The video, with Spanish subtitles, comes from the Democratic National Committee and is aimed at a particular group of Latino voters: those who fled Mr. Chávez’s Venezuela and other authoritarian countries, like Cuba. It has a particular resonance in Florida, a battleground state and home to an increasing numbers of Venezuelans, especially in Doral, west of Miami, where Senator Marco Rubio has an office.
.. The debate has spread to Mexico, where politicians are comparing Mr. Trump to the leftist presidential hopeful Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As Mr. Trump has suggested he might do, Mr. López Obrador rejected the results of Mexico’s last two presidential elections, claiming he was robbed by fraud, and leading protests.
.. “It is not an ideology,” he writes, “but a political logic.” It pitches the idea of a noble section of the people against the idea of an utterly corrupt elite. The populist political strategy centers on this conflict in an emotive way, adapting to fit different contexts — anti-immigrant in the United States, anti-American in Venezuela.
.. While they have wildly different backgrounds and advocate different policies, they are united in posing as the enemy of the entrenched, corrupt elite, who make possible whatever ails the people, be it Muslim refugees or global capital.
.. As the establishment is held as corrupt, today’s populists blame it and its institutions — government, the media — for anything that goes wrong, even when it’s the populists themselves who are to blame. When newspapers report accusations of sexual assault by Mr. Trump, he blames a media conspiracy. When Venezuelans march to complain they have no food, the government denounces a plot by oligarchs and the media. Mr. Trump assailed a judge overseeing a lawsuit against him as being biased. Mr. Chávez jailed a judge who made a ruling he disagreed with.
Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?
In the heat of a presidential campaign, you’d think that a story about one party’s nominee giving a large contribution to a state attorney general who promptly shut down an inquiry into that nominee’s scam “university” would be enormous news. But we continue to hear almost nothing about what happened between Donald Trump and Florida attorney general Pam Bondi.
.. Trump paid a penalty to the IRS after his foundation made an illegal contribution to Bondi’s PAC.
.. And the comparison with stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails or the Clinton Foundation is extremely instructive. Whenever we get some new development in any of those Clinton stories, you see blanket coverage — every cable network, every network news program, every newspaper investigates it at length. And even when the new information serves to exonerate Clinton rather than implicate her in wrongdoing, the coverage still emphasizes that the whole thing just “raises questions” about her integrity.
.. The story of something like the Clinton Foundation gets stretched out over months and months with repeated tellings, always with the insistence that questions are being raised and the implication that shady things are going on, even if there isn’t any evidence at a particular moment to support that idea... The end result of this process is that because of all that repeated examination of Clinton’s affairs, people become convinced that she must be corrupt to the core. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of negative coverage of Trump, because of course there is, but it’s focused mostly on the crazy things he says on any given day... But the truth is that you’d have to work incredibly hard to find a politician who has the kind of history of corruption, double-dealing, and fraud that Donald Trump has. The number of stories which could potentially deserve hundreds and hundreds of articles is absolutely staggering
- According to the allegations, Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected.
.. the frames around the candidates are locked in: Trump is supposedly the crazy/bigoted one, and Clinton is supposedly the corrupt one. Once we decide that those are the appropriate lenses through which the two candidates are to be viewed, it shapes the decisions the media make every day about which stories are important to pursue.
U.S. diplomats fear Trump will unleash cronies as ambassadors
Will he just appoint a buddy to schmooze with the Kremlin?
America’s diplomats are shuddering at the notion that Donald Trump, if elected president, will send unqualified cronies around the world as ambassadors, exporting his bombastic style to sensitive jobs that represent the face of the United States.
.. Like some of his predecessors, President Barack Obama has been criticized for handing out plum diplomatic posts to prominent campaign donors. According to one analysis, Obama has named at least 29 campaign bundlers to ambassadorships, many of them in posh Western European nations.
.. Around 30 percent of Obama’s ambassador appointments have been “political,” according to statistics kept by AFSA. That’s in line with most of Obama’s predecessors dating to the Gerald Ford era.
.. Some countries may even prefer having a political appointee as the U.S. ambassador because of the belief that person is a heavy-hitter who is more likely to have the president’s ear than a traditional State Department employee. Generally speaking, the tougher, less-glamorous assignments — such as Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Yemen — tend to go to career diplomats,
.. Already, there is speculation that Trump may name former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as his ambassador to Mexico
.. no matter who wins November’s election, the American penchant for political appointments is undercutting U.S. anti-corruption initiatives around the world. It’s hard to warn other nations against the dangers of cronyism or selling political office when so many of your ambassadors were campaign bundlers.
The Death of Idealism
This presidential election is a contest between the oldest of the baby boomers. Yet Donald Trump, 70, and Hillary Clinton, 68, represent two very different decades in the formation of that generation. Donald Trump became famous as a classic 1980s type, while Hillary Clinton first attained public notice as a classic 1960s type.
.. During the Reagan years, writers celebrated capitalism not only as a wealth-generating engine but also as a moral system, a way to arouse hard work, creativity and trust.
.. A friend of mine came up to me at one of those parties and summarized the atmosphere: “Not indicted, not invited.”
.. As we saw on Monday night, Trump now represents capitalism degraded to pure selfishness. He treats other people like objects and lies with abandon. Proud to be paying no taxes while others foot the bill, proud to have profited off the housing bust that caused so much suffering, he lacks even the barest conception of civic life and his responsibilities to it.
.. When asked why she wants to be president or for any positive vision, she devolves into a list of programs. And it is never enough just to list three programs in an answer; she has to pile in an arid hodgepodge of eight or nine. This is pure interest-group liberalism — buying votes with federal money — not an inspiring image of the common good.
.. The twin revolutions of the 1960s and the 1980s liberated the individual — first socially and then economically — and weakened the community. More surprising, this boomer-versus-boomer campaign has decimated idealism.
.. Ironically, one of the tasks for those who succeed the baby boomers is to restore idealism. The great challenge of our moment is the crisis of isolation and fragmentation, the need to rebind the fabric of a society that has been torn by selfishness, cynicism, distrust and autonomy.
.. At some point there will have to be a new vocabulary and a restored anthropology, emphasizing love, friendship, faithfulness, solidarity and neighborliness that pushes people toward connection rather than distrust. Millennials, I think, want to be active in this rebinding. But inspiration certainly isn’t coming from the aging boomers now onstage.