Columnist.
Political conventions are echo chambers designed to generate feelings of invincibility, sending forth the party faithful with a spring in their steps and hope in their hearts. Who would want to be a wet blanket at such moveable feasts? Steve Munisteri would. Although he calls himself "the eternal optimist," he respects reality, which nowadays is not conducive to conservatives' cheerfulness. He served as chairman of the Texas Republican Party from 2010 to 2015 because he discerned "a seismic shift in demographics" that meant his state could "turn Democratic sooner than most people thought."
Neither the unanimous decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, nor China's rejection of it, was surprising. The timing of it was, however, as serendipitous as China's rejection is ominous. Coming as Republican delegates convene on Lake Erie's shore, the tribunal's opinion about the South China Sea underscores the current frivolousness of American politics, which is fixated on a fictitious wall that will never exist but silent about realities on and above the waters that now are the world's most dangerous cockpit of national rivalries.
The mills of justice grind slowly, but life plunges on, leaving lives blighted when justice, by being delayed, is irremediably denied. Fortunately, California's Supreme Court might soon decide to hear — four years after litigation began — the 21st century's most portentous civil rights case, which concerns an ongoing denial of equal protection of the law. Every year, measurable injuries are inflicted on tens of thousands of already at-risk children by this state's teacher tenure system, which is so politically entrenched that only the courts can protect the discrete and insular minority it victimizes. In 2012, nine Los Angeles students recognizing the futility of expecting the Legislature to rectify a wrong it has perpetrated asked California's judiciary to continue its record of vindicating the rights of vulnerable minorities by requiring the state's education system to conform to the state's Constitution.
The "party of science" rejects undesirable evidence on the effects of early education.
America's economy has now slouched into the eighth year of a recovery that demonstrates how much we have defined recovery down. The idea that essentially zero interest rates are, after seven and a half years, stimulating the economy "strains credulity," says James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. But last month he and other members of the Federal Reserve Board understandably felt constrained to vote unanimously to continue today's rates for an economy that created just 38,000 new jobs in May, and grew just 0.8 percent in the first quarter, after just 1.4 percent in the previous quarter.
The report was so "seismic" — Daniel Patrick Moynihan's word — that Lyndon Johnson's administration released it on the Fourth of July weekend, 1966, hoping it would not be noticed. But the Coleman report did disturb various dogmatic slumbers and vested interests. And 50 years on, it is pertinent to today's political debates about class and social mobility. So, let us now praise an insufficiently famous man, sociologist James Coleman, author of the study "Equality of Educational Opportunity."
The progressive drive to broadly define and thoroughly eradicate political "corruption" has corrupted politics. But discord is not altogether pandemic in Washington, and last week a unanimous Supreme Court, in this term's most important decision, limited the discretion prosecutors have to criminalize politics. Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell was sentenced to prison for unseemly behavior. He accepted from a Virginia businessman gifts and loans valued at more than $170,000. The businessman wanted McDonnell to help promote his dietary supplement business, including by helping him persuade state universities to study its products.
The walk began at 7:30 a.m., July 1, 1916, when British infantry advanced toward German trenches. In the first hours, eight British soldiers fell per second. By nightfall 19,240 were dead, another 38,230 were wounded. World War I, the worst manmade disaster in human experience, was the hinge of modern history. The war was the incubator of Communist Russia, Nazi Germany, World War II and innumerable cultural consequences. The hinge of this war was the battle named for "that little stream," the river Somme. The scything fire of machine guns could not be nullified even by falling curtains of metal from creeping artillery barrages that moved in advance of infantry. Geoff Dyer, in "The Missing of the Somme," notes: "By the time of the great battles of attrition of 1916-17 mass graves were dug in advance of major offenses. Singing columns of soldiers fell grimly silent as they marched by these gaping pits en route to the front-line trenches."
The Leave campaign won the referendum on withdrawing Britain from the European Union because the arguments on which the Remain side relied made Leave's case. The Remain campaign began with a sham, was monomaniacal with its Project Fear, and ended in governmental thuggishness. The sham was Prime Minister David Cameron's attempt to justify Remain by negotiating EU concessions regarding Britain's subservience to the EU. This dickering for scraps of lost sovereignty underscored Britain's servitude and achieved so little that Remainers rarely mentioned it during their campaign.
"There's an old adage about a vat of wine standing next to a vat of sewage. Add a cup of wine to the sewage, and it is still sewage. But add a cup of sewage to the wine, and it is no longer wine but sewage. Is this what Donald Trump has done to our politics?" —Martha Bayles, in the Claremont Review of Books. Yes, as Republicans should remember when their convention opens in less than a month, on the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump's disparagement of John McCain as unheroic because he was "captured." McCain was captured (with a broken leg and two broken arms) when North Vietnamese shot down his plane. He chose extra years of torture, refusing to leave when his torturers wanted to release him because he was an admiral's son.
Months before the 1940 Republican convention nominated Wendell Willkie, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt's waspish daughter, said that Willkie's support sprang "from the grass roots of a thousand country clubs." There actually was a Republican establishment in 1940, when GOP elites created a nominee ex nihilo.
Mitch Daniels, former governor of Indiana and current president of Purdue University, knows that no one in the audience is there to hear a commencement speaker. When, however, he addressed his institution's class of 2016, it heard him distill into a few lapidary paragraphs a stance toward life that illuminates this political season.
Of the fighting faiths that flourished during the ideologically drunk 20th century, anti-Semitism has been uniquely durable. It survives by mutating, even migrating across the political spectrum from the right to the left. Although most frequently found in European semi-fascist parties, anti-Semitism is growing in the fetid Petri dish of American academia, and is staining Britain's Labour Party.
The Caligulan malice with which Donald Trump administered Paul Ryan's degradation is an object lesson in the price of abject capitulation to power. This episode should be studied as a clinical case of a particular Washington myopia — the ability of career politicians to convince themselves that they and their agendas are of supreme importance.
Misery loves company, so refugees from America's Republican Party should understand that theirs is not the only party that has chosen a leader who confirms caricatures of it while repudiating its purposes. Jeremy Corbyn, the silliest leader in the British Labour Party's 116-year history, might kill satire as well as whatever remains of socialism.
Sitting on the sun-dappled terrace of the House of Lords, watching the Thames flow, Lord Nigel Lawson explains that the June 23 referendum, which he hopes will withdraw Britain from the European Union, was never supposed to happen. It is, he says, the fulfillment of a promise Prime Minister David Cameron expected to be prevented from keeping.
Leaders of the campaign to end Britain's membership in the European Union hope that next month's referendum will make June 23, 2016, a date as luminous in modern British history as May 3, 1979, when voters made Margaret Thatcher prime minister. Michael Gove, secretary of justice and leader of the campaign for Brexit — Britain's withdrawal from the EU — anticipates a "galvanizing, liberating, empowering moment of national renewal."
Sixty-five years ago, what has become the European Union was an embryo conceived in fear. It has been stealthily advanced from an economic to a political project, and it remains enveloped in a watery utopianism even as it becomes more dystopian. The EU's economic stagnation — in some of the 28 member nations, youth unemployment approaches 50 percent — is exacerbated by its regulatory itch and the self-inflicted wound of the euro, a common currency for radically dissimilar nations. The EU is floundering amid mass migration, the greatest threat to Europe's domestic tranquility since 1945.
The mere possibility of a Donald Trump presidency — gold-plated faucets in the house first occupied by John and Abigail Adams — will perhaps have a salutary effect. It might demystify an office that has become now swollen with inappropriate powers and swaddled in a pretentiousness discordant with a republic's ethic of simplicity. This wholesome retreat from presidential grandiosity would be advanced if on Jan. 20, 2017, the 45th president delivered the following inaugural address:
Because advertising is a barometer that often accurately measures America's psychological atmosphere, attention must be paid to this: From May 23 through the presidential election, Budweiser beer will bear a different name. Eager to do its bit to make America great again, the brewer will replace the name "Budweiser" with "America" on its 12-ounce bottles and cans.
