RUTHFULLY YOURS

The most important anniversary this year falls on Monday June 15th, marking the day, eight centuries ago, when a king found himself in a muddy field on the River Thames near Windsor Castle with the great foundational document of modern liberty under his nose and awaiting his seal. Here’s what I had to say about it earlier this year:

The world has come a long way since Magna Carta, and not always for the best. A couple of years back, testifying to the House of Commons in Ottawa about Canada’s (now repealed) censorship law, I said the following:

Section 13 is at odds with this country’s entire legal inheritance, stretching back to Magna Carta. Back then, if you recall–in 1215–human rights meant that the King could be restrained by his subjects. Eight hundred years later, Canada’s pseudo-human rights apparatchiks of the commission have entirely inverted that proposition, and human rights now means that the subjects get restrained by the Crown in the cause of so-called collective rights that can be regulated only by the state.

In our time, sexism and racism have become the province of the rich.

Discrimination by sex and by race are ancient innate pathologies and transcend particular cultures. But the American idea of sexism and racism in the 21st century — unfailing, endemic, and institutional discrimination by a majority-white-male-privileged culture against both women and so-called non-white minorities — has largely become a leftist construct.

We can see how these two relativist -isms work in a variety of ways.

One, the frequent charge of racism and sexism is predicated not so much on one’s gender and race as on one’s gender, race, and politics. Certainly, few on the left worried much about the slurs against Sarah Palin during and after her vice-presidential run. America’s overclass in the media and leftist politics constructed a sexist portrait of a clueless white-trash mom in Wasilla, Alaska, mindlessly having lots of kids after barely graduating from the University of Idaho. Even Bill Maher’s and David Letterman’s liberal armor would not have withstood leftist thrusts had, mutatis mutandis, the former called Hillary Clinton a c–t or the latter disparaged Ms. Clinton as “slutty flight attendant” and joked that, when a teen, Chelsea Clinton had had sexual relations with a Yankee baseball player in the dugout. Ironically it was the by-her-own-bootstraps lower-middle-class Palin who braved the frontier, no-prisoners, male world to become governor of Alaska; in real terms, she is the true feminist. In contrast, according to doctrinaire feminism, Hillary Clinton does not measure up. She has largely clung, in mousy fashion, to her two-timing husband, excused his serial and manipulative philandering with young women of less clout and power, traded on his political nomenclature, and piggy-backed on his career.

These people, step by step, want to make every expression of Israeli and Jewish cultural life subject to their idea of how a nation under constant threat of terrorist bombardment should behave.

They denounce Israel as a militaristic society and then attempt to outlaw every non-militaristic cultural and artistic expression from that society.

The letters page of The Guardian in the UK is regularly filled with letters, jointly signed by “correct-thinking” people who hope that in so doing, they will give themselves both a little puff of publicity and simultaneously signal their loyalty to all modern virtues. The pecking order can be rough. Ordinarily the paper selects the headline names to put under the letter and then adds “and 57 others” or some such. So if you’re the Guardian’s idea of a household name, your name will get in print. But if you are one of the space-filler “C-list” celebrities, people will have to guess whether you are among the “others.”

Even visionary calls for Islamic reform by Egypt’s President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, were not publicly welcomed by a single Western leader.

An ideology that encourages its adherents to engage in deadly rioting, burn down embassies, and kill people over cartoons, but that shows no great signs of sorrow as little girls are sold and raped, most likely does not have much to contribute to advancing civilization.

An ideology that treats women as property, that murders or imprisons intellectuals and that sentences a blogger to 1000 lashes and ten years in jail — if he survives — has no right to blame troubles on the West or anyone else.

This view has nothing to do with the West or any kind of Western intervention.

One hundred twenty-one illegal immigrants now facing murder charges were previously released by federal officials from 2010 to 2014, despite President Obama’s previous assurances that his administration is focusing its resources on the deportation of violent criminals.

The Obama administration released the figures to Congress in a May 28 letter. “Between FY 2010 and FY 2014, there were 121 unique criminal aliens who had an active case at the time of release and were subsequently charged with homicide-related offenses,” Sarah Saldaña, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in a letter to Senate Judiciary Commitee chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Senator Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.).

Hillary Clinton “re-launched” her floundering campaign Saturday on Roosevelt Island, formerly and fittingly known as Welfare Island. Clinton’s desperate effort to associate herself with “everyday Americans” contrasts starkly with the crooked elites with whom she and Bill normally cavort.

In fact, the Clinton Foundation, Bill and Hillary’s elaborate slush fund, includes numerous donors and even one-time board members with dodgy backgrounds, shady dealings, and even criminal convictions that should repel rather than lure a once and perhaps future president of the United States. Peter Schweizer’s meticulously researched new best-seller Clinton Cash (complete with 635 endnotes) delineates this ultimate power couple’s sordid circle.

The last time Jeb Bush ran for office, it was 13 years ago. Barack Obama was serving in the Illinois state Senate. No one had heard of Obamacare or the tea party, and wouldn’t for years. It was before the invasion of Iraq, before Hurricane Katrina, before the financial meltdown. We had just invaded Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq. It was a political epoch ago.

If timing is everything in politics, Bush has, among other things, a timing problem. He had an exemplary record as a conservative reformer in Florida almost a decade ago, but the achievements and fights of the other Republican governors running for president have been the stuff of contemporary headlines. He is a gifted politician, but his father and brother preceded him to the presidency, giving his campaign an inevitable dynastic air as the vehicle of “the third Bush.”

His pitch is that he can reform Washington as he did Florida.

Jeb Bush formally launched his presidential campaign on Monday, and no candidate needed it more. The former Florida Governor’s non-campaign so far has been curiously defensive, but now he has a new opening to make the case for why he can beat Hillary Clinton and be a worthy President.

Mr. Bush’s drawn-out pre-campaign allowed him to help his Super PAC raise money, and fundraising has been his biggest success to date. Money is an important measure of support, especially in a GOP field that is larger and more formidable than any in memory. Mr. Bush’s cash hoard will give him staying power to make it to the Florida primary or the later regional contests in an extended race.

But Mr. Bush’s long launch fuse has also made his candidacy seem more hesitant than dynamic, more biographical than about leading a larger cause. He has spent more time answering questions about his family name, and his brother’s foreign policy, than he has laying out his own campaign principles.

The focus on biography is especially harmful because many Republicans are instinctively averse to nominating the third Bush in 30 years. This does not mean Jeb should take the media bait of trying to explain how he is different than either his brother or his father. It does require offering a vision and agenda that are bold enough to set the terms of the debate, and then show that he can sell them.

Jeb Bush (with or without last name) made a fine debut speech at Miami Dade College Monday, right up there with Marco Rubio’s several weeks ago. Must be something in the Florida water. (Manatees?) They were both far better than the stultified, rigid Hillary, who can’t even quote The Beatles without sounding like a schoolmarm teaching Wordsworth to third graders. (Talk about “Yesterday”!)

Problem is, as I wrote in late May, I still wish Jeb wasn’t running. I had reasons then and they haven’t gone away — and this is with no offense to the former governor who, for all I know, could be the best potential president currently running from either party.

The overwhelming issues for me are democracy itself and defeating Hillary Clinton. Enough already with royal families. Are we Argentina? This is the USA (still… maybe…). Sure politics can be a family business like anything else, but there are limits. And the presidency is one of them, indeed the most important of them.

Twenty miles west of London, in Surrey, lies a quiet meadow along the Thames River. It is a centuries-old place deep in the heart and soul of England, though no formal memorial to it was placed there until the middle of the last century by (ironically) the American Bar Association. Almost a century ago, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem [1] about it:

At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Your rights were won at Runnymede!
No freeman shall be fined or bound,
Or dispossessed of freehold ground,
Except by lawful judgment found
And passed upon him by his peers.
Forget not, after all these years,
The Charter signed at Runnymede.

That charter, the so-called “Great Charter” (or Magna Carta in the Latin used by the Norman rulers of the time), signed under duress by the tyrant King Jacques (we now call him “John”), reined in the power of his capricious reign, 800 years ago today. The event will be commemorated this evening [2] at the site (morning in the U.S.) by Daniel Hannan, southeast England’s representative to the European Parliament, and fierce critic of the EU and defender of the principles of the Anglosphere.