RUTHFULLY YOURS

Those of a certain age will recall the 1990s, the good old days when James Carville warned America that only “an abusive, privacy-invading, sex-obsessed” hypocrite could even think a president’s personal behavior toward women had anything to say about his fitness for public office.

Today it seems like ancient history, now that Donald Trump’s treatment of women has become a political issue. True enough, there was a day when Americans would have blanched at the thought of a candidate bragging about his adultery or using a presidential debate to boast about his genitalia. But in the 1990s we learned that only bluenoses care about these things.

We had it from no less than the Big Dawg himself. On Aug. 17, 1998, just hours after a grand jury session in which he’d tussled with prosecutors asking about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, he delivered a defiant, nationally televised address admitting his earlier denials had been misleading. Still, he insisted, whatever he had done with that young intern was between him and his family.

“It’s nobody’s business but ours,” he said. “Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.”

Even perjury didn’t matter in this case, because, as New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler put it, it was “perjury regarding sex.” All that mattered was that Mr. Clinton was good at his day job.

The American people seemed to agree, with a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll on the eve of the House vote to impeach showing only a third of the public in support.

Here’s the kicker: Donald Trump was on the Bill Clinton side of the argument.

For Mr. Trump, this was all much ado about Monica. Mr. Clinton’s mistake, he said, was that he’d lied about the sex instead of sticking with the argument it was irrelevant. In a September 1998 New York Times forum that ran under the headline “Can Clinton Find the Road Back?” Mr. Trump gave this advice:

“Accept complete responsibility for personal failures, be lucky enough to have enemies with their own shortcomings, and hold steadfast to your political agenda. After the initial shock is past, the American people are less interested in sexual transgressions than they are in public achievements.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Dear Editor:

It seems everyone has missed the actual problem with Madeleine Albright as commencement speaker, including Meghan Daum (“Scripps College’s baffling crusade for simple thinking,” May 12), and Rosanna Xia (“War criminal or role model?” May 9). While both articles shrugged at Albright’s record, and student objections took on standard PC tones, the reason Albright is no role model goes even deeper down the rabbit hold than war criminality.

Let’s recall that, more than anyone else, Albright pushed for a universal military attack against Yugoslavia, such that it was dubbed “Maddie’s War” (remember her in full combat regalia on the cover of TIME). But it’s the spoils of war that make Albright particularly contemptible. Few know that her firm, Albright Capital Management, had aggressively bid for — and was shortlisted to win — privatization of Kosovo’s state telecom company (which wouldn’t be up for grabs without her war to wrest Kosovo from Serbia in the first place). It was only eventually, after being advised how icky it looked, that she bowed out of this grubby profiteering.

Three months earlier, there was a bizarre and telling incident in the Czech Republic. In late October 2012, Albright was signing books at a Prague bookstore when she was confronted by some Czech anti-war activists holding photos of the devastation she visited upon Yugoslavian civilians and their infrastructure — targets unprecedented in the history of traditional warfare. “Get out!” she screamed repeatedly, and followed up with, “Disgusting Serbs.” The video is still available on YouTube.

Is it proper statecraft, when taking one’s country to war in an outside ethno-territorial conflict, for a high official to harbor hatred and perhaps even a vendetta against one of the sides?

Indeed, Albright’s having achieved being the first female secretary of State is regarded as a virtue in and of itself. Rarely is it considered that this ‘accomplishment’ — facilitated by a nod from Hillary to husband Bill — could be an eternal disgrace to womankind. Hillary voters, take note.

Political activists, in rare moments of deep despondency, have been known to poke around at the truth: The problem with mass democracy is voters. Activists, whether of the Left or the Right, are almost always Do-Something types (hence activism rather than inactivism), and so they toy from time to time with schemes for engineering a better voter.

For sunnier sorts, this means pushing for better and fuller voter education; for those of a more nubilous disposition, it means an electoral cull.

What we call voter education often is an exercise in flattering ourselves to the point of delusion. One hears this sort of thing all the time: “If the voters only understood our position, they would support our position.” Maria Svart of the Democratic Socialists of America, a Bernie Sanders supporter, says: “Many Americans, if they understood socialism, would like it.” Similarly: “If they understood libertarianism, they would probably be libertarians. It’s a PR problem.” And: “If they understood conservatism, they wouldn’t be liberals.” Etc.

It never occurs to political activists that the reason their preferred policies do not do well at the polling place is — radical thought — that people do not like them. Free-traders won the argument on the merits two centuries ago during the debate over the Corn Laws (the party organ of the Anti-Corn-Law League lives on as The Economist), but that does not matter. Many (perhaps not most) reasonably well-educated people understand gains from trade (though Tufts students apparently do not know what comparative advantage is), and Pat Buchanan probably encountered the works of Ricardo at Georgetown, but they still do not want free trade. They probably have their reasons, mostly bad ones, but the problem with anti-free-market voters isn’t that they have failed to read Economics in One Lesson. Likewise, what’s holding back voters who think that maybe social democracy under a constitutional monarchy isn’t the best road for these United States isn’t that they’ve never heard of Sweden.

There isn’t some magical incantation that is going to make them understand (and therefore concur), or some clever argument or example that hasn’t been thought of. Those of us who oppose abortion, for example, have indeed heard of miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, and the like. (If I get one more daft email smugly asking if I’ve ever wondered why we celebrate birth anniversaries rather than conception anniversaries . . .) It isn’t that we haven’t thought about these things or heard those arguments: It’s that we’ve thought about these things and found those arguments unpersuasive.

It isn’t that voters are not profoundly ignorant, it’s just that making them less ignorant isn’t really going to help much on Election Day, because political preferences are not, in the main, a function of knowledge.

The second approach — soft disenfranchisement — is probably even less defensible on utilitarian grounds, but talking about it provides activists, especially conservative activists, with a great deal of emotional satisfaction.

Well, cowardly, mousey, he-of-small-intellect George Clooney is at it again. At the tough man contest, the caviar-and-champagne Cannes film festival, gladiator Clooney has slurped and pontificated, “There’s not going to be a President Donald Trump. Fear is not going to be something that drives our country. We’re not going to be scared of Muslims or immigrants or women.”

Now, I am a peaceful fellow, but when I was young, I had a dozen bloody street fights, and I’ve had seventy organized boxing bouts (including six pro fights). And I’ll tell chicken Clooney that I am truly “scared of Muslims or immigrants or women” who strap dynamite to themselves or stab me in the back with knives.

Maybe I don’t have bodyguards like expressionless Clooney. Maybe I don’t have the luxury of not being afraid because I don’t have his armed staff. Not to be afraid of radical jihadists is to be a moron or oblivious or a language-denier like Obama.

Then again, Obama is the faux intellect who believes that sexual organs are secondary to gender identification. Let the boys use girls’ rooms; let the girls use boys’ rooms. Thinking makes it so.

Clooney says fear is not an issue. Maybe they didn’t teach him fear in college because he didn’t pass into his sophomore year, into the age of simulated reason.

Dull-eyes Clooney says, “Trump is the result of the news programs not asking follow-up questions.” He may have forgotten that even Fox grilled him and that Hillary, the woman he has had a $33,400-a-plate dinner for, hardly allows follow-up questions.

Last February, when a federal judge granted Judicial Watch’s motion for discovery on whether the State Department and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deliberately thwarted their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for six years, we knew it spelled big trouble for Clinton. The conservative watchdog group has now scheduled six Clinton email witnesses for deposition testimony throughout the months of May and June.

The first witness, former State Department official Lewis A. Lukens, was deposed on Wednesday, May 18.

According to Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton, some of the information he provided was “embarrassing” and “not helpful” to Clinton and the State Department.

Via the Daily Caller:

Tom Fitton, whose group is suing the State Department, says he is restricted in what he can legally say about an interview conducted with Lewis Lukens, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state and the executive directory of the secretariat during Clinton’s tenure. But the Judicial Watch president did tell The Daily Caller that Clinton will not be pleased with the information he provided.

“The testimony was not helpful for Clinton or the State Department,” Fitton told TheDC in a phone interview.

Lukens is of interest to Fitton and Judicial Watch because of emails that he sent just days into Clinton’s term in which he proposed the idea of setting up a stand-alone computer so that she could email from the agency’s executive offices.

In a Jan. 23, 2009 email to Huma Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Lukens said that he was checking into obtaining a BlackBerry for Clinton issued by the National Security Agency.

In the meantime, in order to allow Clinton to check her email during the workday, Lukens said he would “set up the office across the hall as requested.”

“Also, I think we should go ahead (but will await your green light) and set up a stand-alone PC in the Secretary’s office, connect to the internet (but not through our system) to enable her to check her emails from her desk,” he wrote in the email. CONTINUE AT SITE

As more polls show that Hillary Clinton could lose to Donald Trump, Democratic media and political elites have decided that the problem is— Bernie Sanders. The socialist warhorse has had his campaign fun, but now he and his supporters refuse to slink away quietly into Howard Dean obscurity. Doesn’t he know that his persistence is helping Republicans?

We’d humbly suggest that these Democrats are looking through the wrong end of the campaign telescope. Bernie’s continuing string of victories is the symptom of the political demand for change after eight years of Democratic rule. The real Democratic problems this year are the Obama record and the Clinton candidacy.

“I will be the nominee,” Mrs. Clinton declared this week, and barring an act of God or the FBI director she is no doubt right. Mr. Sanders has a narrow window to get a majority of delegates, even without Mrs. Clinton’s overwhelming lead among declared superdelegates. Unlike the GOP establishment, Democratic elites are getting the nominee they have wanted from the beginning.

Yet Mr. Sanders continues to win primaries even if he has little chance at the nomination. He has won three of the last four major contests, and he lost Kentucky this week by fewer than 2,000 votes. A major chunk of the Democratic base is showing buyer’s remorse at Mrs. Clinton’s looming coronation and is encouraging Mr. Sanders to fight to the bitter end. Few Bernistas will vote for Mr. Trump, but some might decide to demonstrate their unhappiness at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia or stay home in November.

Democrats can blame themselves for much of this political alienation. President Obama was only too happy to indulge the Occupy Wall Street movement when it served his purposes against Mitt Romney in 2012. He and his fellow Democrats played up resentment against “the 1%,” which Mr. Sanders and his voters have decided to take seriously and use as a cudgel against Mrs. Clinton. CONTINUE AT SITE

Free-marketeers who are in tears about Donald J. Trump’s pending presidential nomination should heed the wisdom of the Beatles: “Take a sad song and make it better.”

Trump’s policy agenda remains largely unwritten. While he has detailed solutions on immigration, taxes, and health care, Trump has left many issues untouched. This is a problem, but also an opportunity.

Conservatives and small-l libertarians who supported Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Scott Walker for president can curse Trump . . . or do something constructive: work with him and his team to develop his platform.

Leaders of the following think tanks should meet with Trump and urge him to champion these conservative and free-market ideas:

The Reason Foundation should craft for Trump a limited-government blueprint to reverse the Transportation Security Agency’s accelerating meltdown. Unveiling a Wollman Rink–style overhaul of the imploding TSA is the timeliest way for Trump to demonstrate how he would rescue America from Uncle Sam’s holistic dysfunction.

(Ice skaters abandoned Central Park’s Wollman Rink in 1980 as it fell into disrepair. New York City’s government kept it closed through 1986, while $4.7 million in maintenance ran $12 million over budget, Bloomberg reports, yet the place remained shut. In June 1986, Donald Trump offered to refurbish the attraction in exchange for concession rights, which he would donate to charity. The reconstruction came in two months early and $775,000 under budget. Skating resumed that November and continues today.)

The National Taxpayers Union Foundation should encourage Trump to endorse the Penny Plan: Cut overall federal spending by one penny per dollar each year for five years, then freeze outlays at 18 percent of national income. As a businessman conversant with budgets and spending restraint, Trump would understand this idea and could sell it to voters.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute should advise Trump to smother Obama’s odious Clean Power Plan. Cost: $382 billion in disposable income and $993 billion in forgone GDP through 2040. Benefit: By 2050, expected warming would slip 0.02 degrees Fahrenheit. This is like cranking a thermostat from 72 degrees, all the way down to 71.98. CEI also should ask Trump to halt government prosecution of “global-warming” skeptics.

The reason Bernie Sanders pointedly refuses to condemn his supporters for throwing chairs and making death threats against Democrat officials at and after the party’s Nevada convention is because he doesn’t actually object to their violent behavior.

Sanders blew off pressure from Democrat leaders to disavow ugly tactics by his supporters at the event Saturday evening, calling the complaints “nonsense” and arguing that his supporters were not treated with “fairness and respect.”

Remember that Sanders is seeking the presidential nomination from a party that officially endorsed the pro-cop-killing Black Lives Matter movement and whose leaders swooned over the even more violent Occupy Wall Street movement. As the unrest in Ferguson, Mo.. and Baltimore showed the nation, these people believe that rioting and looting are legitimate forms of political activism.

The pro-violence radicalism among Sanders supporters comes straight from the top. The Vermont senator vocally supports unrepentant Marxist terrorist Oscar López Rivera whom he describes as “one of the longest-serving political prisoners in history — 34 years, longer than Nelson Mandela.”

Sanders told a town hall meeting in Puerto Rico that if Obama doesn’t release López Rivera, “I will pardon him” if elected president.

Here is what the longtime prisoner did:

“López Rivera conspired to transport explosives with intent to destroy federal government property and committed other related crimes — or that the [Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña terrorist group] was deemed responsible for a reign of terror that killed six people and injured 130 others in at least 114 bombings. They includes the 1975 bombing of historic Fraunces Tavern in the city’s Financial District, which left four people dead and wounded more than 50 others, and a New Year’s Eve 1982 bombing at Police Headquarters that maimed three NYPD cops who tried to defuse the explosives.