‘Yes, we have understood. We are going to return to the voters. Politics must move toward the voter, not the other way around. This is called democracy.'” – CSU politician Hans-Peter Uhl
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to continue her open-door migration policy — despite heavy losses in regional elections that were widely regarded as a referendum on that very policy.
Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was defeated in two out of the three federal states voting on March 13. By contrast, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) — an upstart anti-establishment party campaigning against Merkel’s liberal migration policy — surged to double-digit results in all three states: Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt.
Marco Rubio’s speech suspending his campaign after his crushing loss in the Florida primary was a requiem for an entire style of Republican politics.
Rubio represented an upbeat, opportunity-oriented vein in the GOP that ran through George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism back to the late supply-sider Jack Kemp, who practically made a civic religion out of optimism and inclusivity.
Donald Trump has grabbed this Kempian tradition by the collar and frog-marched it from the room with all the delicacy of one of his security guards ejecting a troublesome protester from a rally.
Kemp, a former pro quarterback who was a congressman from Buffalo for years, was the chief proponent of the Reagan tax cuts. To read the recent biography of him by journalists Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke, Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America, is to be struck by Kemp’s touching naiveté by the standards of the 2016 GOP race.
Kemp eschewed personal attacks and opposed negative campaigning. He believed “the purpose of politics is not to defeat your opponent as much as it is to provide superior leadership and better ideas.” And the central idea was, always and everywhere, tax cuts.
Kemp wanted the GOP to be a “natural home of African-Americans.” He favored openhandedness on immigration. He cared deeply about the plight of the urban poor, and about what he called — long before Jeb Bush — “the right to rise.”
In foreign policy, he was a friend of freedom and stalwart advocate of human rights.
Kemp influenced the debate and a generation of conservatives, but his own flaws as a highly undisciplined candidate and the monomania with which he hewed to his ideas limited him as a candidate at the national level.
But Kempism lived on in George W. Bush, whose compassionate conservatism was latitudinarian on immigration and sought to win over minorities by softening conservatism’s edges.
Bush’s foremost domestic achievement was an enormous tax cut, and his Freedom Agenda was a Kemp-like advocacy of human rights on steroids.
Like the eye of a hurricane, Donald J. Trump almost magically keeps himself at the very center of attention, no matter what chaos surrounds him. This phenomenon and the relentless and exhausting drama of the Democratic and GOP presidential primaries largely have kept the eyes of the world off Hillary Clinton and the increasingly ominous developments in the E-mailgate scandal. Despite the former secretary of state’s impressive ballot-box victories, her ethical woes multiply.
The number of classified e-mails on Clinton’s private computer server totals 2,115. At her initial March 10, 2015, news conference on this fiasco, Clinton claimed that “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” Actually, “no” such e-mails actually exceed by 99 the number of years since the birth of Christ.
If the first reports on this intelligence catastrophe indicated that Clinton’s server contained two thousand one hundred and fifteen classified e-mails, the Duchess of Chappaqua would have left her press conference in the back of a squad car.
Clinton’s server held at least 22 e-mails that are too Top Secret to be made public, even if redacted. Moreover, the Washington Post reports that Clinton’s server contained 104 dispatches in which “officials have determined that material Clinton herself wrote in the body of email messages is classified.”
The Post quoted a former senior functionary who is angered by today’s public display of e-mails that were sent securely and expected to remain quiet.
“I resent the fact that we’re in this situation,” the official said, “and we’re in this situation because of Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private server.”
