RUTHFULLY YOURS

A group of state legislators in Missouri has, after a great deal of nagging by your favorite roving correspondent and many others, come around and made a public statement that Professor Melissa Click of the University of Missouri should be fired.

Professor Click, you’ll recall, is the petty commissar who assaulted a student journalist (who has since filed a police complaint) who was covering one of the daft, diaper-filling protests on the Mizzou campus. The protest was happening on a corner of the campus that not only is a public space but a public space recognized as such in Missouri state law, with access to it guaranteed. Professor Click attempts to intimidate the student, physically blocks him, and then swats at his face before calling for “some muscle” to forcibly remove him. So far, neither the university nor the campus police department, which are manifestly run by miscreants and moral cowards, has seen fit to do anything about the case.

When Rolling Stone published its breathless account of what turned out to be an entirely fictitious rape on the campus of the University of Virginia, some critics (ahem) were denounced as monsters for asking such straightforward questions as “Why wasn’t a violent gang rape, purportedly committed on a bed of broken glass, followed up by a police report, which surely, given the details, would have produced physical evidence supporting prosecution and conviction?” In the Missouri case, there was not only a police report but video of the incident, shot by the victim of the crime himself. One can only imagine what would have happened if there were a similar video of, say, a white, portly Mizzou football coach physically laying hands on a young black woman going about her legally protected and legitimate business on the campus.

But, so far, not one thing of any consequence has happened to Professor Click.

On December 29th Hillary Clinton sat down for an interview with the editorial board of The Conway Daily Sun. (I’m on the western border of New Hampshire, Conway is down the other end of the Kancamagus on the eastern border.) As you can see from the photograph at right, the occasion lacks the glamour of her sit-downs with court sycophants like George Stephanopoulos, but it did provide a glimpse of the kind of day Mrs Clinton would be having every single day if the US media were journalists rather than Hillary’s palace guards. Tom McLaughlin is a member of the Sun’s editorial board, and, unlike most of the bigshots at The New York Times, he knows the facts on Benghazi.

Just by way of background, three months ago, the latest crop of email releases from Hillary’s secret server reveals that she knew even as the Benghazi attack was unfolding that it was terrorism and not, as I put it back in September 2012, a spontaneous class-action movie review. As I said to Hugh Hewitt in October:

She chose to politicize it from the moment it was happening, even as it was underway. In other words, in the afternoon of September 11th, when it was 9:00 in the evening in Benghazi, she was already politicizing it. And I think it was damaging that on September 12th, she told not only the President of Libya and the Prime Minister of Egypt, but also her own family members that it was a terrorist attack. And yet, there she was on September 14th at Andrews Air Force Base over the coffins of the dead lying to Tyrone Woods’ family when she told them we’re going to get that guy who made the video, and we’re going to have him arrested and prosecuted… She tells the truth to the Government of Libya. She tells the truth to the Government of Egypt. But she lies to the people to whom she is meant to be a public servant, the American people…

At a critical moment on a critical date in American history, she opened her mouth and vomited forth a sewer of lies that everybody else is supposed to just try and swim their way through to find out the reality of what went on. And if you’re a foreign government leader, you know the truth. If you’re the American people, you get lied to.

Once you know the timeline of her communications with the Libyans, the Egyptians and with Chelsea Clinton, it becomes harder and harder to accept that the video distraction was anything other than a consciously constructed official lie.

Now listen to Tom McLaughlin at the Conway editorial meeting. He has the facts, and she has a lot of generalized evasions about the “fog of war”:

With the next Republican debate scheduled for later this month, I thought it might be worth stepping back to ask about the state of play on the political field. The first item of business is

TRUMPERY. I last wrote at any length about The Donald at the end of July when he was first really soaring in the polls. “I don’t think Donald Trump will be the GOP candidate in 2016,” I wrote then, and I still believe that.

But I also continue to believe, as I said then, that Donald Trump “has raised some issues that the high and mighty dispensers of conventional wisdom would do well to ponder.” Sure, Trump is the walking epitome of vulgarity, a veritable Platonic Form of the gilded comb-over. But what repels the Volvo-driving, Ivy-League-aspiring, SNL-watching, post-Christian, gun-hating, illiberal liberal elite often plays well in flyover country where, mirabile dictu, many folks who still possess

the franchise reside. They kind of liked it when Donald Trump said, à propos John McCain, that he preferred war heroes who did not get captured by the enemy. They liked it when he called Rosie O’Donnell a “fat pig”: between us, they think she is a fat pig, too. The mot about the dishy Megyn Kelly bleeding from “the eyes or wherever” was kind of gross, but CNN got it exactly wrong when they said that Trump’s comment “draws outrage.”

What it drew were titters, partly of admiration (in the old sense), partly of relief. At a time when politicians, like academics, like journalists, are enjoined to walk about on a field of eggshells, worried about offending feministsblackscripplesgaysmexicansinjunsmuslimsweirdosofalldescriptions, Trump’s bravado was . . . refreshing. “He can’t say that” screamed the Minders: “But he just did say it” chortled the insensitive masses. “What are you going to do about it?”