RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton spent a third of her miserable adult life trying to get into the White House. Now the nation’s failed Harridan-in-Chief is determined to spend her remaining years blaming everyone, from Matt Lauer to the Electoral College, for having to live out the rest of her life in flat broke poverty in the eleven rooms of her Georgian Colonial mansion (and the neighboring mansion in their cul-de-sac too).

Current ‘blamees’ include the FBI, millions of white people, sexism, the Russians, Russian sexism, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Matt Lauer and the Electoral College.

And probably the starting lineup of the Denver Broncos. You’ll have to buy the book for the full list.

But What Happened, Hillary’s spiteful magnum opus, does actually answer its titular question.

Hillary happened.

Hillary Clinton is a terrible person. Her politics are terrible. She’s a nasty creature whose hatred, entitlement and greed are in direct proportion to her mountainous avalanches of self-pity.

And What Happened sums up those qualities the way that none of her previous biographies ever did.

What Happened isn’t Hillary unfiltered. The only people privileged to witness that were the Secret Service agents she threw things at and the aides who had to frantically cater to her every whim.

But it’s close enough.

What Happened is still told in Hillary’s treacly insincere voice. But for the first time, its topic isn’t a bunch of insincere platitudes assembled by some combination of aides, staffers, ghostwriters and pollsters.

All that is over.

The carefully constructed machine built to take Hillary to the White House broke down on Wisconsin Highway 14, Florida State Road 20 and Pennsylvania Route 22. Only a skeleton staff of loyalists stayed to help Hillary turn her name recognition and remaining connections into filthy lucre and filthier spite.

That’s what What Happened is. Hillary gets to lash out at everyone and get paid for it. Not only is she upstaging Bernie’s book tour while trying to tie him to Trump, she’s taking shots at another likely Dem 2020er, Joe Biden, not to mention her own badly used DNC and everyone who didn’t vote for her.

If Hillary can’t be president, she’s going to make damn sure that none of her Dem rivals will either.

Hillary will be taking the millions that she had to spend to fight off Bernie in state after state out of his hide piece by piece. And Biden’s vacillation about the entering the race will cost him too.

How much vengeance can Hillary extract with a book? Ask Bernie.

The Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution print edition will be out on September 14. Hillary’s What Happened will be out on September 12.

Two days earlier.

Hillary’s book currently tops Amazon’s bestseller list. Bernie’s is at 39.

President Trump, through his press secretary, has recommended that the Justice Department, which answers to Trump, should consider prosecuting former FBI director James Comey. The statements by Sarah Huckabee Sanders were not a model of clarity, and the way they’ve been reported may have confused matters. There is no doubt, however, that the Trump administration is politicizing law enforcement — exactly what it accuses Comey of having done.

Ms. Sanders accused Comey of leaking “privileged information” to the media and giving false testimony to Congress. The disclosure of “privileged information” is generally not a crime unless the information is classified — and Ms. Sanders did not claim that Comey divulged classified matters. The spokeswoman, moreover, failed to specify what the purportedly false testimony was, although she appeared to be referring to statements the former FBI director made to Congress regarding the Hillary Clinton emails probe — the investigation she accused Comey of politicizing.

Sanders was not clear on whether the White House believed Comey had probably committed a crime or merely strayed into a legal gray area, burbling that his “improper” actions “likely could have been illegal.” While paying lip-service to the notion that encouraging a prosecution is “not the president’s role,” Sanders nonetheless asserted, “I think if there’s ever a moment where we feel someone’s broken the law, particularly if they’re the head of the FBI, I think that’s something that certainly should be looked at.”

The press secretary’s description of the former FBI director’s actions may or may not have been accurate, depending on whether her oral remarks have been correctly punctuated in reporting by the Washington Post (whose version is substantially duplicated by The Hill). The Post relates Sanders’s statement as follows (my italics to highlight the possible confusion):

Comey, by his own self-admission, leaked privileged government information weeks before President Trump fired him. Comey testified that [if?] an FBI agent engaged in the same practice, they’d [sic] face serious repercussions. I think he set his own stage for himself on that front.

Obviously, Sanders was referring to Comey’s disclosure to the New York Times of a portion of a memo he had written about a conversation with Trump. According to Comey, during that February 14 conversation, Trump pressured him to drop the investigation of retired General Michael Flynn, the national-security adviser Trump had just fired. The problem with Sanders’s account, as quoted above, is that the leak to the Times happened days after, not “weeks before,” Comey was fired by Trump.

To recap, Comey was fired on May 9. He has recounted that his leak was a reaction to a tweet by Trump on May 12 — three days later. In that tweet, Trump said, “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press.” Comey related (in Senate Intelligence Committee testimony) that a few days after the tweet, it dawned on him that Trump’s allusion to tapes implied the existence of recordings that could corroborate Comey’s version of events. Using an intermediary, he thus leaked a portion of his memo to the Times, which published a story about it on May 16. Comey hoped the leak would “prompt the appointment of a special counsel” — who obviously would attempt to obtain any relevant recordings. Soon afterwards, Robert Mueller, was in fact appointed special counsel. President Trump has since represented that he made no recordings.

If the Post has framed Sanders’s assertions accurately, she was clearly wrong about the timing of the leak. I suspect, however, that the Post’s punctuation is wrong — which obviously can happen when oral statements are transcribed. The phrase “weeks before President Trump fired him” may not have been the end of Sanders’s first sentence (about Comey’s leak); it may have been the beginning of her next sentence (about Comey’s testimony regarding possible FBI leaking). If I am correct about this, Sanders’s statements should have been reported as follows:

Comey, by his own self-admission, leaked privileged government information. Weeks before President Trump fired him, Comey testified that [if?] an FBI agent engaged in the same practice, they’d face serious repercussions. I think he set his own stage for himself on that front.

This would be closer to accurate. Comey has admitted leaking his memo. The information in the memo — a summary of a conversation between the president and FBI director — was clearly sensitive and, even if not classified, should not have been leaked. And, in a May 3 Senate hearing, Comey had testified that there would be “severe consequences” if he found out FBI agents leaked investigative information. (We should note that this was less than a week before Trump fired him, not “weeks before,” as Sanders said.) This seems like a more plausible rendering. After all, the point Sanders was trying to make was that Comey’s leaking of investigative information was condemnable under his own prior condemnation of such leaking.

In What Happened, Hillary Clinton’s new 512-page recollection of what was perhaps the most painful and awkward election in American history, the former secretary of state recounts an infamous debate moment she shared with Donald Trump:

We were on a small stage, and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled.

In her mind, Clinton recounts, she weighed two options:

Do you stay calm, keep smiling, and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye, and say loudly and clearly, “Back up, you creep, get away from me, I know you love to intimidate women but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.”

Option B, as the kids like to say, would have escalated things rather quickly, with the added bonus of seeming a teeny bit unhinged. Hillary, of course, chose the more repressed Option A: “I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off.”

Ah, yes. It’s difficult to pinpoint the most painful Hillary Clinton moment of the many painful Hillary Clinton moments that populate What Happened, but this one certainly comes close. Think about it: Even now, after months of time to reflect and ruminate and engage in self-soothing techniques like downing Chardonnay and “one-nostril breathing,” Hillary Clinton is completely oblivious to what any decent politician would have realized, if not in the heat of the moment, at least in hindsight: There was an obvious Option C.

I’m referring, of course, to one of my favorite moments in presidential debate history, when a rather creepy Al Gore sidled up to a cheerful George W. Bush, looking as if he may or may have been considering a duel or a gentlemanly bout of fisticuffs. The year was 2000, and the heated topic that catapulted Gore’s blood pressure skyward — brace yourself, for in the scope of today’s tabloid-splashed politics, this will seem rather quaint — was the details of the “Dingell-Norwood Bill.” Gore edged closer, quietly lurking, deadly serious. After ignoring him for a few moments, Bush turned, acted mildly surprised to see him, and greeted him with a bemused, dismissive nod.

The audience broke into laughter. They loved it. Gore did not.

Well, as we all know, Hillary Clinton is no George W. Bush. She is also, as What Happened strains to remind us over and over and over again, no Donald Trump. And while many Americans might wonder why on earth anyone would spend their free time reading a book rehashing what should be fairly obvious by now — Hillary Clinton is not a very good politician — What Happened does manage to offer some valuable insights. Unfortunately, they’re not the ones the author intends.

Let’s talk about David Foster Wallace, shall we? Hillary Clinton does, bringing up his famous “This Is Water” commencement speech in her chapter entitled “On Being a Woman in Politics.” She’s referring to the deeply moving and widely read address in which Wallace discusses human nature and life’s various struggles, noting that “the most obvious realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” The speech opens with an anecdote about two fish who fail to recognize that they are completely immersed in water.

This, according to Clinton, “sums up the problem of recognizing sexism — especially when it comes to politics — quite nicely.”

Among the enduring criticisms of Hillary Clinton: Her sense of entitlement is limitless. She’s tone-deaf and doesn’t understand the average American — nor does she care to. Her greed is insatiable.

Add to this a gaping lack of self-awareness, and you have all the ingredients for the New York City launch of Hillary’s nationwide book tour Tuesday morning (also primary day, not that Hillary — who maintains she’s still here only for us — cares about that either).

Thousands of people lined up outside the Barnes & Noble at Union Square in hopes of meeting their idol. Some slept outside the night before. Clare Hogenauer, an older, disabled upper West Sider, told me she rented a downtown motel room nearby. “I didn’t want to take a chance,” she said.

For Hillary supporters, this event was meant to be a salve, a corrective, a moment of collective grief and healing.

“I’m excited for her book release because it’s something I’ve never seen from a candidate dealing with defeat,” 24-year-old Brandon Echevarria told me. He was at the front of the line, having arrived outside last night at 10 p.m., too excited to sleep. The book and the launch, he said, “has a lot to do with experience and self-help.”

Hillary’s attendees were willing to follow any directive. There were many, and here, in part, were the written instructions:

“A limited number of wristbands for entry will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis with purchase of the featured title at Barnes & Noble Union Square. Hillary Rodham Clinton will sign copies of her new release, What Happened and the 2017 illustrated children’s edition of It Takes a Village, no exceptions or personalizing. She will sign up to two books per customer, one of which must be What Happened. No other books or memorabilia please. Posed photos or selfies will not be taking place . . . Book purchase and wristbands are both required to meet the author, no exceptions.Customers without wristbands will not be allowed to participate in any capacity.”

In other words, everyone was here to serve two purposes: To make sure “What Happened” debuts at No. 1 on the bestseller list and to line Hillary’s pockets. (At least she wasn’t surcharging $89-$3,000 per head, as she is at forthcoming events.)

Hillary’s advertised arrival time was 11 a.m., which came and went. Hundreds of people were penned in on a top floor, with thousands more waiting outside in 80-degree heat. All bags had to be checked, so people didn’t have food or water. Yet most retained their excitement: If they couldn’t have Hillary as president, this was the next best thing.
Modal Trigger
Thousands line up outside Barnes & Noble for Hillary Clinton’s book signing.Gregory P. Mango

Thirty more minutes went by, then forty. And it wasn’t as though people could read Hillary’s book while waiting: They wouldn’t get their copy until they approached the dais, where Hillary would then generically sign it.

Perhaps that was for crowd-control reasons, or perhaps so she wouldn’t be challenged on some of the book’s doozies, such as:

“Although I never imagined running for office myself . . .” (after her politically-charged 1969 commencement speech was covered in Life magazine, her later work on the House Judiciary Committee’s Watergate investigation and her marriage to the politically ambitious Bill Clinton).

Losing presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is opening a promotional tour for her new campaign memoir by smearing President Trump and his tens of millions of supporters as deplorable racists.

Not content to fade into the background as defeated nominees have tended to do in the modern era, the former secretary of state is race-baiting and grandstanding in front of anyone who will listen, a move that is causing consternation among plenty of professional Democrats.

On CBS over the weekend, her description of attending President Trump’s inauguration – it was “like an out-of-body experience” – seems understandable given Clinton’s belief her election was so certain that, in the words she used in the book, she “had not drafted a concession speech.”

But her incendiary claim that Trump’s inauguration speech almost eight months ago was a “cry from the white nationalist gut” went well beyond sour grapes. When Democrats are in trouble, they cry “racist!” When that doesn’t work, they cry “racist!” more loudly and hire publicists to spread the smear.

A credible case can be made that Hillary’s book is a cry for help from a disturbed individual, one who refuses to take responsibility for anything. Ever.

It is a matter of record that in his first address as president Trump made no attempt to stoke the flames of racial resentment. But left-wingers obsessed with alleged “dog whistles” conservatives throw to their supposedly racist base auditorily hallucinate such coded messages daily.

What Trump did do on January 20 was speak of the terrible damage Hurricane Barack and his party’s left-wing policies have inflicted on everyday Americans.

Speaking of the “forgotten men and women of our country [who] will be forgotten no longer,” the new president said:

Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public, but for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists:

Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

Anyone who interprets President Trump’s tough, eloquent call to arms against America’s problems as a “cry from the white nationalist gut” needs psychiatric help.

But we knew that already.

In the interview with CBS’s Jane Pauley, Clinton continued the lies, smearing Trump as a racist demagogue.

“He was quite successful in referencing a nostalgia that would give hope, comfort, settle grievances for millions of people who were upset about gains that were made by others,” Clinton said, adding that she was referring to “millions of white people.”

Although known for her angry, sometimes alcohol-fueled explosions in private, Clinton said she wasn’t enraged enough on the stump to match the public mood. “A lot of people didn’t want to hear my plans. They wanted me to share their anger. And I should’ve done a better job of demonstrating ‘I get it.'”

In the interview, Clinton stood by her obnoxious “basket of deplorables” comment during the campaign, in which she wrote off half of Trump’s supporters as “irredeemable,” even though she previously backtracked on the comment and feigned remorse. “Trump was behaving in a deplorable manner,” she said, giving the sexually descriptive “Access Hollywood” audio footage from 2005 as proof.

Liberalism is a dirty word in today’s left. You hear it most often as an insult, neoliberalism, hurled by the hard left against anyone accused of insufficient hostility to free enterprise and other open systems. If you trust the free market and individual judgement over state regulation, you might just be a neoliberal.

And neoliberals are the biggest enemies of the left.

Liberal has become a slur on the illiberal left which is intolerant of open and tolerant systems. The defining symbol of the illiberal left is the campus safe space where no free speech is allowed. Safe spaces take the college, once the symbol of a liberal commitment to the free exchange of ideas, and invert it into a space that is safe from the free exchange of ideas under a warm and fuzzy name.

The safe space isn’t a campus eccentricity. As the riots from Berkeley to Boston show, using violence to silence free speech isn’t just something overzealous college kids do. It’s what the left does now. And sympathetic lefty mayors of cities put on the same show of helplessness as university administrators.

When the New York Times runs multiple editorials attacking the very idea of speech, one such op-ed claimed that some forms of speech were stressful and therefore a form of violence, it’s not college kids.

It’s the illiberal left.

After Trump’s win, the left reacted by finding fault with an excessively open society. The media blamed “Fake News” spread on social media for his victory and pressured Facebook, Twitter and Google into agreeing to its let its fact checkers decide what was and wasn’t legitimate. It wasn’t censorship, they insisted. It was social responsibility. And social responsibility is how censors justify what they do.

Meanwhile the latest wave of blacklists seeks to shut down organizations and silence individuals.

The post-election paranoia over Fake News and Russia, and the blacklisting surge have a common underlying theme. Our society is too open. Something has to be done to securely shut it down.

Free speech has the same problem as free enterprise. It assumes that we should trust people.

Potential donors to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) need to ask themselves, to what use their money will be put?

In the months leading up to the U.S. presidential election in November 2016, a former director of the World Jewish Congress decried the direction in which the new head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was taking the international human rights group. In a series of columns, Isi Leibler — a prominent Australian Israeli — blasted ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, for turning the 100-year-old organization, whose mission is to monitor and expose anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, into a platform that “represents an echo chamber of left-wing Democratic politics.”

Leibler first took issue with Greenblatt’s April 2016 address to the far-Left Jewish organization J Street, backed by anti-Israel billionaire George Soros.

Leibler wrote that Greenblatt “incorporated [in his speech] criticisms of Israel that were thoroughly inappropriate…[and] indirectly gave a seal of approval for the Obama administration to impose solutions on future borders that could dramatically compromise Israel’s security.”

Ironically, Greenblatt’s rebuttal, in the form of a letter to the editor of The Jerusalem Post, illustrated Leibler’s point. He not only defended J Street, referring to the people in the audience as “a group of deeply thoughtful college students whose commitment to Israel is genuine and whose passion on the issues is impressive;” he claimed that he had not been morally equivocating Israel and the Palestinians.

Columnist Isi Leibler blasted Jonathan Greenblatt (pictured above), CEO of the Anti-Defamation League and a former adviser to President Obama, for turning the 100-year-old organization, whose mission is to monitor and expose anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, into a platform that “represents an echo chamber of left-wing Democratic politics.” (Image source: Erik Hersman/Flickr)

In a subsequent piece, Leibler called Greenblatt to task for having “lost the plot, behaving as though he remained employed by the Obama administration.” Leibler cited the ADL’s July 13, 2016 statement “welcoming the Republican Party platform on Israel,” but expressing “disappoint[ment] that the platform draft departs from longstanding support of a two-state solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict… the only viable way to secure Israel as both a Jewish and democratic state.”

Leibler wrote:

“One can disagree about a two-state policy, but for an American Jewish organization which must remain bipartisan and should be concentrating on anti-Semitism to issue such a statement breaches all conventions. It is totally beyond the ADL’s mandate to involve itself in such partisan political issues.”

Yet this is just what Greenblatt did. In a September 13, 2016 article in the journal Foreign Policy, he contested a video clip of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointing to the Palestinian Authority’s outright refusal to have even a single Jew reside within the boundaries of a future Palestinian state. In the piece, titled “Sorry, Bibi, the Palestinians are not ‘ethnic cleansing’ Jewish settlers,” Greenblatt wrote that Netanyahu “chose to raise an inappropriate straw man regarding Palestinian policy toward Israeli settlements.”

Far more questionable, however, has been the ADL’s support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement — a group established in 2013 to counter police brutality against African Americans, but that quickly mushroomed into a full-fledged “intersectional” anti-American, anti-white, anti-Israel, pro-radical Palestinian organization.

About this, too, Greenblatt made what critics claim is a convoluted statement — saying that the ADL has no “official relationship with the body of activists who claim membership in this effort,” and attributing its “anti-Israel — and at times anti-Semitic — positions” to a “small minority of leaders within the Black Lives Matter movement.”

American progressives have fnally gone all the way to a totalitarian vision, demanding control over not just your behavior, but your thoughts and beliefs. This as the price of simply living without being attacked.

And hats off to Erick Erickson for naming it first. The former RedState honcho and Never-Trumper called it right, and no, I’m not talking about his near-demonic hatred of President Trump.

Last year, Erickson released a book with a title he popularized: You Will Be Made to Care: The War on Faith, Family, and Your Freedom to Believe. The book is a summation of an argument Erickson has long made. As the sexual left makes progress on its biggest projects — same-sex marriage, transgenderism acceptance, pronoun wordplay — they are increasingly unwilling to brook resistance.

Do you believe in traditional marriage but don’t care that gays marry? Think it’s OK teenagers take hormonal injections to swap genders but it’s not right for your kids? Don’t really give a hoot about someone who identifies as “xe”?

Well, too bad, sucker. The new dispensation doesn’t care for your waffling. Going forward, your private beliefs must align with your public stance. No exceptions made or allowed.

In short: You will be made to care

Erickson’s warning was just vindicated in a tweetstorm by Zack Ford, the flamboyant correspondent for the liberal blog ThinkProgress.

Ford, who is prone to pique-filled tantrums, is the site’s LGBTQ editor. His beat consists of sniffing out any hint of pro-heterosexual bias and lambasting it as bigoted, backwards, and tyrannical. He’s a proud atheist who doesn’t hesitate to cite science when it’s convenient. But, nota bene, he believes men menstruate and become pregnant.

In response to an essay by Bethany Mandel in The Federalist, Ford had a bigger meltdown than Sex in the City fans when Mr. Big dumped Carrie at the altar. In her piece, Mandel admitted to once being a supporter of gay marriage, but the liberals’ Torquemada-inspired campaign for transgenderism inclusion among children has changed her mind. Feeling hoodwinked, Mandel pointedly wrote, “The Left has shown the totalitarian manner in which it exacts support, or at least silence, from everyday Americans.”

Ford wasn’t having any of it, no siree. Even though Mandel was an “ally” during the fight for same-sex marriage, her opinion that grates upon the “Approved Position” on transgenderism is hereby invalid. “What [Mandel] argues that [sic] she should be ALLOWED to believe what she believes, even though those odious beliefs harm others,” Ford tweeted. “Indeed,” our hysterical scribe continued, “she is a quintessential example of claiming free speech to justify her bigotry.”

Then came the kicker: “You’ll be ‘made to care,’ because intolerance harms people and is unjustified and the rest of us want the world to be a better place.”