The Republican Race Just Got Angrier and Better

The average Republican primary voter’s seething anger toward the party’s congressional leadership has been the driving force in the party’s presidential race thus far, to the point it’s driven the electorate so stark raving mad that until recently itDonald Trump has been pushed to the top of the polls, and this looming budget deal that the leadership has concocted with President Barack Obama is not going to calm any conservative’s temper.

The deal is just plain awful in every way. It effectively ends the “sequestration” budget cuts that lowered the government’s share of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product from 25 to 20 percent and reduced the annual budget deficits back to the level of the Bush administration, which admittedly doesn’t seem like much, and it also caused cuts in defense spending that are painful to conservative sensibilities, but it was arguably the best the leadership could get and inarguably the most that the leadership could brag about. This is in exchange for promises of budget cuts in 2025, which are unlikely to be worth as much as the magic beans that the Democrats had also offered, and basically represents a complete and utter capitulation to Obama and his free-spending ways. There’s nothing in the deal that addresses Planned Parenthood’s baby-parts business or the Environmental Protection Agency’s rapaciousness or any other other conservative budget complaints, it goes the wrong way on entitlement reform, and it outlasts the Obama administration and thus spares him any more fights over how he spends the public’s money.

As awful as it is as policy, it’s even worse as politics. Aside from infuriating their own average primary voter, and in a futile attempt to lure the sort of uninformed general election voter who is far more likely to be lured by whatever free and shiny object the Democrats are offering, the Republican party’s official leadership are weakening their position with the solid majority of respondents to almost every poll we’ve ever seen who think the government should spend less and do less. The official Republican leadership’s spin on it seems to be that Boehner shrewdly sacrificed his standing with his party’s vast membership, such as it was, to ensure that incoming Speaker John Ryan can begin his more steadfastly conservative reign untainted by the sins his predecessor had so selflessly taken upon himself. This is all going to going down with Ryan’s gavel, though, and he’s not going to get any credit for it from the more establishmentarian organs of the mainstream press, who are already gearing up to portray him throughout the presidential campaign as the right-wing crazy that he used to be back in the good old days of ’12 when he was chosen as the party’s running mate to placate a conservative base weary of the establishment nominee Mitt Romney. Since then Ryan’s gone wobbly on illegal immigration and government shutdown brinksmanship and other causes dear to conservatives’ hearts, however, and by now no knowledgable observer expects a reign more steadfastly conservative than Boehner’s. Thus we have an emboldened left, a dispirited right, and an uninformed middle that will be reassured by the 3l-second network news snippets in between pop songs that the Republicans are still crazily right-wing and the Democrats are still winning.

The average Republican primary voter gets his news in three-hour chunks from talk radio and in page after pixelled page of reliable conservative news sources on the internet and sometimes even on a printed page, and his response to all of this will naturally affect the presidential race. Our guess is that the already flourishing anti-establishment candidates who are completely untainted by any previous elective office will continue to do well, and it will be interesting to see if blustery real estate billionaire Donald Trump or soft-spoken physician Ben Carson gets the best of it, or if the formidable but fading high executive Carly Fiorina can get back in the mix. As the best-selling author of “The Art of Deal,” with a hard-to-deny reputation as a ruthless dealmaker, Trump should gain some advantage, although we’re still convinced what kind of a deal the relatively recent Republican and only occasionally conservative fellow consider would consider good. Among the establishment politicians, both Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz are presented with an excellent opportunity, and it will be interesting to see which one makes the most of it. Given the understandably seething anger of the average Republican primary voter, we expect they’ll try to out-do one another in their willingness to gum up the works. If we were betting men, and if he we had any money to bet, we’d go with Cruz.

Both men came into office by besting the “establishment” candidates in their states, with Rubio the most celebrated because he had upset the hated Rockefeller Republican and soon-to-be Democrat Charlie Crist in his primary, and in a swing state at that, but since then Cruz has proved the more reckless provocateur. His filibustering attempts on previous budget showdowns were widely blamed for the inevitable frenzy of news stories about National Parks closing and old folks dying while their Social Security checks went undelivered and Earth spinning out of its orbit that inevitably followed, as well as the electoral disasters that also didn’t happen, so of course the average Republican primary voter, if not the uninformed voter hearing those 30-second news snippets, has looked kindly upon him ever since. As the most notoriously anti-establishment of the elected officials, he’s well positioned to lead a charge here, and he strikes as the sort who seize it.

Rubio might surprise us, though. We still fondly recall the handsome young fellow who vanquished Crist, and all the rousing speeches about capitalism and constitutional guarantees of liberty and all that full-throated Cuban anti-communism, and we can’t help thinking he’d make a good pick against whatever crazy lefty the Democrats might come up with. Although the 30-second news snippets will continue to characterize him as a right-wing crazy he still needs to shore up that credential with we actual right-wing crazies, so a good old-fashioned Jimmy Stewart-style filibuster would do him even more good. It would also remind the public that he’s a Senator doing his job, which further refutes a minor controversy about all the Senate votes he’s been missing lately while out on the campaign trail, and ensures his name showing up in a lot of headlines that even the most uninformed voters are likely to spot.

Former Florida governor and Bush family scion “Jeb!” Bush tried to exploit the mixed votes in this weeks presidential debate, and the general consensus of pundit opinion is that Rubio responded nicely by contrasting his record with presidential candidates ranging from Sen. John McCain to Sen. Barack Obama, and that Bush’s already faltering campaign took another hit. We can’t see how the oh-so-establishment candidate from the oh-so-establishment family ever thought he stood a chance, and we can’t see how he’ll get one out of a budget deal that confirms every seething angry anti-establishment suspicion of the average Republican voter. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also had a good night slapping around the media in the last debate, but he has a certain East Coast attitude about guns and a shoddy record on Muslim jurists and other issues dear to the hearts of more heartland conservatives, as well as the audio of him of praising Obama’s Hurricane Sandy efforts and photos of them hugging together on the New Jersey shore like the end of some of Will Smith-Josh Rogan “bromance,” so he also never stood a chance and doesn’t stand to gain one from this awful budget deal.

Whichever candidate winds up winning the nomination on the seething angriness of the seething angriness of the average Republican primary voter, we don’t worry that all the pandering will hurt their chances in a general election against what left-wing crazy the Democrats put up. For all the effort packed into those 30-second spots to make the Republicans look extreme, the Democrats are staking out wildly unpopular positions on guns, illegal immigration, law enforcement, abortion, and even on the economic issues that take more than 30 seconds to explain. If Rubio or Cruz have to explain their brinksmanship on a budget showdown to a general electorate, they can say that they did it so that the government would have to spend less and do less, which always polls well, especially after the National Parks are re-opened and the old folks never did miss a Social Security check and Earth stays in its orbit. Given the mood of the average American voter, who by now regards both the Democrats and Republicans with a seething angry suspicion, the candidate that is mostly convincingly running against both parties stands to do well.

— Bud Norman

A Good Night for Royals and Republicans

Due to our principled refusal to pay for cable television, and the National Broadcasting Company’s refusal to share its cable affiliates’ content over their internet without recompense, despite their constant rants about evil capitalism and corporate greed and the rapacious one percent and all that share-the-wealth drivel, and because every bar television in town was of course showing the Kansas City Royals battling the New York Mets in the second game of the World Series instead, we missed most of Thursday’s Republican presidential debate. The press accounts describe an interesting contest, though, and apparently it was mostly fought between the ten invited candidates and the panel of CNBC moderators.

Although it is our usual style to use the full name of an institution on first reference, no matter how much more familiar the acronym might be, we’ve made an exception here because we have no idea what CNBC stands for and don’t care to look it up. We assume the NBC is National Broadcasting Company, and that the C is for Cable or Communism or the first name of some executive’s mistress. In any case, the company seems to have gotten the worst of it, at least as far as the Republican audience was concerned. Some questions were booed, and all of the inevitable pushback by the candidates played well. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz reportedly started it off with a rant about the obviously pointed nature of the questions that brought sustained applause, and then Florida Sen. Marco Rubio got off a line about the media as the “ultimate Super-Pac” and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie interrupted by the moderator’s interruptions by saying it was rude even by New Jersey standards.

The Republican National Committee chairman “tweeted’ his own indignation about the the questions, but it’s worth noting that he signed off on CNBC and its choice of moderators despite their long records of on-air anti-Republican animus, so we can only hope that he was expecting the field would prevail against the questioners and it was all part of a diabolical plot. Or perhaps he’s prepping the eventual winner for the post-season, to borrow a sports metaphor, and knows that he or she will need to be inured to such biased questioning. It does seem to have been pretty biased, too, with almost every query framed according to such liberal assumptions as the 77 cent pay rate for women or the inevitable failure of tax-cutting as an economic stimulus or the Republicans’ supposed relative tolerance for deficit spending, or clearly intended provoke fights between particular candidates. In a debate ostensibly devoted to economic issues Ben Carson was asked about his past service on the board of a corporation that provided benefits to same-sex couples, with the clear implication that he was therefore a hypocrite for opposing same-sex marriage, and his characteristically soft-spoken but stiff-spinner reaction seems to have won that round as well.

So far as we can tell from the first round of stories, though, neither Carson nor fellow front-runner Donald Trump had the expected starring roles. Most of the pundits declared Cruz and Rubio the big winners, and given their past strong performances we’re not surprised. None of the candidates who most needed a strong performance are getting any rave reviews, except perhaps Christie, who won’t be the nominee, so our guess is that Carson and Trump will remain at the top of the next polls but that Cruz and Rubio will be the ones who still stand a chance despite having previously held elective office. We expect that CNBC’s ratings won’t much improve, either, and the Royals wound up winning convincingly enough to rest the bullpen that had been worn out by the previous game’s 14-inning victory, so all in all we’ll count it a good night.

— Bud Norman

Of Polls, Presbyterians, and Seventh-Day Adventists

At this point in an election cycle the presidential opinion polls are about as meaningful as a first quarter score in a National Basketball Association game, and we really ought to be paying more attention to that awful budget deal President Barack Obama is cooking up with whatever Republicans are still purportedly in charge of Congress, but for the first time in too long we recently saw a couple of polls that didn’t have Donald Trump in the lead, so we can’t help reveling in the numbers.

The latest frontrunner, according to no less but no more an authority than the combined efforts of The New York Times and The Columbia Broadcasting System, is Dr. Ben Carson. If true, this is fine by us, as the Republicans seem intent on nominating someone who has never held any elective office, and of the three candidates who meet that criterion Carson strikes us as much preferable to Trump. It’s not just the stylistic differences between the blustery and bragging billionaire real estate mogul Trump and the soft-spoken and humble physician, although that does matter and obviously favors Carson, but also that Carson has been more consistently conservative in his policy views and seems to have a superior character, which of course matters even more. We’re still inclined to look at the broad field for someone has held elective office, and leaning toward Texas Sen. Ted Cruz because of his steadfast conservatism and otherwise impeccable anti-establishment credentials, but we can see the party doing a lot worse than Carson.

Trump has also lately found himself trailing Carson in the crucial early state of Iowa, where the conventional wisdom has long that evangelical Christian voters are the most important Republican constituency, and he seemed annoyed by the turn of events. In one speech he repeatedly mentioned that he was a Presbyterian, adding that people don’t believe it, and bragging that “boy, that’s down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness.” In an apparent reference to Carson’s denominational affiliation, Trump added, “I mean, Seventh Day-Adventist, I just don’t know about. I just don’t know about.” Being heartland evangelical Christian Republicans ourselves, and thus more familiar with the type than Trump, we can’t see it as an effective strategy.

We also know little about Seventh-Day Adventism, except that its day of worship and rest is on Saturday, which we have to admit makes a certain amount of Old Testament sense, we also have to admit that none of our many Sunday morning sermons have ever explained any New Testament reason they’re wrong, and we figure that we don’t know much more probably speaks well of the church. By now we know all about Sunnis and Shiites and the Koran and the Hadith and taqqiya and hudna and dhimmitude and jizya and all sorts of other Islamic concepts, but that’s only because it’s been more necessary than reading up on relatively placid Seventh-Day Adventism. We also understand that the denomination sprang from the fervent Millerite movement that predicted the end of Earth on a certain date in 1843, which is still known as “The Great Disappointment,” and that it retains a certain fascination with the eschatological scriptures, but this does not seem so incompatible with a constitutional republic as jizya or dhimmitude or Twelfth Imams or certain other religious concepts, and we note that most enlightened of the secularist humanists have their own fervently-blieved end-of-times theories that involve all sorts of onerous carbon taxes and pie-in-the-sky light-rail systems.

We’re more familiar with Presbyterians, and count several of them among our good friends, and the general impression we’ve gleaned from their infrequent talk about their faith is that it is indeed down the middle of the road. John the Revelator might have even called it diocletian, which is an obscure word and even more obscure Biblical reference, but a lot of heartland evangelical Christian Republicans will and they’ll probably be less impressed by Trump’s Presbyterianism than Carson’s Seventh-Day Adventism. We can’t look into a man’s heart and have no right to render a final judgment on his everlasting soul, but we can look at Trump’s three marriages and his public boasts of buying off politicians and using the bankruptcy laws to skirt his debts, and one can’t help noticing the haughty spirit and pride, as well as the unmistakable love of filthy lucre, so for the earthly purposes of casting our vote we will adjudge that he’s even less Presbyterian than the most fallen of our Presbyterian friends. Carson certainly seems more steadfastly Seventh-Day Adventist, and for those who are still clinging to their suddenly idiosyncratic religious beliefs, which are suddenly more perilously right-of-the-middle as the culture has lurched so far the irreligious left, that will likely trump Trump’s Presbyterianism. The peculiarities of the Seventh-Day Adventists has earned them a reputation for being litigiously devoted to religious liberty, and at this moment when Catholic nuns are being forced to purchase contraceptive coverage and Baptist bakers are being forced to provide same-sex wedding cakes, and when any fervently held religious beliefs other than jizya and dhimmitude are considered slightly crazy, and astrology and anthropogenic global warming are not, so at this point we’re impressed that the Seventh-Day Adventists have produced such a soft-spoken and humble physician and relatively sane person as Carson.

There’s still plenty of politics left, and that awful budget deal that’s being cooked up will surely figure in it, and somebody who has actually won an election before might wind up winning this election after all, but if it comes down to Trump’s Presbyterian and Carson’s Seventh-Day Adventism we expect the heartland evangelical Christian Republican vote will start trending away from Trump.

— Bud Norman

So How Do We Refer to the Jayhawks?

The student senate at the University of Kansas has voted to repeal the rules of English grammar by using “gender-neutral” pronouns in its official pronouncements, and the news of it comes at a perfect time. With another college basketball season looming, it’s good to have yet another reminder of why we’re not rooting for the Jayhawks.

Proud though we are of being Kansan, and as much as we love to feel morally superior about the state’s abolitionist roots, we’ve never been able to embrace the Jayhawks. It’s partly the annoyingly smug attitude of their omnipresent basketball fans, who tend to go on at length about James Naismith coaching there and the three provable national championships and the two other mythical ones back in the ’20s that only fans of the mythical Jayhawk seem to recognize. They’re at a loss when they run into a University of Kentucky Wildcats’ or University of California-Los Angeles Bruins’ fan, and they keep nicely quiet during football season, but when they run into fans of Kansas State University’s Wildcats or Wichita State University’s Wheatshockers during basketball season they can be downright exasperating. Mostly, though, it’s the school’s tendency to do things like repealing the rules of English grammar for the sake of academic trendiness.

Pretty much any collegiate sports team you might root for is similarly tainted, given the appalling state of American academia, but KU has always seemed more so than either KSU or WSU. The S in KSU indicates that it is a Land Grant University, and thus dedicated to agriculture and engineering and architecture and other things that require objectively verifiable results, and although the departments of the fuzzier disciplines seem to have usual number of trendy academics it still draws a student body that is unlikely to elect a student senate that repeals the rules of English grammar. The W in WSU indicates that it’s an urban university, with a student body that has had enough years at the local aviation factories to realize that some extra educational credentials might move them up a step on the career ladder, and is not at all concerned with such matters as gender-neutral pronouns, and doesn’t even mind that some serious money from the left-wing’s favorite bogeyman Charles Koch has greatly assisted their basketball team’s recent success.

Up in Lawrence they pride themselves on their programs in law and journalism and the liberal arts in every sense of the term, among other fuzzy disciplines, and their students tend to come from swank Kansas City suburbs in Johnson County and the tonier parts of Wichita, rather than the small town folk who flock to KSU or the factory workers who wind up at WSU, so this sort of gender-neutral nonsense comes more naturally there. An impeccably liberal friend of ours used to cover the state legislature for the Lawrence paper, and even he went off on a rant one night about the professors of 18th Century Japanese poetry used to show up at the statehouse with wild demands, and how the agricultural guys from KSU and the the team from WSU touting its new composite aviation materials research seemed so much more reasonable, and although we assume he’s still rooting for his alma mater Jayhawks he seemed a bit embarrassed by it. He was always a most assiduous practitioner of the English language, too, so we expect he would be further embarrassed that it has been repealed by the institution where he matriculated.

The rules of English grammar have well served agriculture and mechanics and all those other objectively verifiable disciplines, and they’ve suited the small town folk and the factory workers well enough, and we hold out hope they’ll persist. KSU and WSU have gotten their licks in against KU over the years,and  just last year the ‘Shocks whipped the ‘Hawks pretty good in the tournament, where the “Chickenhawks” weren’t able to dodge their rising interstate rival, and which we have re-watched at least twice on YouTube, and there’s faint hope we’ll even reach a day when you call a man a he and a woman a she and nobody’s offended that the indeterminate case is expressed in a male gender and we can get back to the more important business they teach at Land Grant and urban universities and in the real world.

— Bud Norman

Hillary and Sanders and Sexism

Although we keep reading in the respectable press that Hillary Clinton’s Democratic presidential nomination is once again inevitable, and her ascension to the presidency more or less a fait accompli, we still harbor hopeful doubts about it. The pre-written and utterly ridiculous accounts of her routing of the Republicans during that Benghazi hearing can’t last forever, and we we can’t help noticing that she’s already resorting to some desperate pouting about her womanhood and victimhood.

That rout of the Republicans during the Benghazi hearings only makes sense, after all, if you’re relying on the respectable press. Those unfortunate souls with nothing better to do than slog through all the videos and transcripts learned that Clinton was proved to have ignored at least 600 requests for enhanced security at the Benghazi consulate prior to the forewarned terrorist attack, that she knowingly lied to the families of four dead Americans and the rest of the country that it was a spontaneous demonstration against a little-known YouTube video rather than a forewarned terror attack, and that an obscure filmmaker was imprisoned and profuse apologies were issues to the Muslim world for enforcing the First Amendment and allowing the slander of the prophet of Islam as result. The accounts of the respectable press will suffice for Clinton for now, but eventually all that indisputable footage will surely end up in an eventual Republican candidate’s well-funded and widely disseminated attack ad.

More worrisome to the Clinton campaign, and more hopeful to us, is the resort to womanhood and victimhood. It started in the first debate, when Clinton cited her sex as a her most important difference to President Barack Obama, who won the office as The First Black President just as Clinton intends to win it as the First Woman President of Any Racial Heritage, and she’s lately upped the ante during a tiff with pesky challenger and self-described socialist and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders over gun control. One of Sanders’ rare crowd displeasing moments during the first debate was when he was forced for to defend his past opposition to gun, which has earned a D- minus grade from the National Rifle Association that is suddenly a disqualifying grade in a Democratic nomination race, and he clumsily defended it as a vote from a “rural state” that is mostly hippies running dairy farms to supply the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream empire with organic milk is just as insistent on its gun rights as Kansas, rather than admitting the more plausible-to-Democrats explanation that  it was because of his longstanding commitment to armed socialist revolution. Since then Clinton has been openly embracing an Australian-style gun-grabbing law that the Democrats used to insist they would never attempt, and Sanders has vociferously responded, which Clinton has described as a sexist “When women talk, some people think we’re shouting.”

This might well prove savvy in a Democratic primary, where there are a preponderance of women, and no doubt more than a few of them who believe they have at some time been wrongly accused by some man of shouting, but we expect it will prove less reliable in a general election. The general electorate, which is still approximately 50 percent male and still includes a fair number of married women who will understand the futility of this complaint, might not prove so forgiving. In any case, the First Woman President won’t get the same 95 percent of the woman vote that the First African-American President won from the African-American vote, and to whatever extent the general electorate remains stubbornly sexist it is looking for a woman who won’t blame her failures on sexism, and that whole Australian-style gun-grabbing thing seems unlikely to play well in a country where not only men but women who have been spooked by that whole culture-of-rape narrative the left is peddling are committed to their God-given and constitutionally-protected right to arm one’s in self defense.

The whole I-am-woman-hear-me-roar thing was bound to surface sooner or later, although we expected it when the Republicans settled on some white guy or another, and especially if it was the boorish Donald Trump, but that it’s already being deployed against the likes of a self-described socialist and Vermont Senator such as Bernie Sanders smacks of desperation. She seems to be benefiting from the double standards of current political discourse, and we’re quite sure that any male politician who had endured such serial humiliations from a spouse would be an object of ridicule rather than sympathy, and with all those men and all those respectably married and Republican women in the mix we think the pitch might yet fall short of an electoral majority.

— Bud Norman

Benghazi and the Difference It Makes

Former Secretary of State and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton spent most of Thursday testifying to a House committee investigating the the tragic deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans at a far-flung consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and by the end of it her handling of the matter was revealed as even more incompetent, dishonest, and thoroughly despicable than was previously known. Still, one can’t help forlornly accepting Clinton’s infamous argument that “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

What was previously known was damning enough, after all. Even by Election Day way back in ’12 it had been established that at Clinton’s urging the administration of President Barack Obama had bombed an odious but defanged dictator out of power in Libya and thus ushered in an power vacuum where various Islamist terror groups thrived, then ignored repeated pleas for more security by the unfortunate men and women who were sent into the resulting anarchy to serve the government, that when the long foreseen terrorist attack at last occurred they lied to the American public that it was the entirely unpredictable result of a spontaneous demonstration sparked by the local populace’s understandable outrage over an obscure YouTube video critical of Islam rather than a well-planned attack by the terrorist gangs that were assuredly being routed, then had the filmmaker imprisoned on a parole violation for exercising his First Amendment rights and assured the United Nations that “the future must not belong to those slander the prophet of Islam,” and withheld information from government and press investigators to cover it all up. None of this prevented Obama’s re-election, and even the resulting scandal about Clinton’s use of a private and unsecured and most likely illegal e-mail server in apparent attempt to keep further embarrassing facts away from public scrutiny hasn’t changed the media perception that she’s still the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

For reasons they cannot adequately explain to us, all of our Democratic friends are quite insouciant about the whole affair. Had it happened during a Republican administration we expect they’d share some at least some of our outrage about it, but in this case they find all sorts of excuses. None seem at all upset that we bombed some Middle Eastern dictator out of power, even though he’d verifiably surrendered all his weapons of mass destruction after the invasion of Iraq and posed no immediate threat to America’s national security, and even though they take a much dimmer view of such actions during Republican administrations. A columnist for a recently-defunct local “alternative paper” blamed the deaths on the daredevil recklessness of the ambassador, despite the repeated pleas for more security, and his readers seemed to accept that a Secretary of State should be doing whatever Clinton doing at the time to deal with such minor matters as the security arrangements for some remote consulate. That she blamed it on a spontaneous demonstration against some obscure and easily targeted filmmaker in order to help her administration’s re-election doesn’t seem to trouble a Democrats’ conscience, either, as they can ascribe any Republican criticism to rank political partisanship and their otherwise steadfast commitment to the most irreligious sorts of free speech ends short of any slander against the prophet of Islam. As for the highly irregular e-mail arrangement that now figures it in the scandal, even the only credible challenger to Clinton’s presumptive Democratic nomination says to great applause that he’s sick of hearing about it.

Pretty much everyone that’s not a true believer in the Democratic faith has already concluded that Clinton is incompetent, dishonest, and thoroughly despicable, too, so there seems little to be gained from another day’s further confirmation of what has so long been obvious. At this point, though, we appreciate even the most futile gesture.

The day’s testimony might not hurt Clinton’s electoral chances, but it can’t possibly help. Committee chairman and South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy was able to get in some digs about how longtime Clinton family consigliere Sid Blumenthal, better known as “Sid Vicious,” who had some economic interest in toppling Libya’s odious but defanged dictatorship, was among the few people who had knowledge of Clinton’s irregular e-mail account while the ambassador in Libya did not. Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan was able to cite some hard-attained e-mails from staff who were appalled that Clinton and other administration officials were peddling a false tale about spontaneous demonstrations against obscure YouTube videos, as well as an e-mail to her daughter admitting that it was well-planned terror attack, and to establish that the lie started with her. Our very own Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo was able to establish that there were at least 600 requests from Benghazi for enhanced security, which forced the embarrassing response that “One of the great attributes that Chris Stevens had was a really good sense of humor. And I just see him smiling as he types this.”

That eerie moment will go mostly unnoticed by the public, and no hardened opinions will be altered by it, but we’re nonetheless glad it happened. There’s something to be said for establishing a factual historical record, no matter how inconsequential it might prove in the short term, and certainly that ambassador and those three other dead Americans deserve that. The unfolding facts can’t help Clinton, either, and there’s something to be said for that as well.

— Bud Norman

Biden Backs Off From the Future

Vice President Joe Biden finally got around to saying that he won’t enter the presidential race on Wednesday, which happened to be the very same day that Marty McFly time-traveled to in that old “Back to the Future” flick, so we were once again reminded of our limited powers of prophecy.

If we were the gambling sort we’d have bet good money, if we had any, that Biden’s candidacy was a sure thing. He has at least the typical politician’s ambition for the ultimate job and the usual vanity to think he deserves it, the Democratic field seems weaker this time around than during any of his numerous earlier attempts at the presidency, and he could have expected President Barack Obama’s implicit endorsement as well as his still-formidable funding-raising prowess and still-intact campaign organization. At least we didn’t predict back in the ’80s that kids would be scooting around on hover-skateboards and holographic sharks would be eating passersby and you could still find a newspaper rack on every corner at this point in history, among the other glaring things the “Back to the Future” filmmakers got conspicuously wrong, but we still must humbly concede that we once again blew another one of our own more short-term predictions.

Much of the rest of the media, somehow unchastened by their own sorry records of prognostication, persist in reading the tea leaves of Biden’s announcement to reveal the future well before any reasonable deadline would require it. The consensus of prophetic pundit opinion on both the left and the right seems to be that without Biden’s interference the inevitable coronation of former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will now proceed as planned all along, and that the public will go along with it, barring her being indicted on federal felony charges or some other hiccup, and it sounds plausible enough that even if we had any money we wouldn’t bet against it. We marvel that would anyone wager some valuable as a reputation on it, though, given how many other things might happen.

A felony indictment or some similarly serious hiccup is not out of the question, after all. The administration Clinton once served as Secretary of State hasn’t seemed at all interested in restraining the ongoing investigations, or the anonymous quotes from highly placed administration sources about it, and even without Biden being the administration’s dog in the fight it has little reason to be any more helpful. Even if the press and her Democratic rivals succeed in squelching the e-mail scandal here’s still all the conflicts of moonlighting interests among her top aides, and the donations by foreign nations to her family foundation, and the four dead Americans who begged for her help in Benghazi, Libya, a matter she’ll be forced to answer for before a congressional committee this very day and which the press will be obliged to report on, not to mention all her Wall Street connections and Wal-Mart corporate board membership and other corporate ties that might terrify the Democratic base, or her famously libidinous husband’s flying around on a corporate jet to tropical paradises with a billionaire ephebophile, or any of the many other things always seem to be happening with someone named Clinton. She might yet survive it all, as always seems to be happening with someone named Clinton, but in our experience even the hottest streaks seem to eventually end.

Some gut instinct also seems to suggest that all those prophetic pundits, who tend to be cloistered inside the beltway of Washington, D.C., have once again not only overestimated Clinton’s inevitability but also underestimated the admittedly ineffable appeal of self-described socialist and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Among our circle of friends and acquaintances and Facebook posters there are far too many Democrats, and we can’t help noticing that almost all of them are enthusiastic about Sanders’ candidacy, and that the rare Clinton supporters seem conspicuously unenthused, and that pretty much everyone else in the middle of that great red splotch on the middle of the electoral map agrees she’s just about the most godawful woman ever, so she’s never seemed all that inevitable to us. These crazy mixed-up kids today don’t understand that “socialist” is a dirty word, either, just as they seem not to understand that any of the dirty words are dirty words, and their ironic hipness is such that they can embrace a Cranky Old Jewish Man as the new Cool Black Guy, and the press has been obliged to report that his crowds have been bigger and more enthused than Clinton’s almost everywhere for months now, which is eerily reminiscent of the last time that Clinton was prophesied as inevitable, so as much as we wish it weren’t so Sanders still strikes us as an ongoing possibility. A Biden candidacy would have split the “establishment” vote from Clinton in the primaries and with Obama’s implicit approval would have stolen many of her crucial black voters and drained little from the very enthused ranks of mostly-white Sanders supporters, and thus would likely have been a boon to Sanders, but even without that gift he still seems from our perspective at least a serious contender if not an outright front-runner.

A good Hollywood screenwriter would be able to concoct countless other possible scenarios, most of which would prove no more prophetic and far less profitable than that “Back to the Future” flick, and our best advice is to cover all the bets as if it were a metaphorical roulette table. The Trump card is still in play, too, to mix our gambling metaphors a bit, so the conjecture is further complicated. We have our rooting interests in all of this, or at least we’re trying to choose them from a few remaining options, but we note how often our rooting interests differs with the way things turn, so at this point we’re venturing no predictions, except that it will prove interesting. There won’t be any Biden in it, which will deny the news writers and screenwriters some much-needed comic relief, barring some post-indictment plot twist, but it will prove interesting nonetheless.

— Bud Norman

Webb Withdraws and the Democrats Lurch Leftward

Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb never did have a chance to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, so his withdrawal from the race on Tuesday won’t much affect the race. The reasons for his early departure say much about the current state of his party, however, so we do find it noteworthy.

Once upon a time, not so long ago that we can’t recall it clearly, Webb would have made a formidable candidate and an even more formidable nominee, but his parting speech frankly acknowledged that at this particular moment in history “my views on many of the issues are not compatible with the power structure and the nominating base of the Democratic Party.” This should have been apparent to Webb even during his little-noticed campaign announcement speech, but it simply could not go unnoticed after the party’s first presidential debate. Webb was forced to defend his past support of the Second Amendment and his past opposition to race-based affirmative action policies, was the only candidate to voice any commonsensical skepticism about the last seven years of foreign policy in general and that awful Iran nuclear bomb deal in particular, and even as he went along with the rest of the candidates he was clearly the least enthused about providing subsidized health care and other expensive government benefits to the untold millions of illegal immigrants that the Democratic Party is intent on inviting to the country. Throw in a few other heresies against the latest Democratic orthodoxy he uttered during his few minutes of airtime, and Webb was the glaringly obvious answer to one of those “which one of these does not belong” questions on all the standardized tests.

Webb was even so gauche as to note that he not only fought in Vietnam but had also served his country as Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, which one liberal Politico “tweeter” immediately characterized as “Jim Webb admitted he killed people.” We don’t remember any liberals being so critical of John Kerry, who “reported for duty” as the Democratic nominee on the basis of his dubious war record rather than the more indisputably documented anti-war activities that launched his career at another radical point in Democratic party history, or raising any objections to President Barack Obama’s boastful claims about killing Osama Bin-Laden, as if he’d rappelled down from the helicopter and done the deed with his own bare hands, but with Webb the reaction from the debate audience and the attending press was plainly apoplectic. We found ourselves almost liking the guy, despite his unenthused support for expensive benefits to untold millions of illegal immigrants and his many other heresies against conservative orthodoxy, but of course that only further confirmed his unsuitability to the current mood of the Democratic Party.

Our liberal friends love to repeat that old cliche about how the Republicans have lurched so far to the right during the past decades that even Ronald Reagan could no longer win its nomination, and we’re sure it seems so to them as they lurch ever further to the left. From our perspective, which has admittedly been fixed here in the middle of the country at the same rightward spot ever since we started reading National Review back in junior high, it is hard to see how GOP’s nominations of George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole and George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney demonstrate any rightward lurching since Reagan, and we don’t see anyone in the current field that’s likely to lurch it the right of that sweet spot, and yet all that leftward lurching on the Democratic side seems apparent.

Our beloved Pop still likes to recall how President Harry Truman stood firm against the Commies, we were raised on tales of PT-109 and that John F. Kennedy speech about bearing any burden and paying any price to ensure the ultimate victory of democracy, and from our childhood we recall how President Lyndon Johnson had the hippies outside the White House chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” despite all his Great Society liberalism. From our own adulthood we still remember when Washington Sen. “Scoop” Jackson and a few other hawkish Democrats had prominent standing in their party, not to mention the Bosnian-bombing President Bill Clinton and peacenik war hero Kerry and Bin-Laden-killing Obama among other recent Democratic warmongers, so the sudden Democratic repulsion to Webb’s much-decorated martial spirit strikes us as a significant development.

Webb’s admitted support for the right to self-defense and opposition to affirmative action policies that favor Obama’s Sidwell Friends-educated children over some Appalachian coal miner’s more promising kid were also respectable opinions within the Democratic circles of our relatively recent recollection, too, and even that unmistakable hesitancy about giving expensive benefits to untold millions of illegal immigrants and the rest of his unforgivable heresies he uttered would have easily been forgiven by the power structure and nominating base of the Democratic Party. At this particular point in the party’s history, though, the putative front-runner Hillary Clinton is running against her husband’s record of tough-on-crime measures and defense of traditional marriage and insouciance about sexual assault while the self-described socialist and surging insurgent and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is arguing that even after seven years of Obama the economy is horrible because we jut haven’t lurch far enough left yet, the party seems to agree that Black Lives Matter and others don’t,  and from our fixed position seem awfully far left at the moment.

Although admittedly situated to the right, we suspect that our position and Webb’s is closer to the center than his former rivals. There are still an awful lot of white people and even among the Democrat kind of them there’s bound to be some resentment that Obama’s Sidwell Friends-educated children have some legal advantage over their own kids, and Americans of all colors and party affiliations have become accustomed to the right of self-defense, and a commonsensical appraisal of the past seven years of foreign policy in general and that awful Iran nuclear in particular will be skeptical, and it takes a certain sort of Democrat to be sufficiently enthused about paying expensive benefits for untold millions of illegal immigrants, so Webb’s departure does not seem to bode well for the Democratic Party’s general election fortunes. The Republicans seem intent on screwing up such a golden opportunity, of course, but it still does not bode well.

Webb’s much-decorated martial spirit was still on display as he retreated, saying that while his party is not comfortable with many of his policies “frankly I am not comfortable with many of theirs.” He hinted at a third party-challenge, a one-in-a-zillion shot that seems his best bet for the presidency at this point, and we’d like to think it might drain a few votes from Democrats who still believe all the traditional Democratic nonsense but aren’t so leftward lurched that they buy into all the latest nonsense. We’re not sure how many Democrats fit this projection, though, and he might wind up stealing a few Republican votes if Donald Trump wins the nomination, so at this point we’re not sure how noteworthy is withdrawal really is.

— Bud Norman

The Washington Post’s Latest Scoop

Nothing so warms as the heart as a good old journalistic screw-up, especially when the self-righteous watchdogs of democracy and unforgiving judges of other people’s failures in the most almighty media are forced to admit that they are also mere humans. We had a good chuckle, therefore, to hear about The Washington Post’s premature announcement that Vice President Joe Biden has entered the Democratic presidential race.

The story was quickly retracted, profusely apologized for, and we don’t for a moment believe there was any nefarious intent. There was a for-internal-use-only “slug” on top of the story and “XX” markings where information was apparently supposed to be updated, so it was clearly pre-written copy intended to be used in the event that Biden did announce his candidacy, and some unlucky Postman or another simply hit a “send” rather than a “save” button and inadvertently thus sent it out over the internet. Anyone who thinks that the mistake indicates some inside knowledge of a Biden candidacy should know the paper almost certainly has another story in its computer files about how Biden has announced he isn’t running, and that it could have just as easily been the one that was published by a click on the wrong button.

We have some sympathy for the accidental offender, as even our humble operation has occasionally clicked on the “publish” icon rather than the “saved” icon and thus sent out unfinished and un-headlined columns to those readers kind enough to “follow” us on their “mobile devices” or those who just happened drop by during the short interval before the article was finished and headlined, although we can proudly note that has only resulted in some momentary confusion and a chance to watch how our word craft is so carefully polished, and it has never obliged us to apologize that what we posted was completely untrue, even if it was slightly incoherent. During our long years of toil for the local newspaper we gave first-hand witness to some truly spectacular and thoroughly retracted journalistic screw-ups, too, and on one occasion long ago very early in our obituary-writing days it was entirely our fault, so we try not to be too judgmental or self-righteous about such things. Still, this error seems to have resulted from journalistic tendencies that can be easily corrected.

Almost of all of those spectacular and thoroughly retracted journalist screw-ups we witnessed first-hand resulted from some editor or another’s insistence that the truth be written up and published before it could possibly be known. On one still locally infamous occasion two of the local aircraft manufacturers were vying for a sizable military contract, and in a city where aviation is still the most significant component of the local economy the editors were very interested in the outcome of the competition, and the poor fellow on the aviation beat, who was a good reporter and a buddy of ours, was under intense pressure to announce the result before the government or any of the television stations did. He buckled under and went with his best sources and best guess, both of which turned out to be completely wrong, and the winning company paid for a full-page in the local media’s satirical “Gridiron” revue to show a photo-shopped Harry Truman holding up the local newspaper’s headline where “Dewey Beats Truman” used to be. Our friend’s career never recovered, the careers of the editors who insisted on reporting the news before it happened never suffered, and we see it happen all the time.

Editors seem all the more eager to publish the truth they prefer before it can possibly be known. Nearly every mass shooting, even the frequent ones that occur abroad, usually begin with editorial assumptions that soon require more inconspicuous retractions. Natural catastrophes and real unemployment rates during Republican administrations seem prone to inconspicuous retractions than during Democrat administrations, too, and we can’t count how many times the “Tea Party” has been inconspicuously retracted from stories. Pretty much all the coverage of the unpredictable Democratic and Republican presidential primaries has been unaccountably cocksure, and the watchdogs of democracy and unforgiving judges of other people’s faults seem as ever.

Not that we’re entirely averse to the time-honored newspaper practice of writing up two plausible alternative stories in advance, just in case you’re right enough to be able to get a few minutes ahead of the competition. Many election cycles ago we were relegated to some forgettable congressional race, and as our deeply buried dispatches warned it turned out to be a nail-biter. Foreseeing this we had written three stories, with lots of “XX” markings for last-minute-before-deadline information, and one proclaimed candidate “A” the victor and the other one candidate “B,” and the third apologizing that as of press time no victor was apparent, yet even 10 minutes before deadline our editor was demanding a submission. With the latest polling numbers showing a single-digit margin we agreed to hand in the third option, but she rather haughtily insisted we tell our readers the outcome whether we knew it or not. She wound up as a the big-time editor at a newspaper down south, which happened to be one of the last two-newspaper towns left in America and where her drunken-driving arrest was front page fodder for the competitor, and we’re proud to say we withheld our byline from any story that purported to tell the truth before it was known.

Those pre-written stories almost always need to be re-written, too. By the time Biden does or doesn’t get into the race the storyline will be much different, and will need to include Donald Trump’s latest “tweet,” and the who, what, where, when, and why of a couple day’s ago will seem incoherent by the time paper hits your front door step, and your best bet to spare you a spectacular journalistic scandal and complete retraction is that third option conceding that you really don’t know what the hell is going on. So long as you keep your computer files free of any more cocky files, you won’t have this kind of embarrassment. Besides, the presses run all night and you’re going to be on the doorsteps of your readers before they wake up, and after the electronic media have beat you to the wrong story, so take a little extra time to get it right.

— Bud Norman

E-Mails, “Emails,” and Alternate Realities

According to no less an authoritative source than The New York Times, “Obama’s Comments About Clinton’s Emails Rankle Some in the F.B.I.” We don’t hear that from any more authoritative source, however, so we can’t shake a nagging suspicion that’s there’s a lot more to it than what the once-venerable paper would now consider “All the news that’s fit to print.”

There’s no doubt that President Barack Obama did indeed go on television’s “60 Minutes” program and say that former Secretary of State and current Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private and unsecured e-mail server didn’t pose a threat to national security, even as he acknowledged that it was a mistake, and we won’t quibble with the article’s characterization that he “played down the matter.” Nor do we doubt that The New York Times’ multiple reporters accurately quoted or paraphrased the unnamed current Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and one named former law enforcement agent who claim to be infuriated by the president’s prejudgment of a matter they are still diligently investigating. We don’t doubt that all the names and titles and other facts that are explicitly stated have been assiduously checked by what’s left of the Gray Lady’s copy desk, even if they are now so trendy they’re no longer hyphenating “e-mails,” but what’s not stated yet clearly implied still smells fishy.

The article includes some unexpectedly interesting background material, including past administration crackdowns on federal officials’ handling of sensitive material, and past instances of the administration resisting prosecutions of other more politically necessary officials, to the extent that a typical New York Times reader might find it shockingly critical of the administration. Even under the cloak of anonymity those unnamed FBI and other law enforcement officials will likely seem convincingly outraged to the average Times reader, and the average New York Times reader might even conclude that the president is protecting a fellow Democrat from due treatment under the law. The average New York Times reader would be delighted to hear that, though, so we can’t credit the paper with any institutional courage, and we find it interesting that they’re still running articles with Clinton and “emails” in the same headline.

We don’t have even any unnamed sources in the FBI, but we do have a theory based on the reports of The New York Times and the rest of the old-fashioned that this is all bunk. Based on pretty much everything we’ve seen, heard, and read during the past seven years we have concluded that Obama is convinced he really is the messiah he proclaimed himself to be during the ’08 election, that he wants his transformative reign continued through the ’16 and ’20 elections, and that Hillary Clinton is not his chosen successor. A similar empiricism has convinced us that the F.B.I. is no longer the doggedly independent institution of Jimmy Stewart and Efram Zimbalist Jr., and that it now contains more than a few agents willing to anonymously feign outrage at administration criticism of an investigation that has long been given administration blessing. Even The New York times concedes that the administration “walked back” its criticism in short order, and that the downplaying included an admission Clinton had made a mistake, and future Times stories will no doubt include further unnamed high administration officials leaking further disclosures about those “emails,” but that the administration can point to an unexpectedly critical New York Times story that seems to have its hands of any blame.

Given the lack of attention paid by the F.B.I. to other administration scandals, its sudden doggedness about Clinton’s “emails,” and all the resulting drip, drip, drip of stories quoting an ongoing investigations and plenty of highly placed yet unnamed administration officials, we can see why Obama might want to portray him as downplaying the matter. Given our experience of The New York Times, we can believe it would happily cooperate. We recently ran into a friend of ours who is a political Democrat tonight and he thought our theory that ridiculous, but he was also convinced that Clinton is the inevitable nominee and that only the inevitable Jeb Bush nomination could stop her.

— Bud Norman