RUTHFULLY YOURS

Reince Priebus: Revelation “raises even more questions” about Bill Clinton’s tarmac meeting with Loretta Lynch.

One of the email chains from the latest WikiLeaks document dump indicates that the Hillary Clinton campaign had a contact at the Obama Department of Justice that fed them information about one of her court cases. The revelation now has Republicans wondering if the Clinton camp colluded with the DOJ on the entire email investigation.

The email chain in question reveals that the Clinton camp got a heads up in May of 2015 about one of the lawsuits seeking the production of Clinton’s emails while at the State Department.

On May 18, 2015, Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon received an email from an unnamed DOJ official saying, “Hey Brian, this was filed tonight.” Fourteen minutes later Fallon, a former spokesman for the DOJ, emailed Clinton confidante Cheryl Mills to pass along a tip: “DOJ just filed a briefing saying the gov’t proposes releasing HRC’s cache of work-related emails in January 2016,” he wrote.

The actual date was January 15 — two weeks before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Government lawyers had disclosed the date in court documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by VICE News.

Mills responded, “Get out!???”

The next day, May 19, Fallon emailed to say, “DOJ folks inform me there is a status hearing in this case this morning, so we could have a window into the judge’s thinking about this proposed production schedule as quickly as today.”

“Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life,” President Clinton whined.

It was the late hot summer of ’98 and the man dubbed “Slick Willie,” the nickname he claimed to dislike the most, was facing the prospect of becoming the first president to be successfully impeached.

These days the Clintons seem to have changed their minds about whether presidents should have private lives that ought to be pried into. So did the media, which back then insisted that it was “just sex,” but has belatedly decided that a president’s sexual conduct ought to be subject to scrutiny after all. But then again double standards are its stock in trade. They always have been.

Bill’s bedroom is off limits, but Trump’s isn’t.

Unable to run on national security, the Clintons want to run on the same subject that they once eschewed. And they want Trump’s sex life to be up for public debate, but not Bill’s.

The media has joined in this chorus which insists that when Trump mentions Bill’s rapes, he’s climbing into the “gutter,” but that when Hillary references Trump’s tape, she’s taking the “high ground.”

How can the same subject be both the gutter and the high ground? It’s either one or the other.

Meanwhile the clock to the next Islamic terror attack goes on ticking.

Back in ‘98 Bill Clinton complained, “Our country has been distracted by this matter for too long, and I take my responsibility for my part in all of this. That is all I can do. Now it is time, in fact, it is past time to move on,” he added. “We have important work to do — real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face.”

These days the Clintons don’t want to move on. They want to discuss the Trump tape as often as possible. Why? Because they don’t want to deal with what the Clintons did move on to.

Hours before 9/11, Bill Clinton was giving a speech in Australia and boasted that he could have gotten Osama bin Laden, but chose not to because of the collateral damage in Kandahar.

“I nearly got him. And I could have killed him,” he admitted.

The planned airstrike had been vetoed in late December ’98. Congress had postponed debate on impeachment a few days earlier to allow Bill Clinton to bomb Iraq in peace. The raids accomplished little except to distract from the impeachment debate and from his refusal to take out Osama bin Laden.

Regarding Donald Trump’s private sexual comments: We are living through a national hysteria.

To understand how and why, it is necessary to understand the indispensable role hysteria plays on the left. The Left is always in major crisis mode. And in nearly every case, the crisis is wildly exaggerated or simply false — in other words, hysteria.

For example:

Few people deny that the earth is warming. To assert that is not hysteria. What is hysteria is the Left’s position that carbon emissions will destroy life on Earth.

No one denies that there are racist cops. What is hysteria is the Left’s claim that innocent blacks are routinely shot to death by racist cops.

The widespread protests against the name Washington “Redskins” were pure left-wing hysteria — ended only by the revelation through polling that the vast majority of American Indians couldn’t care less about the name.

The examples are endless: from the alleged epidemic of heterosexual AIDS in America and preschool molestation scares in the ’80s to the wildly exaggerated dangers of secondhand smoke and the baseless fears about electronic cigarettes.

We are regularly forced to endure a new left-wing-manufactured, media-supercharged hysteria.

One of the online questions posed to Hillary Clinton during the second presidential town hall debate in St. Louis on Sunday evening had to do with remarks she had reportedly made in private to a Wall Street audience, revealed by WikiLeaks, that she has “both a public and a private position” on such issues as Wall Street reform. The questioner wanted to know whether “it is okay for politicians to be two-faced.” Hillary Clinton rationalized her private remark to her audience of Wall Street benefactors as a reference to “Abraham Lincoln after having seen the wonderful Steven Spielberg movie ‘Abraham Lincoln.’”

The only association Hillary Clinton can legitimately claim with the memory of Abraham Lincoln was when the Clintons traded on his name and rented out the Lincoln bedroom to wealthy donors while she and Bill Clinton inhabited the White House.

Donald Trump was ready with the perfect retort: “She got caught in a total lie… She lied. And now she’s blaming the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln – Honest Abe. Honest Abe never lied. That’s the big difference between Abraham Lincoln and you. That’s a big difference.”

The latest releases from WikiLeaks revealed other disturbing dimensions of Hillary’s private/public dichotomy. For example, Hillary Clinton, in a bid to win over Bernie Sanders voters, reversed her previous support for free trade deals. Although originally a supporter of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Hillary has in more recent years publicly criticized it. During her primary campaign against Sanders, Hillary also came out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which she had called the “gold standard” while serving as Secretary of State. With respect to the issue of open borders, Hillary Clinton’s so-called fact-check website charges that “Donald Trump and his allies have falsely said Hillary Clinton wants to ‘create totally open borders.’” Yet, in a private speech to a Brazilian bank in 2013, Hillary extolled both “open trade” and “open borders,” according to this excerpt released by WikiLeaks: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.”

Hillary has time and again publicly insisted that she did not place any classified information at risk from hacking by adversaries when using her private e-mail system and devices while Secretary of State. However, she acknowledged in one private speech, excerpts of which were released by WikiLeaks, that “at the State Department we were attacked every hour, more than once an hour by incoming efforts to penetrate everything we had.” Hillary also acknowledged security concerns with the use of blackberries for government business at the time she arrived at the State Department. Yet she would have the public believe that her unsecured private system, server and blackberry devices were somehow not vulnerable to enemy intrusion.

Paul Ryan told House Republicans Monday that he won’t defend Donald Trump’s campaign or his other behavior, and the Speaker advised Members to do what is best for their districts. This is not a new position so much as the latest restatement of a familiar strategy: to limit the 2016 electoral damage and preserve the GOP majority as a check on whoever wins the Presidency.

Defending down-ballot races isn’t the most inspiring goal, and it won’t satisfy those who want the moral validation of condemning Mr. Trump and all his works. But Republican leaders have real institutional obligations, and these include serving the country when their political choices are less than ideal.

At the current moment that means preventing Hillary Clinton from returning to Washington with a Democratic Senate and perhaps even House. One irony of this election is that as Mrs. Clinton has focused on disqualifying Mr. Trump’s character and temperament, she has also released about 112,000-odd words of little-noticed policy proposals that a Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be happy to rubber-stamp.

A new burst of liberal legislation could include a “public option” for ObamaCare that would be one more giant leap toward government-run health care. Energy from fossil fuels would become stranded assets. Government by and for the regulatory state would accelerate, and the Supreme Court would be lost to judicial conservatives for a generation. A final irony is that a Pelosi-Schumer Congress would readily pass the “amnesty” immigration bill that has animated Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
This prospect ought to concentrate Republican minds because House and Senate races are becoming more competitive as Mr. Trump slips. In the Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll published Monday, voters favored the generic Democratic ballot in Congress by seven points, 49% to 42%. Last month the spread was plus-three.

The same survey also shows the Trump predicament for GOP leaders. Some 67% of Republican voters said Congress should continue to support Mr. Trump, while 14% say they should call on him to drop out and 9% say they can’t support him personally. Mrs. Clinton is nonetheless widening her leads in swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Ohio.

The question for Congressional Republicans is how to distance themselves from Mr. Trump when he says the indefensible without alienating his loyal core. Like it or not, a 45% plurality of GOP primary voters nominated Mr. Trump, and they knowingly put him on the ballot because they concluded that his unconventional political profile was a risk worth taking.

That choice may not have been wise, but the GOP can’t renounce democracy and win elections. A successful party must acknowledge the voters that Mr. Trump has inspired and the legitimate problems he has identified. These voters aren’t “irredeemable” in Mrs. Clinton’s phrase; most are ordinary Americans frustrated by their diminished economic prospects. CONTINUE AT SITE

The second presidential debate was a Trump victory, no doubt about it, even though the timely leaking of his “locker room tape” should have given his opponent a clear advantage. Hillary’s problem is that she can’t go there, not with that satyr of a husband in the wings
We know who doesn’t want Trump to win. Hillary for one, along with the Democrats in general, the infamous 47% of tax-hoovers (who have probably grown to around 55% by now), to which, strangely, you can add many, if not most, of the wealthiest financial institutions across the world. There is then the media, and not just the journalists and reporters but the owners who are all-in for Hillary. And there’s a large proportion of the Republican Party which must include the #NeverTrumps who are the supposedly right-side conservative writers, bloggers and columnists, but who are part of the political establishment with no obvious allegiance to small government and the preservation of the American Republic.

And, of course, there are the dead citizens and non-dead non-citizens who will also be lining up to vote her in, along with those who vote early and often. Not to mention those who will vote for her because she is a woman irrespective of any other considerations whatsoever.

Formidable, almost impossible odds facing Donald Trump, in other words. Even after a flawless presentation against his Obama-clone opponent, in which he took Hillary apart despite each and every effort by the laughably “impartial” moderators, the bad news is that Donald Trump remains no better than 50-50 to win. But that is also the good news. He has not yet lost and might yet emerge victorious.

And why that is so is because he represents the last chance for the United States to save itself, and approximately 51% of the voting American public know it.

The supposed killer issue was a 2005 tape made of Trump discussing in crude terms his approach to women. And possibly in anyone else’s hands, this would have been the death blow it may still turn out to be. But for Hillary Clinton, married to a genuine sexual predator, this is an issue that can only be used carefully, as the blowback is so enormous. Whatever Trump has done is as nothing in comparison with what Bill Clinton has done, who was protected by Hillary in quieting the many and various “bimbo eruptions” (her term). I regret to have to deal with this, but since you’d have to have been born before 1980 to have an active memory of any of it. I will deal with only one, the story of Paula Jones, and I will include it only at the end.

I find all this repulsive, and the Paula Jones story is the least disturbing among the stories that surfaced at the time, and it is plenty disturbing since it was only one instance of what must have been nuch more common at the time. What is more repulsive is listening to others go on about Trump, as if Clinton were not orders of magnitude worse. But what is actually significant is that bringing that tape to light has enraged Donald Trump so that we ended up with the single most devastating, one-sided debate in American political history. With Bill’s past once again in everyone’s minds, Hillary could not truly exploit the tape to the full extent she might. Trump’s was a cold anger, but it was devastating.