Let’s see, this week, Donald Trump continued his public attacks on the family of a Muslim US Army Captain killed while serving in Iraq.

Trump made it clear that he is uninterested in GOP unity by announcing specifically that he is not supporting Paul Ryan or John McCain.

Airing of the famous Daisy political commercial by Democrats was made redundant when some source within the Trump Campaign leaked to Joe Scarborough the unsettling information that Donald Trump asked an unidentified foreign policy expert engaged in advising him, three times, why the US could not use nuclear weapons. That one made headlines all day yesterday.

The same RNC bigwigs who suppressed opposition and rammed the Trump nomination through the Convention two weeks ago, this week, are reportedly panicking.

Reince Priebus is described as “very frustrated” and “stressed,” because he is “running out of excuses” to offer party bigwigs about Trump’s political incompetence and indifference to basic political norms. Republicans are panicking because Trump is frittering away a chance to defeat Hillary Clinton amid “self inflicted mistakes” and “missed opportunities.”

Trump is sinking in the polls. Even Fox News is giving Hillary a ten-point lead.

And it’s only the beginning of August. The boxcar-loads of opposition research the Dems and their media allies have been saving up are still just sitting there, waiting to be unloaded and fired.

We are faced with two possibilities: either Donald Trump is such a spoiled and totally-deranged sociopathic narcissist that he is out of touch with reality, unadvisable and uncontrollable, and his personal dementia is causing him to self-destruct in the course of the campaign, or the Clinton-Trump Conspiracy Theory, the hypothesis that Trump was put up to all this by Bill Clinton as a diabolically-clever, Hail-Mary-Pass strategy to sabotage the Republican Party’s nominating process and elect the hideously-unpopular Hillary in what-ought-to-have-been a Republican landslide victory year, is really true.

(NYM contemplated the Conspiracy theory as far back as February and found further evidence in May.)

There is no way to know the truth at present, but it’s going to be interesting to watch events unfold.

Either way, whether Donald Trump is simply so nutsy-cuckoo that he can’t help sabotaging himself, or whether he is throwing the election deliberately and intentionally, it is a sad commentary on all those loco-in-the-cabeza Trumpshirts out there that they have been themselves barking mad enough to pin their hopes and lend their support to a totally-unqualified, ethically-challenged, blowhard millionaire, who is dubiously Republican and obviously anything but a principled conservative. Don’t blame National Review or the Conservative Movement for electing Hillary, when it was you who rejected all the decent, rational, conservative, and qualified GOP candidates and went whoring after a Reality-TV Celebrity Clown with a big mouth and a handful of airy promises and crackpot policy positions.

The Hill:

Trump: Republicans ‘have no choice’ but to vote for me.

Donald Trump said Thursday that Republicans wary of his campaign have little choice but to vote for him anyway.

“If you really like Donald Trump, that’s great, but if you don’t, you have to vote for me anyway. You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges,” Trump said at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

“Have no choice, sorry, sorry, sorry. You have no choice,” Trump continued, calling the late Justice Antonin Scalia a “great guy” and acknowledging tied decisions at the Supreme Court after his death.

In the first place, I do not believe that Donald Trump has any real conservative convictions, and I don’t believe his promises are worth any more than his payment agreements with local New Jersey contractors. Once he’s in office, he can do anything he pleases, and what Trump will do is whatever he thinks is good for Trump.

Supreme Court seats are also not the be all and end all of everything. We had a majority of Republican appointees and Chief Justice Roberts changed his vote once and saved Obamacare twice.

The fact is Donald Trump is not only unqualified to be president, insofar as he has any positions, his positions (Nativism, Protectionism, Isolationism) constitute reprehensible and long-refuted debris from the rubbish-pile of American political history. Know-Nothing-ism Redivivus has nothing to do with Conservatism or the traditional positions of the Republican Party.

Trump is a repulsive personality. He is vulgar and a bully, and he gives constant evidence of being afflicted with a very serious personality disorder. Faced with criticism or opposition, he behaves like an ill-mannered 8-year-old rather than a serious adult. My own opinion is that there is something really wrong with the judgement of anyone who would promote the contemporary equivalent of Caligula to the chief magistracy of the Republic.

I’m afraid that Hillary Clinton is not an acceptable alternative. Hillary is a crook and a cynical democrat demagogue allied with the radical left. She, too, has some kind of disordered personality, and a record of bad judgement.

The fact is we are simply screwed this year. There is no major party choice to vote for. It’s happened before. The first presidential election I was eligible to vote, the personally-repulsive, China-recognizing, EPA-creating, non-conservative Richard Nixon was running against George McGovern who was representing the Anti-Vietnam War socialist radical left. I voted tongue-in-cheek for John Schmidtz, a Bircher congressman who talked about the Illumati Conspiracy.

We are going to have a bad four years however this comes out. I’ll grant you that there is a certain charm to the idea of electing Trump. Putting Trump in the White House would be a lot like stuffing a disgruntled water snake into a thoroughly-disliked high school Biology teacher’s desk drawer. But this is our country we’re talking about, not high school. Human lives, the fate of the free world, and the Constitution are at stake. We’re probably better off really if (ugh!) Hillary wins. That way, we take our lumps for another four years, and elect a qualified genuine conservative in 2020 after Hillary makes a major mess and the chickens really come home to roost. But I will not be voting for her either.

Five Feet of Fury‘s Kathy Shaidle, at Takimag, attempts to explain, and justify, the twisted motivations of someone willing to support Donald Trump.

I don’t like Donald Trump on the First Amendment, don’t trust him on the Second, and positively loathe him on eminent domain. I covered that here at Taki’s in October 2012, when I was also still pissed at Trump for firing Adam Carolla on The Apprentice.

Trump says creepy crap about his daughter.

He’s vowed to bring manufacturing back to America just as corrupt, collectivist labor unions were finally in hospice; I grew up in a steel town, in the ’70s—I dread spending what’s left of my life hearing “Take This Job and Shove It” on an endless loop once millions of Americans suddenly remember why they hated that type of work in the first place. (With the added “bonus” of having to pay more for—or go without—all the stuff they used to buy so cheaply at Costco and Walmart, presuming they stay in business.)

I’m afraid he’ll turn the Map Room into the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.

But if Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, I will literally fall to my knees and weep with relief.

I’m not proud of that. I hate feeling propelled, rather like a cat in heat, by a toxic cocktail of shallow novelty-seeking and primitive tribalism. As a conscientious, civic-minded reason to cheer a presidential wannabe, “He annoys all the right people” ranks somewhere between “It’s just time for a change” and “This’ll teach the bastards a lesson.” I know.

But 15 years after September 11—and however long it’s been since O.J., and since “global warming” became a “thing”—I just can’t cope. And drinking’s not an option.

I thought we were going to nuke Afghanistan, not build schools for inbred pedophiles with no written language—or worse, let them and their ilk into the country. I agree with Derb that “the most amazing, astounding, astonishing statistic of the 21st century is that the annual rate of Muslim immigration into the U.S.A. increased after 9/11.”

Meanwhile, millions of low-IQ Mexicans stream across your southern border, bringing their well-documented attitudes about rape, animal cruelty, drunk driving, and litter. (Can you people really not mow your own lawns or build your own decks? A serious question for another time…)

Now, switching from grapes to cotton: I figured that after Americans got electing their first black president out of their systems, they’d return to their senses—not hand the fool a second term.

The political correctness my anarchist pals and I wrote off in the late ’80s as an irritating passing fad on a par with Cabbage Patch Dolls has become, along with certain varieties of mental illness, enshrined in public policy and entrenched in quotidian intercourse.

It’s 1968 with (even) crappier music. I want it over.

Read the whole thing.

Apparently, the desire to pull down the pillars of the Temple and let the roof fall on those annoying holier-than-thou liberals is sufficient motivation to cause some people to depart from reality and to become ready to vote for the presidency of an unqualified clown whose only real area of agreement with genuine conservatives is a yen to give an upraised finger to political correctness. If you are sane, it’s not enough.

Reuters:

North Korea has backed presumptive U.S. Republican nominee Donald Trump, with a propaganda website praising him as “a prescient presidential candidate” who can liberate Americans living under daily fear of nuclear attack by the North.

A column carried on Tuesday by DPRK Today, one of the reclusive and dynastic state’s mouthpieces, described Trump as a “wise politician” and the right choice for U.S. voters in the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election.

It described his most likely Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, as “thick-headed Hillary” over her proposal to apply the Iran model of wide sanctions to resolve the nuclear weapons issue on the Korean peninsula.

Read the whole thing.

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But, hey! Kim Jong-Un was undoubtedly just reciprocating. After all, back in January, Donald Trump had kind words for North Korea’s insane and murderous dictator. In fact, he praised him specifically for his ruthlessness and brutality.

Telegraph:

Donald Trump has praised the leadership style of North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un, for the “amazing” way he murders political rivals.

During a Republican political rally in Iowa at the weekend, he repeated his assertion that Muslims should not be allowed to enter the US before turning his attention to the North Korean despot, who has carried out frequent purges of officials.

“You’ve got to give him credit. How many young guys – he was like 26 or 25 when his father died – take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden… he goes in, he takes over, he’s the boss,” said Mr Trump, known for his own less than subtle style of leadership in the American version of The Apprentice.

“It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one. This guy doesn’t play games.

My Yale classmate Charles Lipson (now teaching law at Chicago) admires the slickness of Slick Willie over at the Huffington Post.

Bill Clinton’s convention speech was a tour de force. He had a difficult task to accomplish, or rather, several difficult tasks, and he performed them as well as any politician could.

His overriding task was to humanize Hillary and reintroduce her to America, for the 37th time. He spent much of his speech doing that, sharing anecdotes of Hillary as a student, a loving daughter from a good Midwestern family, a young woman willing to take chances, and a new mother raising Chelsea—all while working on important policy issues in Arkansas. He subtly depicted her as the leader in their marriage, or at least an equal partner, suggesting he knew how to become a “First Husband” and was ready for the role. He spoke of their meeting in the Yale Law Library, falling in love, giving birth to Chelsea, raising her, and taking her to college, becoming empty nesters.

In short, Bill Clinton depicted a real person in a real marriage. It is widely assumed, of course, that their marriage is a sham, filled with his cheating and her cold fury, held together only by their political ambitions. As Dennis Miller once put it, “Bill and Hillary’s marriage couldn’t have been any more about convenience than if they’d installed a Slim Jim rack and Slurpee machine at the base of their bed.” Bill’s speech was a long, brilliantly-crafted and perfectly-delivered effort to paint over that image and present a new one. …

In sum, he painted a portrait of someone who deserves to be elected, if you believe the portrait. But do you?

Bill’s whole speech led up to that question, and he did not leave it hanging. Using the Tom Sawyer approach he has honed over decades, he asked it directly. He said that he had just described a person who was very different from the person Republicans described last week. That means one of them is real, one’s a cartoon. The question is, which picture is the real Hillary? He answered that question in his quietest, most sincere tones, biting his lip and inviting empathy.

It was the work of a master salesman. He brought the buyers into the showroom, showed them a “great buy, exactly what you need” and pointed out all the bells and whistles. But he cannot close the deal himself. He’s not running; Hillary is, and she lacks Bill’s rhetorical gifts and zest for campaigning. He loves to touch the flesh; she recoils from it. She is a grating, hectoring speaker and a far less effective campaigner than Bill Clinton (or Donald Trump). Now that Bill has primed the customers, the big question is “Can Hillary close the deal?”

Read the whole thing.

Michael Isikoff reports that there are clues to the hackers’ identity.

Just weeks after she started preparing opposition research files on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort last spring, Democratic National Committee consultant Alexandra Chalupa got an alarming message when she logged into her personal Yahoo email account.

“Important action required,” read a pop-up box from a Yahoo security team that is informally known as “the Paranoids.” “We strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors.”

Chalupa — who had been drafting memos and writing emails about Manafort’s connection to pro-Russian political leaders in Ukraine — quickly alerted top DNC officials. “Since I started digging into Manafort, these messages have been a daily oc­­­­currence on my Yahoo account despite changing my p­­a­ssword often,” she wrote in a May 3 email to Luis Miranda, the DNC’s communications director, which included an attached screengrab of the image of the Yahoo security warning.

“I was freaked out,” Chalupa, who serves as director of “ethnic engagement” for the DNC, told Yahoo News in an interview, noting that she had been in close touch with sources in Kiev, Ukraine, including a number of investigative journalists, who had been providing her with information about Manafort’s political and business dealings in that country and Russia.

“This is really scary,” she said.

Chalupa’s message is among nearly 20,000 hacked internal DNC emails that were posted over the weekend by WikiLeaks as the Democratic Party gathered for its national convention in Philadelphia. Those emails have already provoked a convulsion in Democratic Party ranks, leading to the resignation of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the wake of posted messages in which she and other top DNC officials privately derided Bernie Sanders and plotted to undercut his insurgent campaign against Hillary Clinton.

But Chalupa’s message, which had not been previously reported, stands out: It is the first indication that the reach of the hackers who penetrated the DNC has extended beyond the official email accounts of committee officials to include their private email and potentially the content on their smartphones. After Chalupa sent the email to Miranda (which mentions that she had invited this reporter to a meeting with Ukrainian journalists in Washington), it triggered high-level concerns within the DNC, given the sensitive nature of her work. “That’s when we knew it was the Russians,” said a Democratic Party source who has knowledge of the internal probe into the hacked emails. In order to stem the damage, the source said, “we told her to stop her research.” …

In mid-June, Democratic Party suspicions about the hackers seemed to be confirmed when CrowdStrike, an outside security firm retained by the DNC, reported that it traced the hackers to two separate units linked to Russia’s security services: the FSB, Russia’s equivalent of the FBI, and GRU, the country’s military intelligence agency. The company noted strong similarities between the attack on the DNC by the suspected GRU hackers and previous cyberintrusions of unclassified systems at the White House, the State Department and the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (After discovering the data breach, a DNC security source said its cyberexperts noted that the hackers’ exfiltration of files took place “9 to 5, Moscow time.”)

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Patrick Tucker, at the Atlantic, has more details.

Considerable evidence shows that the Wikileaks dump was an orchestrated act by the Russian government, working through proxies, to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

“This has all the hallmarks of tradecraft. The only rationale to release such data from the Russian bulletproof host was to empower one candidate against another. The Cold War is alive and well,” Tom Kellermann, the CEO of Strategic Cyber Ventures said.

Here’s the timeline: On June 14, the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, under contract with the DNC, announced in a blog post that two separate Russian intelligence groups had gained access to the DNC network. One group, FANCY BEAR or APT 28, gained access in April. The other, COZY BEAR, (also called Cozy Duke and APT 29) first breached the network in the summer of 2015.

The cybersecurity company FireEye first discovered APT 29 in 2014 and was quick to point out a clear Kremlin connection. “We suspect the Russian government sponsors the group because of the organizations it targets and the data it steals. Additionally, APT29 appeared to cease operations on Russian holidays, and their work hours seem to align with the UTC +3 time zone, which contains cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg,” they wrote in their report on the group. Other U.S. officials have said that the group looks like it has sponsorship from the Russian government due in large part to the level of sophistication behind the group’s attacks.