Columnist.
There was a time when one of the worst sins you could commit on the American Right was to buy into "false moral equivalence." During the Cold War, this usually meant saying that we were no better than the Soviet Union. For example, Democratic Sen. William J. Fulbright — Bill Clinton's mentor — said of the Soviet Union in 1971, "Were it not for the fact that they are Communists — and therefore 'bad' people — while we are Americans — and therefore 'good' people — our policies would be nearly indistinguishable." My old boss William F. Buckley famously had the best retort to this kind of myopic asininity. "To say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around."
Phyllis Schlafly died this week at the age of 92. I had my disagreements with the legendary conservative activist, particularly of late. She died the day before publication of her last book: "The Conservative Case for Trump." The title alone should offer the reader a hint of at least one of those disagreements. Indeed, the deep family squabble among conservatives over the question of Donald Trump gives Schlafly's death added poignancy because it played itself out in her own family. When Schlafly endorsed Trump last spring, six members of the board of directors of Schlafly's Eagle Forum, including her own daughter, tried to have her removed from the organization.
Since it's been seven months since the Iowa caucuses and it'll be another three-plus years until that hell is fresh again, this is the best time to talk about ethanol. Just in case you didn't know, ethanol is very popular in Iowa and other corn states, which is why most presidential candidates swear once every four years that they love ethanol so much they'd marry a jug of it if they could. If only for a moment, loyalty to this government moonshine becomes as fraught with political symbolism as a gay wedding in which both grooms refuse to wear American flag pins while declining to stand for the national anthem in support of our troops.
Last week delivered one of the most remarkable moments of this most remarkable political season. A major politician defended the conservative movement and the Republican Party from guilt-by-association with a fringe group of racists, anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists who have jumped enthusiastically on the Donald Trump train: the so-called alt-right. "This is not conservatism as we have known it," the politician said. "This is not Republicanism as we have known it." That politician was Hillary Clinton, and that's astonishing. Clinton is normally comfortable unjustly condemning conservatism and the GOP for the sins of bigotry and prejudice, not exonerating it. After all, she coined the phrase "vast right-wing conspiracy."
Do you know the old wheelbarrow joke? It's truly funny only to grandpas and the grandkids they tell it to, so I won't bother with the elaborate setup. For years a factory worker pushes a wheelbarrow full of straw past a security guard on his way out. Suspicious that the guy is stealing something, the guard looks in the straw but can't find anything. Finally, when the worker is retiring, the guard asks, "I know you've been stealing something — can you tell me what it is? The guy smiles and says, "Wheelbarrows." That joke keeps popping into my head whenever I hear Hillary Clinton's defenders say there's no evidence of a quid pro quo in the fresh batch of emails released this week. According to many Republican critics, the trove provides fresh evidence that the Clinton Foundation was, in Donald Trump's words, a "pay-to-play" scheme, selling access to and favors from the secretary of state.
One of the most exhausting things about politics is a mindset that says "scandal for thee, but not for me." Consider the perennial (alleged) scandal of presidential golf. When George W. Bush was commander in chief, he played a lot of golf, and his critics were outraged — or at least pretended to be. Whether it was the political pressure or his own conscience, President Bush ultimately decided to stop golfing. "I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf," Bush told Politico in 2008. "I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them."
If you want proof of the journalism profession's staggeringly high self-regard, you could do worse than to study the kerfuffle over the not-quite-demise of Gawker. Gawker was a successful news and gossip site founded by Nick Denton that often prided itself on being mean-spirited, prurient and callous all in the name of attracting as many eyeballs as possible. It went — and still goes — by the motto "Today's gossip is tomorrow's news." I was never a fan of Gawker, but I never loathed it either. What I found unfathomable, though, was the fascination with it. People talked about it as if it represented a paradigm-shifting revolution in media. What started as a blog became a collection of blogs and ultimately a bundle of different properties, including the sports site Deadspin, the women's site Jezebel and the D.C. gossip site Wonkette. Maybe they took these beats to the next level (or to a lower one), but this wasn't exactly reinventing the wheel.
To listen to both his defenders and critics, Donald Trump represents the U.S. version of a new nationalism popping up around the world. I'm not so sure. In a fairly representative analysis, Politico's Michael Hirsh explained the "new nationalism" as "a bitter populist rejection of the status quo that global elites have imposed on the international system since the Cold War ended, and which lower-income voters have decided — understandably — is unfair." James P. Pinkerton, writing for the stridently pro-Trump website Breitbart.com, sees nothing less than a "Worldwide Trumpian Majority" forming to oppose globalization in all its forms.
Donald Trump's supporters complain that the media is fixated on the billionaire's wild and crazy campaign while ignoring or at least downplaying Hillary Clinton's gaffes, missteps and outright scandals. And they're right. There is a double standard. Actually, it's a multipronged standard. For some in the mainstream media, good old-fashioned left-wing bias is at work. Every four years, the Republican presidential candidate is treated like some alien warlord wandering in from the badlands beyond the frontier to seize power in our glorious capital city.
Donald Trump has the GOP trapped in not one Catch-22, but two. Call it a Catch-44. The first Catch-22 has been the subject of widespread conversation over the last few weeks. As GOP pollster Glen Bolger summed it up for The New York Times: "Do we run the risk of depressing our base by repudiating the guy? Or do we run the risk of being tarred and feathered by independents for not repudiating him?" "We're damned if we do and damned if we don't," he added. Lots of Republicans adore Trump — just consider the enthusiasm at his massive rallies — and will turn on the establishment Republicans who betray him.
One of my all-time favorite lines is from Henry Thoreau: "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." It came to mind this week when the White House and State Department insisted that the charge the U.S. paid a ransom to get back American hostages was purely circumstantial. Sometimes, a $400 million pay-off in laundered money, delivered in the dead of night in an unmarked cargo plane isn't what it looks like. January 16 was "Implementation Day" for the nuclear deal between the United States and Iran, in which the state sponsor of terror received sanctions relief possibly worth as much as $150 billion — which would be roughly equivalent to 40 percent of its GDP — in exchange for some guarantees against developing nuclear weapons ... for a while. (The merits, and even the nature, of the Iran nuclear deal are hotly disputed, but that's a topic for another time.)
Among the innumerable flip-flops, course corrections and reinventions that have come to define Hillary Clinton's three decades in public life, perhaps the most interesting one is her decision in 2016 to go all in as the woman-candidate. In 2008, Clinton downplayed her gender. Mark Penn, her chief strategist in that campaign, had a "FWP" (First Woman President) plan that emphasized toughness, not nurturing. Voters, he argued, did "not want someone who would be the first mama, especially in this kind of world." Ann Lewis, a 2008 senior adviser, told the New York Times last year that the decision not to double down on gender was the "biggest missed opportunity" of Clinton's presidential bid. "It was not a major theme of the campaign," Lewis added.
Dear Mainstream Media and Democrats: It's your turn. Now that Donald Trump has been formally nominated, the formal responsibility to stop him passes from the right to the left, from Republicans to Democrats and the journalists who amplify their values. You're going to find it a very tough slog. And it's your own damn fault. During the primaries, the task of exposing the true nature of the Trump takeover fell disproportionately to a few conservative magazines, columnists, renegade radio hosts and behind-the-scenes activists. We all failed. There will be plenty of time for recriminations and "we happy few" speeches later. (If you detect a note of bitterness on my part, I'm not being clear enough: I contain symphonies of bitterness.)
In normal times, the report this week that Donald Trump wanted John Kasich to be the real president would have made more of a splash. According to Kasich aides, the Trump campaign desperately wanted the Ohio governor to be his running mate. Kasich, out of concern for his eternal soul or his political future, resisted the idea. But the Trump campaign pressed harder. At one point Donald Trump Jr. reached out with an amazing offer, according to the New York Times: How would Kasich like to be the most powerful vice president in American history? If elected, Trump would put Kasich in charge of two broad areas of policy making.
It was reported late in the second day of the GOP convention that a large number of Republican National Committee staffers were stricken with the norovirus. Most commonly associated with the sorts of gastrointestinal crises aboard cruise ships that attract wall-to-wall CNN coverage, the norovirus is known for inducing bouts of "explosive diarrhea and vomiting," according to various news reports. Given that the presidential primary season has been figuratively bowel-stewing, it only seems fitting that it might end with such on-the-nose literalism.
If you love Hillary Clinton just the way she is, you're in luck. If you adore Donald Trump and don't want to ever see him change, congrats. But if you're a passionate liberal who is sour on Clinton and hoping that the "real Hillary" will break through, my advice to you is, "Start drinking heavily." Likewise, if you're a committed and sincere conservative but just can't get your head around the excitement over Trump, I'm afraid to tell you: This is it. Visions of a mature, disciplined, "presidential" Donald Trump are hallucinatory fantasies.
It seems almost ghoulish to look for a silver lining in the dark cloud that blanketed the nation last week. But I think there was one. The killings by police in Minnesota and Louisiana, quickly followed by the killings of police in Dallas, knocked the lazy certainty out of almost everybody. At least for a moment, antagonists on either side of polarizing issues could see beyond the epistemic horizon of their most comfortable talking points. Black Lives Matter activists thanked the police for their protection and sacrifice. Conservative Republicans, most notably House Speaker Paul Ryan and former Speaker Newt Gingrich, spoke movingly about race in America.
It was clear from FBI Director James Comey's congressional testimony Thursday that he thinks Hillary Clinton lied to the American people, even if he was reluctant to say it in so many words. But then he didn't need to. We've known for over a year that Clinton has been lying about her server. She lied about the reason she set it up — she claimed she wanted the convenience of using just one device. She claimed she never sent or received any classified email. She claimed she handed over all of her work-related emails. She claimed that her stealth system had been approved. She claimed that her lawyers read every one of her emails before opting to hand them over or delete them.
Load up on popcorn: The Republican ticket may be poised to go to 11. According to numerous reports, Donald Trump is considering Newt Gingrich as his running mate. And as traffic-baiters like to say on the Internet: You won't believe what happens next! But first I should come clean. I like Gingrich. My wife worked for him for several years. Whatever his faults, the former House speaker — and architect of the "Republican Revolution" in 1994 — is a brilliant man with almost encyclopedic knowledge of political history and a grab bag of other topics as well. When John Boehner stepped down from the speakership last year, I proposed in this space that Gingrich serve as his temporary replacement.
"I have an idea. The federal government needs to compile a list of women who shouldn't be allowed to get abortions."
