RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is a sizeable faction in this country that is disgusted with the choices we have going into the 2016 General Election. While the choices are far from the quality a great nation like the United States deserves, they are what they are. No amount of complaining, abdication of responsibility or indignation will change this reality.

But, like it or not, the outcome of this election will affect each and every one of us, and in ways that can never be rectified in our lifetimes, if at all. It is for that reason this election is a referendum on the issues, not on the candidates. It is also for this reason that it needs to be reiterated – in no uncertain terms – that General Elections are not for electing your favorite candidate. They are for protecting the country from the worst candidate.

Right now we have two candidates – arguably not the best the country can offer, who possess two extremely different visions for the country. It is about these differences – exclusively – that we must base our choices come Election Day. Put bluntly, this election isn’t about personalities, capabilities, soundbites or even criminality; it is about issues, and on these issues, we do have choices to make.

Yes, the names on the ballot give us pause. I will cede that point but offer this rebuttal for your consideration.

On the one hand, we have a politically untested, braggadocios businessman in Donald Trump who routinely makes statements before he thinks about the consequences of his words. But while many may have their principles insulted by the prospect of casting a vote for such an overt braggart, there is no question that he loves and appreciates the country that has allowed him to be so successful.

No pearl went unclutched when Trump refused to agree in advance to validate the giant scam that is this election. Yeah, scam. In light of all we’ve seen during this stupidest of years, a year where I had to move my book about this country tearing itself apart from the fiction section to nonfiction, how the hell can anyone keep a straight face as he, she, or xe demands that we default to trust the system?

Okay, this is where Team Fake Pearl Clutch jumps in and whines about my “dangerous talk” and about how I have no “honor” because I won’t submit in advance to another establishment okie-doke. Yeah, sure, whatever – and the emperor caught pneumonia because the little kid pointed out that he wasn’t wearing any clothes, not because he was walking around with his junk in the wind.

The system is manifestly rigged – even Heap Big Chief Warren used to say so until a memo informed her that this meme is now inconvenient – so spare me your sanctimonious crap about our sacred system. Our loyalty is properly only to the Constitution, not a perversion of it. Just because you hold office under Article I, II, or III doesn’t mean we still owe you respect or deference when you treat your obligations to the People like a teenage Thai boy at one of Raymond Burr’s Halloween parties.

We owe the system nothing. Nada. Zip. Instead, the system owes us fairness and honesty, and without them it has no right to our default acceptance of its results. That acceptance must be earned. This means that the system must aggressively police its own integrity, and this year it has utterly failed to do so.

The most important thing in a democratic republic, the keystone that holds it together and ensures the peaceful transition of power, is the ability for a loser to accept a loss. We used to be able to fight out our political differences and, if we came up short, shrug and say, “Well, next time we’ll convince a majority.” We could move on, confident that the playing field had been level, that we had been heard, and that we had lost fair and square.

“Not anymore. Trump’s wrong about a lot, but he’s not wrong about this. He may very well lose, but it won’t be fair and square. And Trump is not the problem for saying so.

In a sudden and shocking burst of coherence during the third debate, in which Trump put a cherry on top of his brutal trouncing of his Westworld-escapee opponent by refusing to agree to be scammed, The Donald articulated a three-point critique of the system that its defenders have not even tried to answer. Instead, all we got was fake outrage over Trump’s perfectly legitimate rejection of the default legitimacy of our illegitimate system.

The Clinton campaign’s recent attacks on Donald Trump for his comments about a beauty queen’s weight problems were months in the making, according to an opposition research report uncovered in emails released by WikiLeaks on Sunday.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton invoked those comments during the first presidential debate on Sept. 26. Near the end of the showdown, during a sustained riff about the Republican nominee’s past remarks about women, Clinton cited the case of Miss Universe 1996 Alicia Machado.

“And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest,” Clinton said. “He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name.”

Trump responded: “Where did you find this?”

The answer is: in a 157-page opposition research file that Clinton’s campaign had been using since at least Dec. 19, 2015, the day research director Tony Carrk emailed it – and research files on Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio – to Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta. Podesta’s emails were subsequently hacked and more than 25,000 of them have been released so far by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

In a section on Page 31 titled “Trump Has Devalued And Demeaned Women Repeatedly Throughout His Career,” Trump’s comments to “This Morning” in 1997 are transcribed under the heading “Trump On Miss Universe Pageant Winner.”

“She weighed 118 pounds, or 117 pounds, and she went up to 160 or 170,” Trump said on “This Morning.” “So this is somebody that likes to eat.”

© FoxNews.com On ‘The Kelly File,’ the former Miss Universe says she is sharing her story for the Latino community

Machado is not identified by her last name, and her first name is misspelled “Alisa.” The supposed “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping” put-downs do not appear either. However, Trump’s printed comments on Machado in the document seemingly show the Clinton campaign began considering using the episode against the business mogul before the primaries even began.

Her record on defense and foreign policy offers a cautionary tale

After yet another meeting of diplomats failed to resolve the war in Syria, our ever-clueless secretary of state, John Kerry, said on October 15 that diplomacy would continue because of “the urgency of trying to find something that works other than military action.”

As if it were intended to illustrate Kerry’s foolishness, a Russian navy battle group led by the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov sailed for Syria less than a week later to engage its combat aircraft against the U.S.-backed forces trying to topple Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

Sending the Kuznetsov wasn’t a militarily necessity. Other Russian aircraft could have easily been deployed to Syria. But sending the aircraft carrier is a demonstration of Russia’s ability to project power and a reminder to America and its allies that diplomacy cannot succeed unless it is backed by the threat of military force.

Though he may do more harm before he leaves office, President Obama will soon be irrelevant. It’s time to look to the future. As ghastly as that prospect is, unless the most reliable pollsters are badly wrong, that president will be Hillary Clinton.

Her record provides all the evidence we need to derive the bases on which she would decide matters of defense and foreign policy as well as the most likely result. Those factors compel the conclusion that the events of the next four years will prove far worse than we expect.

The relentless ineptitude of the Obama-Clinton-Kerry team did not proceed from the same foundation as Mrs. Clinton would on her own. She is campaigning on her claims of experience in making the hardest decisions a president has to make.

There are four key proofs that enable us to determine the manner and means by which Mrs. Clinton will decide foreign policy and defense matters.

A thick fog of impropriety continues to linger around Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal.

Every time you think you must have heard the last of the irregularities in the Clinton e-mails investigation, another shoe drops. So now we learn that the political backers of a longtime Clinton crony and fixer, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, made $675,000 in cash and in-kind contributions to the election campaign of the wife of the FBI official who later ran the investigation of Mrs. Clinton.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the contributions went to the 2015 Virginia state senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, the wife of then-associate-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. McAuliffe had recruited Dr. McCabe to run. After her campaign ended unsuccessfully (Dr. McCabe lost to incumbent Republican Dick Black), Andrew McCabe was promoted to deputy director, a role in which he assumed oversight of the Clinton e-mail investigation.

The donations to Dr. McCabe’s campaign included nearly half a million dollars from McAuliffe’s political action committee. The Virginia Democratic party, which McAuliffe substantially controls, also contributed over $200,000 in the form of “mailers.” McAuliffe is reportedly under investigation due to unrelated allegations of campaign-finance violations.

The appearance of impropriety here is disturbing, but it should be put in perspective. The FBI investigation overseen by Deputy Director McCabe uncovered significant evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Mrs. Clinton and her associates — they obviously put together a strong case despite being significantly undermined by the Justice Department. The decision to recommend against prosecution was made by FBI director James Comey, not McCabe. It was highly unusual for the FBI to make a public recommendation about prosecution, and Comey’s was primarily based not the evidence but on his legal analysis of the relevant statutes (which is even more unusual since that is not the FBI’s job).

The ultimate decision, moreover, was made not by the FBI but by the Obama Justice Department. On that score, we now know (a) the president, using an alias, had willfully e-mailed Clinton’s private account, notwithstanding that he later told the public he’d learned about her use of private e-mail from news reports, so any charges brought against Clinton would have implicated him — that was not going to happen; (b) while the investigation was still underway, President Obama endorsed Clinton, and he made public statements indicating her actions did not endanger national security, undermining the case against her; and (c) Obama’s attorney general furtively met with former President Bill Clinton — i.e., the husband of the main subject of the investigation — shortly before announcing (after Comey’s unusual public recommendation) that the case was being closed without charges.

Hillary Clinton’s “treatment of DS [Department of State] agents on her protective detail was so contemptuous that many of them sought reassignment or employment elsewhere,” according to a just-released summary of an FBI interview with a former State Department official. “Prior to CLINTON’s tenure, being an agent on the Secretary of State’s protective detail was seen as an honor and privilege reserved for senior agents. However, by the end of CLINTON’s tenure, it was staffed largely with new agents because it was difficult to find senior agents willing to work for her.”

Clinton’s State Department agents are hardly the first to complain about her bullying.

“She derives pleasure from lording over other people who cannot do anything about it and who are less powerful than she is,” author Ronald Kessler told Newsmax TV’s J. D. Hayworth.

In fact, Clinton’s well-documented history of profane, unhinged outbursts against those who work for her spans decades.

While Clinton’s vulgarity is presented here in relatively family-friendly form, fill in the blanks and imagine the pain that this woman inflicted when she uttered these words.

“I’m not voting for Clinton,” Air Force staff sergeant Eric Bonner posted on Facebook in July.

“It’s because she actually talked to me once. Almost a sentence,” wrote the Air Force K-9 handler. “I got to do a few details involving Distinguished Visitors.”

“One of my last details was for Hillary when she was Secretary of State,” Bonner continued. “I helped with sweeps of her DV quarters and staff vehicles. Her words to me?”

According to Bonner, Clinton told him, “Get that f***ing dog away from me.”

“Then she turns to her security detail and berates them up and down about why that animal was in her quarters,” Bonner added. “For the next 20 minutes, while I sit there waiting to be released, she lays into her detail, slamming the door in their faces when she’s done. The Detail lead walks over, apologizes, and releases me. I apologize to him for getting him in trouble. His words, ‘Happens every day, Brother.’”

“Hillary doesn’t care about anyone but Hillary.”