No Not N.C. But The Five Candidates!
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I was corrected by a dear friend and fellow memo reader that the young pianist's last name is Alexander not Arnold. I even had the ticket stub staring me in the face so I do not know where I got Arnold from. I'm losing it.
Arnold, Alexander whatever, the young jazz pianist was unbelievable.
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There is confusion over whether Iran will have access to U.S.banks or the financial sanctions remain in place. You have Sec. Kerry suggesting, in an MSNBC appearance, Iran has mostly complied with the deal terms (the administration is peeved about missile launches but apparently will bluster and do nothing) and thus Iran will have access to America's banking system.
Then, you have testimony by the Treasury Department's sanctions chief, Adam Szubin, before a Congressional committee suggesting to Sen. Bob Corker, no relief or dollar access has been granted. If no access has been granted that would be different from what Kerry said in public but nothing surprises me when it comes to purposeful confusion or simply uncoordinated incompetency, emanating from the Obama Administration.
Congress has learned Obama's word is basically unreliable as is that of those who speak for the Administration from The IRS, EPA , Justice Department etc. (See 1 below.)
My link source came from an article written by Richard Lardner, of The Associated Press , entitled:
"US official says no access to US financial system for Iran," and which was reprinted in The Atlanta local paper recently.
You can read it for yourself: http://www.mdjonline.com/news/
Meanwhile, as the Administration struggles and wiggles to find a way to help Iran become more powerful, Obama and his lackeys at the Justice Department continue to make life difficult for American Companies seeking relief from onerous tax burdens America places on corporations who do business and create unrepatriated profits overseas.
I understand the Obama argument that foreign nations do not play fair when they create lower tax concessions for the purpose of luring relocation's by corporation's. Corporations also have an obligation to stockholders to be tax efficient so perhaps the problem lies with our tax rules. (See 1a below.)
The housing debacle was, in part, caused by political demands that banks make home loans to those who really could not afford the homes they were buying. Why? Because Democrats wanted to win votes of the underclass. GW warned it would lead to a debacle but buying votes was more important.
You can blame Sen's Schumer and Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank for some of this if you wish to seek the genesis of the most recent housing depression.
Yes, Wall Street responded to this politically created burgeoning demand with garbage mortgage tranches but the impetus was politically driven.
The same has proven true as to why the increased cost of college tuition. When the government seeded billions for education loan guarantees these "higher" education entities knew they could "heighten" tuition. Again, politicians seeking the youth vote with tax payer funding and guarantees are to blame and now we have billions of questionable loans which will default. Why?
First, not everyone is suited to go to college.
Second, many of these loans have been made with students who cannot find a job that will help them expunge these debt burdens.
Finally, when you throw a lot of money at something you get a lot of unintended consequences as pay back.
Now Bernie and Hillarious want tax payers to unburden these kids from their obligations simply because the government program went wild. What hypocrisy!
Also, Obama's Justice Department has announced they will fight the proposed merger between Halliburton and Baker-Hughes on the ground it is anti-competitive.
Halliburton and Baker-Hughes have agreed to divest billions of current components of their businesses but only G.E is a bidder and with the oil price debacle it is difficult to meet the pressing demands of The Justice Department Lawyers. Hedge Funds will make fortunes shorting these stocks and many energy corporations have gained the ear of Obama's Justice Department claiming the burden this merger will create for them. (See 1b below.)
As government gets larger it forces business consolidations because costs of compliance, more rules and regulations, higher taxes drive these occurrences and then the politicians complain about what they have caused. More hypocrisy.
Grahm-Dodd is killing small local banks and the politicians and bureaucrats scream about too large to fail which their inane policies are causing.
The issues are too complex for the average disconnected and unattached citizen to understand but when higher costs hit them the politicians connive and blame capitalists who have been driven to act in their own self-interest and they are accused of being greedy etc.
I am not excusing capitalists, their manipulating and illegal actions but many times their motivation is driven by government policies over which they have little control or influence because they are driven by profit which conflicts with political interests driven by re-election and vote buying.
There is no better economic system than free markets and competition regulated by enlightened and honest oversight. Perfect, no but beats Bernie Sanders' nonsense and Hillarious' bludgeoning disingenuous rhetoric.
Government has become the sludge that gooks up our economic system and Obama has accelerated government's meteoric growth and consequent stifling effect.
This from a long time friend (See 1c below.)
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Abbas remains obdurate so little will happen if he maintains this position and The U.N will continue to blame Israel.(See 2 and 2a below.)
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More regarding questionable off shore practices by Prime Minister Cameron's father sent to me by my English Girl Friend and fellow memo reader. (See 3 below.)
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Sometimes ignorance goes beyond bliss. (See 4 and 4a below.)
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Dick
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1) The Iran Nuclear Deal Keeps Changing
By Eli Lake
Like most of Washington, I was under the impression that the nuclear negotiations with Iran ended in July. There was the press conference in Vienna, the U.N. resolution that lifted the sanctions on Iran and the fight in Congress that followed. That turns out to have been wrong.
I should have been more suspicious when no one actually had to sign anything at the end of the negotiations or when the "deal" was not submitted to the Senate as a treaty for ratification. And while it's true that the Iranians have disposed of nuclear material, modified sites and allowed more monitoring, they also keep haggling over the terms.
Now, according to an Associated Press report, the Obama administration is considering a rule change to allow some Iranian businesses to use off shore financial institutions to access U.S. dollars in currency trades. When the White House sold it to Congress, senior Treasury officials promised the nuclear agreement would not allow such dollar transactions, since Iran's financial system has been repeatedly designated as a concern for money laundering. It was not part of the "deal" that was agreed in July, which only lifted nuclear related sanctions on Iran, but kept in place other sanctions to punish the country's support for terrorism, human rights abuses and its ballistic missile program.
In a statement Thursday urging the Treasury department not to go through with the rule change, Democratic House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer said:
I want to make clear my concerns that the Administration had indicated that there would be no further concessions beyond those specifically negotiated and briefed to Congress. I do not support granting Iran any new relief without a corresponding concession.
This is not how the Iranians see it. Over the last month, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has complained that the U.S. was not upholding its end of the bargain. He implied that Iran may have to back out of its own commitments if the U.S. does not do more to signal to foreign banks and businesses that it's safe to invest in his country.
And that's just the latest example of a new concession won by Iran. Over the summer, Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress that the U.N. resolution that ended international sanctions on Iran's nuclear program would nonetheless retain language that prohibited Iran from testing ballistic missiles. And yet a March 28 letter from the U.S. and the European Union to the U.N. Secretary General this week conspicuously declined to call Iran's recent ballistic missile tests a "violation" of that resolution.
This caught the attention of Rep. Mike Pompeo and two of his fellow Republican House members, Pete Roskam and Lee Zeldin. In a letter to Kerry sent Thursday, they write, "The seeming American refusal to name these Iranian tests as violations is in direct conflict with the administration’s earlier commitments."
The White House sees it differently. This week Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser for strategic communications told reporters that Iran's missile tests were not part of July's nuclear agreement, which is strange because most experts consider missiles that can deliver a nuclear weapon to be part of a country's nuclear program.
Again, the Iranians have been firm on this point. There is barely a day that goes by when the country's leaders don't affirm that they have a sovereign right to test as many missiles as they choose. And in case the message wasn't clear, Iranian television made sure to broadcast images of those missiles emblazoned with Hebrew words that said "Israel must be wiped off the earth."
This pattern began over the summer when Obama himself assured Congress and the public that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would have the ability to inspect any suspicious site that it wanted. The Iranians countered that their military facilities were off limits.
It turns out they were right. When the IAEA devised a plan to inspect Iran's Parchin facility, the Iranians refused international inspectors access and allowed only a ceremonial visit from the agency's director. The Iranians were allowed to collect their own site samples.
Experts disagree on whether any of these post-deal concessions are significant. The administration argues that Iran has complied with its primary commitments -- the removal of low enriched uranium, the modification of key nuclear sites like Arak and allowing far greater transparency of its program.
But this misses the point. Despite Obama's 2012 campaign promise, the president accepted an agreement in July that allowed Iran to keep in place the industrial-sized nuclear program it had built in defiance of the United Nations. This gives Iran a loaded gun with which to blackmail the rest of the world. If more concessions are not granted, then Iran can always restart its program.
In theory, Obama and future presidents could then re-impose sanctions. But realistically it will be much harder to persuade America's allies and adversaries to take drastic steps, particularly as so many other countries are now looking to reinvest in Iran's economy. After all, it took years to carefully build the coalition that imposed the sanctions that forced Iran to negotiate.
Iran's leaders seem to understand this. So does the Obama administration. And the terms of the agreement we thought was completed in July keep changing to the benefit of Iran.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
1a)
Jack Lew’s Corporate Tax Ambush
Another lawless attempt to scapegoat business in an election year.
Treasury secretary Jack Lew in Washington D.C. on March 30. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG NEWS
You can tell it’s an election year, because the Obama Administration is moving again to
blame U.S. companies for trying to remain competitive despite the developed world’s
worst corporate tax burden. No less than President Obama himself appeared in the White
House press room Tuesday to praise new Treasury rules, issued the day before, that sandbag Pfizer Inc. and other companies using foreign takeovers to reduce their tax burden.
Mr. Obama started by telling everyone how splendid the U.S. economy is doing, which
shows how low political expectations have sunk after seven years of 2% growth. This
Obama boom will be news to Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, who are both promising
faster growth through better socialism.
But on that score Mr. Obama wants to help his fellow Democrats with one more lawless
Treasury rewrite of longstanding U.S. tax law. Twice before, in 2014 and 2015, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew simply issued notices that changed the rules to make it more difficult
for a merging company to adopt a foreign legal address—so-called corporate inversions.
But those attempts flopped—because the business incentive is so great to escape America’s destructive combined state and federal corporate tax rate of more than 39%.
Now Mr. Lew is really turning the screws, as he announced a new crackdown on “serial inverters.” He’s referring to companies that have repeatedly done things that are perfectly
legal. And now he’s going to make them pay, starting with the Pfizer merger with Allergan
that Mr. Lew wants to stop. Allergan shares lost more than $15 billion in market value
Tuesday after the Treasury ambush.
In order for a U.S. firm to gain the full tax benefits of an inversion under longstanding
rules, its foreign merger partner has to be almost as large. After a series of inversion deals in recent years, there are now more big foreign companies, many based in Ireland. Mr. Lew
doesn’t want them merging with any more U.S. companies and pulling the headquarters
addresses over to Dublin. So his new rule will ignore transactions conducted in the last
three years and pretend that these firms are smaller than they really are in order to prevent
them from doing deals that other companies can still do.
This would almost surely be thrown out if it were challenged in court, but Mr. Lew knows
that is unlikely to happen. Team Obama figures they can get away with this illegal rewrite because potential corporate partners would likely need to merge and then suffer at the
hands of the IRS before they could have the standing to sue. Not many corporate
executives—or their shareholders—are willing to do that.
Mr. Lew also wants to ban what liberals call “earnings stripping.” The rest of the world
calls this lending money to a U.S. subsidiary, but the basic idea is that whenever a U.S.-
based division of a company legally deducts interest payments from its taxes, Mr. Obama
sees a tragic reduction in federal tax revenue. So Mr. Lew has decided to reinterpret a
1969 law to propose a new rule in 2016 that changes longstanding conceptions of the
difference between debt and equity in order to raise corporate tax bills.
And here’s where it gets ugly for everybody, not merely “serial inverters.” All loans
within a company will now have to be scrutinized and categorized according to new
standards. A prominent tax lawyer tells us to prepare for a “sea change in corporate back
offices” as companies navigate a new ocean of compliance questions.
As if this weren’t bad enough, Messrs. Obama and Lew accompanied their new rules with
lectures about the benefits of operating in the U.S. and its “rule of law.” But these
companies are acting legally and behaving rationally under the law that Congress has
written.
***
The irony is that Congressional leaders in both parties are eager to rewrite the corporate
tax code in a way that helps the U.S. economy. Paul Ryan has been trying to negotiate a
corporate tax reform since 2014, as have Chuck Schumer and Rob Portman in the Senate.
But Messrs. Obama and Lew won’t deal in good faith because they want any corporate
reform to be a huge net tax increase yielding tens of billions in new annual revenue they
can spend.
So the rest of the world will continue to march down the Laffer Curve on corporate tax
rates, making their countries better destinations for companies that want to be globally
competitive. Britain’s Tories recently announced a plan to cut the U.K. corporation tax
rate to 17% by 2020, from 20% now, which is down from 28% in 2010. The lowest Mr.
Obama will even consider is 28%, which is barely worth the political effort.
All of this is one more example of how Mr. Obama’s economic policies increase political uncertainty and erode the potential for faster growth and rising incomes. No one can see
the investment that won’t occur or the jobs that won’t be created in the U.S. because of the Obama-Lew desire to stick it to corporations and their workers in an election year
1b)
It's official: DoJ files lawsuit to block Halliburton from buying Baker Hughes
Halliburton (HAL +5.2%) and Baker Hughes (BHI +5.2%) move higher following official news that the U.S. Justice Department has filed a civil antitrust suit seeking to block their $35B merger deal, confirming earlier reports.
The DoJ alleges the HAL-BHI merger, which would combine the no. 2 and no. 3 oil services companies, threatens to eliminate competition, raise prices and reduce innovation in the oilfield services industry.
The companies say they will "vigorously contest" the DoJ action, and that the combination would provide customers with access to high quality and more efficient products and services, and an opportunity to reduce their cost per boe.
1c) Predictably Unpredictable
The race to the White House, what it means for you (and why the same forces are at work in your company, even if you don't see it yet)
Citizens are angry at Washington gridlock and "politics as usual." Candidates are blurring lines, not only in policy but in attitude. The assumptions of the past no longer apply. There's a reason why the Showtime documentary chronicling this year's election cycle is called "The Circus"!
We are fully immersed in a "new reality" and you are seeing it unfolding now on a very public stage. The candidates who've embraced these new realities are experiencing success; those who are slow to embrace it (or, in some cases, don't even see it) have failed miserably.
I have news for you. This "new reality" is not going away after November 8th. And the same undercurrents we're seeing play out on the national political stage are unfolding in your company...even if you don't see it yet.
Just like in politics:
- Your key stakeholders are unhappy but they won't tell you.
- Multiple generations in the workforce mean differing perspectives and conflict.
- Customers who feel ignored will take their business elsewhere.
- Strategies that worked in the past are no longer getting results.
- Advisors are stuck in the past, not addressing the realities of now.
- Your advisors are telling you what you want to hear, not what's real.
There is an old expression: "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
Don't make the same mistakes Presidential candidates have made. Learn from this moment in history and chart a successful path forward for your company, your customers and your career... Bud Hockenberg
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2)
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2a)
Palestinians reject Israel's demands for unconditioned peace talksSource: Xinhua 2016-04-05 |
| RAMALLAH, April 5 (Xinhua) -- The Palestinians insist that they will not accept the resumption of unconditioned peace talks with Israel, a senior official stated on Tuesday. |
Saeb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator and Secretary General of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), told "Voice of Palestine" Radio that the Palestinians reject the notion of restarting the peace talks with Israel unconditionally.
Erekat was responding to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's earlier remarks that he invites Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for a meeting to study ending incitement between the two sides.
"In case the meeting is held, Netanyahu should first announce an end of settlement, release prisoners arrested before signing Oslo peace accords in 1993 and recognize all the signed peace treaties between the two sides," said Erekat.
He insisted that "If Netanyahu doesn't do this, there will be no resumption of negotiations," adding that "in relation to incitement, we know how to respond to it."
Erekat accused Israel of waging a comprehensive war against the Palestinians, which includes a demolition of homes, lands confiscations, holding bodies of Palestinians and breaking into Palestinians' holy places.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++3)I saw this on the BBC News App and thought you should see it:Panama Papers: PM 'won't gain from offshore funds in future' - No 10
Downing Street is forced to further clarify David Cameron's financial affairs after questions about his late father's investment fund.
Disclaimer: The BBC is not responsible for the content of this email, and anything written in this email does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the email address nor name of the sender have been verified.
H----
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4) Hamas: Bernie Sanders by the numbers
Op-ed: The Democratic candidate was unavailable Tuesday to correct his casual traducing of Israel via a grossly inflated Gaza death toll. He was doubtless too busy winning Wisconsin. Heaven help us
David Horovitz David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011)
Bernie Sanders exacerbated his shockingly under-informed address on Israel from late last month with an interview to the New York Daily News this week in which he casually traduced Israel.
In his March speech — which he said he would have delivered at AIPAC’s Washington policy conference if only they’d let him read it out over satellite — he demanded that Israel remove its blockade from Gaza while simultaneously professing to support Israelis’ “right to live in peace and security.” Needless to say — or rather, evidently, needful to say to Sanders — backing Israelis’ right to live in peace and security entails working to ensure that terrorist groups committed to Israel’s destruction are not allowed to import the weaponry they need to achieve that goal. Demanding that Israel end the Gaza blockade is tantamount to demanding that Hamas be enabled to freely bring in rockets, missiles and all manner of other military equipment to expedite Israel’s demise. Only a politician who supports Hamas — such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan — or one with a grossly inadequate understanding of Israel and its challenges could possibly endorse such a position.
In his New York Daily News interview, Sanders dismally reconfirmed that he falls into the latter category. The would-be president castigated Israel for an ostensibly “indiscriminate” war on Gaza in the summer of 2014, and, while admitting that he didn’t really know the facts, asserted, twice, that Israel killed over 10,000 innocent civilians in the course of that conflict.
Over 10,000 innocent civilians? That’s seven times the self-serving figure asserted by Hamas, the terror group that runs Gaza, and gleefully adopted by the UN Human Rights Council, the sham body that obsessively loathes Israel. According to Hamas, 1,462 civilians were killed. The Israeli authorities believe the true figure was far lower, both because Hamas inflated the overall numbers of combatants and noncombatants killed, and because Hamas deliberately misrepresents many of its own dead gunmen, who often fought out of uniform, as civilians — to demonize Israel, and to minimize its own losses. Israel also stresses that Hamas deliberately placed Gazans in harm’s way by putting its rocket launchers and terror tunnel openings in and around their homes. Finally, Israeli officials note that no civilians whatsoever would have been killed had Hamas not chosen to maintain its violent hostility to Israel, which since 2005 has had no civilian presence and no military presence whatsoever in the Gaza Strip. In Gaza, Israel did what much of the world — including Bernie Sanders — would have it do in the West Bank: It left. And war followed.
None of this has made any impact on Bernie Sanders because, quite evidently, he hasn’t bother to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with any seriousness. This, despite asserting in that non-delivered but widely disseminated speech from last month that “issues impacting Israel and the Middle East are of the utmost importance to me, to our country and to the world.”
Only the laziest, most superficial presidential contender could allow himself to throw around false and incendiary numbers in the way that Sanders did in his New York Daily News conversation. This was by no means the only instance of him proving himself lacking in knowledge and rigor, but it was the most clear-cut and dismal, and it’s worth quoting in full.“I don’t remember the figures, but my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza. Does that sound right?” Sanders ventured initially.
His interlocutors told him he was likely wrong: “I think it’s probably high, but we can look at that,” someone from the Daily News replied, according to the paper’s transcript.
But Sanders, undeterred and un-correctable, insisted on repeating it, even as he again acknowledged that he didn’t really know what he was talking about: “I don’t have it in my number…but I think it’s over 10,000,” he persisted. “My understanding is that a whole lot of apartment houses were leveled. Hospitals, I think, were bombed. So yeah, I do believe and I don’t think I’m alone in believing that Israel’s force was more indiscriminate than it should have been.”
Yes, Mr. Sanders, a lot of homes were leveled, and other civilian facilities were targeted — when and where Israel determined that Hamas was using civilian infrastructure to shield its military infrastructure, and overwhelmingly after Israel had attempted to minimize the likely civilian impact. Sounds complicated? Well, yes, Mr. Sanders, fighting a terror group that ousted a slightly less evil leadership and now runs Gaza’s government, subverting all relevant resources to its avowed goal of destroying Israel, is complicated. Understanding those complications requires taking a little time and making a little effort. And that, all too clearly, is something Bernie Sanders is proving abidingly disinclined to do.
The Times of Israel on Tuesday reached out to the Sanders campaign, to invite him to correct his sevenfold inflation of the already likely inflated Hamas figures for Gaza’s 2014 dead, and to apologize for the error.
Correction and apology came there none. Unsurprisingly, perhaps. He and his staff were doubtless preoccupied with his triumph in Wisconsin. Yes, indeed. How could you not want a man of his caliber as president?
4a)
These Five Are the Best We Can Do?
Presidential politics are so degrading, thanks to the press and the Internet, that superior people stay out.
Midway through historian G.P. Baker’s biography of the Roman general and master
politician Sulla (139-78 B.C.), I came across the following two sentences: “There are some systems which naturally take control out of the hands of good men. There are even some
which necessarily put it in the hands of bad ones.” Baker’s observation took my mind
away from Rome and back, where it was not eager to go, to the current presidential
campaign. How did it come about that we have five such unimpressive contenders for the presidency of the United States? Is there something in our system of electing candidates
that makes inevitable the rise of the mediocre and even the exaltation of the vulgar?
Difficult to find anyone who talks about the presidential primaries with any enthusiasm.
Even yellow-dog Democrats and academic feminists can’t get much worked up for Hillary Clinton. The young are apparently taken with the socialist fantast Bernie Sanders—but
then, being young, they don’t realize he is nothing more than a digitally remastered 1930s
replay.
PHOTO: ZUMA PRESS/GETTY IMAGES/BLOOMBERG/REUTERS
On the Republican side, John Kasich
talks endlessly about his own
accomplishments—he balanced the
national budget, he worked splendidly
with those across the aisle when in
Congress, in Ohio he has done
everything but wipe out ISIS—in a
manner that, though he seems unaware of it, is off-putting even to voters who want to like
him. Ted Cruz is the very model of the contrast gainer: He looks good, that is, only in
contrast to Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump’s vulgarity is nonpareil—and by his vulgarity I don’t mean his profanity
merely, but the vulgar quality of his speech, his thought, his very sentiments. So low have things fallen owing to Donald Trump that lifelong Republicans have told me that, in a
Trump-versus-Clinton election, they are likely to hold their nose and vote for Mrs. Clinton.
This, though, doesn’t mean that politics before Donald Trump were all that elevated. For
many years now most Americans, I suspect, have not voted enthusiastically for the
candidates the system provided. Unless locked into one of the two parties, voters have used the lesser-evil standard in presidential elections. Only in the current campaign one needs the
political equivalent of a Geiger counter to discover where that lesser evil lies.
Superior people are no longer attracted to politics. They stay away because so much
connected with contemporary political life is degrading. Mitch Daniels, a thoughtful man
and a successful Republican governor of Indiana, steered clear of presidential politics
because, as he openly acknowledged, he had no wish to put his family through the
humiliation that accompanies running for the office.
The media and Internet are the major instruments of contemporary political degradation.
The media were once more restrained, operating under a largely self-imposed control.
During the Kennedy administration, journalists agreed not to photograph the president
smoking or playing golf; as for his high jinks above stairs in the White House, that was
never up for public discussion. In earlier years, no reporters brought up the lady friends of Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower, and focusing on FDR’s physical incapacity
during wartime was unthinkable.
Things changed under the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. His position on the Vietnam
War went contrary to that of most members of the media, who decided that opening the
president to attack was not only feasible but honorable. The media’s adversarial role
intensified under Richard Nixon. After Watergate, “investigative journalism” became one
of the heroic professions. What investigative journalists chiefly investigated was
malfeasance and above all scandal.
The advent of the Internet made this all the worse. The Internet is without an ethical
standard. On it anyone can say anything—and usually does. Donald Trump has added to
the demeaning quality of the proceedings by using the Internet—those endless insulting
tweets—and attracting press and television with his steady stream of attacks on the
personal lives of his opponents.
The only people willing to put up with the scourging that running for office now entails
are those of vast and usually empty ambition. Viewing the candidates of both parties
during the debates, one felt that nearly every one of the participants was in business for
him- or herself.
One saw Marco Rubio and thought, in another time a successful siding salesman. One
saw Carly Fiorina and thought, in the old days a scolding grammar-school principal. One
saw Martin O’Malley and thought, who let this guy off the used-car lot? One sees Hillary Clinton and thinks how exhausting it must be for her, day after day, to argue on behalf of
all those things—justice, equality, fairness to women—that in their personal life she and
her husband flouted.
How did we get here? In ways not yet successfully explained but that seem indubitable, the Internet and in its trail the news media have come to cater to, if they have not helped
create, the lowering of the national attention span and the taste for complication. Today it is difficult to engage the interest of much of the public in anything above the level of scandal. Serious political discourse has long been one casualty of this; civility is now another. The consequences of these losses are likely to be on exhibition, in HD, in a Trump-Clinton
election contest, which figures to be America’s first PG-13 race for the presidency. My
advice is don’t let the kids watch it.
Mr. Epstein’s books include “Masters of the Games: Essays and Stories on Sport”
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
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