RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Bernie Sanders team boasts that more than 650,000 people have donated to the Vermont senator’s presidential campaign. Those donors ought to be asking for a refund, on grounds of political malpractice.

If Sanders devotees took a momentary break from their adulation, they’d realize they have good cause to get their money back. Most of Mr. Sanders’s low-dollar donors dug deep to send that $20 or $50 in the belief that their candidate is in it to win.

Mr. Sanders must be in this race for something, but it can’t be the Oval Office.

A candidate who was in it to win wouldn’t have given Hillary Clinton an assist with her email problem, or ignored her Clinton Foundation entanglements. Mr. Sanders radiates that he is too pure of heart, too sincere a liberal, too focused on “serious issues,” to deign to address Mrs. Clinton’s ethics. He brags that he doesn’t run negative ads; he deplores “political soap opera.” No doubt many of his supporters admire him for that. Mrs. Clinton certainly does. ( Bill Clinton will too, once he stops laughing.)

It had to be Denmark, didn’t it?

If you are the sort of person who has better things to do — which is to say, a fully functioning adult who is not professionally obliged to follow these things — then you probably missed the exchange between Mrs. Clinton and Senator Sanders at last night’s debate, when she lectured him that the United States isn’t Denmark and he responded with a rousing defense of the Danish model.

Never mind, for the moment, that neither of these batty old geezers has the foggiest idea of what’s going on in Denmark, or in the other Nordic countries. Denmark, like Sweden before it, has been engaged in a long campaign of reforming its famously generous welfare state. The country’s current prime minister is the leader of a center-right party, which, strangely enough, goes by the name “Left,” Venstre. (You might even call it libertarian; its former longtime leader wrote a book bearing the positively Nozickian title “From Social State to Minimal State.” ) Denmark has been marching in the direction exactly opposite socialism for some time. Our friends at the Heritage Foundation rank its economy the eleventh most free in the world, one place ahead of the United States, reflecting Denmark’s strong property rights, relative freedom from corruption, low public debt, freedom of trade and investment, etc.

Don’t tell Senator Sanders, but Denmark’s corporate tax rate is a heck of a lot lower than our own.

When the late William Safire called Ms. Clinton a “congenital liar,” he knew whereof he spoke. Her debate comments on Libya clearly reveal that mendacity is in Hillary’s DNA.

“Well, let’s remember what was going on,” Hillary Clinton told Anderson Cooper Tuesday night in Las Vegas in response to his question about the bombing of Libya. “We had a murderous dictator, Qadaffi, who had American blood on his hands, as I’m sure you remember, threatening to massacre large numbers of the Libyan people.”

Before going any further, we might want to note that In April 2009, Qaddafi’s son Mutassim had a cordial meeting with Secretary of State Clinton in Washington. At that time she was apparently not too squeamish about the blood on his old man’s hands. “We deeply value the relationship between Libya and the United States,” Hillary told the press with the tall, Western-looking young man standing beside her.

Back to Las Vegas. “We had our closest allies in Europe burning up the phone lines begging us to help them try to prevent what they saw as a mass genocide, in their words,” Hillary continued with a straight face.

The Democratic presidential nomination was fun while it lasted.

It ended late on Oct. 13 with Bernie Sanders’s incredible dismissal of Hillary Clinton’s email quagmire. The smile that illuminated Hillary’s face as Bernie folded actually looked genuine. She accepted Bernie’s political pardon with a handshake and an effusive, “Thank you, Bernie, thank you.”

In normal political competition, you don’t blow off your opponent’s main vulnerability, in Hillary’s case, her credibility. Notwithstanding an official FBI investigation, that problem looks to be behind her now, at least with unsettled Democrats.

From wherever Joe Biden was sitting Tuesday, the hill to the presidency just got steeper, because Democratic donors from New York to Hollywood were concluding that she’s going to be all right. A residual minority of progressives will stick with Sen. Sanders through the primaries, but an American politician preaching “revolution” won’t win a presidential nomination.

President Obama’s interview on CBS ’s “60 Minutes” Sunday has rightly received attention for his defensiveness about Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Syria. But the President made other news that deserves more attention: to wit, his legal advice to the FBI and Justice Department about Hillary Clinton’s email server.

The FBI has acknowledged it is investigating the former Secretary of State’s use of a private server for official communications, especially her mishandling of classified information. Though she denied in April that classified material had crossed her server, we now know that was false. Hundreds of emails sent to or from her server contained national secrets, some highly classified. She used her own email system in violation of the Federal Records Act and in order to protect her emails from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, and this evasion made her emails vulnerable to foreign hacking.

Yet when Steve Kroft asked if the server posed a security risk, Mr. Obama dismissed the idea by saying “I don’t think it posed a national security problem.” But how would he know unless his lawyers are filling him in on the investigation? Mr. Obama must know as a lawyer how inappropriate it is for a President to comment on a case being conducted by executive-branch officials who work for him.

Republican voters think the economy is the number one issue but can’t manage a public discussion on economic policy, as I observed Oct. 4 (“Who are you, and what have you done with the Republican Party?“). They flail at hot-button issues, defunding Planned Parenthood, for example, and look for scapegoats such as illegal Mexican immigrants (whose numbers are actually falling). It seems pointless to make predictions of any sort in the midst of the moral equivalent of a riot, but nonetheless I will go out on a limb: the Republicans will nominate Sen. Ted Cruz as president and Sen. Marco Rubio as vice-president, by process of elimination.

This conclusion seems inevitable by process of elimination. The voters are in a surly, rebellious mood and display their anger by telling pollsters they will vote for anti-Establishment candidates who never have held office (Trump, Carson, Fiorina, Paul).

Republicans should wake up because, stultifying and predictable as the Democrats were Tuesday night (in case you missed it, Lincoln Chafee is a Man of Peace — or was it granite?), much as “climate change” is now the official religion of their party (someone should lead a prayer to Gaia at the beginning of their debates), much as they promise endless new pie-in-the-sky social programs without the slightest hint of how they intend to pay for them (other than taxing Donald Trump), the “evil party” didn’t spend much of the evening tearing each other down. Quite the contrary. With the most minor exceptions, they provided a cheering section for each other.

If Republicans continue their approach in their next debate, bashing each other at will and in extremis, they are likely going to lose in November 2016 and then we all lose. The country loses, maybe even disappears as we know it. Republicans aren’t the “stupid party” for nothing — and that includes the Tea Party and RINOS, both equally dopey, not to mention Kevin McCarthy who may have made the greatest unforced political error of the no-longer-young century. Republicans should focus like the proverbial lasers on the opposition, not each other. Fiorina and Rubio have both showed how to do this on different occasions.

Bernie Sanders crawled into the tank (where he jlined the media) and strengthened the possibility of being Hillary Clinton’s running mate (or God forbid cabinet member) last night when he said during the first Democratic debate:

“Let me say something that may not be great politics, but I think the secretary is right, and that is the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damned emails!

“The middle class Anderson, and let me say something about the media as well. I go around the country talk to a whole lot of people, middle class in this country is collapsing. We have twenty-seven million people living in poverty. We have massive wealth and income inequality. Our trade policies have cost us millions of decent jobs. The American people want to know whether we’re going to have a democracy or an oligarchy as a result of Citizens United.

“Enough of the emails! Let’s talk about the real issues facing America!”

See it for yourself via a CNN tweet:

It was clear from the first five minutes of the Democratic Presidential Candidates Debate on CNN (Oct. 13, 2015) that the debaters were sadly out-of-date. It seemed we went through a time-space warp. Social, economic, and foreign policy issues were discussed as though no laws addressing these concerns had been passed during the past 100 years.

Blacks

Anderson Cooper asked the candidates if “black lives matter or all lives matter.” No one acknowledged that black-on-black crime has skyrocketed in our cities. No one noted that the Democrats have controlled our big cities for more than 50 years, yet poverty, the collapse of the black family, and gun violence have been escalating that entire time. No one noted that literally trillions of dollars in Federal poverty dollars have been poured into communities of color with less than glorious results. No one noted the gains made through Affirmative Action or civil rights legislation. Instead we had references to “get out of jail free” cards to offset too much incarceration, free tuition for college (I’ve been good Santa, really), and making those rich bastards in the top .6% pay, pay, and pay some more.

The Dems like to point to the tax rates having been higher before Ronald Reagan’s presidency; yet many of the problems they descry existed before Reagan, and were not ameliorated during any Democratic Presidential administration after Reagan. Lyndon Johnson promoted the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Despite the fact that tax rates for the top earners has gone down, the payments made under that act and amendments to that act made over the years have consistently gone up. So, the communities, white and black, supported by those programs have not suffered because of the lowered tax rates. Yet, the black community is insisting more than ever that it is “deprived” by the uptight Republicans. The debate proceeded as though we were in the fifties and had had no experiences with the ineffectiveness or even the limits of poverty programs to solve social problems. Those pricey programs correlate with even more community unrest and hateful rhetoric than before such programs, along with Affirmative Action, even existed. Thus, the debate was dancing around talking points that accept the retrograde thinking that has stifled black advancement, not helped it.