Columnist.
Ted Cruz's electrifying performance at the 2016 Republican National Convention will be long remembered, and deservedly so. At a critical moment, when the party of Lincoln had uncomfortably but nonetheless thoroughly embraced a lifelong Democrat/reality star/violence-abettor — and when few leading Republicans had demonstrated the courage to oppose him — Cruz did. Politicians live for the adulation of crowds, and it's bracing, even thrilling, to see one stand up straight when suffering their jeers. Cruz was particularly effective because he dropped the Southern preacher style he affected during the primaries and spoke plainly.
In the aftermath of the violence of the past two weeks, I was genuinely rooting for President Obama to achieve the eloquence for which he has such an unearned reputation. If ever there were a moment that called for largeness of spirit, the racially motivated assassination of five officers following the disturbing and highly questionable police shootings of two black men by white officers was such a time. The bitterness and score settling by both left and right (portions of the right, under Trump, have joined the racial-grievance industry) is a dismaying rollback of the civic unity we've achieved over the past 50 years. The left shouts "Black Lives Matter" as if cops had declared open season on them, and the right denies that there is any case of police conduct that was not utterly justifiable.
The Islamic State, you have to acknowledge, is on quite a roll. Over the July 4 weekend, the FBI arrested a northern Virginia neighbor of mine, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh. He was apparently plotting a Fort Hood style attack and told an FBI informant: "I just want to live a good Muslim life and die as a Shaheed (martyr)." Jalloh was thwarted, but around the globe, fellow admirers or members of ISIS have been inflicting chaos and death at an accelerating rate.
"Why do people hate Hillary Clinton so much?" a reporter from the Canadian Broadcasting Company asked me this week. I responded that the pitiless rancor of American politics today is out of all proportion to our real challenges — but it's worth recalling how Hillary Clinton earned her miserable reputation. It was the flagrant and prodigious lies. She has arguably abused power, enriched herself and her family with blatant influence selling and betrayed an arrogant disregard for the normal rules.
We've heard a great deal this campaign year about the plight of the working class. The left tells a story about the middle class being destroyed by predatory millionaires and billionaires who are soaking up 99 percent of the "income gains" (as if national income were one giant Big Gulp and the 1 percent managed to nab the biggest straws). Donald Trump tells a different story. The jobs that once provided a stable middle-class income have been outsourced. If people are unemployed, it's because the factories are all in Guangzhou or Juarez. Trump promises that he will bring those jobs back.
Whole doctoral dissertations could be devoted to the question of what makes President Obama angry and what does not. His Tuesday broadside against Donald Trump stood in marked contrast to Sunday's somewhat-cold response to the Orlando massacre. This is a pattern.
The phone has been ringing off the hook at Judge Aaron Persky's chambers at the Santa Clara County court for the past several days. "Tell your judge he can go to hell, and I hope his kids get raped and he rots in hell," said one caller. The judge and members of his family have received death threats — which seems to be the way America rolls these days. Just a suggestion: If you disapprove of something strongly, consider the words "shame," "scandal" or "debacle." Try not to commit a crime yourself in protesting a lenient sentence.
A gorilla has taken control of your TV set. What an apt metaphor for the past year. In fact, of course, I refer to the actual gorilla that was (if you take the word of some of the more unhinged commenters on social media) "assassinated" by zoo officials in Cincinnati. I nearly wrote "who," but that would be to commit the error so many are making in this case — confusing animals with people. To recap: A family visited the gorilla exhibit over Memorial Day weekend. A 3-year-old child managed to slip into the gorilla enclosure while his mother was distracted.
As someone who believes that excessive partisanship and Balkanization is poisoning our politics, I have tried to view Hillary Clinton as something other than the ghoul she is portrayed as in conservative circles. No accusation against her is considered too outlandish to gain assent in some precincts of the right: Vince Foster was murdered. Clinton covered up a cocaine smuggling operation in Arkansas. She assassinated Kathleen Willey's cat.
Washington state's Republican Party just defied the stampede toward "unity." Meeting over the weekend, they awarded 40 of the state's 41 delegates to Ted Cruz. Washington's Republicans have refused to be sheep.
EgyptAir Flight 804 — carrying 66 people, including three children — departed from Paris on Wednesday night. Just before it was scheduled to land in Cairo, it appears to have made a 360-degree turn before plunging 9,000 feet and disappearing from radar. Was it terrorism? Donald Trump leaped onto Twitter at 6:27 a.m. to suggest as much: "Looks like yet another terrorist attack. Airplane departed from Paris. When will we get tough, smart and vigilant? Great hate and sickness!"
Let's call this the most unsurprising headline of the year so far: "Marriage Increases the Odds of Surviving Cancer, Studies Find." Next thing you know they'll be discovering that salt makes you thirsty. I'm not actually belittling the science, more the opposite. Even the most cursory glance at social science data accumulated over the past, oh, 150 years provides copious evidence that we humans do better pair-bonded for life. And if data doesn't convince you, there's also literature, anecdote, tradition and intuition. But let's stick with science for now.
The greatest failures of the past generation concern men, women and sex — and there could not be two more awful representatives of what has gone wrong than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton delights in presenting herself as a feminist icon — but she is weighed down by the weaknesses of feminism and can boast few of the strengths. The weakness is her itchy trigger finger on accusations of sexism. She's playing in the biggest of big leagues yet reaches for the sexism charge with dull predictability.
A longtime Republican conservative emailed me after Donald Trump's Tuesday night romp through the "Acela corridor." "Is the GOP now the anti-trade, anti-immigrant party?" I don't think so, but take no comfort in the reason: Republicans haven't signed on to protectionism and nativism (or at least, only a minority has), but they seem to have lost all philosophical coherence.
If it concerns sex in any way, you can be sure that our culture will fixate on it and manage to defy common sense with hyperventilating indignation. Same-sex marriage roiled the waters for decades, but now that the Supreme Court has big-footed that question, culture warriors are prowling for new realms of transgression to embrace. So, coming soon to a bathroom near you: transgenderism.
Does this sound familiar? "They wanted something new, something fresh, and they found in this man a radical discourse. He said he would get rid forever of the old elites." Or this: "He ran as the outsider, the non-politician in a country which had come to distrust politicians. The media loved him, and he loved them back. ... They gave him huge amounts of newspaper space and hours on television." Or this: "He can be funny. He can seem buffoonish. He obeys none of the rules for what is expected of a head of state, or for that matter, a public official on television."
When a Republican has been in the presidency for eight years, as George W. Bush was, Democrats run against the Republicans. When a Democrat has been in office for eight years, as Barack Obama will soon have been, Republicans run against Republicans. This is a year in which the multiple failures of the Obama years should be irresistible for Republican presidential candidates. Democrats, correspondingly, should be awkwardly sidestepping and tightrope walking to avoid a too-close association. Instead, partly due to the eccentric obsessions of Donald Trump, we've seen Republicans reprising debates about the wisdom of the Iraq War while ignoring the greatest foreign policy debacles of the Obama years.
In a year of floors falling away under one's feet (such as the assumption that nearly all Americans demand a minimal level of civility in public life), the Corey Lewandowski story represents one more gob smack. That Donald Trump stands by the belligerent Lewandowski tells us more of what we already knew about Trump, and also hints at the coward beneath the blowhard.
Is there any way for Ted Cruz or John Kasich to wrest the Republican nomination from Donald Trump? With every tick of the clock, it looks less likely. The chances differ for the two candidates. Kasich needs a miracle. Cruz may possibly succeed with a new emphasis. Kasich's claim boils down to this: He's a Midwestern moderate who may not perform well in deep-red states such as Texas and Utah but will find his natural constituency in the Northeast and West Coast states coming up. His electoral performance and his campaign's incompetence suggest otherwise.
I first became aware of Donald Trump when he chose to make cheating on his first wife front-page news. It was the early '90s. Donald and Ivana Trump broke up over the course of months. Not that divorce is shocking, mind you; among the glitterati marriage seems more unusual. Nor is infidelity exactly novel. But it requires a particular breed of lowlife to advertise the sexual superiority of one's mistress over the mother of one's children. That was Trump's style. He leaked stories to the New York tabloids about Ivana's breast implants — they didn't feel right. Marla Maples, by contrast, suited him better. She, proving her suitability for the man she was eager to steal from his family, told the papers that her encounters with the mogul were "the best sex I've ever had." It wasn't just Donald Trump's betrayal that caught my eye, nor just the tawdriness: It was the cruelty.
