RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dear Donald Trump:

You are a great deal-maker. By your own account you’re the greatest dealmaker of the 20th century, and almost certainly the greatest dealmaker of the 21st century, even though it isn’t quite over yet. The Art of the Deal is your campaign playbook, as CBS News reported April 1. You have promised great trade deals with China, a great deal with Mexico to build a wall on the border, and other great deals on theSupreme Court, peace in the Middle East, healthcare and everything else that anyone has asked you about.

How would you like to the greatest dealmaker of all time?

You can go to Cleveland on July 18 and make the most stupendous deal in all of human history. Lots of people get to be president of the United States, but there can only be one all-time greatest dealmaker, and that could be you.

It’s clear that you won’t win the Republican nomination on the first ballot. Your delegates will have no obligation to vote for you on the second ballot, and a lot of them will vote for Sen. Ted Cruz on the second ballot. They probably will be joined by Marco Rubio’s 170 delegates and others.

There’s a digital outcome here.You can be the Greatest of Dealmakers, or G.o.D. — not the God, but a god, as Bill Murray said inGroundhog Day — or you can be the diametric opposite of the Greatest of Dealmakers, namely a Sore Loser, or to be precise, the Sorest Loser in the known universe. For Donald Trump to be a Loser would be tragic; for Donald Trump to be the Sorest Loser would introduce a disturbance into the space-time continuum. That can’t be allowed to happen.

No-one is saying you are a Sore Loser — yet. The risk is out there. Republican officials in a number of states complain that your organization has threatened them personally over delegate allocation. Your advisor Roger Stone warned earlier this month, “We will disclose the hotels and the room numbers of those [Republican convention] delegates who are directly involved in the steal [that is, not supporting Trump]. We’ll tell you who the culprits are. We urge you to visit their hotel and find them.”

It’s a strange spectacle from the vantage here in Israel: of the five remaining U.S. presidential candidates, one, lately, has been bashing Israel—and it’s the only one of the five who’s Jewish.

Bernie Sanders’s “recollection” that “over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza” during the summer 2014 war was, as many have noted, five times beyond Hamas’s claims. Sanders then changed it to “the number was I think 2100”—which is actually the figure that the UN, not known as a pro-Israel body, came up with, and even the UN said about one-third of that total were terrorists.

For the record, Israel’s Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center carried out a name-by-name analysis of the 75% of the Gaza fatalities who could be identified, and found that, of those, 55% were combatants. (Here former U.S. Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey says that Israel went to “extraordinary lengths” to limit civilian casualties in Gaza.)

Sanders’s astonishing ignorance—he’s been a U.S. senator since 2007—was further revealed when, asked what he thought of Michael Oren’s criticism of his inflated Gaza figures, he answered, “Who is Mr. Oren?” Oren is, of course, the former high-profile Israeli ambassador to the U.S. (2009-2013) and author of the bestselling book Ally on the Obama administration’s hostility toward Israel.

But Sanders’s ignorance is not just a personal foible. When it comes to Israeli issues, Sanders is an ideologue. He parrots the standard ideological line of people who do not know what they’re talking about and don’t feel they need to know what they’re talking about, since the ideology comes prepackaged. Trying to add nuance, Sanders said Israel “has a 100%…right to live in freedom,” then added: “we will not succeed to ever bring peace into that region unless we also treat the Palestinians with dignity and respect.”

There are many ways to reply to that, such as: the Palestinians already receive more aid per capita than any other group; they have already been offered, and rejected, statehood far more than any other people in history (the offers run from 1937 to the present); in the existing Palestinian entities of Gaza and the (West Bank) Palestinian Authority, women, gays, Christians, people of dissenting views, and others are treated with something other than “dignity and respect”—a situation certain to be perpetuated if the Palestinians attain independent statehood; and so on.

The state of Delaware has made itself a very comfy home for corporations to legally domicile themselves. Many large publicly listed companies are officially Delaware corporations, in part because the Delaware Chancery Court has specialized in issues of corporate governance and is widely regarded as expert and fair. But another component of Delaware’s legal system for registering and governing corporations is its lack of transparency compared to other states. Owners of companies registered in Delaware can remain anonymous. Like, for example, in Panama.

Thus, as The Free Beacon reports:

The address “1209 North Orange Street” in Wilmington, Del., has become known in recent years as the epicenter of U.S. corporate secrecy. The squat, split-level building is the official address of over 285,000 companies, many of which are looking to take advantage of Delaware’s Panama-like secrecy rules, tax incentives, and business-friendly case law.

Among those 285,000 shell companies (with no operations at all in Delaware):

Hillary and Bill Clinton quietly set up two shell companies listed at “1209 North Orange Street” in 2008 and 2013, the Washington Free Beacon has found. The names of the companies, but not their location, were first made public in tax filings released by Hillary Clinton last year.

According to records, one of the Clintons’ “1209 North Orange Street” companies is WJC, LLC, which was set up by Bill Clinton in 2008 as a pass-through for his consulting fees.

Another company at the same location, ZFS Holdings, LLC, was set up in February 2013, one week after Hillary Clinton left the State Department. Hillary Clinton received $5.5 million from her book publisher, Simon & Schuster, through the company.

The “1209 North Orange Street” building is the headquarters for the Corporation Trust Company. The firm acts as a registered agent for thousands of corporations that are not actually located in Delaware, including the Clintons’ companies.

Now, all of this is notable only because Hillary Clinton poses as a crusader against Wall Street abuses.

Hillary Clinton has promised to crack down on tax havens on the campaign trail. Referring to the Panama Papers last Wednesday, Clinton condemned “outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere.”

Two things are worth noting about Donald Trump’s whining over what he suddenly perceives as the “rigged” GOP nomination contest.

1. Trump is powerfully illustrating the fraud at the core of his case for the nomination. He claims that because he is a successful businessman he would be much more adept than conventional politicians at mastering the intricacies of problems and processes. He will, he brags, figure out how to deal with challenges in a way that maximizes American interests, assembling the best, most competent people to execute his plans of action. As a result, we are told, American will “win, win, win” with such numbing regularity that we will be bored to tears by all the success.

But look what is happening. The process of choosing a Republican nominee for president, while far from simple, is not as complicated as many of the challenges that cross an American president’s desk. There are, moreover, countless experienced hands who know how the process works and how to build an organization nimble enough to navigate the array of primaries (open and closed), caucuses, party meetings, varying delegate-allocation formulas, etc., exploiting or mitigating the advantages and disadvantages these present for different kinds of candidates. Yet, Trump has been out-organized, out-smarted, and out-worked by the competition – in particular, Ted Cruz, whom I support.

Trump is not being cheated. Everyone is playing by the same rules, which were available to every campaign well in advance. Trump simply is not as good at converting knowledge into success – notwithstanding the centrality of this talent to his candidacy. Perhaps this is because he is singularly good at generating free publicity (and consequently minimizing the publicity available to his rivals). Maybe he underestimated the importance of building a competent, experienced campaign organization. But he can hardly acknowledge this because it is a colossal error of judgment – and his purportedly peerless judgment is the selling point of his campaign.

As the prospect of a contested Republican presidential convention increases, so does the brawling over delegates—and the whining from the losers. If someone decides to run for President, is it too much to ask that he or his campaign managers understand the nominating rules?

“The system is rigged, it’s crooked,” Donald Trump said Monday on Fox News, with his usual understatement, after Ted Cruz won 34 GOP delegates in Colorado while Mr. Trump was shut out. “The people out there are going crazy, in the Denver area and Colorado itself, and they’re going absolutely crazy because they weren’t given a vote. This was given by politicians. It’s a crooked deal.” The truth is that he lost due to his own campaign’s ineptitude.

The state politicians in Colorado did exactly what they are entitled to do under Republican Party rules: set up a process that allocates delegates to candidates in any way a state party sees fit. Most state parties nowadays hold primary or caucus elections, but some do so with a hybrid system that can seem convoluted but makes sense if the goal is to build a party of volunteers from the ground up.

Colorado awarded delegates through a caucus process that began with precinct meetings and moved to congressional district and state GOP conventions. The attendees at those conventions then voted to elect the delegates to the national convention, and Mr. Cruz won 30 delegates that will be pledged to him on the first ballot. Another four are free agents but say they prefer Mr. Cruz. Three others are state party leaders who are free to vote as they please.

None of this was “crooked.” Mr. Trump is claiming the process was rigged because the Colorado GOP cancelled its usual straw poll held on Super Tuesday (March 15 this year). But the state party made that decision last August because such a poll would have been binding under new national GOP rules, and the Colorado party wanted its delegates to be free to support the candidate they liked in what was then a crowded field. The decision wasn’t aimed at Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cruz cleaned up in Colorado because his campaign was paying attention to the process. Whatever one thinks of the Texan’s appeal as a candidate, his campaign is organized and focused on winning the required 1,237 delegate majority. This speaks well of his ability to lead a complex organization. CONTINUE AT SITE

At a Bernie Sanders event in New York City, a black “community activist” began ranting about “Zionist Jews” running the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. At previous events, Sanders had been quick to condemn what he claimed was bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric by Republicans. But when confronted with the real thing by a left-wing activist at one of his own events, he couldn’t do it.

There was no condemnation of anti-Semitism. Instead after an initial claim that he was proud to be Jewish, he switched to a rambling speech criticizing Israel and distancing himself from Zionism.

Bernie Sanders had suggested at the same event that President Clinton was racist for defending his crime fighting policies to Black Lives Matter protesters, but would not condemn anti-Semitism. Instead of defying left-wing hatred for Jews, he tried to suggest that he wasn’t one of the “bad Zionists”. He was one of the “good Jews” who had a balanced position on Israel and “Palestine”.

It was a sad and shameful display. And this was not the first time that Bernie saw bigotry and blinked.

When NPR’s Diane Rehm accused him of having dual citizenship in Israel, he stumbled through a reply, but never condemned the anti-Semitism inherent in the question. He backed Jesse Jackson despite the Hymietown slur. When asked about it, he did his best to avoid directly condemning anti-Semitism.

Bernie Sanders came out of a political movement rife with anti-Semitism. He encounters it in public on a regular basis. And he is too much of a coward to stand up to it.

After Roseanne Barr ran for president, she stated that during the campaign, “everything I had ever believed about the left was severely shaken” and that she discovered that “many of those I had considered comrades were naked bigots”.

And she did what Bernie Sanders won’t do. She condemned the bigotry.

There’s little doubt that Bernie Sanders has encountered far more anti-Semitism in private than he has in public. And at every turn of the road, he made the decision to fall in line and keep his mouth shut.

In the UK, prominent Jews and non-Jews within Labour have been speaking out against growing anti-Semitism within the party and its political adjuncts. But here there’s a culture of silence about anti-Semitism on the left. And those who speak out pay the price. Consider the response to Phyllis Chesler’s The New Anti-Semitism. And, in contrast, the mainstreaming of Max Blumenthal’s blatant bigotry.

The “gentleman’s agreement” used to be that Jews were expected to keep quiet about anti-Semitism on the left while claiming that all the bigots were on the right. Bernie Sanders is a product of that system. His refusal to talk about anti-Semitism while accusing the right of bigotry is typical of how it works.

The Sanders event at the Apollo Theater also featured Harry Belafonte, who had claimed that “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich” and Spike Lee who had responded to criticism of anti-Semitic stereotypes in his movies by saying that he “couldn’t make an anti-Semitic film” because Jews run Hollywood. What does it say about Bernie Sanders that these are the ugly views of the people whom his campaign used in order to present him to a black audience?

A highly controversial Muslim leader appeared on a panel with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in Los Angeles last month. Salam al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), was kicked off of a congressional terrorism commission in 1999 when his organization’s open support for terrorist organizations was brought to light.

Marayati came under fire again just a few years later when on the day of the 9/11 attacks he fingered Israel as the culprit in a radio interview on a Los Angeles radio station.

Under his continued leadership, MPAC continues to promote extremist conspiracy theories, including accusations published on the group’s website in 2010 that Israel was harvesting the organs of Palestinians — a claim that was denounced by the Anti-Defamation League as a blood libel.

But Marayati’s appearance with Hillary Clinton is hardly unusual, as the relationship with the Clinton family goes back to 1996 — when he served as a delegate for Bill Clinton during the Democratic National Convention that year.

Waves of controversy have not stopped Hillary Clinton from continuing to promote Marayati, including appointing him to positions during her tenure as Obama’s secretary of State. So his appearance at the March 24th campaign panel held at the University of Southern California is no surprise.

In a Fox News debate, Donald Trump attacked Sen. Ted Cruz’s critical reference to “New York values” with a passionate reference to the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. As Real Clear Politics reported his remarks:

I’ve had more calls on that statement that Ted made, that New York is a great place, it’s got great people, it’s got loving people, wonderful people. When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York.

You had two 110-story buildings come crashing down, I saw them come down, thousands of people killed, and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup, probably in the history of doing this, and in construction, I was down there. And I’ve never seen anything like it. And the people in New York fought, and fought, and fought, and we saw more death and even the smell of death, nobody understood it, and it was with us for months, the smell. the air.

And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched, and everybody in the world loved New York, and loved New Yorkers, and I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.

Trump once wasn’t so enamored of the World Trade Center or its replacement, the Freedom Tower, describing them in terms that, according to the Independent Journal Review, provoked a backlash from outraged New Yorkers:

In an article from the New York Post dated September 18th, 2001, Trump said of the towers:

“To be blunt, they were not ‘great’ buildings… They only became great upon their demise last Tuesday…”

But Trump’s controversial statements surrounding the World Trade Center towers and the 9/11 attacks were far from over. In 2005, victims of the 9/11 attacks lambasted the billionaire for his insensitive remarks about the proposed “Freedom Tower.”

In regard to the construction of the Freedom Tower, Trump called the building inappropriate, which he suggested was unfit for that part of New York City:

“The Freedom Tower should not be allowed to be built. It’s not appropriate for Lower Manhattan, it’s not appropriate for Manhattan, it’s not appropriate for the United States, it’s not appropriate for freedom.”

Even before he entered the political arena, it was evident to most anyone with eyes that Donald Trump was a moral disgrace.

Philandering, misogyny, fraud, bankruptcy and tackiness were almost synonyms for his name. To all that, as a candidate for the presidency, Trump has added serial lying, racism, religious bigotry, slander and the outright encouragement of violence, with threats of more violence should he be deprived of the delegates needed to clinch his party’s nomination.

Yet many people with eyes — millions of them, in fact — have cast their votes for this creature from the cesspool. What are we to make of these fellow Americans?

CLINTON DISLIKED BY 55% OF AMERICANS, BUT TRUMP HATE ‘YUGER’

For obvious reasons, they are being treated by Trump’s rivals with tender solicitude. Trump’s followers remain important players in the ongoing battle for votes in the Republican primaries that remain. And whoever ends up as the Republican nominee will need them to show up at the polls in November to defeat Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

What is harder to excuse is the fact that more than a few conservative commentators, including many who revile Trump himself, have addressed his supporters with sympathy. The conservative columnist and Cruz supporter David Limbaugh has appealed to Trump’s followers as “patriots,” telling them, “I understand and share your frustration” as he implores them not to vote for their candidate of choice.

Part of the problem

To Peggy Noonan, Trump’s supporters are “are earnest and full of concern for America”; they are the “unprotected,” full of “legitimate anger” at the “protected” class that misgoverns them.

Going one step further is the commentator Dennis Saffran, writing in the American Spectator, who hastens to defend Trump’s supporters from their critics, calling them victims of “blatant class bigotry.”