While millions of Republican primary voters have chosen Donald Trump as the party’s nominee, Bill Kristol and a small but well-heeled group of Washington insiders are preparing a third party effort to block Trump’s path to the White House.
.. In addition to alleging that Trump is lacking in principles and character, Kristol claims that the Republican candidate is a crackpot conspiracy theorist, a disqualifying trait. Kristol’s evidence is a remark Trump made on the eve of the Indiana primary suggesting that Ted Cruz’s father might have something to hide about his alleged acquaintance with Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Kristol wrote:
Calling in to Fox and Friends, Donald Trump, as Politico summarized it, “alleged that Ted Cruz’s father was with John F. Kennedy’s assassin shortly before he murdered the president, parroting a National Enquirer story claiming that Rafael Cruz was pictured with Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets in New Orleans in 1963.”
The liberal writers at Politico can perhaps be forgiven for reporting that the Enquirer only claimed that Oswald and the senior Cruz were pictured together. The Enquirer actually published the picture.
“Here’s Trump in his own crazed words,” Kristol continues:
[Trump:] “His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Kennedy’s being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it. I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”
Comments Kristol: “What’s horrible is a leading presidential candidate trading in crackpot conspiracy theories.”
So it might be, if Trump were actually putting forward a conspiracy theory. But what we have here, obviously, is not a theory but some Trumpian campaign mischief — not dissimilar in form to his earlier suggestion that because Ted Cruz was born in Canada, he might not be able to actually run for president even if he were to win the nomination. These were both campaign tricks — dirty tricks if you like — to throw a rival off balance and gain an advantage.
Zuckerberg again rejects claims of Facebook impact on U.S. election
Ahead of the Nov. 8 election, Facebook users saw fake news reports erroneously alleging that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump and that a federal agent who had been investigating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was found dead.
.. “After the election, many people are asking whether fake news contributed to the result, and what our responsibility is to prevent fake news from spreading,” Zuckerberg said on Saturday.
Trump: The “Rigged Election”
But any points Trump might have scored down the debate’s home stretch were negated when Wallace broached the topic Trump has hammered in recent days: a “rigged election.” The Republican nominee refused to say he would accept the results on November 8, promising only that he would examine them “at the time.” When Wallace reminded Trump of America’s tradition of peaceful transitions of power, and pressed for a more specific answer, Trump replied: ”I’ll keep you in suspense.”
.. In other words, any Trump claim of a stolen election will not require alleging a couple hundred fraudulent votes in one key swing state, the way the 2000 election came down to Florida. It will require alleging tens of thousands of fraudulent votes, perhaps hundreds of thousands, in each of four or five key swing states, most of whom have Republican secretaries of state who are overseeing the elections process and sworn to protect the integrity of the ballot. In other words, Trump will argue that our voting system was flooded with close to a million or perhaps more than a million illegitimate votes for Hillary Clinton across several states. Arguing that the 2016 election was stolen will require believing in vote fraud on a massive scale, going on underneath the noses of hundreds of poll watchers, polling place workers — or with the complicity of all of these officials.
It will be a vast conspiracy theory for the ages.
Anti-Semitic Anti-Zionism
The movement of “Corbynistas” — an alliance of young leftist dreamers and old guard Leninists who have demolished Tony Blair’s centrist “New Labour” as comprehensively as Trump has hijacked the Republican Party — embraces an ideology. It’s anti-American and anti-Western and broadly anti-capitalist, much in the mode of Cold War Soviet sympathizers.
Trumpism, by contrast, is an anger-driven, conspiracy-fueled, scapegoat-manipulating, ideology-free movement dedicated to the elevation by any means of one man, portrayed as a savior, to the most powerful office in the world.
.. Corbyn is not really interested in power because power involves compromise and he is a self-regarding purist of the worst kind.
.. But when Corbyn and his extreme left backers engage in what the British political theorist Alan Johnson has called “anti-Semitic anti-Zionism,” something far more coherent and ideological is at work.
A cross-party parliamentary committee concluded this month that Corbyn has created a “safe space” for “those with vile attitudes towards Jewish people,” and that Labour’s passivity before anti-Semitic incidents risked “lending force to allegations that elements of the Labour movement are institutionally anti-Semitic.”
.. He has attended an event organized by a pro-Palestinian group founded by an avowed Holocaust denier, Paul Eisen. He has permitted the word “Zio” — an anti-Semitic term used by the Ku Klux Klan — to become the modish slur in Labour circles on campuses and elsewhere.