Loose Ends (5)

• George Will thinks Republicans should ditch Trump and draft Mitch Daniels for president. I heartily agree with the idea, though I doubt you can persuade Daniels to do it. I tried once, in 2011. Will:

Without explicitly mentioning the paranoia currently convulsing many campuses, Daniels identified its origin. He said that “even more absurd” than the idea that life is a lottery is the idea that “most of us are victims of some kind, and therefore in desperate need of others to protect us against a world of predators and against our own gullibility.”

Daniels’s words to the Class of 2016 clarify why the 2016 presidential campaign offers an echo, not a choice. The presumptive Democratic nominee is a progressive committed to government ambitious enough to iron the wrinkles of luck out of life, and to distribute equity to life’s victims, meaning to everyone. The presumptive Republican nominee is a world-class whiner (a victim of debate moderators who are meanies, and most recently of a “rigged” judicial system) who is telling Americans that they are comprehensively victimized (by wily Chinese exporters, manufacturers making Oreo cookies abroad, freeloading allies, etc.). Purdue has the president the nation needs.

• The (London) Spectator, a most sober publication, has come out in favor of Brexit. Their editorial is behind a subscription paywall, but this link gets you to it through a workaround.) Sample:

Since 1975 the EU has mutated in exactly the way we then feared and now resembles nothing so much as the Habsburg Empire in its dying days. A bloated bureaucracy that has outgrown all usefulness. A parliament that represents many nations, but with no democratic legitimacy. Countries on its periphery pitched into poverty, or agitating for secession. The EU’s hunger for power has been matched only by its incompetence. The European Union is making the people of our continent poorer, and less free.

This goes far beyond frustration at diktats on banana curvature. The EU has started to deform our government. Michael Gove revealed how, as a cabinet member, he regularly finds himself having to process edicts, rules and regulations that have been framed at European level. Laws that no one in Britain had asked for, and which no one elected to the House of Commons has the power to change. What we refer to as British government is increasingly no such thing. It involves the passing of laws written by people whom no one in Britain elected, no one can name and no one can remove.

Sort of sounds like Washington, DC, and its relationship to the states, doesn’t it?

• Some internet hackers are hacking into ISIS Twitter feeds and spamming them with porn and homoeroticism. I like the spirit of this, but I’m not convinced that ISIS folks aren’t actually in favor of porn and homoeroticism. It sent me back to Richard Grenier’s fabulous 1983 comic novel, The Marrakesh One-Two. If Grenier had been more famous, he’d have had the fatwa against him before Rushdie. Read especially the opening paragraph of chapter 9. That’s all I’ll say. (Though I will share it with our VIP subscribers in our resumed regular VIP Briefings. Another reason to subscribe and become a VIP member!)

• Speaking of hackers, isn’t there something circular about hacking a hack like Hillary? Anyway, the Russian hack of the DNC website has yielded what purports to be the 210-page opposition file on Donald Trump. Mother Jones has posted it here. Maybe someone wants us to believe it is a hack to get the whole thing out there all at once? Related question: why didn’t the Russians hack the RNC? Probably because there’s no intelligence to be found there. (Rim shot!)