A Woman, Sure, but This Woman?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, July 31, 2016

A favorite National Review chengyu is “tallest building in Wichita,” which is derived from William F. Buckley’s response to Gary Wills’s claim that Lillian Hellman, the blacklisted Hollywood Communist, was “America’s greatest living female playwright.” That’s a lot of modifiers separating “greatest” and “playwright.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton is without a doubt the greatest current female American major-party presidential nominee.

It is dumb but, for whatever reason (it isn’t entirely ununderstandable), we place great significance on those qualifiers, which is why that endless parade of witless cow-eyed hacks participating in and reporting on the Democratic National Convention beamed so dopily about the fact that an American political party had nominated as its presidential candidate a person with a genital configuration common to slightly more than half of the human race 37 years after Margaret Thatcher became the British prime minister, 47 years after Golda Meir became the Israeli prime minister, 50 years after Indira Gandhi became the Indian prime minister, 18 years after Ruth Dreifuss became president of Switzerland, etc.

If elected, Mrs. Clinton will replace Barack Obama, who was our first black president, albeit a black president with a white mother and a grandmother who was, in his words, a “typical white person.” (Unlike President Obama, I’ve never met a typical white person.) When Obama was nominated, we were assured by the high and mighty that that, too, was a moment in which we were “making history.”

Did we?

There is some symbolic importance to Obama’s election and Mrs. Clinton’s nomination, to be sure. But black Americans are not today remarkably better off than before Obama’s inauguration, and it is not clear at all that Obama’s presidency did anything to improve race relations in the United States; there is in fact much more evidence that his habit of cynically and stupidly fanning the flames of racial resentment for his own political ends made things worse.

Probably not a lot worse, though. Presidents are not as important as we think they are, and not half as important as they think they are. America’s black leadership and its would-be black leadership are in the midst of a political convulsion that has thrown up a great deal of asininity and irresponsibility in the form of Black Lives Matters and allied movements, but that doesn’t have much to do with the complexion of the president. It has more to do with the fact that large-scale immigration and the new social prominence of Hispanic and homosexual interest groups is eroding African-Americans’ historical position as the living barometer of American liberalism. For centuries, the racial conversation in the United States was black and white, notwithstanding the occasional atrocity against the Indians or a Chinese Exclusion Act or three. Now that conversation is something else, and this is a source of anxiety for black leaders who do not wish to see their role in the nation’s affairs reduced to that of a Choctaw chief with no casino.

Mrs. Clinton’s nomination will have a similarly negligible effect on the lives of American women. It isn’t exactly a Muppet News Flash that women can run for high office in these United States: You can be Sarah Palin and be on a major-party ticket and be called a “c**t” by all the nice people who will be urging you to vote for Mrs. Clinton as a show of solidarity with women. You can be a woman and do a hell of a lot better job running PepsiCo than Mrs. Clinton did running the State Department. You can be a woman and be seriously considered for the Republican nomination in spite of a slightly short political curriculum vitae. You can be a woman and be a Marine.

If your daughter didn’t already know that she could grow up and make of her life whatever her dreams and abilities allow, and learned otherwise only upon seeing a dreadful politician take the next step in her dreadful career, that isn’t a failure of a patriarchal society. You’re just a bad father.

Mrs. Clinton’s nomination will mean relatively little to women as such for the same reason that Barack Obama’s presidency has had little effect on black Americans as such: because these are large, diverse groups of people with wildly different backgrounds, economic interests, political preferences, and dreams. Nigerian-American Mormon entrepreneurs in Maryland and writers from Caribbean backgrounds in Texas and half-Kenyan politicians in Illinois and 17-year-old women in North Philadelphia are not a coherent unitary group, and neither is the female half of the American polity. These are crude categories used crudely by crude people for crude ends. What ends? Getting you to give them what they want by tricking you into believing that you are doing something for yourself by investing power and status in people with whom you share trivial personal characteristics and who in fact view you in purely instrumental terms.

If you think Mrs. Clinton “cares about women,” ask Juanita Broaddrick or Gennifer Flowers.

There will be much talk in the coming months in the form of this question: “Isn’t it time we elected a woman president?” But the question isn’t whether to elect a woman president; it is whether to elect this woman president, and the answer to that question among sane and sensible people is: “Not if we can help it.”

Yes, Mrs. Clinton is the first female major-party presidential nominee. At some point (perhaps not too far in the future) we will have our first Hispanic nominee, our first Hispanic and female nominee, our first Indian-American nominee, our first Jewish nominee (so close, Barry Goldwater!), our first homosexual nominee, etc. We could have had our first “black, Puerto Rican, one-eyed, Jewish” nominee if only Sammy Davis Jr. had lived in our era, when celebrity is considered a qualification for public office.

If the best you can say for your candidate is that she’d be the first to lug a pair of ovaries over the finish line, that isn’t much.

Hillary’s Critics Don’t Hate Her Because She’s a Woman

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, July 29, 2016

Hillary Clinton has a heinous, grating, and dissonant voice. She hectors. She lectures. She assiduously over-pronounces, as if she were speaking English as a second language or navigating a densely written legal treatise for the benefit of an elderly relative. When attempting to sound inspiring, she instead seems irritated; when aiming to be meaningful, she comes across as censorious; and, on the rare occasions when she condescends to crack a joke, her demeanor is more tipsy than materteral. She is a bad speaker, and at this stage in her career, she is not going to get better.

I mention this shortcoming not because it represents a dispositive case against her campaign — it does not; that can be found elsewhere — but because, since Hillary spoke last night, I have seen a concerted attempt to cast those who have noticed her ineptitude as “sexist” or “reactionary” or worse. They are no such thing. In a free society, it is imperative that the citizenry is encouraged to say whatever it wishes about those who would wield power, and, judging by the responses I saw yesterday evening, a whole raft of Americans wanted to say that Hillary Rodham Clinton is an atypically unappealing character. By setting their observations beyond the pale, Clinton’s apologists are attempting to foreclose a certain portion of political debate. They should not be allowed to do so.

Underpinning the pushback against those who find Hillary unappetizing is a false and dangerous presumption: to wit, that to criticize Hillary’s mien is in fact to criticize all women. If it were the case that every female politician were greeted with the same appraisals as was Hillary, such a charge might hold water. We might wonder, for example, whether we are so accustomed to hearing men speak in public that we are judging all political orators by their criteria and not by women’s. In addition, we might ask whether the formats, rules, and venues that have grown up around our male-dominated politics suit those of the opposite sex. How, we might inquire, can all Americans be expected to compete under a set of standards that were tailor-made for one group?

Happily, though, we do not need to ask these questions, because Hillary is not indicative of all women, and because the bad reviews that she has attracted are the product of her own shortcomings rather than of a general dislike for her sex. Recall, if you dare, the effusive praise that has been lavished on female rhetoricians over the last few weeks. On Wednesday night, President Obama was introduced by a septuagenarian mother who had lost a son in Afghanistan. By popular acclaim, she was adjudged to have done a wholly terrific job. A night earlier, the first lady, Michele Obama, delivered one of the best political speeches that I — nay, that anybody — has ever heard; such a good speech, in fact, that the press corps began speculating to a man that she might consider running for office herself.

At the RNC, meanwhile, the best of all the addresses was delivered by Laura Ingraham (content notwithstanding). This reflected a pattern. At the 2012 RNC, the most effective speech by far was delivered by Condoleeza Rice (many watching, you will remember, wished in that moment that she were the nominee), while, in 2008, a pre-crazy Sarah Palin all but raised the roof.

This isn’t about women. It’s about Hillary Rodham Clinton.

There are few tendencies that are more destructive of the political order than the progressive insistence that all civic and stylistic criticisms must, deep down, be rooted in structural hatred. When John Lewis’s policy preferences are set above harsh comment because he is a national hero, the Enlightenment presumptions that underpin the republic are dealt a heady blow. When opposition to President Obama’s agenda is written off as “racism,” purely because the object of opprobrium is black, rational discussion is rendered less likely. And when the widespread human reaction to a cynic such as Hillary Clinton is cast as the product of latent chauvinism, we all move one step closer to a world in which conscience is subordinate to euphemism. There is nothing written in stone guaranteeing the charisma or eloquence of the Democratic party’s nominee, nor are Americans obliged to feel warm and fuzzy toward the first woman to have a real shot at the White House. Hillary Clinton is a bad speaker, a chronic opportunist, and an unlikable personality. There is no need for her defenders to bring her whole sex down to her level.

Hillary Forgets Herself

National Review Online

Friday, July 29, 2016

In the hours before their candidate’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton’s aides said that she would take the occasion to “reintroduce herself” to the American people. Again. Mrs. Clinton has been a fixture — an inescapable one — in American politics for a quarter of a century. She’s had more new-and-improved versions than a brand of laundry detergent. She lamented that “there is no other Donald Trump” other than the one with whom we are familiar. There is no other Hillary Rodham Clinton, either.

But if you need a reintroduction to Mrs. Clinton, we will oblige: She is an opportunist without anything resembling a conviction with the exception of her unwavering commitment to abortion, a “public servant” who along with her husband grew vastly wealthy exploiting her political connections and renting access to everybody from Goldman Sachs to Vladimir Putin, a petty, grasping, vindictive, meretricious time-server whose incompetence and dishonesty have been proved everywhere from Little Rock to Benghazi.

Dressed symbolically all in white (as though she were a bride or a monarch enjoying her privilège du blanc), she delivered a speech that was one part It Takes a Village and eleven parts old State of the Union speeches from Barack Obama and her husband. Her presentation was her usual hectoring — she is not capable of speaking in another mode — and one of her themes was the superiority of collective action to atomistic individualism, as though she were running against Ayn Rand rather than Donald Trump. She decried “mean rhetoric” and then said that people who operate their businesses in ways that displease her are unpatriotic. She suggested that pillaging high-earning individuals and companies with confiscatory taxes could fund an endless goody bag of patronage for her constituents.

I.e., the usual Hillary.

“My primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the U.S.,” she said. That is of course unobjectionable, as indeed was much of what she said — that’s how platitudes work. But five minutes’ worth of serious thinking is enough to bring into question whether Mrs. Clinton is even serious about her most vanilla banalities. There is no serious person — Republican or Democrat — who believes that the Obama administration and its policies have produced the level of “good jobs with rising wages right here in the U.S.” that Mrs. Clinton promises. Even she doesn’t believe that, and said as much in her incoherent way: Democrats have failed to address the concerns of “working people” (surely most of us are working people), she avowed, but Barack Obama still doesn’t get enough credit in spite of this failure, and she’ll do better by doing . . . exactly the same things that Barack Obama promised.

Barack Obama, with his pen and his telephone — and his solid Democratic majorities during the first years of his presidency — did not actually do very much to revive American economic dynamism. He poured billions of dollars into pet projects for politically connected firms such as Solyndra and daffy green-energy projects that have not paid off while the ever-more-aggressive regulators under his control have applied something between a foot on the brake and a foot on the neck of the economy. If Mrs. Clinton objected to any of that, she was strangely quiet about it. If she has better ideas, she did not voice any of them. Where has she been since 1992 if not near the levers of power?

It isn’t that we expected Hillary Rodham Clinton to trash President Obama as he passed the Democrats’ baton to her. But if her platform is to be more of the same, then she should say as much. If her aim is to be a “change maker,” as her husband called her, then she owes the voters an explanation of exactly how and why the Obama administration failed to do what she believes it should have done. Blaming congressional Republicans for having different views and nonconforming policy preferences will not do.

She was, of course, mostly maddeningly vague. To the extent that she ventured down from the lofty heights of moral preening and celebrating herself as a semi-divine agent of History, she mostly cleaved to her familiar list of free stuff and a proposal for punitive tax hikes on unpopular individuals, companies, and industries. Maybe there are some rubes out there who think that this will result in tuition-free college for “the middle class,” as though shifting around costs made things less expensive. (How’s that working out for your health care?) Her strategy on the Islamic State? Same thing we’ve been doing, but with an added “We will prevail!”

Well.

While we do lament the implicit lack of self-respect and individual responsibility underpinning the philosophy of president-as-Santa-Claus, the economic and cultural anxieties of the American public are not the products of political hypochondria. And neither are the national-security concerns that should be weighing heavily in American minds as the Islamic State demonstrates that its reach goes from Syria to France to Orlando and beyond. There is an alarming deficit of genuine leadership in the United States — and on the world stage — and the fact that some people have fond memories of the years in which Mrs. Clinton’s husband was occupying the Oval Office and bothering the interns isn’t much of an argument for investing her with the most powerful political portfolio on Earth.

Her most persuasive argument was that she isn’t Donald Trump. His most persuasive argument is the converse, and nothing Mrs. Clinton said on Thursday evening changes that.

My God, She’s Running as Hillary Clinton

By Jonah Goldberg

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Last night’s Democratic convention was a brilliantly scripted run-on sentence. A stationary parade of speakers built layer upon layer of emotion, patriotism, and drama heightening the anticipation for a political climax the likes of which we have not seen since Barack Obama rode a lightning bolt down from Mount Olympus to deliver his acceptance speech betwixt the pillars of his temple in Denver. The Republican convention in Gotham, complete with its Caesarian chords, offered the perfect opening for the Democrats to build a four-night argument — or at least impression — that the Democratic party is the more optimistic and patriotic party alternative. As Erick Erickson and others have noted, Barack Obama’s speech the night before was more Reaganesque than anything we saw at the Republican convention. The fact it was so staggeringly hypocritical merely underscored the breadth and depth of the political opportunity Donald Trump has given the Democrats. Only in the era of Trump would Democrats dare to try to compete with the Republicans on the turf of American exceptionalism.

Not every speech over the first three nights was a homerun — or even a success. But cumulatively they succeeded in building a narrative arc that begged for a rhetorically pyrotechnic crescendo. The angry denunciation of Trump by a Muslim father of a fallen American soldier, the patriotic pride of a Medal of Honor recipient, the stentorian harangue from Marine General John Allen, the chants of “USA! USA!”: It all built anticipation for the big reveal at the end of the night. The Joycean run-on-sentence was primed like a coil to burst the dam of expectation with an exclamation point so enormous only horribly mixed metaphors can capture it.

Like attendees of a tribal war feast, the crowd waited for the main course. What glorious dish of red meat lay under the giant brass dome? A whole roast bull stuffed with an ostrich stuffed with a boar, perhaps?

Finally, the panel opened up and out came the meal: A gluten-free bran muffin and a warm kale smoothie.

It didn’t seem that way at first. You can’t have that kind of buildup and not get a little swept away at first. When Hillary Clinton walked out in that white suit, I thought for a moment that the makers of the new all-estrogen Ghostbusters had decided to launch a remake of Fantasy Island with one of the Golden Girls in Ricardo Montalban’s role. Here she was to make all of our dreams come true.

Like a dog who mistakenly thinks at first that he’s being driven to the park, liberal pundits and cheering delegates were initially psyched. But as it became ever more clear that the adrenaline-soaked run-on sentence of the preceding two hours wasn’t going to end with an exclamation point but with a sort of meandering ellipses of a road trip past familiar concrete landmarks of clichés and exhausting pit stops of liberal boilerplate, the dogs started to circle in their seats to settle down for the long ride ahead. Even the big dog himself, Bill Clinton, decided to check out for a while and count sugar plums dancing in his head (by which I mean a stripper named Sugar and another one named Plum).

My God, She’s Running as Hillary Clinton

Considering how much I’ve gotten wrong this year, indulge me for a moment to say I got this one exactly right. For years now, I’ve been writing that there is no new Hillary, that she’s the woman who tells you “there’s no eating in the library,” and that no matter how many times we’re told she’s been “reinvented” and “reintroduced” the dog food still tastes the same. It’s Hillary all the way down.

There’s another reason beside the obvious one why the Democrats are leaning so heavily on the fact that Hillary Clinton is the first female major-party nominee. I’m not saying that feminists and many normal Americans aren’t sincere when they celebrate this fact — or that they are wrong to celebrate it. Just because there’s an important subtext doesn’t mean that the actual text isn’t important (a fact so obvious, you need to go to an expensive college to have it taught out of you). But Hillary Clinton needs the “woman card” precisely because she’s transcended identity politics. People don’t see Hillary Clinton as the manifestation of a category, they see her as . . . Hillary Clinton.

Barack Obama was a blank slate for most Americans, so his status as the first black nominee and president was inextricably part of his identity. Hillary Clinton is a known quantity. She’s Nixon in a pantsuit. She’s been a tedious, grating, cynical, corrupt presence in our lives for nearly three decades.

The Democrats have a similar strategy to O.J. Simpson’s lawyers. As a celebrity, Simpson was not particularly known as a black man. It was only when the facts weighed against him in a court of law that the lawyers had to reinvent his racial identity in order to evoke racial solidarity among the jury.

Hillary Clinton hasn’t murdered anybody. But they need to gloss over the undercoat of her personality with a layer of exciting feminism. Why? Because the jury of voters know her. And you know what? They don’t like her very much. That this fact raises such ire and discomfort among her defenders is the ultimate proof of its veracity.

Every day we hear another sycophant, supplicant, or ally insist that the “real Hillary” is such a wonderful person. “If only you knew her like I do” they proclaim, at once signaling loyalty to the matriarch and boasting of their own access. But no one ever thinks these testimonials through. For we are also told, sometimes in the same breath, that her problem is that she’s just not a great politician or “performer”; “she’s a workhorse not a show horse” virtually every flack and lackey proclaims as if they can get people to stop believing their lying eyes.

Well, think about that.

The key attribute of many great politicians is their ability to hide their true selves. Bill Clinton and FDR were legendarily good politicians and virtually every biographer backs up that judgment by pointing to their ability to convince any audience or adversary they spoke to that they were really on their side. (Bill Clinton is such a consummate performer, he famously made himself cry at Ron Brown’s funeral — only after he saw that he was on camera.) We are supposed to believe that Hillary Clinton lacks anything like this artifice, and yet she has somehow managed to hide her true self from the American public for more than a quarter century? That’s an impressive performance for a non-performer.

I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton can be more charming in person than she appears on TV. But you’d need earth-moving equipment to set a bar any lower than that.

We Get Hillary, She Doesn’t

Hillary Clinton tried to address the problem head on in her speech last night: “The truth is, through all these years of public service, the ‘service’ part has always come easier to me than the ‘public’ part. I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me.”

No, actually they do know what to make of her. It’s Hillary who doesn’t know what to make of the public. And even I can muster some sympathy because “getting it” would require understanding something about herself that no person would want to understand. Who wants to accept that after a lifetime of public exposure people have concluded they just don’t like you or trust you?

It must be even more mystifying because she has surrounded herself with a praetorian entourage of validators and supplicants. I refer you again to my favorite e-mail from Hillary Clinton’s server (at least until the Russians comply with Donald Trump’s latest order). Lanny Davis, who in his Renfieldesque service to the Clintons has spent decades spinelessly inch-worming through rivers of sh*t like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, wrote her a three-page (!) note begging her to offer a kind word about him to a reporter:

I consider you to be the best friend and the best person I have met in my long life. You know that from the dedication and appreciation of you I have always felt and expressed to you over four decades.

Clinton’s response to this sphincter-muffled entreaty? Silence.

If I asked someone I considered the best person and best friend I’ve ever had for a kidney, I wouldn’t expect them to automatically agree. But I’m fairly certain the contenders for that honorific would think about it. But if I asked for a throwaway blurb to a reporter? I have enemies who would do that.

Clinton has surrounded herself with such people for decades, no doubt in part as a psychological survival mechanism (one that has only fueled her paranoia and vindictiveness). But, still, you can understand why someone who could get Sidney Blumenthal to lick-bath her with his forked tongue, might be sincerely mystified why the peasantry isn’t as enamored with her.

The Wages of Conscience

Last night I tweeted:

Why this convention is better: It's about loving America. GOP convention was about loving Trump. If you didn't love Trump, it offered nada.

3:26 AM - 29 JUL 2016

It’s the most retweeted thing I’ve ever tweeted. And I stand by it 100 percent. By definition a cult of personality candidacy isn’t going to be as inclusive as a broad, classically liberal philosophy. I am repulsed by his personality, so I am not fit for the cult.

That tweet also elicited predictably angry responses from all of the folks you’d expect to be angered by it. But the anger is instructive. I understand that some people, including many friends and former fans, are cross with me because they sincerely think that whatever Trump’s flaws, “we” have to do everything we can to stop Hillary Clinton. I get that, and I am truly sympathetic (Heck, I play a major role in Dinesh D’Souza’s full-barreled assault on Clinton and the Democrats).

I’m not going to revisit all of my reasons for why I reject the idea that I should, out of partisan loyalty, transform myself into a pliant hack for a party whose nominee not only has contempt for me, but far more importantly, for most of the things that led me to wear the Republican label in the first place. As should be clear from this “news”letter so far, I’m not going to let the GOP make me a liar for Donald Trump and I’m not going to let my contempt for Donald Trump make me a liar for Hillary Clinton. They are both awful, and if Hillary Clinton wins my conscience will be clear because the people responsible for that loss will be the ones who let this thin-skinned and bullying poltroon hijack the party in the first place.

I’m sure I’m being unfair to many, but I’m convinced I’m being entirely fair to at least a few when I say that some of the anger aimed at #NeverTrumpers isn’t purely motivated by rage against those insufficiently dedicated to stopping Hillary — it’s also derived from a sense of shame on the part of those willing to sell their souls to this creamsicle colored kakistocrat. The thinking seems to be, “If I’m willing to sell out to this guy, who are you not to?” And among the politicians, the calculation seems to be that if everyone makes a deal with the devil, no one can be singled out for blame when this ends in tears.

One of the reasons corruption is so hard to eliminate, particularly in the developing world, is that honesty is seen as a kind of betrayal. Bribe-takers like bribes, to be sure, but they also hate those who won’t take them — not just because the refusers threaten their livelihoods, but because such refusals remind the corrupted that they had a choice.

Every day I hear from people who accuse me of thinking I’m better than them for not bending the knee. I will, in all honesty, plead guilty to sounding like that sometimes (though it is not my intent). In Cleveland, more than a few delegates told me I need to “man up” or put my “big-boy pants on” and get on board the Trump Train. I hear such hectoring hourly on Twitter and in e-mail (it’s a strange definition of manhood that requires abandoning one’s convictions and hopping aboard the bandwagon). When I refuse, I can on occasion hear the needle-prick-pop of conscience prompting them to shout louder at me.

Patriotism, Surrendered

But back to last night. In response to my tweet, scores of people mocked the idea that the Democrats are more patriotic than the Republicans. They scorned my naiveté for not seeing that the show last night was an eminence front, a put on.

It’s all so ridiculous. Of course, I understand that this was show business. Hillary Clinton represents a century-old American tradition of thinking there’s nothing wrong with America that being more like Europe won’t fix. The organizers last night had to whip-up chants of “Hillary!” and “U-S-A!” and reportedly deploy white-noise machines to drown-out the catcalls and boos of the sizable chorus of those who’d rather choke than cheer the U.S. military. This is the party, after all, that booed God at their last convention and spent the Bush years rending cloth and gnashing teeth over American-flag lapel pins.

But so what? That is all evidence of the political and strategic success of the Democratic convention. Donald Trump rejects the traditional and legitimate understanding of patriotism in favor of nationalism. These are different things. Patriotism is attachment to the creeds, texts, and ideas of our Founding. Nationalism is a tribal loyalty to blood or soil or sect. Donald Trump is no Hitler, but I’m often reminded that Hitler was fond of noting he was not a patriot but a nationalist. Jay Nordlinger loves to quote Bill Buckley: “I’m as patriotic as anyone from sea to shining sea, but there’s not a molecule of nationalism in me.”

I’ve always slightly disagreed with Bill on this. A nation needs a little nationalism to bind the people to patriotic principles. As Chesterton tells us, the purely rational man will not marry and the purely rational soldier will not fight.

Too much nationalism is poisonous, but as Paracelus said, “Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.” Too little nationalism can be as dangerous as too much, because without nationalism there’s no sinew to hold together the bones of the republic.

I’m not prepared to declare the lethality of Donald Trump’s toxic nationalism, but I am fully ready to say that it is dangerously undiluted by patriotism. Donald Trump has no attachment to the Constitution beyond a transactional commitment to say that he likes it when asked — all twelve articles of it. He values will and strength and has contempt for those safeguards that protect us from “leaders” enamored with will and strength. Must we hear him mangle the cliché that the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact one more time?

Donald Trump’s candidacy and convention created a vacuum the Democrats were only too willing to fill. Americans want to love their country and to do so they must believe it is lovable. The America Donald Trump describes is one where we have no right to judge, never mind condemn, murderous dictators. (In this, he sits in the same saddle as Barack Obama who warned us not to get on our high horses about a gang of theocratic goons who rape children and bury mothers alive.)

The transnational progressives running the Democratic party may not think America as it is lovable, but at least they understand the necessity of faking it.