Megan Ring

From an Angry Reader:

COULD THESE REALLY BE YOUR WORDS?

 “When Trump shoots off his blunderbuss, is it always proof of laziness and ignorance, or is it sometimes generally aimed in the right direction to prompt anxiety and eventual necessary reconsideration?”

 ITS IGNORANCE AND YOU KNOW IT. HAS HE ONCE DESCRIBED DETAILS OF HOW IS GOING TO ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING CONSERVATIVE??

 “The Clinton Foundation is like no other president-sponsored nonprofit enterprise in recent memory.”

 AT LEAST THE MONEY GOES TO CHARITY

 YOUR MAN TRUMP SPENDS IT ON HIS PORTRAIT

  Larry A. Feig, Ph.D.

Professor

Department of Developmental, Molecular and Chemical Biology

Department of Neuroscience

Tufts University School of Medicine

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Larry Feig,

Beware of using all capital letters; usually they seek to create emphases otherwise lacking in an argument. I read both Clinton’s and Trump’s agendas posted on their websites. Progressives should vote for Clinton, conservatives Trump. On the major issues—debt, taxes, regulation, health care, national security, abortion, climate change, fossil fuels, illegal immigration, etc.—their respective positions are entirely antithetical. One can argue their respective characters do not warrant support, or their flip-flops make both insincere. Perhaps. But their official positions as we head toward Election Day are clear and clearly at odds.

VDH

The Unenviable Next President

Megan Ring
by Victor Davis Hanson// Defining Ideas
 

After a strange and divisive election season, November 8 is almost here—and it couldn’t have come soon enough.

Whoever wins will be in an unenviable position. The nation is in free-fall: current foreign policy, the economy, health care, and federal borrowing are not sustainable. Yet the needed chemotherapy, in the short-term, will have more excruciating side-effects than the pain of the growing cancer itself—ensuring that the next president will be hated as a cruel oncologist by his suffering patients, the public.

Take health care. Nothing President Obama promised about the Affordable Care Act ever came true—if indeed such assurances were ever intended to come true. Premiums did not fall by $2,500. In fact, they rose on average by $4,800. We did not necessarily keep our plans or our doctors. The ACA certainly did not lower the deficit—another one of Obama’s pledges. Continue reading “The Unenviable Next President” →

Has Clinton topped Nixon?

Megan Ring
By Victor Davis Hanson// Town Hall
|
Has Clinton topped Nixon?

Another day, another Hillary Clinton bombshell disclosure.

This time the scandal comes from disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop computer, bringing more suggestions of Clinton’s sloppy attitude about U.S. intelligence law. Meanwhile, seemingly every day WikiLeaks produces more evidence of the Clinton Foundation leveraging the Clinton State Department for pay-for-play profiteering.

At this point, Clinton has trumped former President Richard Nixon’s skullduggery — but without the offset of Nixon’s foreign policy accomplishments. Continue reading “Has Clinton topped Nixon?” →

Never Trump Republicans: Spoilers or Saviors?

Megan Ring
 By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
If enough of them decide that Hillary’s corruption is too much to take, she could be finished, at last.
Will there be an eleventh-hour Never/Against/No Trump Reconsideration?
The question gains new relevance as a Hillary Clinton landslide, widely predicted until recently, now seems unlikely.
We are back to the razor’s edge, a likelihood of a close one- to three-point victory either way, and an even closer vote in the Electoral College. Once again, eyes focus on the Never Trump camp. It is at a crux, no doubt feeling schadenfreude that in extremis Donald Trump would beckon to them, of all people, with his “come home” campaign, while they are uneasy that his home-stretch themes, despite all the scary talk of a new exclusionary nationalism, nonetheless reflect most of the positions of their own mainstream conservatism.

Continue reading “Never Trump Republicans: Spoilers or Saviors?” →

No reason to assume Hillary’s troubles are behind her

Megan Ring

 

Hillary Clinton was resting, running out the clock, sitting on a supposed large lead and hoping that the election was sooner than later. Now after the latest Weiner disclosures, she is crisscrossing the country, terrified of collapsing polls, and wishing that she had three more weeks rather than just one. With the Clintons, farce is the desert to scandal: the profiteering Clinton Foundation as a humanitarian treasure; Hillary the former corporate attorney as child and little-guy crusader; Bill Clinton, both sexual predator and feminist hero.

Hillary didn’t just delete e-mails under congressional subpoena; she insisted that some 33,000 e-mails were mostly about yoga and Chelsea’s wedding – sort of like saying that one can beat 31 trillion-to-one odds of turning $1,000 into a $100,000 cattle-futures profit in no time by merely reading the Wall Street Journal. Until Friday, FBI director James Comey, in Hillary’s eyes, was a sober and judicious public servant who had rightly seen insufficient cause for her indictment. Now she believes that he is a rank Republican politico seeking to rob her of her presidency. Continue reading “No reason to assume Hillary’s troubles are behind her” →

The Strange Silence of Bernie Sanders

victorhanson
The Corner
The one and only.

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

The core of Bernie Sanders’s maverick campaign was “not business as usual.” For a year he offered a comprehensive critique both of status quo Democratic politics and the corrupt culture of elite Washington in uncompromising fashion.

In an era of Never Trump publicity, daily harsh critiques from some conservatives of the Trump campaign, and various signed letters from Republican luminaries distancing themselves from Trump, where is the commensurate Sanders outrage over various email disclosures?

One consistent theme from the DNC and Podesta troves is that the Sanders campaign was sabotaged by the Democratic National Committee, prompting the resignation of its chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (and perhaps soon her successor as well); that the Clinton campaign worked hand in glove with the Obama administration; that Sanders himself was sandbagged in perhaps more than one debate by Donna Brazile, who undermined the integrity of the forum by providing John Podesta and team Clinton with some of the debate questions in advance; and that the transcripts of Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street six-figure compensated speeches confirm Sanders’s indictment of Clinton’s quid pro quo, wink-and-nod accommodation with big money, along with her admission that she has a public facade that should not be confused with her private (and real) sympathies. All of this is quite aside from the Clinton campaign’s banal disparagement of everything Sanders, from leaking unflattering photographs of him to attacking his purported atheism, as they dismissed his followers as prolonged adolescents who never left their parents’ basements.

What transformed Sanders from a supposedly principled muckraker and uncompromising tiger into an obsequious and mostly silent mouse who shrugs that stuff just happens in politics?

No answer needed.

The Clintons — At the End of All Things

victorhanson
 by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Epic greed, power, and pride: Where’s the bottom? With Bill and Hillary, there’s no telling.

What was the Clinton telos? The end point, the aim of all their lying, cheating, criminality, dishonor, and degradation?

Given the latest Weiner scandals coming on top of the latest WikiLeaks scandals, we wonder, what did the Clintons really wish to end up as — and why? Are they Goethe’s Faust or tortured souls crushed by the weight of their money bags in Dante’s Fourth Circle of Hell?

For a few criminals, remorse comes with old age; but for the Clintons, near-70 was to be the capstone, the last chance to trump all their prior shenanigans. They were artists of amorality, and the election of 2016 was to be their magnum opus.

Collate the FBI reopened investigation, WikiLeaks Podesta trove, revelations about the Clinton Foundation, the e-mail–server scandal, the DNC disclosures, and the various off-the-cuff campaign remarks of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and one then ponders what was the point of the Clinton shakedowns, the loss of reputation, the crude lawbreaking, as they neared their seventh decade. To paraphrase Barack Obama, in his progressive sermonizing on making enough money, did the two ever think they had enough money, enough honors, enough power already?

The Hillary/Bill fortune — generated by pay-for-play influence peddling on the proposition that Bill would return to the White House under Hillary’s aegis and reward friends while punishing enemies — hit a reported $150 million some time ago, a fortune built not on farming, mining, insurance, finance, high-tech, or manufacturing, but on skimming off money. The Clintons are simply grifters whose insider access to government gave them the power to make rich people richer. Continue reading “The Clintons — At the End of All Things” →

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

victorhanson
The Corner The one and only.
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
In the “you can’t believe this” category, Washington, D.C. lawyer, former Clinton official, and self-described Hillary Clinton supporter Jamie Gorelick goes to the pages of the Washington Post to complain that James Comey’s FBI reinvestigation is a peril to democracy.
That is a hypothetical, although Gorelick had no apparent problem earlier when Comey could not square the circle of detailing how Clinton’s reckless behavior did not rise to the level of an indictable offense.
What is not a hypothetical, but a real peril to democracy, is Ms. Clinton’s de facto undermining federal law as secretary of state to hide private communications and thereby endanger national security — well aside from calibrating secretary of state face-time with donations to her family’s foundation — and disguising those facts by obfuscation, lying, and stone-walling.
For that matter, what is destroying democracy is an elite culture of amorality in Washington, in which incestuous politicians, journalists, and lawyers go out from government and politics into government-related finance, law, and lobbying, often cashing in without proven expertise or experience — in other words, in the manner that one Jamie Gorelick (whose Post byline of high government service mysteriously stops nearly 20 years ago at 1997) served for nearly six years (1997–2003) as vice chairman of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) under the infamous Franklin Raines. Raines and Gorelick oversaw a $10 billion loss, putting Fannie Mae on the trajectory to its implosion during the 2008 meltdown.
For all that damage, Gorelick walked away from the Fannie Mae mess with $26,466,834 in compensation and “bonuses,” although for what reason and on what merit no one has yet ascertained. The bonus was almost as mysterious as her own original appointment to Fannie Mae as an outgoing Clinton official, given that Gorelick had no banking expertise whatsoever to help manage one of the nation’s most important lending institutions.
In today’s Washington ethos, Gorelick, who owed her job to Bill Clinton, and, thanks to him, made millions as her agency imploded, now writes about the FBI director’s supposed ethical problems as emblematic of a danger to democracy — in a not so subtle fashion to help the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Gorelick’s public career could charitably be called a textbook case of conflict of interest. Meanwhile, no one any longer recalls the millions of Americans who lost their homes and savings in part due to the consequences of sloppy, unethical, and callous leadership of Washington’s government-sponsored finance and lending.
If you seek the monuments of Trump’s origins, look around Washington.

victorhanson

Comment from an Angry Reader:

You’re a civil guy, and it is appreciated. It would be a waste of time, however, for us to engage in colloquy. I can only hope that you are not spared the results of your short-sightedness, and cheerleading for Donald Trump—the word is apt, despite your ‘preference’ in the primaries—that perhaps someone you love takes a bullet along with the countless Mexicans and Muslims who will suffer at his hands along with many of the rest of us. Then, you may be able to feel something like Kipling felt when his own son died in wartime.

 —Kurt Lipschutz

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Kurt Lipschutz,

I have answered your earlier angry letter, but confess that you are not a civil person. As I wrote, I am not a cheerleader for Donald Trump, but concluded that in a world of bad and worse choices Trump is less toxic than is Clinton and the assorted Clinton scandals that come with her. Enforcing border security and ensuring immigration is legal, diverse, and meritocratic is reasonable—despite your macabre suggestions.

You know nothing about the circumstances of Kipling’s remorse over the death of his son in WWI, which is likely because either he had helped his son’s own efforts to lift a medical deferment to serve, or he was angry that the British Army had had plenty of warning of the need to prepare for a looming war with Germany and did not field or lead a suitable army worthy of its soldiers’ sacrifices. And you reach a real low when you suggest that someone close to me should die to convince me to agree with your own particular political positions. Anyone who has a lost a child would find your ill wishes for the murder of one of my loved ones pathological and beneath contempt.

VDH

The Alienated American

Megan Ring
by Victor Davis Hanson// Defining Ideas
 

Many Americans increasingly seem psychologically, if not materially, disengaged from their own country. A few vote with their feet and move to quieter enclaves in the American rural West or to no-income-tax states in the South and hinterlands. More withdraw with their minds, by shutting out most of the noise emanating from American popular culture, politics, and the media.

I spent my vacation in September in small towns in southern Michigan, and a few days of October traveling to a number of communities in rural California, as well as talking to a variety of people on my farm. In all these venues, I kept meeting the same sort of detached American. Though these men and women came from varying class and ethnic backgrounds, they were united by a sense of malaise. Let me sum up what I think is the new Americanus alienatus. Continue reading “The Alienated American” →