RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dear Trump Voter,

For several months now, you have heard people such as me criticizing you for your zealous devotion to Donald Trump. We have pointed out that Donald Trump’s policy preferences, on matters ranging from abortion to taxes to private-property rights, are closer to Hillary Clinton’s than to those of any Republican in the last half-century. We have pointed out that Donald appears to have no particular knowledge of most of the subjects that would occupy his time as America’s chief executive; nor does he exhibit any particular inclination to study up. We have noted his strongman tendencies, his penchant for scurrilous personal insults, and his general megalomania.

We have noted these things, and much more — and yet you refuse to leave his side.

We understand the attraction. You feel small and under siege, and Donald seems manly and strong. He has money and “astonishingly excellent” health and a really big tower. He is fecund with barbs and insults.

If we thought this relationship were healthy, we would support you. We only want you to be happy, prosperous, and in the lowest tax-bracket possible. But we — well, we were in Sioux City, Iowa, this weekend, and we think you need to know what your Donald really thinks of you:

The polls, they say I have the most loyal people. Did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.

The presidency’s most crucial duty is the protection of American national security. Yet, interviewed by Hugh Hewitt months into his campaign, Donald Trump did not know the key leaders of the global jihad. The man who would be commander-in-chief was unfamiliar with Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader who has been murdering Americans for over 30 years; Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s longtime deputy who has quite notoriously commanded al-Qaeda since the network’s leader was killed by U.S. forces in 2011; and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State (ISIS) and a jihadist so globally notorious that many teenagers are aware of him.

Of course a man who wants to be president should make it his business to know such things. But even the casual fan who does not know the players without a scorecard at least knows who the teams are and why they are competing. Trump failed even that basic test, confusing the Kurds (a minority ethnic group beleaguered by ISIS) with the Quds Force (the elite operatives of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps).

​The global jihad is complex, comprising terrorist organizations and abettors that include rogue nations and other shady accomplices. Their fluid alliances and internecine rivalries often defy the Sunni–Shiite divide. Matters are complicated further still by ideological allies such as the Muslim Brotherhood that feign moderation while supporting the jihadist agenda. The threat is openly aggressive on its own turf but operates by stealth in the West. A president may not have to be good with names to oppose it effectively, but he has to grasp the animating ideology, the power relations, and the goals of the players — and how weakening one by strengthening another can degrade rather than promote our security.

Via Politico:

Noam Chomsky would “absolutely” choose Hillary Clinton over the Republican nominee if he lived in a swing state, but her primary challenger, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, “doesn’t have much of a chance,” the MIT professor and intellectual said in a recent interview.

Chomsky, who lives in the blue state of Massachusetts, said he would vote for Clinton if he lived in a swing state such as Ohio.

“Oh absolutely…my vote would be against the Republican candidate,” Chomsky told Al Jazeera English’s Mehdi Hasan in a two-part interview — part of which will air Friday on “UpFront.”

Chomsky cited “enormous differences” between the two major political parties. “Every Republican candidate is either a climate change denier or a skeptic who says we can’t do it,” Chomsky said. “What they are saying is, ‘Let’s destroy the world.’ Is that worth voting against? Yeah.”

A good chunk of the electorate who is mad at either party’s establishment would probably vehemently disagree with the “enormous differences” line. I know for a fact that disgruntled conservatives could be assuaged quite a bit if Mitch McConnell would just once be as mad at the Democrats as he is at Ted Cruz.

From the start, since we first learned about the home-brew email system then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set up for conducting her government business, I’ve argued that she very likely committed felony violations of federal law. Yet it appears I underestimated the gravity of her misconduct — ironically, by giving her the benefit of the doubt on a significant aspect of the scheme.

When the scandal went public in March 2015, Mrs. Clinton — already the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee — held a press conference to explain herself. Among other well-documented whoppers, she maintained that she had never stored classified documents on, or transmitted them via, her private server. I theorized that she was exploiting the public’s unfamiliarity with how classified information is handled in government systems:

In the government, classified documents are maintained on separate, super-highly secured systems. … Mrs. Clinton would not have been able to access classified documents even from a “.gov” account [i.e., a non-classified State Department account], much less from her private account — she’d need to use the classified system. In fact, many government officials with security clearances read “hard copies” of classified documents in facilities designed for that purpose rather than accessing them on computers.

…

[S]ince we’re dealing with Clintonian parsing here, we must consider the distinction between classified documents and classified information — the latter being what is laid out in the former. It is not enough for a government official with a top-secret clearance to refrain from storing classified documents on private e-mail; the official is also forbidden to discuss the information contained in those documents. The fact that Mrs. Clinton says she did not store classified documents on her private server, which is very likely true, does not discount the distinct possibility that she discussed classified matters in private e-mails.

“Imagine if Hitler had liked Jews,” I told an Israeli politician recently who asked me to characterize the Republican frontrunner. The comparison seems more apt every day. The title of this note refers to Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 satire, “The Resistible Rise of Alfonso Ui,” portraying Hitler as gangster in the mode of Al Capone.

Donald Trump has tapped an ugly mood in America’s middle class, whose prospects have dimmed noticeably since the 2008 financial crisis. For the first time since the Great Depression Americans are losing ground that they cannot regain. Median household income fell by nearly 10% from 1999 through 2011 and remains far below previous peaks. Home ownership is down from 69% in 2008 to just 64%. The rate of participation in the labor force has fallen from 66.5% before the crisis to just 62%, the lowest since the 1970s. A generation of young people has graduated from college with mediocre earnings prospects and mountains of student debt.
Median Income Falls for the First Time Since the Great Depression

Jobs are to be had flipping burgers, emptying bedpans or driving a UPS truck.
Burger and Bedpan Jobs Predominate

The last two generations of American entrepreneurs–the dot.com bubblers of the 1990s and the mortgage manipulators of the 2000s–got carried out in body bags. The great mortgage scam sucked tens of millions of Americans into the bubble. Late entrants lost their homes, with 4 million homes under foreclosure by 2012 and another 6 million at risk. It’s not just that Americans are earning less, but that their path back to financial security is cut off.