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TRUMP, REJECTING POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, WOOS “DEPLORABLES”, WHILE CLINTON IS AFFLICTED BY SCANDALS & SECRECY

Deplorably, Trump is Going to Win: David P. Goldman, Asia Times, Sept. 11, 2016 — The presidential election was over the moment the word “deplorable” made its run out of Hillary Clinton’s unguarded mouth.

The Way Trump Talks: Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 7, 2016 — Until recently, American politics was as flat as a backyard swimming pool.

The Bribery Standard: Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Aug. 25, 2016 — Bernie Sanders never understood the epic quality of the Clinton scandals.

This is America’s Last Chance: Conrad Black, National Post, Sept. 9, 2016 — In news terms, it has been a quieter summer than usual, and not remotely reminiscent of invincible summers that presaged a global descent into terrible times, such as 1929 or 1939.

 

On Topic Links

 

Hillary Lies About Her Health, Nets Say ‘Both Candidates’ Guilty: Kyle Drennen, MRC News Busters, Sept. 12, 2016

Third-Party Candidates Set to Shake up Presidential Election: Marisa Schultz, New York Post, Sept. 10, 2016

The Problem with Hillary: David Suissa, Jewish Journal, Aug. 30, 2016

President Trump Isn’t Farfetched: Douglas E. Schoen, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 6, 2016

 

 

                 DEPLORABLY, TRUMP IS GOING TO WIN

David P. Goldman

Asia Times, Sept. 11, 2016

 

The presidential election was over the moment the word “deplorable” made its run out of Hillary Clinton’s unguarded mouth. As the whole world now knows, Clinton told a Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender fundraiser Sept. 10, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up.”

 

Hillary is road kill. She apologized, to be sure, but no-one will believe her: she was chilling with her home audience and feeling the warmth, and she said exactly what she thinks. The “Clinton Cash” corruption scandals, the layers of lies about the email server, health problems, and all the other negatives that pile up against the former First Lady are small change compared to this apocalyptic moment of self-revelation.

 

You can’t win an American presidential election without the deplorables’ vote. Deplorables are America’s biggest minority. They might even be the American majority. They may or not be racist, homophobic and so forth, but they know they’re deplorable. Deplorable, and proud. They’re the median family whose real income has fallen deplorably by 5% in the past ten years,  the 35% of adult males who deplorably have dropped out of the labor force, the 40% of student debtors who deplorably aren’t making payments on their loans, the aging state and local government workers whose pension funds are $4 trillion short. They lead deplorable lives and expect that their kids’ lives will be even more deplorable than theirs.

 

Americans are by and large forgiving people. They’ll forgive Bill for cavorting with Monica “I did not have sex with that woman” Lewinsky in the Oval Office and imposing himself on any number of unwilling females. They might even forgive Hillary for losing tens of thousands of compromising emails on an illegal private server and then repeatedly lying about it in a way that insults the deplorable intelligence of the average voter. But the one thing you can’t do is spit on them and tell them it’s raining. They’ll never forgive you for that. They’re hurting, and they rankle at candidates who rub their faces in it.

 

Mitt Romney’s campaign was unsalvageable after the famous 2012 “47% remark,” by which he simply meant that the 47% of American workers whose income falls below the threshold for federal taxes would be indifferent to his tax cut proposals. The trouble is that these workers pay a great deal of taxes–to Social Security, Medicare, and in most cases to local governments through sales taxes and assessments. After a covert video of his remarks at a private fundraiser made the rounds, Romney spent the rest of the campaign with the equivalent of an advertising blimp over his head emblazoned with the words: “I represent the economic elite.” Clinton has done the same thing with the cultural elite.

 

There are racists and homophobes in the Trump camp, to be sure. Everybody’s got to be somewhere. Trump is no Puritan, however, and really couldn’t care less what sort of sex people have, or who uses what bathroom (as he made clear), or who marries whom. He built a new country club in Palm Beach two decades ago because the old ones excluded blacks and Jews. He’s no racist. He’s an obnoxious, vulgar, salesman who plays politics like a reality show. I’ve made clear that I will vote for him, not because he was my choice in the Republican field (that was Sen. Cruz), but because I believe that rule of law is a precondition for a free society. If the Clintons get a free pass for influence-peddling on the multi-hundred-million-dollar scale and for covering up illegal use of private communications for government documents, the rule of law is a joke in the United States. Even if Trump were a worse president than Clinton–which is probably not the case–I would vote for him, on this ground alone.

 

That’s not why Trump crushed the Republican primaries. He won because Americans are tired of an economic elite that ignores them. Americans know the game is rigged against them. For generations Americans could make their way from the bottom to the top of the heap by starting businesses. In some periods more of them succeeded than others, but everyone knew someone who got rich more or less honestly. That came to a crashing end during the Obama Administration. There were fewer small firms with fewer workers in 2013 than there were in 2007…

 

The deplorables look at the American economy as a lottery. They aren’t sophisticated, but they’re sly: They know the game is rigged, because there aren’t any winners. The American economy is more corrupt and more cartelized then at any time in its history. Productivity growth was negative for the past two quarters, and five-year productivity growth is the lowest since the stagflation of the 1970s. Corporations are making money by gaming the regulatory system rather than deploying new technologies. Close to half of the increase in corporate profits during the past decade can be attributed to regulatory rent-seeking by large corporations, according to a June 2016 study by Boston University economist Jim Bessen. Bessen concluded that “investments in conventional capital assets and R&D account for a substantial part of the rise in valuations and profits especially during the 1990s. However, since 2000, political activity and regulation account for a surprisingly large share of the increase.”

 

That’s why Trump won the nomination. Ted Cruz, an evangelical Christian, solicited the religious vote (what Hillary Clinton thinks of “homophobes”), but the evangelicals by and large voted for Trump. They want an outsider with a big broom to come in and sweep away the Establishment, because the Establishment has given them deplorably few crumbs from the table these past eight years. As “Publius” wrote Sept. 5 in Claremont Review, “A Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.” There are any number of things I would like Donald Trump to do as president. I have no idea what he will do when elected. Deplorably, we’re going to find out.

 

 

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                                  THE WAY TRUMP TALKS

         Daniel Henninger

Wall Street Journal, Sept. 7, 2016

 

Until recently, American politics was as flat as a backyard swimming pool. This year, the politicians gathered for their quadrennial family cookout, known as the presidential primaries. Suddenly, everyone saw some big old blond guy in red trunks bouncing on the diving board. Uh-oh. Then the big guy launched himself, butt first, into the middle of the pool. Everyone, and I mean everyone, got soaked. Uncle Don, the uninvited guest at the 2016 election, has upended almost everything we knew about presidential campaigns. Not least is the way Donald Trump talks.

 

“I would build a great wall. And nobody builds walls better than me, believe me. And I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall…Get ’em out of here. That’s right. Get ’em out of here.” Nobody in politics talks like that. It violates what we now call “the political discourse.” For years, politicians have been oh-so careful with their words. In part, this is the language of constituencies and coalition-building, the constant calibrating of support.

 

But it is also because in our time the media has made politicians pay a price for saying anything that risks harming this or that collection of political sensibilities. When Hillary Clinton said, “I have a lot of experience dealing with men who sometimes get off the reservation,” the press said she had disrespected Native Americans. It’s ridiculous, but real. No straighter jacket exists in politics today than language. Marco Rubio, an articulate and often forceful speaker, is careful not to push too far beyond the spin zone.

 

There is also the fact-checking mania. PolitiFact got a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for its microscopic fact-checks . . . and the politicians went to ground. Scrupulous exactitude in politics may be a good thing, but it’s also dull. A century or more ago, “intemperate” wasn’t in the political vocabulary. Compared with Teddy Roosevelt, Donald Trump is Little Bo-Peep. The historian William Leuchtenburg writes that Roosevelt once attacked the Colombians as this “pithecoid community” of “Dagos” and “homicidal corruptionists.” Possibly we are better off without TR’s red-faced eruptions. The problem today is that fear of offending or losing votes has so blanded out the political class that many of these politicians and the American electorate are no longer speaking the same language.

 

Into this void flopped a couple of rhetorical throwbacks—Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Though both lacked eloquence, people everywhere responded to their blunt language, to the point of being oblivious to its content. It was the way they talked that connected with voters. Messrs. Trump and Sanders liberated their audiences from normal politics, because normal politics had become suspect. Some argued that Mr. Trump merely tapped into latent anger at political correctness. But Bernie embodied PC. Something else in the culture elevated this new political language.

 

It isn’t exactly truth-telling, because so much of what these two said remained obscure. Liberal critics pointed out that Bernie’s spending was essentially limitless. The Trump wall, like Jack’s beanstalk, kept getting bigger. It didn’t matter. It seemed—or sounded—so real. Many people today think food isn’t real unless the label tells them it is organic or artisanal. TV commercials announce, “Not actors, real people.” Politics has no immunity from these new interpretations of what’s real. Just the feeling of authenticity for many has become more powerful than understanding the grubby realities of political limits.

 

Many voters don’t want to hear established politicians talking about the political process, as Mrs. Clinton is doing now, endlessly. What they want is a fighter, a valiant gesture. The Trump and Sanders detractors thought they were hearing a fascist or a socialist wingnut. Their supporters were hearing Sir Galahad, a knight to the rescue. The political language of a Trump or Sanders also became a kind of shared code of entry. Only individuals able to speak the new language among themselves could “get it.” The discussions of illegal immigration and income inequality go on inside a kind of impenetrable regional dialect, like the way Donald Trump says China—“Chiiii-nuh!”

 

Hillary Clinton is the antithesis of the current need. Every word she speaks, because it is so carefully planned, rings instantly false. Even the true ones. Still, the now-evident limitation of this new emotive political language is that none of its speakers or hearers knows what to do next. What comes after the words remains an unchartered frontier.

 

Bernie Sanders fell short. The current Trump campaign looks like a game of Twister, covering the blank spots. Even the Clinton camp is wrestling with two words—honest and trustworthy. In the suddenly tightening presidential race, we are seeing, or hearing, the careful and “reliable” political language of Hillary Clinton in competition with the intemperance of Trumpian rhetoric. One sounds real, the other just doesn’t. The new way of talking in American politics may turn out to be enough to win.‎

 

 

Contents           

THE BRIBERY STANDARD

Charles Krauthammer

Washington Post, Aug. 25, 2016

 

Bernie Sanders never understood the epic quality of the Clinton scandals. In his first debate, he famously dismissed the email issue, it being beneath the dignity of a great revolutionary to deal in things so tawdry and straightforward. Sanders failed to understand that Clinton scandals are sprawling, multi-layered, complex things. They defy time and space. They grow and burrow.

 

The central problem with Hillary Clinton’s emails was not the classified material. It wasn’t the headline-making charge by the FBI director of her extreme carelessness in handling it. That’s a serious offense, to be sure, and could very well have been grounds for indictment. And it did damage her politically, exposing her sense of above-the-law entitlement and — in her dodges and prevarications, her parsing and evasions — demonstrating her arm’s-length relationship with the truth. But it was always something of a sideshow. The real question wasn’t classification but: Why did she have a private server in the first place? She obviously lied about the purpose. It wasn’t convenience. It was concealment. What exactly was she hiding?

 

Was this merely the prudent paranoia of someone who habitually walks the line of legality? After all, if she controls the server, she controls the evidence, and can destroy it — as she did 30,000 emails — at will. But destroy what? Remember: She set up the system before even taking office. It’s clear what she wanted to protect from scrutiny: Clinton Foundation business. The foundation is a massive family enterprise disguised as a charity, an opaque and elaborate mechanism for sucking money from the rich and the tyrannous to be channeled to Clinton Inc. Its purpose is to maintain the Clintons’ lifestyle (offices, travel, accommodations, etc.), secure profitable connections, produce favorable publicity and reliably employ a vast entourage of retainers, ready to serve today and at the coming Clinton Restoration.

 

Now we learn how the whole machine operated. Two weeks ago, emails began dribbling out showing foundation officials contacting State Department counterparts to ask favors for foundation “friends.” Say, a meeting with the State Department’s “substance person” on Lebanon for one particularly generous Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire.

 

Big deal, said the Clinton defenders. Low-level stuff. No involvement of the secretary herself. Until — drip, drip — the next batch revealed foundation requests for face time with the secretary herself. Such as one from the crown prince of Bahrain. To be sure, Bahrain, home of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, is an important Persian Gulf ally. Its crown prince shouldn’t have to go through a foundation — to which his government donated at least $50,000 — to get to the secretary. The fact that he did is telling.

 

Now, a further drip: The Associated Press found that more than half the private interests who were granted phone or personal contact with Secretary Clinton — 85 of 154 — were donors to the foundation. Total contributions? As much as $156 million. Current Clinton response? There was no quid pro quo. What a long way we’ve come. This is the very last line of defense. Yes, it’s obvious that access and influence were sold. But no one has demonstrated definitively that the donors received something tangible of value — a pipeline, a permit, a waiver, a favorable regulatory ruling — in exchange.

 

It’s hard to believe the Clinton folks would be stupid enough to commit something so blatant to writing. Nonetheless, there might be an email allusion to some such conversation. With thousands more emails to come, who knows what lies beneath. On the face of it, it’s rather odd that a visible quid pro quo is the bright line for malfeasance. Anything short of that — the country is awash with political money that buys access — is deemed acceptable. As Donald Trump says of his own donation-giving days, “when I need something from them . . . I call them, they are there for me.” This is considered routine and unremarkable.

 

It’s not until a Rolex shows up on your wrist that you get indicted. Or you are found to have dangled a Senate appointment for cash. Then, like Rod Blagojevich, you go to jail. (He got 14 years.) Yet we are hardly bothered by the routine practice of presidents rewarding big donors with cushy ambassadorships, appointments to portentous boards and invitations to state dinners. The bright line seems to be outright bribery. Anything short of that is considered — not just for the Clintons, for everyone — acceptable corruption. It’s a sorry standard. And right now it is Hillary Clinton’s saving grace.          

 

 

Contents                                   

             

THIS IS AMERICA’S LAST CHANCE

Conrad Black

National Post, Sept. 9, 2016

 

In news terms, it has been a quieter summer than usual, and not remotely reminiscent of invincible summers that presaged a global descent into terrible times, such as 1929 or 1939. There has not even been the sort of flash crisis that brought us all in from the verandas or off the water early to follow president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s brilliant invasion of Lebanon in 1958 or the Soviet Bloc’s brutal suppression of the Czech pursuit of the chimera of “Communism with a human face” in 1968.

 

This summer, we really only had the clangorous American presidential campaign to divert us from our comparative leisure. In some ways, it has been the most astonishing of these quadrennial electoral Super Bowls of living memory: an unprecedented mountain of legal and ethical baggage obstructing one candidate, and the other a total outsider to political office, violently opposed to and by the entire political class, including the media, and with a propensity to utterances vastly more self-injurious than some famous gaffes of the past that sank candidacies. An early such incident was when a spokesman for Republican candidate James G. Blaine dismissed the Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” in 1884, enabling Democrat Grover Cleveland to carry New York state and the election by 1,149 votes. (In 1891 as secretary of state, Blaine intervened in the Canadian election and urged Canada to seek annexation, through the pages of the Toronto Star — obviously that didn’t fly either). Many readers will remember president Gerald Ford’s denial that Poland was a Soviet-dominated country in 1976, and president Jimmy Carter’s reference to a “national malaise” in 1979 (of which the chief symptom was shortly judged to be his presence in the White House).

 

In this election, at least until recently, neither nominee was imaginable as a victorious presidential candidate except in contemplation of the other. However, and as some readers will recall that I suggested might happen, Donald Trump, having sewn up the Archie Bunker vote, the roughly 40 per cent of Americans who hate political correctness, dislike government on principle, own firearms, and have a generally macho view of America, tempered in policy terms by isolationist tendencies; has deposited that vast following, which he richly entertained through the primaries, on the electoral scale. And now he has set out to give enough of the mainstream a comfort level that he is not, himself, temperamentally or stylistically unsuited to the great office he seeks, to tip the balance for him. It is working, as the polls are now about even. However it ends, this is the final stage of a tactical progress of great virtuosity.

 

Everyone who has followed this campaign will recall the smug conventional wisdom of the Republican insiders and both the conservative high-brow and liberal middle-brow media, and the immense clot of international America-watchers that quadrennially thickens and becomes more vocal each election year. They smugly repeated to each other that Trump was just “building his brand,” couldn’t attract the votes of more than 20 per cent, then, 30, 40 per cent of Republicans, would be sand-bagged at the convention by the credentials committee, would split his party and trail Hillary Clinton by 30 points. He would be dropped “like a hot rock” (Senate leader Mitch McConnell) by other Republican candidates. He was pandering to violence and misogyny and racism, and was a crackpot and a warmonger.

 

Those were the trees; there are three whole forests that were generally unnoticed. The public will not stand any longer for the chronic misgovernment produced by the Bushes, Clintons and Obama, each begetting the next: the housing bubble, the Great Recession, 12 million illegal immigrants; a decade of war in the Middle East, mostly to Iran’s benefit, which generated a massive humanitarian crisis; Iran and Russia as putative allies in the shambles of Iraq and as opponents in the adjoining Syrian bloodbath; and doubling the national debt and quadrupling the real money supply in seven years to achieve an economic growth rate of one per cent. The people gave the Congress to Newt Gingrich opposite Bill Clinton, to Nancy Pelosi opposite George W., to John Boehner opposite Barack Obama; they all failed, the presidents and the Congresses. Turning the rascals out didn’t produce better rascals. Trump was the only person on offer who wasn’t complicit in any of it.

 

The second forest is that Trump raised the Republican vote in the primaries by 60 per cent. In many swing-states, such as Indiana, his vote equalled that of Clinton and Bernie Sanders combined. Millions of Americans who had given up on the great political charade, jubilantly bought the political incorrectness, a candidate who called Islamic terror “Islamic terror” and did not call the San Bernardino massacre “workplace violence.” Trump is now the only person in American history to gain complete control of a major political party from the outside without being a cabinet officer selected by his predecessor or a prominent general…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]

 

Contents                       

           

On Topic Links

 

Hillary Lies About Her Health, Nets Say ‘Both Candidates’ Guilty: Kyle Drennen, MRC News Busters, Sept. 12, 2016—After Hillary Clinton nearly collapsed due to an undisclosed case of pneumonia on Sunday, on Monday, all three network morning shows tried to deflect from questions about her health and honesty by claiming that “both candidates” were guilty of not being forthcoming on the issue.

Third-Party Candidates Set to Shake up Presidential Election: Marisa Schultz, New York Post, Sept. 10, 2016—Third-party candidates are usually an afterthought in presidential elections, but Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein could impact the outcome of this year’s race, analysts say.

The Problem with Hillary: David Suissa, Jewish Journal, Aug. 30, 2016—My friends who support Hillary Clinton defend her habit of playing fast and loose with the truth and with ethics by saying, “Well, you know, that’s what politicians do.” It’s a clever strategy. It doesn’t pretend to deny Clinton’s ethical breaches; instead, it puts them into some vague larger context that "files them away" so we can all go back to bashing Donald Trump, who is really doing stuff we’ve never seen before.

President Trump Isn’t Farfetched: Douglas E. Schoen, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 6, 2016—To listen to conventional wisdom, Hillary Clinton practically cannot lose the presidential election. The various forecasting services, from FiveThirtyEight to CNN to Predictwise, give the Democrat about a 70% chance of winning the White House in November.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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