RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s note: Credit goes to Dr. Bob Shillman for the title of this article.

Hillary Clinton’s bizarre claim that billionaire businessman Donald Trump will cause a recession if elected to the presidency was overshadowed yesterday as Trump took deadly aim at the pathological liar’s horrifying public service track record.

For her part, Clinton glibly dismissed Trump.

“As I said yesterday in Ohio, Donald Trump offers no real solutions for the economic challenges we face,” Clinton said in a speech to the faithful in Raleigh, N.C. “He just continues to spout reckless ideas that will run up our debt and cause another economic crash.”

Around the same time, Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, laid into “Crooked Hillary” with a vigor and focus that Americans haven’t seen for a while. Trump’s speech, in which he accurately described Clinton as a “world-class liar,” was very well received and is making left-wing pundits nervous — for good reason.

Unlike Trump’s address, Clinton’s speech was a carefully constructed alternate reality held together by a tissue of leftist lies. Clinton’s oration was an economically illiterate catalog of hoary Marxist cliches, or as Dr. Bob Shillman quipped, “liar, liar, pantsuit on fire.”

Clinton offered a vague outline of her disastrous socialistic economic agenda, largely a continuation of President Obama’s anti-growth policies and tainted as it is by a focus on so-called social justice objectives at the expense of economic growth and individual rights.

She spoke nonsensically of “growth that’s strong, fair, and lasting … that reduces inequality, increases upward mobility, that reaches into every corner of our country.” To keep her union thugs happy, Clinton vowed to “say no to bad trade deals and unfair trade practices, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” and no to the “assault on the right to organize and bargain collectively.”

Ignoring the fact that she served front and center in a radically left-wing administration that over the last nearly seven and a half years has presided over the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression, Clinton promised “to make this economy work for everybody … building it from the ground up, from every home and every community, all the way to Washington.”

Leftists like Hillary enjoy anthropomorphizing inanimate objects and abstract concepts because they can’t win policy arguments on the merits. They prefer fabricating monsters they can slay.

Guns and gas-guzzling SUVs “kill” people, they routinely claim as if machines were sentient, volitional beings. To them the U.S. Constitution is a “living document” that changes with the times. And like their cousins the Keynesians, they treat the economy like a circus animal that can be manipulated and taught tricks, instead of as the product of billions of individual decisions made every day by producers and consumers.

Clinton dredged up one of the Left’s favorite and most insidious talking points, declaring “it is way past time for us to guarantee equal pay for women.”

The fanciful claim that women earn less than men will probably never die because it is essential to the Left’s narrative that America is inherently unfair. Of course comparing men’s wages to women’s wages is like comparing apples to oranges. Women pull in less money because they tend to opt for more humanities and fewer science and math majors in college. Owing to family and child-rearing obligations, women as a group also tend not to work the long hours that men work.

Critiquing President Obama’s claim that women earn just 77 cents for every dollar men earn, the Manhattan Institute’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth wrote in 2013 that the 77-cent figure “is bogus because it averages all full-time women, no matter what education and profession, with all full-time men.”

“Unmarried childless women’s salaries, however, often exceed men’s,” she wrote. “In a comparison of unmarried and childless men and women between the ages of 35 and 43, women earn more: 108 cents on a man’s dollar.”

The feminist fabulist continued spinning yarns.

“Excessive inequalities such as we have today reduces economic growth,” Clinton said, pretending she likes the market economy. “Markets work best when all the stakeholders share in the benefits,” she said, paying homage to candidate Obama’s mantra that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

“There are great ideas out there,” Clinton said. “And we are going to be partners in a big, bold effort to increase economic growth and distribute it more fairly, to build that economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top.” The “Wall Street corporations and the super rich,” also known as her most ardent supporters, must be made to “pay their fair share of taxes.”

She promised to “make college debt-free for all” and to “rewrite the rules so more companies share profits with their employers and few ship profits and jobs overseas.”

Clinton defended the international cash-for-future-presidential-favors trading platform known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. She belittled Trump for highlighting the corruption endemic to the enterprise that is primarily devoted to enriching the Clinton family.

Trump is trying “to distract us” by “attacking a philanthropic foundation that saves and improves lives around the world,” she said with a straight face. “It’s no surprise he doesn’t understand these things.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore dismantled what he called Clinton’s “Twilight Zone” grab bag of proposals. A related speech Hillary gave the previous day “was vacant of ANY ideas at all about how to help the economy. The left’s idea cupboard is entirely empty. ”

Moore mocked her claim that here “in America we pay our bills,” a reference to what he called “Trump’s sensible idea of refinancing out debt to lock in historically low interest rates.” The Obama administration in which Clinton served has generated some $8 trillion of new debt, which is hardly “paying the bills.”

“It’s passing them on to the next generation,” Moore wrote.

Clinton’s claim that Trump doesn’t understand the new economy and job creation, is “a bold claim since Donald Trump is a highly successful businessman who actually has created thousands of jobs, while Hillary has gotten rich off of… politics.”

Moore continued:

“The class warfare theme ran throughout the speech, and yet this presents Hillary with another uncomfortable problem. Obama has raised the minimum wage, he already did spent $830 billion on infrastructure stimulus spending, and he has taxed the bejesus out of the rich. And the result wasn’t more equality and a resurgent middle class, but an angry and worried worker class that hasn’t seen a pay raise in 15 years and with household incomes in the last seven years that have fallen behind inflation. Some 95 million Americans aren’t working and the poverty rate is still hellishly high.”

Clinton “is selling the American voters sand in the desert: four more years of stay the course economic bromides at a time when two out of three voters say that the U.S. is on the wrong, not the right track.”

Trump fired back at Hillary yesterday, hitting her hard enough that Clinton worshippers are getting anxious.

Slate’s Michelle Goldberg lamented that the tide may be turning against the Benghazi bungler Trump paints as a corrupt, money-grubbing, political hack. Crestfallen, the diehard leftist called Trump’s Wednesday speech on Clinton’s record dishonest and demagogic but “terrifyingly effective” and “probably the most unnervingly effective” speech the man has ever given.

“In a momentary display of discipline, he read from a teleprompter with virtually no ad-libbing, avoiding digs at Bill Clinton’s infidelity or conspiracy theories about Vince Foster’s suicide,” speaking “for 40 minutes without saying anything overtly sexist.” Instead, he took aim at “Clinton’s most-serious weaknesses, describing her as a venal tool of the establishment.”

“Hillary Clinton gave China millions of our best jobs and effectively let China completely rebuild itself,” Trump said. “In return, Hillary Clinton got rich!” He added, “She gets rich making you poor,” and declared her possibly “the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency.”

Goldberg treated Trump’s address as brilliant performance art in which he “interwove truth and falsehood into a plausible-seeming picture meant to reinforce listeners’ underlying beliefs.”

Pretending her readers were complete idiots ignorant of Hillary’s history, Goldberg wheeled out Washington establishment yes man David Gergen to denounce what he called Trump’s “slanderous speech.” On CNN an animated Gergen made a fool of himself by castigating Trump for relying on the exhaustively documented allegations of graft and corruption in Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by acclaimed best-selling author Peter Schweizer.

Regurgitating the self-serving nonsense peddled by leftist slander shop Media Matters for America, the “conservative misinformation” monitor that Hillary herself takes credit for founding, Gergen said that the “book has been basically discredited.”

Not so. In fact, the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Politico, Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC News, and CBS News have all confirmed several key details in Clinton Cash, investigative reporter Matthew Boyle points out.

Gergen added, “I’m sorry, at this level, you can’t slander somebody.”

Why Gergen has attained such prominence at this level in the Washington punditocracy is unclear.

What is clear is that he seems to know nothing about the Clinton family and has been asleep throughout Barack Obama’s Saul Alinsky-inspired presidency.