Dominic Green

Convention season ain’t over till the dead cat bounces.  A dead cat bounce, as followers of the animal spirits of the market know, is a small recovery in the value of a declining asset. As the wisdom of those who work in tall buildings has it, even a dead cat bounces if you drop it from a high window.The week before the Democratic convention, the polls showed Donald Trump trimming Biden’s double-digit lead into single figures. The numbers varied, but they averaged out to suggest that Biden was 7 or 8 percent ahead — not yet within the margin of error, but trending toward it.The Democrats’ non-conference that was nearly in Milwaukee was meant to arrest that decline.

Congratulations to Sen. Tim Scott for delivering one of the best speeches on the opening night of the Republican meta-convention, and combining an inspiring personal story with a dog whistle louder than Kimberly Guilfoyle.Guilfoyle merely bellowed a passing slur at ‘cosmopolitan elites’. As the daughter of a Puerto Rican ‘immigrant’, a cable news star, the ex-wife of a governor and the girlfriend of the President’s son, she knows a member of the cosmopolitan elite when she sees one — for instance, when she looks in the mirror.Scott went beyond hypocrisy. ‘They want to take more money from your pocket and give it to Manhattan elites and Hollywood moguls, so they get tax breaks,’ he said of the Democrats.

It’s no fun to see Bill Clinton in a virtual vacuum. He’s a people person, a glad-hander, a back-rubber, a donor-stroker, a bottom-fondler. But on Tuesday night, Clinton was a prisoner of Zoom. The big dawg had no legs to rub against.Clinton probably felt as bad about it as his audience. No extended ovation and whooping. No chance to mingle in the green room and offer a White House internship to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Not even an over-long embrace of Rosalynn Carter or a back massage from Jeffrey Epstein’s 22-year-old masseuse after an arduous journey on a private jet to Africa.Tuesday Night was Legacy Night at the Democratic convention, which is not in Milwaukee even though it claims it is.

The Executive Order is political weakness at its most powerful. The spectacle of Donald Trump adding his Sharpie-stroke to the catalogue of puissant signatures confirms the United States’ slow but steady drift from a Romanesque republic to Roman-lite empire. Trump was supposed to be better, or at least different.The wisdom of the day has it that the business of America is business, even when, as in healthcare, that business is thoroughly corporatized. Who better to negotiate through the paralysis of Congress than a commercial deal-maker, a splitter of the difference, a washer of one hand with the other?

Why should the United States prop up the defense of Germany, the richest country in Europe — and against Russia, Germany’s closest energy partner?Two reasons. One is what the sociologists call ‘path dependency’. The US has had troops in Germany since the winter of 1944, and the Cold War and Nato turned military occupation into strategic alliance. Since 1990, a vast machinery of budgets and employments, civilian and military, has perpetuated a strategy for a conflict that no longer exists. As British soldiers used to sing, ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.’ This is not a good reason for risking American lives.The other reason that American forces are there is because they have to be somewhere near there.

For most Jewish Americans, Jared Kushner is the son-in-law and counselor of a president they didn’t vote for in 2016. He prays with a punctiliousness they romanticize but prefer not to emulate. Jared’s grandparents learned about history the hard way: they survived the Holocaust and immigrated with no money and little English. The typical Jewish American grandparents are boomers who vote Democratic all the way down the card. They believe America is different for the Jews, even if they were raised to believe that difference was un-American and bad for their careers. And here comes Jared, a frum Jew who married the boss’s blonde daughter. It could be a romance from Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. Less romantically, it is a tale from history.

Show me who you lie about and I’ll tell you what you are. The big lie in this, our season of historical illiteracy and gratuitous destruction, is that the Jews are responsible for police killings of black Americans. How? The racist police of Amerikkka are trained by the Zionists. That’s right. America has no history of violence against blacks and no history of anti-black policing. In the new blood libel, America was one big interracial paradise before the Jews taught Derek Chauvin to put his knee on George Floyd’s neck. ‘Israel security forces are training American cops despite history of rights abuses,’ tweeted Charlotte Greensit in 2017.

Of course June 19 should be a federal holiday. It’s not just the right thing to do: it’s also the smart thing to do. If Donald Trump doesn’t establish honoring the freeing of America’s black slaves in the national calendar today, then we’ll know that he’s asleep at the switch: too busy tweeting ‘LAW & ORDER’ in full caps, or nodding out in bed to Tucker, or incapable of leaving a mark on American life and politics any deeper than a divot left by his five-iron.Emancipation Day, which is what it should be called, would be a symbol, but also a statement of fact. It would acknowledge slavery, but also freedom.

Prince Andrew isn’t hiding from the Department of Justice, a source close to the Prince told me on Friday — and Geoffrey Berman, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, isn’t telling the truth. Who to believe, the prince or the prosecutor? Andrew has kept his head below the parapet since discussing his connections to Jeffrey Epstein in a disastrous BBC interview last November. But Berman has been a voluble and public presence. Three times in the last six months, Berman has accused Andrew and his lawyers of refusing to co-operate with the Department of Justice’s request that he make a witness statement. Andrew and his team have said nothing — until now.

The war of the statues is no longer a battle over the memory of slavery, or the Confederacy, or the deployment of stone dead generals to reinforce Jim Crow. It is a battle over the legitimacy of the United States which, despite all the evils, is history’s greatest and possibly final experiment in human freedom.The struggle has turned from Confederate generals to the Founders: from those who seceded from the United States to those who laid its foundations. Students at the University of Missouri are petitioning for the removal of a statue of ‘racist slave owner’ Thomas Jefferson, whose statue at Birmingham, Alabama was damaged in an arson attack. Last week at George Washington University, Washington’s bust was toppled from its plinth.

The revolution is eating itself at the New York Times. After the Times ran Sen. Tom Cotton’s call for using the National Guard to quell riots, a riot broke out in the Times’s News department. Although a poll earlier this week found that 63 percent of Democrats ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ supported Cotton’s suggestion, the woke warriors at the Times were truly triggered. On Thursday, some 800 staffers broke the terms of their contracts and publicly denounced their employer. Most demonstrated their fearless individuality by retweeting the same sentence: ‘This article endangers Black @nytimes staff.’There’s no mob without a lynching.

Some steal their luxury leisure goods, but others take their leisure by the luxury of right, and all of it is wrong. While gangs using luxury vehicles and lookouts cross the bridges into Manhattan for targeted looting — as opposed to looting Target, which is how the George Floyd riots began — the children of the elite parade their virtue and distract the police by acting out fantasies of violent revolution. How proud Mr and Mrs de Blasio of Yorkville, Manhattan must be of young Chiara, arrested on Saturday night in Manhattan for unlawful assembly.

There is no right to burn down your neighborhood, but it’s always an option. Freedom means choice, and real freedom must include the choice of self-destruction — but not destroying someone else’s neighborhood. Especially not when the neighborhood is mostly black and poor. That is what the privileged whites of antifa are doing by instigating disorder and destruction in Minneapolis’s 3rd precinct and elsewhere. Cost-free kicks at black people’s expense: the height of white privilege. Race is the American sickness, and though everyone is sick of it, no one has the cure. The murder of George Floyd and the fact that it took riots before his killer was charged, confirms, should anyone still need confirmation, that Americans are still not equal before the law.