Over at the CIA and the National Security Agency headquarters, they must be really enjoying watching Democrats in Philadelphia squirm over WikiLeaks’s exposure of tens of thousands of internal Democratic Party emails. There’s a word for what is happening in the intelligence community:
Blowback.
Throughout the entirety of the Obama administration, nothing was done as WikiLeaks damaged our national security with its serial leaks of highly classified intelligence documents.
.. When in 2010 WikiLeaks released more than 76,000 secret intelligence documents — exposing “the identities of at least 100 Afghans who were informing on the Taliban, including the names of their villages, family members, the Taliban commanders on whom they were informing, and even GPS coordinates where they could be found,” as I wrote in The Post — nothing was done.
.. Instead of targeting the CIA or the NSA, WikiLeaks has gone after an organization Democrats actually care about — the Democratic National Committee.
As Democrats Gather, a Russian Subplot Raises Intrigue
But the release on Friday of some 20,000 stolen emails from theDemocratic National Committee’s computer servers, many of them embarrassing to Democratic leaders, has intensified discussion of the role of Russian intelligence agencies in disrupting the 2016 campaign.
The (G.O.P.) Party’s Over
This column has argued for a while now that there is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy. At least a one-party autocracy can order things to get done.
.. We can survive a few years of such deadlock in Washington, but we sure can’t take another four or eight years without real decay setting in, and that explains what I’m rooting for in this fall’s elections: I hope Hillary Clinton wins all 50 states and the Democrats take the presidency, the House, the Senate and, effectively, the Supreme Court.
.. Finally, if Trump presides over a devastating Republican defeat across all branches of government, the G.O.P. will be forced to do what it has needed to do for a long time: take a time out in the corner. In that corner Republicans could pull out a blank sheet of paper and on one side define the biggest forces shaping the world today — and the challenges and opportunities they pose to America — and on the other side define conservative, market-based policies to address them.
.. Right now, the G.O.P. is not a healthy center-right party. It is a mishmash of religious conservatives; angry white males who fear they are becoming a minority in their own country and hate trade; gun-control opponents; pro-lifers; anti-regulation and free-market small-business owners; and pro- and anti-free trade entrepreneurs.
.. The party was once held together by the Cold War. But as that faded away it has been held together only by renting itself out to whomever could energize its base and keep it in power — Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party, the National Rifle Association. But at its core there was no real common denominator, no take on the world, no real conservative framework.
.. John Boehner gave up being speaker of the House because he knew that his caucus had become a madhouse, incapable of governing.
Why Trump Wins: He knows border wars have replaced culture wars.
Instead, Trump held a large rally in Phoenix, where he was introduced by Arizona’s tough-on-the-border sheriff, Joe Arpaio, drawing a crowd far larger than any other candidate had mustered. Shortly after, in Las Vegas, he brought on stage the father of a young man who had been murdered by an illegal alien. He mocked NBC for dropping him while standing by Brian Williams, who had been caught lying on the air. This was the backdrop to Trump’s surge: a tough immigration and border-control message reinforced by a refusal to bend before what had become a massive barrage of liberal denunciation.
Within weeks, every prestige newspaper in America had published columns written by Republican neoconservative figures anathematizing Trump and warning that his success would “stain” the Republican Party. Republican voters, from that July through the following May, ignored them.
.. Trump’s victory in the primaries has elicited a great deal of establishment hand-wringing and wondering what more could have been done to stop him. Many blamed the press for giving Trump “free media”—which of course he benefited from only because he was unafraid of reporters, and viewers wanted to see and hear him. Some pointed to the unwieldy size of the initial GOP field or the failure of well-funded establishment super PACs to attack Trump early on. In fact, the GOP establishment campaign against Trump was massive: the pages and websites ofNational Review, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, the New York Times, and the Washington Post overflowed with anti-Trump polemics throughout the campaign season, and Trump was eventually bombarded with more than $70 million of negative TV advertising, three times more than he spent in his own campaign. Yet it seemed to make little difference.
.. But his weaknesses are obvious as well—a shallow grasp of policy, a tendency frequently to say things that are probably not true, an impulse to personalize conflicts and create unnecessary antagonisms. Few would describe his character as “presidential.”
.. For all of Trump’s talents, his victory probably owed as much to underlying political currents as to his brilliance as a leader and political tactician.
.. He won many who consciously or unconsciously identified with the pre-multicultural America that existed for most of the last century. And he won with backing from the growing group of Republicans who understand that the Iraq War was an unmitigated disaster.
.. When one examines Trump’s main opponents— Bush and Rubio then, Hillary Clinton now—on the critical issues of immigration (legal and illegal), trade, and Iraq and other military interventions, one finds no substantial differences between them. In foreign policy, the liberal interventionists who would staff a Hillary administration line up seamlessly with neoconservatives in support of continued American “hegemony.” A recently published Center for a New American Security report, produced by charter members of both groups, makes this unambiguously clear. With some tweaking on social issues and the Second Amendment, Hillary Clinton could have run interchangeably with Bush and Rubio in the Republican field, and vice versa.
.. the 2016 election ratifies a party realignment that began in 1968, when white working-class voters started moving towards the GOP. The core of Trump’s supporters are the political descendants of what had been the backbone of the Democratic New Deal coalition: working-class whites, politically strongest in the South and flyover states. On the triad of trade, immigration, and foreign policy these voters are nationalist, not globalist
.. On the left, the argument that national boundaries are themselves, like racism or sexism, an arbitrary and unjust form of discrimination is made with growing frequency.
.. Lind suggests that “border wars” have replaced “culture wars” as the critical dividing line between the parties.
.. But even if he loses, he will have transformed the Republican Party. Because the Democratic coalition, perhaps now best exemplified by the twin poles of Goldman Sachs and Black Lives Matter, is inherently unstable
.. The concept of “white privilege”—whose emergence has taken the education world by storm—seeks essentially to hold responsible all whites, whatever their own views or personal conduct, for the legacy of racism.
.. the growing use of anti-“white privilege” pedagogical techniques—such as films, teaching exercises, mandatory confession, and other measures—has had the unintended result of making many white students, and their appalled parents, more conscious of having an inescapable and defining white identity. Trump is probably quite sincere in his assertion that he himself is “the least racist person” in politics, but there is little doubt his campaign has benefited from a white reaction to an emerging liberal cultural and educational discourse that depicts whites, and especially white males, as more dangerous and immoral than any other people.
.. the growing use of anti-“white privilege” pedagogical techniques—such as films, teaching exercises, mandatory confession, and other measures—has had the unintended result of making many white students, and their appalled parents, more conscious of having an inescapable and defining white identity. Trump is probably quite sincere in his assertion that he himself is “the least racist person” in politics, but there is little doubt his campaign has benefited from a white reaction to an emerging liberal cultural and educational discourse that depicts whites, and especially white males, as more dangerous and immoral than any other people.