I wondered whether Donald Trump, to show solidarity with Melania, might begin his acceptance speech with the words “Four score and seven years ago . . ..”  No such luck, but I was interested to learn not long ago that the final words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address were cribbed.  He ended the Address: “and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English in the late fourteenth century.  The preface to his Bible states: “This Bible is for the government of the people, for the people and by the people.”  The statement dates from 1384, twenty-three score and nineteen years before Lincoln spoke.  I don’t read the Bible very often, and I rarely venture into works written in Middle English, so it figured I was going to miss this connection.  Daniel Hannan pointed it out in his superb “Inventing Freedom”.

In his first address to Parliament after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill said “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”  Theodore Roosevelt had made a very similar statement in 1897.  Decades before Churchill, Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom Oscar Wilde had a love affair, said that poetry “is forged slowly and painfully, link by link, with blood and sweat and tears.”  Even earlier, the poets Donne and Byron each turned phrases incorporating tears, sweat, and blood, not necessarily in that order.

The moving final paragraphs of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech, where he rings the changes on “Let Freedom Ring” are remarkably similar to an address to the Republican National Convention in 1952 by a gentleman named Archibald Carey, Sr.

Another class of borrowings arises when the original author is still living and has given permission for the use of his or her words, but which the current speaker or writer claims as his or her own.  In 2008, candidate Obama replied to candidate Clinton’s accusation that his ideas were “just words” by pointing out that the Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and other famous statements were also “just words”.  Mr. Obama’s friend Deval Patrick had earlier made the same point in virtually the same words, but Senator Obama had not given Governor Patrick credit for them.  Governor Patrick confirmed that his friend had used the words with permission (although some critics thought the permission might have come after the fact) and then-Senator Obama agreed that he should have given Governor Patrick credit.

The relationship between President Kennedy and Ted Sorensen is more complicated.  Kennedy received the Pulitzer Prize for his book “Profiles in Courage,” which was published under his name.  There is good reason to think that most of the book was written by Sorensen.  Sorensen is said to have written Kennedy’s inaugural address, although Kennedy acted as if he were the author.  When a reporter, Hugh Sidey, visited Kennedy on January 17, 1961, Kennedy was writing on a legal pad and indicated that he was in the act of composing his inaugural address.  It later turned out that he was copying Sorensen’s text into his own hand.  After the President was murdered, the story goes that Mrs. Kennedy insisted that Sorensen destroy the draft of the speech he had prepared.

There is no shame in a president getting help on an inaugural address.  We know that Lincoln asked for William Seward’s editorial assistance on his First Inaugural.  Neither man made any attempt to hide the fact, and scholars have been able to review Seward’s edits to give us a good idea of what the speech owes to Lincoln and what to Seward.  The Kennedy case is different only because the parties insisted on keeping Sorensen’s role hidden.  Sorensen revealed his version of the story late in his life.

A more extreme example is also more speculative.  The writer Jack Cashill is convinced that Bill Ayers wrote “Dreams from My Father,” a book whose cover declares that its author is Barack Obama.  I haven’t read Cashill’s book (“Deconstructing Obama”) but I understand the author uses sophisticated methods of textual analysis to attribute the authorship of “Dreams” to Ayers.  Perhaps historians of a later generation will sort the story out, if indeed there is anything to be sorted.

And let’s not even examine the extensive plagiarism that Joe Biden committed in 1988, when he made a few superficial changes to a speech given by Neil Kinnock, the leader at the time of Britain’s Labor Party, and presented it as his own.

So, Melania Trump or her speech writer might have figured that cribbing a few phrases from Michelle Obama was no big deal, given the extensive history of heavy borrowing by all the worthies who went before her.  But context is everything and what may be forgiven in an Obama, overlooked in a Martin Luther King, or ignored in a Kennedy, is not going to go unnoticed when a Slovenian supermodel tries it.  A better way would have been: “As was said most recently by our First Lady, a woman whose house I hope to occupy with the same grace and dignity she demonstrates, and whose vegetable garden I hope to tend with my son Barron when the next growing season comes to Washington, Donald and I were ‘raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life . . . . .’”

July 17, 2016 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.  DiMaggio came to the plate four times in the 57^th game, played in Cleveland.  He sent two shots down the third base line that could easily have been hits.  Twice, the Cleveland third baseman made dramatic back-handed stabs at the ball, followed each time by a heroic throw to first to record two outs instead of two doubles.

The streak began on May 15, 1941.  During the course of the 56 games, DiMaggio hit .408, with 15 home runs and 55 runs batted in.

The record for consecutive games with a base hit that DiMaggio broke was set in 1897 by William Keeler, known to baseball history by the micro-aggressive nickname “Wee” – he stood five foot four.  Wee Willie Keeler hit safely in the first 44 games of the 1897 season.  He had hit safely in the last game of the 1896 season.  Because organized baseball allows consecutive game records to carry over from one season to the next, Keeler can be said to have held two records:  44 consecutive games with a hit in one season and 45 consecutive games over two.

Whichever record you care to assign to Wee Willie, it had stood for 44 years when the 1941 season started.  A measure of the magnitude of DiMaggio’s achievement is the fact that in the intervening three-quarters of a century, no one has come close to his 56 game mark.  Wee Willie broke a record that had been set in 1894.  Two players threatened his record in the early decades of the twentieth century.  Ty Cobb had a streak of 40 games in 1911.  George Sisler hit safely in 41 consecutive games in 1922.  When Wee Willie died in 1923, he may have felt that his record was going to be safe for a good long while.  And 44 years is an impressive lifespan for a baseball record.

Pete Rose is the only player to come within sight of the record.  He got to 44 in 1978.  Paul Molitor got to 39 in 1987.  Once a player gets into the 30s, every further game increases the notoriety and the pressure.  But Rose was two weeks away from reaching the record when even he, the all-time leader in career Major League hits (sorry, Ichiro), failed to get a hit in the 45^th game.

DiMaggio got a hit in what would have been the 58^th game had the streak continued.  That proved to be the first in a new 16 game streak.  So, the Yankee Clipper hit safely in 72 out of 73 games.

Baseball records and statistics are often front-loaded with qualifiers.  A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a few innings of Mariner baseball on the radio when Robinson Canó hit a home run.  The announcer told us that this was his 761^st career extra-base hit, which tied him for seventh place among Major League second basemen.  Prior to a World Series game a few years ago, I learned that one of the pitchers holds a record for World Series games in which a starting pitcher has gone at least eight innings and struck out ten or more batters without giving up a walk.  Sorry, I don’t remember who it was.

That’s part of the charm of DiMaggio’s record.  There are no qualifiers.  There is no wind-up.  He hit safely in 56 consecutive games, full stop.  No one else has come close.  It’s a record that will likely still be standing 75 years from today.

“We have two parties here, and only two. One is the evil party, and the other is the stupid party. . .. Occasionally, the two parties get together to do something that’s both evil and stupid. That’s called bipartisanship.”  (attributed to M. Stanton Evans, Samuel T. Francis and others)

The year 2016 is one in which both parties have run their pennants, one marked with a big S and the other with a huge E, to the top of their respective flagpoles.  When the wind is strong enough, you can hear the two flags snapping in the breeze.

Let’s take the Stupid Party first.

When I was a lad growing up in northern New Jersey, I joined the Boy Scouts.  Our troop ran the way a lot of things did in New Jersey.  The kids whose fathers were in charge of the troop got their merit badges through “pull”.  Their dads would fill out the necessary paperwork and the badges were issued in due course.  The rest of us had to actually undertake the tasks required to get the badge.

One of the badges had to do with community service.  A local charity was looking to the Boy Scouts to help drum up publicity for a fundraiser.  Our job was to get local businesses to put signs in their store-front windows advertising the event.  We were divided into pairs and sent off to improve our community through our good works.

My partner and I walked into a small dry-cleaning shop and politely asked if we could put a sign in the front window.  We didn’t know that we were the tenth pair of Scouts to make the identical request that day.  The dry cleaning guy groaned.  What he might have said, had he been in a better mood, was something like “Boys, thanks so much for trying to help your community.  Unfortunately, you are the tenth pair of scouts to make the same request today.  I am already committed, but maybe you could try one of the many other stores on the street, see if they can help you.”

What he actually said was, “Whaddaya bothering me for?  There’s enough people for everybody!”

When we got out of the store, I started laughing and I didn’t stop until I got home.  When I quoted the guy to my parents, they started laughing.  For years, if I wanted to get a laugh in our house I could say “There’s enough people for everybody”.  It never failed (with an admittedly easy audience).

What’s even funnier, as I look back on it, is that I knew exactly what he meant.  If you have lived for any time in the New York metropolitan area, you’ll know the kind of person I’m talking about.  There is a certain communication style common in that area, where the speaker leaps from point to point, leaving it to others to figure out the logic, or lack of it, that underlies his or her (but usually his) commentary.  There is a certain skill required to decode the words used by these excitable people and their logic is often called into question by others with the same communication style.  The resulting dialogues make heavy use of sarcasm, generalization, and reductio ad absurdum.

I think Donald Trump is a person of this type.  He has something complicated he wants to say, he has a very short time to engage his audience, and the details might not hold their attention.  They certainly don’t hold his.  When complaining about the judge overseeing his Trump University case, he could have talked about the specifics of the rulings the judge has made and suggested that the judge is biased against him.  The judge has been a member of an organization that provides legal aid to illegal immigrants.  Trump has said he is in favor of more rigorous enforcement of the laws prohibiting illegal immigration.  He could have emphasized the disagreement and suggested that the judge is giving vent to an ingrained bias.

He might have been wrong about those accusations, but he would have been arguing from known and agreed facts.  Instead, he said the judge was “Mexican” and “hates Donald Trump.”  Had he spelled his points out and skipped the ethnic identification of the judge, he might have avoided some of the charges of racism that have been aimed at him.  Some, not all.  There is a segment of the commentariat that is going to accuse him of racism in any case.

Some, not all, of his other outlandish statements yield to this treatment.  Take his proposed ban on entry by Moslems into the U.S.  He might have made his point (if it in fact was his point) this way: “Sharia law is incompatible with republican self-government.  Our government is based on the principle stated in the Declaration that the people have the right to manage their own government ‘organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness’.  A system of law that looks to divine revelation, one that treats as apostasy all human efforts to adopt laws inconsistent with or beyond the scope of that revelation, is not appropriate to a free people.  We have no objection if other nations wish to organize their laws under the principles of Sharia.  Saudi Arabia offers a fine example of what such a system would look like and we recommend it to those who believe that Sharia offers the best path toward a stable, prosperous, and happy society.  Iran is another.  If you find those models appealing, please feel free to relocate to a country that provides you with the opportunity to live under a government and a system of law of which you approve.  However, we do not wish to inject into our political discourse an element that is aimed at replacing our system of republican self-government with rules that are derived from an authority that we do not recognize.

“We know that many Moslems do not believe in, or do not favor, the application of Sharia law.  With them, we have no argument and we are happy to see them practice their religion under the same system of ordered liberty under which we practice ours, or for that matter decline to practice any religion.  We need to find some way, consistent with our tradition of religious liberty, to deny entry to those whose political, not religious, convictions commit them to work toward the imposition of Sharia law.  We reject them whether they are jihadi terrorists who seek to achieve their goals through violence or Islamists who will try to achieve their objective through stealth or other non-violent methods.  We will not be unfair to anyone on the basis of religious belief but we reserve the sovereign right to exclude anyone whose political views are at odds with the fundamental principles of self-government on which our society is built.”

That takes too long to think, let alone say.  A lot of the audience is going to get lost or bored.  (Not anyone reading this, needless to say, but we all know people.)  It’s easier to just shout out that we need to ban all Moslems “until our government figures out what in the hell is going on.”  Could be a long wait.

Similarly, Mr. Trump’s attitude toward a physical barrier between the United States and Mexico is not wildly irrational.  There is reason to think that the population that enters the country illegally is somewhat more prone to commit crimes than the typical legal resident.[1]  The research is complicated and the conclusions are tentative.  It’s easier to say that “Mexico is sending their criminals across the border.”  Saying that also ignores the fact that about half of the individuals who are in the U.S. illegally entered the country on a visa.  Building a wall might solve the one-half of the problem that walks across the southern border, but it still leaves the country vulnerable.

Again, it takes too long to say that.  The speaker and the audience don’t have the time, the patience, or the interest.

And a number of Mr. Trump’s shenanigans do not yield to the generous treatment that I have suggested for some of his positions.  It is unforgivable to mock a disabled person.  Decent people do not attack others because of their appearance.  It is not acceptable to attribute an aggressive debate question to the moderator’s bodily functions.

Add to that the candidate’s brazen ignorance of the benefits of trade between nations, his stated preference for extending the reach of libel laws notwithstanding the First Amendment (on which question he may, if elected, be able to find common ground in the United States Senate, where every Democratic Senator has voted to limit the scope of the amendment), his limited understanding of the issues of life vs. choice, and you have someone who has demonstrated that he does not have sufficient intellectual depth or emotional stability to qualify him for the high and distinguished office he seeks.

And yet, we have to consider his likely opponent in November.  Let’s take a look at the standard bearer of the evil party.

Say this for Donald Trump.  Despite his public presentation as a crude, loutish, inarticulate, and superficial candidate, there is a small but growing brace of intelligent, articulate, public intellectuals who vouch for him[2].  The private Trump, they tell us, is far more impressive than the public one.

On the other hand, if you suggest that Hillary Clinton is a dishonest person, totally lacking in personal integrity, I don’t think you will hear a firm contradiction from her supporters.  It would be a bold commentator who would offer a direct defense of her honesty.   Instead, the response from her public defenders is of the “There’s no smoking gun” variety.  They’ll say this even when there is a smoking gun, like the private server in the bathroom closet in Colorado.  In fact, there is an arc to the various defensive postures that her supporters will take over the course of any given scandal.  We start with “Let’s let the investigation play out and see where it leads before we rush to judgment.”  We continue with “The investigation is nothing but a fishing expedition, a partisan attempt to smear a political opponent.”  We may make a quick stop at “This is straight out of the Republican play book, part of the vast right-wing conspiracy that has been out to get her for the last 25 years.”  We conclude with “This is old news.  There is no smoking gun.  It’s time to move on.”  Until the next one.

The point is, you will not hear her defenders say that this honest woman, a model of integrity, the very mold of honor, is being besmirched, the way you will occasionally hear Donald Trump’s supporters say that, in private, he is personable, intelligent, and articulate.

Perhaps the difference is that it is possible to be intelligent in private but a lout in public.  We can always hope that the private person will emerge to replace the public one.  If a person’s public conduct is lacking in integrity, his or her good behavior in private doesn’t carry much weight.  That is one of the connotations of “integrity”.

Rather than wander through her more than 40 years of public conduct, let’s focus on only one incident.  On the night of Tuesday, September 11, 2012, after the attack on the Benghazi consulate, Mrs. Clinton sent an email to her daughter describing the incident as an “Al Qaeda style attack”.  The next night, September 12, she sent an email to the Egyptian Prime Minister, telling him that the incident was a planned attack and not a reaction to a video.

At some point in the next few days, the Obama administration decided that the offensive video was the explanation for the Benghazi attack.  Susan Rice went on five Sunday news programs on September 16 to repeat the administration position about the video.

In between the attack on the 11^th and the Sunday shows on the 16^th, the nation held a solemn memorial service when the remains of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and the three individuals who died trying to protect him and the others in the compound were returned to Joint Base Andrews on September 14.  At the service, Hillary spoke to each of the four families.  Members of three families (excluding that of the ambassador) report that Hillary told them “We will make sure the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”

She said this or something like it three times, once to each family.  Four different individuals have recalled these conversations.[3]  One of these individuals, a retired lawyer and administrative law judge, made a note of the Secretary’s comments in the memo book that (he tells us) he carries with him at all times.  The note is dated September 15.

She now denies making these comments.  The family members stand by their statements.

Dear reader and friend, could you do what Hillary is accused of doing?  Could you look a grieving family in the eye and lie to them about the cause of their loved one’s death?

You could not.  It would not occur to you to do it.

Would you join an organization whose leadership behaved that way?  Would you want a person who had done something like that – someone who has done things like this repeatedly over the course of her public life — running your neighborhood community club, your PTA, or your kids’ soccer league?

We are none of us saints.  Any leader of any organization will be imperfect and will have said things or done things that he or she would wish to unsay or undo.  But even after we acknowledge that none of us is fit to cast stones, is it unreasonable to expect a modicum of integrity or decency in a political leader?

The Stupid Party and the Evil Party have really outdone themselves this time.

It is barely conceivable that one or both of these specimens will fail to win their party’s nomination.  On the Republican side, several commentators from the #NeverTrump school have made the point that delegates are not legally bound to vote for a particular candidate.  More precisely, the position is that state laws purporting to bind delegates to a national convention are unconstitutional.  One hears reports that some delegates are persuaded and are actively attempting to derail the Trump nomination.  My record as a predictor of political events is spotty – worse than that if you have to know the truth – so I hesitate to offer a prediction.  I don’t expect the Stupid Party delegates to the Republican convention later this month to revolt in sufficient numbers to change the outcome.

On the Democratic side, the reaction to the meeting between former president Clinton and Attorney General Lynch may have decreased the attorney general’s room for maneuver should the FBI recommend criminal charges against the former Secretary of State.  Some reports state that she has agreed to “rubber stamp” the recommendation of the FBI and DOJ professional staff.  Others state that that she “fully expects” to accept the recommendation of the investigative team after it has been reviewed by senior staff.  The indications are that the recommendation, whatever it turns out to be, will not arrive prior to the Democratic convention.  So, the overwhelming likelihood is that Mrs. Clinton will be her party’s nominee at the convention, even if later events are in doubt.

I accept that there is a chance, perhaps 5%, that one of these two will not be the next president.  If that longshot does not come in, then on January 20, 2017, one of the finest exemplars that the Stupid Party or the Evil Party could conjure will take the oath of office.

If that is to be the outcome, let us resign ourselves to it with as much grace as we can muster.  There will be another election in 2020.  Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, a socialist, conservative, or libertarian, pro-choice or pro-life, there is no reason to hand the Stupid Party to someone this stupid or the Evil Party to someone who presents this level of evil.  Let’s all resolve to provide a better person to bear our standard, whatever it may be, at our next opportunity.  The four years will go by before you know it.

[1] The question is not free from doubt.  See “Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Conflicted Issue” at http://cis.org/ImmigrantCrime.  The authors are serious scholars and are not axe-grinders, which is not true of many researchers in this area.  Their tables 5, 6, and 7 provide a reasonable basis to believe that illegal immigrants are over-represented in prison populations and among those who have committed felonies.  It should also be emphasized that there is reason to believe that legal immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the native population.

[2] I am thinking of Monica Crowley, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, and Conrad Black.  Larry Kudlow joined this group late and Steven Moore appears to be signing up.

[3] Some family members report no recollection that she made such a statement.