RUTHFULLY YOURS

It literally is impossible to write quickly enough to stay abreast of the scandals engulfing Hillary Rodham Clinton.

After a delightful visit with my family and friends in southern California, I sat down at Los Angeles International Airport late Thursday night to await my flight back to New York City. I planned to write a recap of just last week’s news regarding Hillary’s e-mails, the Clinton Foundation, and several of President Obama’s policies that Clinton backs.

I jotted down a simple outline, to which I since have added a few details:

1. Gilbert Chagoury: The Lebanese/Nigerian businessman gave $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation and pledged $1 billion more. The foundation’s Doug Band contacted Hillary’s top aide, Huma Abedin, to arrange a meeting for Chagoury with the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon. The Los Angeles Times now reports that Chagoury “was pulled off a private jet in Teterboro, N.J., and questioned for four hours because he was on the Department of Homeland Security’s no-fly list. He was subsequently removed from the list and categorized as a ‘selectee,’ meaning he can fly but receives extra scrutiny.” Why? A “Homeland Security document shows agents citing unspecified suspicions of links to terrorism, which can include financing extremist organizations.” He later was denied entry visas because “the U.S. put Chagoury in its database used to screen travelers for possible links to terrorism.”

2. Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which Hillary Clinton supports, reportedly includes secret side agreements that permit the ayatollahs to cheat on how much enriched uranium they can produce and how many radiation “hot rooms” they can operate. Codifying Tehran’s violations of this agreement made it easier for Obama to end sanctions, unfreeze Iran’s assets, and surge billions of dollars into the hands of Earth’s biggest state sponsor of radical Islamic terrorism.

All Never Trump conservatives maintain that their decision to never vote for Donald Trump is guided by their principles. I have no doubt that this is true.

But some of them — though by no means all — seem to imply, or at least may think, that conservatives who vote for Trump have abandoned their principles. Indeed, the charge of compromising on principle is explicitly leveled at Republican politicians and members of the Republican “establishment” who support Trump.

I cannot speak for all conservatives who are voting for Trump, but I can speak for many in making this assertion:

We have the same principles as the Never Trumpers — especially those of us who strongly opposed nominating Trump; that’s why we opposed him, after all. So almost everything that prevents Never Trumpers from voting for Trump also troubled us about the candidate. (I should note that some are less troubled today.)

So where do we differ?

We differ on this: We hold that defeating Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, and the Left is also a principle. And that it is the greater principle.

Obviously, the Never Trumpers do not believe that. On the contrary, some of the most thoughtful Never Trumpers repeatedly tell us that the nation can survive four years of Hillary Clinton–Democrat rule. And then, they say, conservatism will have cleansed itself and be able to take back the nation after four calamitous years of a Hillary Clinton presidency — whereas if Trump wins, he will be the de facto face of conservatism, and then conservatism will have been dealt a potentially fatal setback.

This argument assumes that America can survive another four years of Democratic rule.

So, it really depends on what “survive” means. If it means that there will be a country called the United States of America after another four years of a Democratic presidency and a left-wing Supreme Court for quite possibly another four decades (as well as dozens of lifetime appointments to the equally important lower federal courts), the country will surely survive.

But I do not believe that the country will surely survive as the country it was founded to be. In that regard we are at the most perilous tipping point of American history.

It is true that the country’s survival was threatened in the 1860s, and only a terrible civil war kept it whole. But, with the colossal and awful exception of slavery, neither side challenged the founding principles of America.

Donald Trump demonstrated true chutzpah in accepting an invitation from Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to meet with him.

On August 31, 2016 Trump met Peña Nieto just hours before addressing an enthusiastic crowd of supporters in Arizona where he laid out his ten-point plan to address the immigration crisis that impacts so many of the challenges and threats that America faces today.

It was politically courageous for Trump to meet with the Mexican President. After nearly eight years of the feckless Obama administration, his demonstration of strength and focus at that meeting was refreshing.

Peña Nieto has compared Trump to Hitler and Mussolini, and Trump has, for the past year, made it clear that he opposed the policies of the Mexican government that have resulted in so many criminals, gangs and narcotics flowing from Mexico into the United States.

The meeting was a gamble but it paid off. As President John F. Kennedy said during his inaugural address,

“So let us begin anew–remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

While President Kennedy was referencing the ongoing tensions with the former Soviet Union and our relationship with Mexico is hardly as adversarial as was our relationship with the USSR, Mexico is separated from the United States by the longest border that divides the First World from the Third World, thus creating huge economic pressures on that border.

Mexico is an important trade partner of the United States. However, a huge component of that trade is illegal and involves illegal aliens, narcotics, weapons and money flowing across the border in violation of our laws.

The Clinton Presidential Center sits near Interstate 30. It is located at 1200 President Clinton Ave in Little Rock, Arkansas. A mere 1,200 miles from the posh digs of the Clintons in Chappaqua, New York.

Little Rock advertises a “Billgrimage” to visit Bill Clinton’s roots in Little Rock, but the Clintons have gotten what they wanted out of Arkansas and Little Rock. And the Clinton Presidential Center.

They’ve moved on to bigger things since.

There isn’t much to do at the Clinton Presidential Center, an awkward glass building shaped like a bus that looks like it’s about to fall into the Arkansas River, but like the equally precarious political fortunes of the Clintons, never quite does.

There are exhibits of Bill’s rise to power. And there’s a gift shop offering a copy of GQ autographed by him for a mere $350, a bronze bust of him for only $29.95 and a t-shirt with the words, “I Miss Bill.”

But how can you miss somebody who never goes away?

They might miss Bill in Little Rock, which he left behind for wealthier places where he can mingle with those who can do far more to advance his career than the locals. Instead they have to make do with Buffalo Blue Cheeseburger at Forty Two, the Clinton Presidential Center’s restaurant, which also offers catering services.

If there’s one thing you can be sure of when it comes to the Clintons, they never miss an angle.

The Clinton Presidential Center website is just a gateway to the network of Clinton Foundation sites. The white banner and menu of the Clinton Foundation is meant to lure visitors in first.

And that’s appropriate, since the Center began as a front for the Foundation.

It’s become a tradition for presidents to have their own libraries. Bill Clinton wanted to raise a modest $200 million for his glass shoebox on President Clinton Avenue. But he had to settle for $165 million.

A lot of the money came from abroad. The Saudis ponied up millions. Clinton’s former FBI director described him begging for a donation to his library from Prince Abdullah during a meeting asking the Saudis to give the FBI access to suspects in a terror attack which had killed 19 Americans.

“Bill Clinton raised the subject only to tell the crown prince that he understood the Saudi’s reluctance to cooperate, and then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library,” he wrote.

The Clintons always have their priorities.

The election of Hillary Clinton would mean final defeat for American conservativism — for at least a generation and almost certainly for much longer than that. The demographic changes certain to flow from eight more years of open borders, general amnesty, and distribution of the newly arrived statist voters to electorally vulnerable states would make the Left’s presidential victory this fall, for all practical purposes, permanent.

And that’s without considering the effect on the electorate of the increasingly intolerant and repressive educational and political environment, an environment that for eight more years would continue driving substantial segments of the populace, especially the vulnerable young, into the ever more mandatory belief systems of the Left.

But don’t worry: After Clinton’s election the elegant and witty columns of George Will, William Kristol and Jonah Goldberg, aided by the surpassing political skills of the Bush and Romney families, will save us all from both these calamities, and from all the other unnamed ones that Hillary and the Left will bring.

Uh, maybe not.

If Clinton prevails there will be no conservative (or Republican) president during the lifetime of any adult member of the feckless Republican royal families, or of Mr. Goldberg or the children of George Will or William Kristol. Their prediction that the presidency will be recovered in short order is a pipe dream. Over the medium term, twenty to twenty-five years, that recovery would approach demographic impossibility.

Despite the inarguable magnitude of the coming Clinton/Left disaster, Republican/conservative turncoats, led by these and other members of what Peggy Noonan aptly terms the “protected classes,” are working for Clinton’s election.

In unalloyed self-destructive irrationality, the support of Hillary Clinton by Never Trump commentators and Republican politicians is sui generis.

Never before in American history have intellectual and political leaders of a major party deliberately attempted to open the gates of enduring power to an enemy sworn to their eradication.

Are they moved by general snobbery, confusion caused by overwork, East Coast social pressure? I’ve stopped trying to figure it out and stopped caring.

But on a different level, on the level of their own personal careers and perceived short-term well-being, I’m absolutely certain what they think:

“We’ll do fine under Clinton and the Left. Under Obama we’ve experienced all of what Clinton will bring and we’ve flourished. Under Clinton we’ll do it again. We’ll continue speaking out, politely and carefully of course, and they won’t touch us; we won’t lose our jobs, our children won’t be expelled, there’ll be no unpleasant changes in our expensive neighborhoods or our children’s toney private schools, we’ll drink with the same refined people in our clubs and cocktail parties. Through it all, we’ll continue making an excellent living as the articulate opposition to the wretchedness the Left will be imposing on the American working and middle classes. The little people, the unprotected people, will endure the downside — low wages, high taxes, unsafe and decaying neighborhoods, destroyed public schools, and violent racial animosity. We’ll be the Left’s safe and well paid critics.”

What an appalling betrayal of the vast majority of Main Street voters who elected two Bush Presidents and made conservative intellectuals ‘cushy lives possible!

This is clear: Trump’s defeat, if it occurs, will be the work of the NeverTrumps.

A criminal organization masquerading as a political party, as the saying goes, Bubba Division. How would you like to make $18 million for a do-nothing job?

The guest list for a private State Department dinner on higher-education policy was taking shape when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a suggestion.

In addition to recommending invitations for leaders from a community college and a church-funded institution, Clinton wanted a representative from a for-profit college company called Laureate International Universities, which, she explained in an email to her chief of staff that was released last year, was “the fastest growing college network in the world.”

There was another reason Clinton favored setting a seat aside for Laureate at the August 2009 event: The company was started by a businessman, Doug Becker, “who Bill likes a lot,” the secretary wrote, referring to her husband, the former president.

Nine months later, Laureate signed Bill Clinton to a lucrative deal as a consultant and “honorary chancellor,” paying him $17.6 million over five years until the contract ended in 2015 as Hillary Clinton launched her campaign for president.

I know, I know: there’s “no evidence” of a quid pro quo (as if there naturally would be) and we can’t prove there is. So let the Washington Post hastily assure you of same:

There is no evidence that Laureate received special favors from the State Department in direct exchange for hiring Bill Clinton, but the Baltimore-based company had much to gain from an association with a globally connected ex-president and, indirectly, the United States’ chief diplomat. Being included at the 2009 dinner, shoulder to shoulder with leaders from internationally renowned universities for a discussion about the role of higher education in global diplomacy, provided an added level of credibility for the business as it pursued an aggressive expansion strategy overseas, occasionally tangling with foreign regulators.

“A lot of these private-education guys, they’re looking to get into events like this one,” said Sam Pitroda, a higher-education expert who was representing a policy commission from India at the State Department dinner. “The discussion itself is irrelevant. . . . It gets you very high-level contacts, and it gets you to the right people.”