RUTHFULLY YOURS

The candidate has taken to maligning opponents’ motives—but 57% of voters don’t trust her.

President Obama came into office promising to unify America, but he has made political discourse meaner and more cynical. Whenever Mr. Obama is playing a weak hand, he questions the motivations of those who disagree with him and mangles the truth to undermine any criticism.

Take the president’s recent statement that Republican opponents of his nuclear deal with Iran are making “common cause” with hard-liners in Tehran who chant “Death to America.” Or consider his warnings that those opposed to the deal are “big check writers to political campaigns” and “the same array of forces that got us into the Iraq war”—a charge that borders on thinly veiled anti-Semitism.

The EPA’s new anticarbon rule is full of redistribution to offset its harm to the poor.

President Obama says that critics of his plan to decarbonize the economy are “the special interests and their allies in Congress” repeating “the same stale arguments” about “killing jobs and businesses and freedom.” He adds that “even more cynical, we’ve got critics of this plan who are actually claiming that this will harm minority and low-income communities.”

Is he thinking of critics who work at the Environmental Protection Agency? Perhaps so, because multiple new antipoverty transfer programs are built into the EPA’s new Clean Power Plan. The fine print is there, for anyone who cares to look, 1,317 pages into the rule’s 1,560-page preamble.

The ordinary business of economic life goes on quite separately from forensic examinations of its innards. And it can be made reasonable sense of by anyone of inquiring mind provided theory does not obfuscate reality. Unfortunately, Keynesian obfuscation is pervasive
… that there may be a supply of commodities in the aggregate surpassing demand … appears to me to involve so much inconsistency in its very conception, that I feel considerable difficulty in giving any statement of it which shall be at once clear, and satisfactory to its supporters.

— John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy

If numbers of patients were to sicken progressively and dreadfully after prolonged medical treatment we might ask whether the treatment was any good. We might even ask whether the treatment was doing more harm than good. That’s medicine. Apparently, the same scrutiny is not applied to the practice of economics. If it were, we might ask how it was possible that many developed economies are suffering from high levels of unemployment; measured, for example, at over 11 per cent across the eighteen-country Eurozone (Lithuania has recently become the nineteenth). And this, so long after the cure for unemployment—injections of government stimulus expenditure to boost demand—was given theoretical imprimatur by the followers of John Maynard Keynes and prescribed by armies of economists employed by governments. It is surely time that old-fashioned common sense kicked in and we declared, after seventy-five years and more of assiduous application, that the economic medicine has turned out to be snake oil at best and hemlock at worst.

Friend —

You might hear some news over the next few days about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Because you are an important part of this team, we wanted to take a few minutes to talk through the facts — we need your help to make sure they get out there.

There’s a lot of misinformation, so bear with us; the truth matters on this.

Here are the basics: Like other Secretaries of State who served before her, Hillary used a personal email address, and the rules of the State Department permitted it. She’s already acknowledged that, in hindsight, it would have been better just to use separate work and personal email accounts. No one disputes that.

The State Department’s request: Last year, as part of a review of its records, the State Department asked the last four former Secretaries of State to provide any work-related emails they had. Hillary was the only former Secretary of State to provide any materials — more than 30,000 emails. In fact, she handed over too many — the Department said it will be returning over 1,200 messages to her because, in their and the National Archives’ judgment, these messages were completely personal in nature.

Conservative social media is a very depressing place these days. It’s not just all the people on the same side hurling hate at each other. It’s the fragmenting of a once united movement into candidate partisan groups that circulate talking points and fight culture wars against ‘outsiders’.

This isn’t the Tea Party. It’s little cults of personality around candidates. It’s cultural groups forming around people, signaling insiders and outsiders, the righteous and the infidels.

This isn’t about Trump. It’s about all the candidates who have attracted passionate followings. Conservative social media these days often consists of these partisans having it out.

I don’t know who the winner of all this is, but it isn’t going to be the things we believe in.

Like it or not, China will play an important role in Western Asia, because the imperative of energy security and the rollout of the “One Belt/One Road” require it to do so. As China engages with this unruly region, the seeming irrationality and self-defeating behavior of its minor powers are a source of endless frustration to China, which looks at Western Asia through the rational eyes of commercial interest, and offers investments on the grand scale that stand to benefit all of its states.

When we last spoke some months ago in Beijing, Turkey’s President Erdogan infuriated you. Turkey meddled where it had no competence—in nuclear negotiations with Iran, with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, with Hamas in Gaza, with ISIS in Syria, and with Uyghur rebels in China’s Xinjiang province. Not long from now, I predict, you will be furious at Iran’s meddling in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and perhaps Azerbaijan. Why, China asks, do the petty pretenders to empire in Western Asia risk their own well-being with adventures of this sort?

Gerald Walpin is a New York lawyer who graduated from Yale Law Schoolcum laude and served as a U.S. inspector general from 2007 to 2009. He is the author of “The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution” (Significance Press 2013).

Can you imagine an Ivy League university today scheduling student group-alumni dinners at which they exclude black, women, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and gay groups from the dinner tables, and limit attendees to Jewish, Catholic and Christian groups? Unbelievable in today’s academia.

If somehow it occurred, demonstrations — in which I would have joined, if I were then a student — would have brought the school to a standstill, until the school canceled the dinners or tendered invitations to excluded groups.

Junior New York Senator Kristen Gillibrand’s August 6 announcement supporting President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal should not go unpunished.

Junior New York Senator Kristen Gillibrand’s August 6 announcement supporting President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal should not go unpunished, both in view of the demographics of the state she represents and the unprecedented presidential incitement against Jews and the State of Israel.

For Israel, the stakes in the outcome of this deal could not be higher. While Secretary of State John Kerry dismissively argues that although Iran has a “fundamental ideological confrontation” with Israel, it has not yet taken active steps toward Israel’s annihilation. But Jews with sensitive antennas understand better.

Can Charles Schumer ever be master of the Senate? It’s hard to imagine on the basis of the lackluster nature of his opposition to President Obama’s nuclear-arms deal with the regime in Iran.

“Master of the Senate” is the title of the volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson that covers LBJ’s leadership in the upper house of Congress. It includes his maneuvering to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Bill.

What a ruthless, manipulative, bombastic, cunning leader LBJ was. He twisted arms, threatened, cajoled, pontificated and sulked — and outworked his colleagues, too — to get his way in the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Particularly on a matter of conscience, like civil rights. Can anyone imagine LBJ taking the kind of powder that Mr. Schumer is taking now on Mr. Obama’s plan to appease Iran?

LBJ, of course, didn’t face the kind of gutter attacks that Mr. Schumer is facing. The New York Post, in an important editorial on Monday, reported that “anti-Semitism is all over the drive to make Chuck Schumer shut up about his opposition to the nuke deal.”

The administration has been pulling out all the stops. Yet with every passing day, what I at first called “Schumer’s finest hour” is turning into a shocking collapse, as the senator privately shrinks from the fight.

Swiss to lift ban on transport of Iranian crude oil and other sanctions beginning Thursday. Is it inviting other countries to flout the sanctions through it?

Even before Iran has met conditions contained in the Nuclear Iran deal, the ever-eager Swiss have begun lifting sanctions on Iran in a show of support for the Nuclear Iran deal negotiated by the U.S. and its P5+1 partners with Iran. They are also darn happy with their good relations with Iran.

The Swiss Federal Council announced the decision it reached on Aug. 12 to officially list sanctions beginning on Thursday, Aug. 13. The Swiss government had been engaged in direct dialogue with Iran and had already suspended the sanctions in Jan. 2014.