RUTHFULLY YOURS

If the political class had a theme song, it would be that old Toby Keith tune, “I Wanna Talk About Me.” Donald Trump knows the feeling, though of late he has been focusing on others. He wants to talk about Bill. He wants to talk about Hillary. He wants to talk about the 1990s, and Vince Foster, and Juanita Broaddrick.

He wants to talk about things that could help him win an election.

That Hillary Clinton today has a shot at the White House comes down to one reality: People forget. This is a politician utterly defined by scandal, and with more baggage than the carousels at Dulles International. She ought to be disqualified. And yet the Clintons thrive, the beneficiaries of forgetfulness. They’ve spent decades bulling through their messes, blaming their woes on right-wing plots, and depending on a fickle press and a busy nation to lose interest in their wretchedness. It works every time.

Yet Mr. Trump has a way of disrupting the status quo. He does this in part by behaving in ways most politicians wouldn’t or couldn’t. Unlike Republicans who may be wary of resurrecting the Clinton past, for instance, Mr. Trump is not afraid of being labeled “obsessive.” But there is usually a method to his madness. And his current let’s-campaign-like-it’s-1999 strategy has purpose—it’s part offense, part defense.

On offensive, Mr. Trump’s goal is to play off the soaring distrust Americans have in Mrs. Clinton by tying the past to the present. He wants voters to realize that the Whitewater land deal and Paula Jones aren’t dusty, closed chapters in the Clintons’ history. They are, rather, markers on a long continuum, one that begins with young Bill’s draft-dodging and continues today with mature Hillary’s private-email-server deletions and Clinton Foundation money-grubbing. And those scandals would accompany the Clintons back to the White House and define the next eight years, a prospect that Mr. Trump hopes will depress the entire nation.

“[W]hether it’s Whitewater or whether it’s Vince or whether it’s Benghazi. It’s always a mess with Hillary,” said Mr. Trump in a recent interview. CONTINUE AT SITE

The stunning news that the FBI has been investigating Virginia Governor (and key Clinton Machine operative) Terry McAuliffe for a year is widely seen as an ominous sign for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But a lot of tealeaf reading is necessary to figure out what is really going on.

CNN obtained the scoop:

Virginia Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the FBI and prosecutors from the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, U.S. officials briefed on the probe say.

The investigation dates to at least last year and has focused, at least in part, on whether donations to his gubernatorial campaign violated the law, the officials said. (snip)

As part of the probe, the officials said, investigators have scrutinized McAuliffe’s time as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative, a vehicle of the charitable foundation set up by former President Bill Clinton.

Now who might those “US officials briefed on the probe” be? People with political motives to leak this news. Four basic alternatives suggest themselves:

Someone who wants to damage the Hillary Clinton campaign and is anxious to open a new front in the public controversies over her political machine, including the Clinton Foundation.
Someone anxious to demonstrate that the ongoing FBI probe is serious, and that the Justice Department will not take a dive on pursuing the issues beyond the negligent handling of classified material.
Someone who wants to crate pressure on the Justice Department to act on whatever FBI referrals may be coming.
Someone wants to warn McAuliffe and his associates that they are under scrutiny.

None of these alternatives is good news for the Clinton Machine.

Hillary Clinton may be the weakest prohibitive favorite ever to run for the presidency.

She is generally given strong odds of beating Donald Trump in the fall, yet she is tied with him in the early going as she struggles to shake a 74-year-old socialist who persists in notching victories in the Democratic primary contest.

Armed with an impeccable résumé and pedigree, and an impressive campaign and fundraising apparatus, Hillary has it all — except a rationale for her campaign and the ability to excite voters.

The latter failing is made all the more striking by what has happened all around Clinton this year. She is bracketed in her own party and the opposing party by candidates who routinely draw crowds numbering in the thousands. Who are vivid and unmistakably themselves. Who have memorable catchphrases that capture their core message in a few words. Who are running crusades as much as campaigns.

If Donald Trump wants to make America great again, Hillary wants to keep it okay; if Bernie Sanders wants to incite a political revolution, Hillary wants to convene a task force to come up with options short of a revolution, to be studied closely for a decision at a later date. In an election season buffeted by gale-force winds of change, Clinton is the status quo rendered in the most stultifying, conventional fashion possible.

Hillary is hated without being interesting. Yes, the Republicans nominated a radioactive candidate, but only after a great upheaval forged by a highly entertaining figure who upset all prior conventions and norms. The Democrats are nominating an equally radioactive presidential candidate as the “safe” alternative of their establishment.

This year was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s “turn,” after her humiliating loss in 2008 to Barack Obama. She has paid her dues as secretary of state for Obama. And the apparent Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, is written off by most pundits as a buffoon without a chance in the general election. Yet, Clinton’s campaign continues to be dismal, and is getting worse — to the point where the socialist Bernie Sanders polls better against Trump than does Hillary Clinton. How can that be?

At least eight reasons come to mind — several of them relating to Clinton’s innate character flaws and past scandals.

1) The E-Mail Scandal
Although the FBI has not finished its investigation and sent its results and recommendations to the Obama Justice Department, most of the media and public have learned enough about the e-mail/server scandal to conclude that had any mid-level State Department or intelligence-agency employee emulated Hillary Clinton’s use of a private unsecured server — along with serial denials and lying about such use — he would have been fired and prosecuted.

Hillary’s exemption so far hinges entirely on the fact that she is the Democratic party’s only viable presidential candidate; her indictment would send the party into crisis, given that the committed socialist Bernie Sanders would be the most deserving to inherit the nomination. So her Sword of Damocles swings with public opinion. What keeps Hillary out of jail, or at least a plea-bargain, is her political viability, first as the likely Democratic nominee, and second as a presumable winner over Trump. But take either likelihood away, and she de facto loses exemption and becomes expendable — a fact that is well known to her and which cannot be an easy reality to face each morning. She is beginning to resemble a Third World caudilla who knows that the minute she loses power, so too she loses her head.

2) The Clinton Cash Shakedowns
The Clintons left the White House broke, by their own admission, in 2001 and are now worth well over $100 million — lucre apparently predicated on the degree to which corporations and foreign governments believed that the phoenix-like couple would once again return to power, and would remain true to character as punishers of non-contributors and abettors of donors.

The couple founded the Clinton Foundation as a quid-pro-quo money-laundering enterprise designed to sell influence for cash and to keep Clinton, Inc., hangers-on and employees viable in between Clinton presidential runs. The key to the Ponzi scheme was that unlike Carter, Reagan, or the Bushes, the Clinton couple could dangle the idea that Bill was not term-limited by his eight years but could become reincarnated for another two terms under Hillary’s aegis — thus transforming what should have been an emeritus president into a retread with regenerative power to use the office to help or hurt the rich. It would require a suspension of disbelief to assume that companies or foreign governments gave millions of dollars to the Clinton initiative because they wished to help the poor and the sick. All benefactors knew that they were investing in influence, and the Clintons were selling it to the highest bidder in a way never true of any other presidential foundation. Never mind that such coziness with Big Money was antithetical to the progressive pretensions of the Democratic party and the Clintons’ own populist veneer. Each day over the next six months that there is a disclosure about yet another duplicitous donor or yet another pay-to-play scheme, so each day confidence in Hillary’s honesty and integrity erodes further.

Many are the facts that the national media refuses to address. One such fact is that concerning the pattern of violence that’s emerged on the part of the supporters of self-declared “socialist,” Bernie Sanders.

In addition to the fact that they conflict wildly with those held, traditionally, by Americans generally, socialists hold moral beliefs that demand the deployment of the overt coercion of others of those who don’t share those values.

Socialists, intent upon commandeering the resources in person and property of citizens, seek to militarize the countries on which they set their sights. The quintessential illustration of this in our own place and time is the multi-trillion dollar, decades-long redistributionist scheme launched by Lyndon Johnson and deliberately couched in the militaristic language of “war,” i.e. “the War on Poverty.”

But long before anyone had heard of Johnson, one of America’s most famous 20th century philosophers—an unapologetic socialist and self-styled pacifist—recognized that if socialism stood a chance of taking root, it had to appropriate both the language and organization of the “war regime.”

As far back as 1910, William James was writing that those states that were “pacifically organized” must “preserve some of the old elements of army discipline,” for “the war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues…are absolute and permanent human goods.”

Thus, they “must be the enduring cement[.]”

James insists that a “permanently successful peace economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy,” that in “the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting” humans “must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.”

Those of a certain age will recall the 1990s, the good old days when James Carville warned America that only “an abusive, privacy-invading, sex-obsessed” hypocrite could even think a president’s personal behavior toward women had anything to say about his fitness for public office.

Today it seems like ancient history, now that Donald Trump’s treatment of women has become a political issue. True enough, there was a day when Americans would have blanched at the thought of a candidate bragging about his adultery or using a presidential debate to boast about his genitalia. But in the 1990s we learned that only bluenoses care about these things.

We had it from no less than the Big Dawg himself. On Aug. 17, 1998, just hours after a grand jury session in which he’d tussled with prosecutors asking about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, he delivered a defiant, nationally televised address admitting his earlier denials had been misleading. Still, he insisted, whatever he had done with that young intern was between him and his family.

“It’s nobody’s business but ours,” he said. “Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.”

Even perjury didn’t matter in this case, because, as New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler put it, it was “perjury regarding sex.” All that mattered was that Mr. Clinton was good at his day job.

The American people seemed to agree, with a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll on the eve of the House vote to impeach showing only a third of the public in support.

Here’s the kicker: Donald Trump was on the Bill Clinton side of the argument.

For Mr. Trump, this was all much ado about Monica. Mr. Clinton’s mistake, he said, was that he’d lied about the sex instead of sticking with the argument it was irrelevant. In a September 1998 New York Times forum that ran under the headline “Can Clinton Find the Road Back?” Mr. Trump gave this advice:

“Accept complete responsibility for personal failures, be lucky enough to have enemies with their own shortcomings, and hold steadfast to your political agenda. After the initial shock is past, the American people are less interested in sexual transgressions than they are in public achievements.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Dear Editor:

It seems everyone has missed the actual problem with Madeleine Albright as commencement speaker, including Meghan Daum (“Scripps College’s baffling crusade for simple thinking,” May 12), and Rosanna Xia (“War criminal or role model?” May 9). While both articles shrugged at Albright’s record, and student objections took on standard PC tones, the reason Albright is no role model goes even deeper down the rabbit hold than war criminality.

Let’s recall that, more than anyone else, Albright pushed for a universal military attack against Yugoslavia, such that it was dubbed “Maddie’s War” (remember her in full combat regalia on the cover of TIME). But it’s the spoils of war that make Albright particularly contemptible. Few know that her firm, Albright Capital Management, had aggressively bid for — and was shortlisted to win — privatization of Kosovo’s state telecom company (which wouldn’t be up for grabs without her war to wrest Kosovo from Serbia in the first place). It was only eventually, after being advised how icky it looked, that she bowed out of this grubby profiteering.

Three months earlier, there was a bizarre and telling incident in the Czech Republic. In late October 2012, Albright was signing books at a Prague bookstore when she was confronted by some Czech anti-war activists holding photos of the devastation she visited upon Yugoslavian civilians and their infrastructure — targets unprecedented in the history of traditional warfare. “Get out!” she screamed repeatedly, and followed up with, “Disgusting Serbs.” The video is still available on YouTube.

Is it proper statecraft, when taking one’s country to war in an outside ethno-territorial conflict, for a high official to harbor hatred and perhaps even a vendetta against one of the sides?

Indeed, Albright’s having achieved being the first female secretary of State is regarded as a virtue in and of itself. Rarely is it considered that this ‘accomplishment’ — facilitated by a nod from Hillary to husband Bill — could be an eternal disgrace to womankind. Hillary voters, take note.

Political activists, in rare moments of deep despondency, have been known to poke around at the truth: The problem with mass democracy is voters. Activists, whether of the Left or the Right, are almost always Do-Something types (hence activism rather than inactivism), and so they toy from time to time with schemes for engineering a better voter.

For sunnier sorts, this means pushing for better and fuller voter education; for those of a more nubilous disposition, it means an electoral cull.

What we call voter education often is an exercise in flattering ourselves to the point of delusion. One hears this sort of thing all the time: “If the voters only understood our position, they would support our position.” Maria Svart of the Democratic Socialists of America, a Bernie Sanders supporter, says: “Many Americans, if they understood socialism, would like it.” Similarly: “If they understood libertarianism, they would probably be libertarians. It’s a PR problem.” And: “If they understood conservatism, they wouldn’t be liberals.” Etc.

It never occurs to political activists that the reason their preferred policies do not do well at the polling place is — radical thought — that people do not like them. Free-traders won the argument on the merits two centuries ago during the debate over the Corn Laws (the party organ of the Anti-Corn-Law League lives on as The Economist), but that does not matter. Many (perhaps not most) reasonably well-educated people understand gains from trade (though Tufts students apparently do not know what comparative advantage is), and Pat Buchanan probably encountered the works of Ricardo at Georgetown, but they still do not want free trade. They probably have their reasons, mostly bad ones, but the problem with anti-free-market voters isn’t that they have failed to read Economics in One Lesson. Likewise, what’s holding back voters who think that maybe social democracy under a constitutional monarchy isn’t the best road for these United States isn’t that they’ve never heard of Sweden.

There isn’t some magical incantation that is going to make them understand (and therefore concur), or some clever argument or example that hasn’t been thought of. Those of us who oppose abortion, for example, have indeed heard of miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, and the like. (If I get one more daft email smugly asking if I’ve ever wondered why we celebrate birth anniversaries rather than conception anniversaries . . .) It isn’t that we haven’t thought about these things or heard those arguments: It’s that we’ve thought about these things and found those arguments unpersuasive.

It isn’t that voters are not profoundly ignorant, it’s just that making them less ignorant isn’t really going to help much on Election Day, because political preferences are not, in the main, a function of knowledge.

The second approach — soft disenfranchisement — is probably even less defensible on utilitarian grounds, but talking about it provides activists, especially conservative activists, with a great deal of emotional satisfaction.