From the right: Dems’ Selective Outrage on Russia

Democrats profess to be outraged over the hacking — presumably at the direction of the Russian government — of John Podesta’s e-mails. So Jim Geraghty at National Review asks why those same Democrats aren’t “bothered, much less outraged, by the possibility that [Hillary] Clinton used an insecure server, allowing her e-mails and the classified information in them to be hacked by . . . foreign intelligence agencies?” Fact is, “Clinton and other Democrats don’t get that upset when Russia or other hostile states do things that threaten the country as a whole. But when they threaten the party or her odds of winning the election, it’s an outrage.”



Scientist: ‘Leftover People’ Could Elect Trump . . .

Author Carson McCullers called them “the leftover people” — those who feel they don’t belong to any social group or clique. MIT lecturer Mike Stopa in The Boston Globe suggests these voters — “working-class men and women” who once made up the Democrats’ “core constituency” — could put Donald Trump in the White House. “The NASCAR-loving, country-music-listening, culturally conservative working class doesn’t exist just in the Rust Belt or the South,” he writes. “These are the people whose salaries have ebbed as the 1 percent has prospered.” Moreover, “they know, as The New York Times recently trumpeted, that the rich this year are voting for Hillary Clinton. They know they are not.”



Society critic: . . . And So Could ‘Forgotten Women’

Conventional wisdom says if Clinton becomes our first female president, she’ll owe it to Trump for personal behavior that energized women to her side. But Kay Hymowitz in City Journal says pundits may be ignoring “a striking class and education divide” among female voters. College-educated women are strongly for Hillary, but “less-educated white women” appear “willing to look past Trump’s serial offenses” and support him. Many of “these women have male relatives or friends in the military,” which explains “much of their contempt for Hillary Clinton, whose infamous question from the Benghazi hearings — ‘What difference at this point does it make?’ — was the verbal equivalent of a cottonmouth bite.” Their “worldview is a planet apart from our Trump-o-phobic media, professional, and political class.”



Conservative take: Europe’s New Blasphemy Courts

European nations are “seeing the reintroduction of blasphemy laws through both the front and back doors,” writes London-based commentator Douglas Murray for The Gatestone Institute. British Olympic gymnast Louis Smith’s career “has been put on hold and potentially ruined” because of a drunken video in which he and friends imitated Islamic prayer rituals. Murray questions the outrage over Smith’s mockery of religion “in a country in which Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ is regularly voted the nation’s favorite comic movie.” Meanwhile, Dutch politician Geert Wilders is on trial for asking a crowd whether they wanted “fewer Moroccans” in their country. Agree with him or not, says Murray, “by prosecuting someone for saying what he said, the courts in Holland are effectively ruling that there is only one correct answer to the question.”

Ex-teacher: WikiLeaks Exposes How NEA Works

The WikiLeaks expose of John Podesta’s e-mails has confirmed the “manipulation” by bosses at the National Education Association “to ensure that Hillary Clinton would be the union’s choice for Democratic presidential nominee.” This, writes Larry Sand for the Orange County Register, even though “it’s no secret that many in the union favored [Bernie] Sanders.” Yet the teachers union, working closely with Clinton campaign officials, backed her without “any formal steps to find out who its rank-and-file actually preferred” and even agreed not to schedule a vote unless Clinton was certain of victory. Sanders supporters cried foul, but “a teacher who is troubled by NEA’s politics and/or its backroom dealing has virtually no options” to protest.

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann