RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bubba Bites Back

I guess we can start with Bill Clinton’s outburst against the Black Lives Matter crowd yesterday. Again, since the caffeine hasn’t even sunk in yet, let’s kick this bullet-point style. (I find transitions between paragraphs to be something of a burden these days. For instance, I wrote this piece on contested conventions for the Corner the other day in about 25 minutes. I let my research assistant Jack out of his kennel and told him, “Sniff for typos, boy. That’s a good boy.” He caught a bunch, but also said, “You don’t need to number your points. It reads fine without them.” He was right, of course. But that didn’t spare him a savage beating. I told him, “It puts the numbers back in, or it gets the hose again.”)

So where was I? Oh right Phoenix, Clinton, Black Lives Matter. I found the whole episode interesting for three however many reasons I come up with below.

1. Bill is doing something Hillary won’t: defend the Clinton record of the 1990s. Hillary’s happy to campaign on the gauzy nostalgia for the 1990s, when the gauzy nostalgia helps her. But the moment the politics change from taking credit to taking responsibility, she quietly slinks away like Joe Biden after farting at an arms-control summit. (“Look at Putin’s face! He thinks it was his translator! He’s gonna have that guy killed!”)

2. Unlike Hillary, who thinks her place in the history books is in front of her, Bill knows that 95 percent of his obituary has already been written. So he has a much more vested interest in defending his record. By moving to the left of her husband (where she was in the 1990s!) on economics, criminal justice, foreign policy, etc., Hillary slowly strips away the substance of Bill’s presidency. Take away the Balkan war, banking reform, etc., and what’s left of the Clinton legacy? Pretty much the fact that he singlehandedly turned the West Wing into a penile colony.

RELATED: Hillary’s Still Weak

3. Oh, at this point, I should also say Bill Clinton is right! The Black Lives Matter movement is not without its legitimate complaints and arguments — I’m in favor of some criminal-justice reforms. But they want to work from the assumption that there are no black bad actors in this story. It’s white supremacy all the way down. The problem with this is that even if white supremacy — whatever people mean by that — is the massive problem some lefties imagine, it still doesn’t excuse bad individual moral choices. Excuses don’t become explanations simply because you shout them. It’s a very weird corollary to social-justice logic. If you see everyone simply as representatives of groups — white oppressors and black victims — you withdraw the moral agency from individual actors on both sides of the equation (which, technically speaking, is racist). White people become agents of oppression and morally culpable even if they’ve done nothing wrong. Black criminals who prey on innocent black people become victims, about whom no one can say an unkind word.

4. One fun consequence of all this is that Bill very well could turn out to be a liability for Hillary, which would be kind of hilarious given that Hillary would be just another left-wing activist lawyer were it not for her husband. She rode her Arkansas mule all of the way to the White House gates only to see the sign reading, “No Mules Allowed.”

RELATED: Hillary’s Democratic Party Is What an Actual ‘Establishment’ Looks Like

5. There’s an old cliché that we become more conservative as we get older. The social science on all this is more mixed than you might think, depending on what you mean by “conservative.” There’s definitely a tendency for people to become more curmudgeonly as they age. That’s certainly my experience. I find myself yelling at clouds a lot more than I used to. But that’s not what’s going on here. Bill Clinton is probably a good deal more liberal than he was 20 years ago. The problem is the Democratic party is a lot more liberal than it was 20 years ago. Bill’s locked-in to his positions (See item No. 2) and that means he’s sliding rightward on the ideological spectrum.

Times Change

P. T. Barnum did not actually say, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The maxim endures nevertheless, and if ever anything showed why, it is the chimerical immigration plan Donald Trump has managed to turn into a front-running presidential bid. On Tuesday, Trump shared that plan’s centerpiece with the Washington Post: his strategy to force Mexico to pony up the $5 to $10 billion he insists will be enough to build 1,000 miles of towering, impregnable wall.

The squeeze-thy-neighbor gambit hits the Trump trifecta: it is at once vain, authoritarian, and asinine.

After ten months, The Donald’s stand-up routine has descended into self-parody: As the Myrmidons sing along, Trump first brays that he “will build the wall” (which, incidentally, would have no bearing on visa overstays, who account for nearly half of the illegal-alien population). Then, he vows to get Mexico to foot the bill, as if there were honor in extorting a poor but reasonably amicable neighbor into paying the vital border-security costs of a profligate superpower in whose budget $10 billion barely qualifies as a rounding error. (Compare, e.g., Trump’s promise to do nothing about unsustainable entitlements that are bankrupting the economy.)

Yet, absent from most of his speeches to the ardent faithful — and from his campaign’s position paper, with which he seems unacquainted — is the vow he reserves for more progressive audiences and media interviews: He will readmit most of the 11 million illegal aliens (as he puts it, “the good ones”) with legal status after he wastes considerably more than $10 billion to chase down and deport them.

RELATED: Donald Trump and the Return of Right-wing Statism

That is, while portraying himself as the scourge of illegal immigration, Trump is actually proposing amnesty of the “touch-back” variety occasionally championed by open-borders advocates. In Trump’s plan, deportation is not a security measure; it’s a laundering scheme.

Mind you: That position paper of his laments “the influx of foreign workers [from illegal immigration],” which “holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans — including immigrants themselves and their children — to earn a middle class wage.” Which sentiment is hard to square with an amnesty plan that, by Trump’s own reasoning, will hold down salaries, keep unemployment high, and make it difficult for poor and working-class Americans to earn a middle-class wage.

Oh if that were only true…maybe some New Yorkers…those that elected Chris Gibson, Elise Stefanik, Peter King, Lee Zeldin, (9 out of 27 Representatives are Republican)but how about those who have reelected Rangel, de Blasio, Cuomo and so many representatives who run on a fusion ticket with Working Families Party a far left group……?rsk

The polls say that Donald Trump is set to sweep New York with more votes than in any previous primary of this election cycle. How on earth is this possible? It must be a mistake. New Yorkers know this man well, better than the residents of any other state, better than those of us who do not watch reality television shows. They see him around town in all the best places. They have seen him on the covers of the tabloids all the time. They know better than the rest of us that he is a self-promoting double-dealer, a three-times married man who revels in demeaning women, especially if they cross him or he is ready to move on to the next one. They know that he has exactly No knowledge of the Constitution, foreign policy, the military, education, terrorism, law-making, law-breaking, etc. He is a man of great wealth who does, and has always done, what he wants, when he wants, how he wants, and to whom he wants. He suffers no consequences when he does these things badly, unlawfully, or cruelly. His money has, for his entire life, set him apart from the lives of most Americans. He has gold-plated toilets when millions of citizens worry about how to repair their own necessary appliances they consider luxuries.

How can New Yorkers who so enthusiastically support his candidacy for the presidency put aside his obvious narcissism and megalomania? He viciously attacks his opponents unjustly, and with unnecessary personal venom. Not one of his opponents has been spared. He likened Dr. Ben Carson to a pedophile, over and over again, then pretended to defend him against Ted Cruz when it was CNN that reported Carson’s departure from Iowa. He called Marco Rubio all manner of sordid, childish names. He eviscerated Jeb Bush at every opportunity. He insulted Carly Fiorina’s appearance, as he has countless other women. And what he says about Cruz only reveals who he fears the most. For good reason. Cruz has actually read the Constitution, and he remembers it. He knows it by heart.

New Yorkers, especially those in Manhattan, are smart people; they have to be to live there, to afford to live there. They have the best of everything: theatre, music, food, living spaces, close access to airports and faraway places and the money to travel. Do they, in their heart of hearts, really think Donald Trump has the right stuff to be the President of the United States? They cannot possibly think that. They know better.