RUTHFULLY YOURS

In parliamentary systems, party platforms are blueprints for governance. In the U.S., they reflect the preferences of each party’s base—the activists and interest groups to which the party must pay attention. Changes in party platforms from one election to the next reveal shifts in thinking and—even more—the balance of power within the base as new groups surge and established forces give way.

That is why the 2016 Democratic platform is so significant. The platform committee hasn’t made public the text that will be taken to the Democratic convention in less than two weeks. But at this stage, based on the July 1 draft and 82 amendments to its text adopted by the end of the final platform committee meeting in Orlando, Fla., we know with near-certainty what the platform will say—and what it means.

The party that Hillary Clinton will lead into battle this fall is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party. In important respects it is not even Barack Obama’s Democratic Party. It is a party animated by the frustrations of the Obama years and reshaped by waves of economic and social activism.

Not surprisingly, the document endorses a range of Hillary Clinton’s campaign proposals, including a massive infrastructure-investment program, new incentives for small business, expanded profit-sharing to increase workers’ earnings, a tax on high-frequency financial transactions, paid family and medical leave, an enhanced earned-income tax credit for young workers without children, access to computer-science education for all K-12 students, and measures to make college education more affordable.

Neither is it surprising that the draft incorporates some of Bernie Sanders’s key proposals—most notably, a $15 per hour minimum wage—and that it doesn’t take sides on issues that divided the party, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and a broad tax on financial transactions, where neither side would give way.

In other respects, however, the draft is truly remarkable—for example, its near-silence on economic growth. The uninformed reader would not learn that the pace of recovery from the Great Recession has been anemic by postwar standards, or that productivity gains have slowed to a crawl over the past five years, or that firms have been reluctant to invest in new productive capacity. Rather, the platform draft’s core narrative is inequality, the injustice that inequality entails, and the need to rectify it through redistribution.

Last night the JewishPress.com brought the news that a GOP subcommittee drafted and endorsed a pro-Israel plank that includes every single item on every (truly) pro-Israel wish list, thanks to the hard work of a few lawmakers such as South Caroline State Rep. Alan Clemmons and several pro-Israel organizations, including the Iron Dome Alliance.

But this morning brings more huge news: the full committee endorsed the pro-Israel plank with no changes. And the passage of that adamantly pro-Israel plank was met with a standing ovation by those in the room.

The Republican party ain’t what it used to be, or at least it doesn’t match the anti-Israel party portrait which so many people have tried to peddle.

And what of the Democrats? Jeff Ballabon, chairman of the Iron Dome Alliance, told the JewishPress.com that his coalition has made it very clear that they “would still love for Democrats to accept the same language and will attempt to persuade delegates in light of today’s success but ha[s] little optimism that it would be accepted.”

He said the coalition didn’t want this (strongly pro-Israel) policy to be tied only to one party, “this should be America’s policy,” but the enthusiasm with which the important language was met and embraced by the Republican platform committee speaks volumes.

While rumors have been swirling that the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC has been trying to stop the truly pro-Israel plank from getting out of the station, if they engaged in that effort, it failed.

And if AIPAC did not work to defeat this non-Two State language, it’s a whole new AIPAC world in which Israel is now in control of the best resolution of the various conflicts besieging the Jewish State, rather than bowing its head to dictates from the U.S. It also signals a change in the lobby’s stance regarding the disputed territories, which it has never strongly embraced.

Here is the language of the new Republican Party Platform on Israel:

In the first draft of the 2016 Republican-party platform, references to the two-state solution do not appear. CNN reports the “delegates drafting the Republican National Convention platform approved removing language encouraging a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians.”

An earlier draft had included support for “two democratic states” — the policy of recent Republican and Democratic administrations — but had removed a reference to Palestine included in the GOP platform four years ago. On Monday, the national security subcommittee of the Platform Committee approved an amendment dropping support of a two-state solution, according to four people who were in the room for the discussion. . . . “The U.S. seeks to assist in the establishment of comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East, to be negotiated among those living in the region,” the approved amendment said. “We oppose any measures intended to impose an agreement or to dictate borders or other terms, and call for the immediate termination of all U.S. funding of any entity that attempts to do so.”

The Democratic party platform supports a two-state solution, as it has previously.

What are we to make of this?

Support for a two-state solution has not always been American policy since Israel won the West Bank and Gaza in 1967’s Six-Day War. The initial assumption was that the West Bank would go back to Jordan, and Gaza to Egypt, as part of a “land for peace” deal that would be negotiated between Israel and each of those countries. When I worked in the Reagan administration, Secretary of State George Shultz was explicit in saying we did not favor the creation of a Palestinian state.

And after all, why would we? The Palestine Liberation Organization was led by Yasser Arafat, a terrorist and a thief. Who would want to give him a state? Well, Bill Clinton did. At Camp David in 2000, Clinton tried to broker an agreement between Israel and the PLO chief that would have handed him the West Bank and Gaza. But Arafat said no to Clinton and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.

Karl Marx, in a particularly dyspeptic moment, offered this description of what he dismissed as the lumpen proletariat:

“Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.”

Even Donald Trump’s critics would not go so far as to suggest that his voter base consists of vagabonds, pickpockets or even, ugh, “literati.” But for the longest time, the American media saw the Trump base as an “indefinite, disintegrated mass” of mostly angry, lower-middle-class white males. The early Trump adopters often looked like bikers, with or without jobs. The Trumpen proletariat.

This was the original Trump bedrock, the proles who could look past him saying that John McCain, though tortured for years by the Vietnamese, wasn’t a hero. Even now they’ll blink right by Mr. Trump’s remark this week that Saddam Hussein was “good” at killing terrorists (“they didn’t read them their rights”), despite the unhappy fact that Saddam was a psychopathic, blood-soaked torturer responsible for the deaths of perhaps a half million non-terrorist Iraqi citizens.

(Still, one may ask: When the day after her Comey pardon, Hillary Clinton proposes “free” tuition at public colleges for families earning up to $85,000 a year, and $125,000 by 2021, how come her campaign isn’t universally laughed and mocked off the map?)

The media originally looked upon the emerging Trump base with suspicion and distrust, regarding it as a volatile and possibly dangerous political faction but one that would slip back to the shadows as the Trump candidacy faded.

We are 10 days from the party conventions, and Mr. Trump sits, uneasily as always, close to the polling margin of error against the former Secretary of State, former U.S. senator and former first lady Hillary Clinton. The Trumpen proletariat turns out to be bigger than imagined.

In the nonstop conversation about the 2016 election, the question at the center of everything is whether one is a “Trump supporter.” But if it is true that in this election all the rules have been broken, couldn’t it also be true that Donald Trump has himself become a bystander to the forces set in motion this year? CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton on Wednesday accused Donald Trump of looting his casinos and pillaging Atlantic City, and that was the gracious part. If she’s going to criticize Mr. Trump’s business record, she should also have to defend the failure of Atlantic City’s model of progressive governance.

Democrats aim to rehash the story of how Mr. Trump loaded his casinos with debt and declared bankruptcy four times—stiffing creditors and workers while shielding himself personally—ad nauseam through November. “He doesn’t default and go bankrupt as a last resort,” Mrs. Clinton declared. “He does it over and over again on purpose.” She’s one to talk about incorrigible behavior.

While Mr. Trump may have contributed to Atlantic City’s downward spiral by oversaturating the casino market, it takes more than one man to raze a city. The businessman experienced a moment of lucidity—if only he could expand beyond 140 characters—when he fired back in a tweet that “Democrat pols in Atlantic City made all the wrong moves—Convention Center, Airport—and destroyed City.”

In 1976 New Jersey voters approved a referendum that legalized gambling in Atlantic City. The constitutional amendment required casino revenues to fund programs for senior citizens and disabled residents, but politicians have instead funneled the cash to favored projects and businesses under the guise of promoting development. Guess how that’s turned out?

A 1984 law required casinos to pay 2.5% of gaming revenues to the state or “reinvest” 1.25% in tax-exempt bonds issued by the state Casino Reinvestment Development Authority for state and community “projects that would not attract capital in normal market conditions.” Investment recipients have included Best of Bass Pro shop, Margaritaville and Healthplex.

A decade later, state lawmakers imposed a $1.50 fee (which has since doubled) on casino parking spots to fund Atlantic City transportation, casino construction and a convention center. In 2004 lawmakers added a $3 surcharge for casino hotel stays to finance new hotel rooms and retail establishments, which had the effect of promoting unsustainable commercial and casino development. CONTINUE AT SITE

There has already been a tsunami of commentary about FBI Director James Comey’s remarkable performance today. Director Comey informed the world that he would not recommend that criminal charges be pursued against Hillary Clinton in the matter of her mishandling of classified material on her hombrew email system. There is much disbelief and anguish about this, a lot of it to the point. I think that my friend Andrew McCarthy was particularly astute with his NRO column. The title sums it up: “FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook.”

Andy homes in on the gaping hole at the center of Director Comey’s argument. On the one hand, Director Comey allows that “there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information.” On the other hand, he found “no clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws.”

So, you might be asking yourself, what? As Andy points out,

Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust.

Director Comey admits all this, indeed, he took pains to lay it out carefully. But he concludes that because Hillary Clinton did not intend any harm by her negligent behavior, there were no grounds to recommend prosecution. “Our judgment,” he said, “is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

This makes no sense. Andy:

In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.

How are we to understand Director Comey’s conclusion? Some commentators — my friends James Robbins and Roger L. Simon, for example — argue that Director Comey’s withering assessment will in the end be more damaging than an indictment because he has pointedly drawn attention to Clinton’s recklessness and incompetence. “Did Comey,” Roger asks, “Actually Destroy Hillary Clinton by ‘Exonerating’ Her?”

My sad suspicion is that the answer is “No.” Why? Because that would only be the case if there were sufficient public outrage to call her to account. Is there?

Cast your mind back over the many, many scandals the Clintons have been involved in: Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster, cattle futures, Monica Lewinsky, etc., etc. Has anything ever stuck? As far as I know, the answer is “No.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton is corrupt and corrupting of everyone she touches. President Obama has engaged in outrageous executive conduct so often as to be numbing. Those in powerful positions throughout this administration behave like lawless thugs and keep getting away with it. The courts have been packed with judges who find excuses to not enforce the laws or who create ones out of ideology contrary to intent. The major media shamelessly look away or cover up for the lawless and abusers, and seek every opportunity – or blow out of proportion every trivial thing – to damn opponents of the regime. Much of the Republicans in office lack the guts or integrity to fight back, outside of mewing noises.

Where does that leave us now?

The Tea Party movement occurred at a point in time between elections, and succeeded in electing many who promised to be better. Some have been. Many have been useless or become tools. Now, it is election time, and the demonstration we require is at the ballot box.

Donald Trump is far from the perfect leader. But, then it takes someone with gumption and determination who will not be intimidated to take on the rot that permeates our government and self-appointed ruling class. And, Trump is the only revolution we have available.