RUTHFULLY YOURS

Beyond its vulgar details, Americans didn’t learn much new about Donald Trump in the video of his sexual boasting with Billy Bush. Anybody paying attention already knew Mr. Trump is crude and loutish and given to crassly judging women by their looks. His exchange with Megyn Kelly of Fox News in the first GOP debate made that clear. Republican voters nominated him despite these risks, and the release of an especially lewd and nasty 11-year-old tape put Mr. Trump’s candidacy in crisis as he faced the second presidential debate Sunday night.

Our email inbox is filled with Republicans saying this is a double standard because while Mr. Trump may talk like a lout, Bill Clinton acts like one and Hillary Clinton enables him. Oh, and Democrats still revere JFK, who was a sexual predator in the White House.

This is all true, and it is a bit much to see the same liberals who said Mr. Clinton’s actual exploitation of an intern was merely about sex, or who called Paula Jones trailer trash, now wax indignant about Mr. Trump’s bragging. The same moralists who celebrate misogyny in pop music and a sex-crazed culture are also conveniently outraged by a man who was marinated in that culture before he entered politics.

Yet as a matter of cold political reality these objections don’t matter. Mr. Trump’s behavior is offensive to traditional standards of decent male behavior, and conservatives rightly made the case that “character counts” against Mr. Clinton in the White House.

Even before the tape and his half-apologies, Mr. Trump was underperforming with college-educated Republicans, especially women. The tape may disqualify him with these voters, and more such tapes may surface. Democrats know how to do opposition research, and Mr. Trump’s past is an opponent’s field of dreams.

This is the political reality that Mr. Trump confronted Sunday night, and the question was whether he did enough to repair the damage to his candidacy by asking voters to look past his comments to the larger stakes of the election. On that score he did better on the issues than he did in apologizing.

Mr. Trump was less effective in the first half hour because his apology for the tape seemed too grudging. He also couldn’t resist going after Bill Clinton’s sexual abuses, which didn’t make Mr. Trump look any more presidential. Americans already know about the Clinton deceptions about sex, which is one reason polls show that most Americans don’t want to vote for Hillary. That’s the main—the only—reason Mr. Trump is still within striking distance after his many blunders.

Mr. Trump’s problem is that voters aren’t sure they trust him to sit in the Oval Office. His lack of impulse control, his inability to take criticism, his 3 a.m. Twitter rants and his seeming failure to prepare for debates all reinforce the doubts the Clinton campaign is raising about his immaturity and temperament.

On the issues Mr. Trump was much better prepared on Sunday, and he kept Mrs. Clinton on the defensive on taxes, ObamaCare and her own ethical problems with her private email server. She isn’t any better than Mr. Trump at apologizing, and we’ll bet Mrs. Clinton doesn’t try citing Abraham Lincoln again as a defense of her private versus public persona. Mr. Trump’s riposte about “Honest Abe” exposed the falsity of that answer.

The Trump campaign should be throwing thank-you bouquets at Hillary’s minions for unearthing an 11-year-old video of the businessman speaking raunchily about women to Hollywood Access host Billy Bush. Why?

1. It demonstrates the sheer panic the Hillary campaign is in at the devolving internal-poll numbers that show the ailing candidate barely keeping her [involuntarily] bobbling chin above the water line of decisive failure.

2. It highlights the startling absence of the MIA candidate, who has not been seen since a campaign appearance in Ohio on October 3, leaving surrogates to speak in her stead. This strange absence, just weeks away from the vote for president, tends to confirm the suspicion that Hillary’s frequent symptoms of illness––spasmodic coughing fits, seizure-like head jerking, inability to ascend stairs without men gripping her arms, a left eye that turns involuntarily inward, episodes of freezing in mid-sentence––utterly disqualify her from the office she seeks, which demands top-notch physical strength and mental acuity.

3. Speaking of acuity, we already know that Hillary’s judgement is gravely impaired. Who else uses private servers that are sieves for our national security secrets; lies repeatedly and compulsively to camouflage her disastrous foray into Benghazi; was a central player in facilitating a deal, through the Clinton Foundation slush fund, that gave Vladmir Putin overwhelming control over the global uranium supply chain; and who chooses Sen. Tim Kaine as a running mate?

Kaine is a man who writer Scott McKay describes in “The Kaine Scrutiny” as:

…having “a history of anti-American radical leftism…for nearly 40 years,”

…being a friend and ardent follower of “a violent Communist lunatic…”

…having a “complete lack of business or private-sector experience…[having] never signed the front of a check”

…being a typical phony liberal who on the one hand apologizes for slavery and then institutes a Project Exile program which led to the “mass incarceration of a disproportionately black cohort of perpetrators”

…having “a history of selling himself out to the Muslim Brotherhood,” which has poured huge money into his coffers

…bringing “the stench of corruption with him, something that seems inescapable with any Clinton minion”

After all of the time spent by many people, including myself, explaining the tactics of Saul Alinsky and how today’s Progressive-Left has turbo-charged them, it is stunning – in fact, incredulous – that Conservatives and Republicans are falling for the Clinton deflection con. The complete acquiescence to this tactic is, sadly, proving the Progressives right. Maybe the Right isn’t that smart at all.

The proof in the pudding is the self-righteous outrage being leveled against Donald Trump for an audio recording that exposes a private, “boys-will-be-boys” locker room conversation in which he is braggadocios about his sexual prowess. In every corner of the Conservative world, from social media to the halls of Congress, people are tripping over themselves to castigate Trump for talking like almost every guy has at some point I his life. If you are a guy and you refute that statement you are an unmitigated liar.

And at a time when the self-righteous Right is vomiting invective against the “crass” and “lewd” statements made over a decade ago by Trump, Wikileaks is revealing that this was Hillary Clinton’s plan all along. To promote someone that many would consider “extreme” and then to control the narrative to destroy him or her, leaving her pathway to the Oval Office unencumbered.

In 2015, FOX News reported, the Clinton campaign strategized about ways to elevate Donald Trump and other “extreme” Republicans as “Pied Piper” candidates. These candidates would ultimately be so “unpalatable,” that smearing them into oblivion would be easy and, in the end, the distaste the public had for the candidate would help Clinton win. These “Pied Piper,” Wikileaks revealed, candidates also included Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.

Now, if you bothered to read Rules for Radicals, something I have been saying is an absolute must if you care to protect the Republic from the Progressive movement, you know that they have executed a few rules right out of the textbook. If you read Rules for Radicals, then you also recognize that the anti-Trump crowd has been duped into falling for these Alinsky tactics once again.

Alinsky Rule No. 4 states:

“‘Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.’ You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.” Alinsky continues, “This is a serious rule. The besieged entity’s very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.”

Does this sound familiar? It should. It is exactly what the Clinton team and their Progressive lapdogs in the mainstream media have dangled in front of unwitting Conservatives to fracture the cohesiveness of the vote just 30 days out from Election Day.

Alinsky Rule No. 5 reads:

“‘Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.’ There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.”

This is history….the tired old party is realigning by splitting elites from the vox populi…..and whatever the outcome of the election this will be tectonic….This is the culmination of the dissatisfaction that started with the Tea Party….stay tuned! rsk

UPDATE — 10:30 p.m. ET: Ohio Senator Rob Portman is the latest Republican to climb aboard the anti-Trump bandwagon. Portman, who is cruising to reelection in the Buckeye State, released a statement Saturday night withdrawing his support of Trump — and announcing his intention of writing in Pence’s name for president. “I thought it was appropriate to respect the millions of voters across the country who chose Donald Trump as the Republican Party nominee. While I continue to respect those who still support Donald Trump, I can no longer support him. … I will be voting for Mike Pence for President.” Portman’s announcement brings the overall count of anti-Trump Republicans — among congressmen, senators, and governors — to 55.

UPDATE — 7:30 p.m. ET: The ranks of anti-Trump Republicans continue to swell. Of the GOP’s 331 total congressmen, senators, and governors, 54 of them — or 16 percent – have now publicly stated their opposition to the Republican nominee. That tally, according to the expert whip-counter @Taniel, includes two dozen Republicans who withdrew their support after the release of Friday’s video in which Trump can be heard making extremely vulgar comments about women. Some have rescinded their endorsements, while others have gone further in calling on Trump to step aside and allow Mike Pence to replace him as the party’s nominee.

That group of 24 includes several Republicans who are facing competitive reelection fights. One of them is John McCain, the GOP’s 2008 presidential nominee, who issued the following statement Saturday afternoon: “I have wanted to support the candidate our party nominated. He was not my choice, but as a past nominee, I thought it important I respect the fact that Donald Trump won a majority of the delegates by the rules our party set. I thought I owed his supporters that deference. But Donald Trump’s behavior this week, concluding with the disclosure of his demeaning comments about women and his boasts about sexual assaults, make it impossible to continue to offer even conditional support for his candidacy.”

Are Americans so addlepated as to pick an incompetent, thoroughly corrupt globalist over an often-vulgar man who loves his country and has accomplished a great deal?

Years ago I wrote of my contempt for the white togaed squishes of the right who flee the grounds of the forum when jackals attack their allies in order to keep their garb free of stain. This week in the lead up to the second presidential debate tonight, they’re at it again.

Just as evidence of the Clinton corruption is once again made manifest in the release of more of her emails and a closer look at the late revised Clinton foundation filings, they flee Trump because of a suspiciously timed tape of an eleven-year-old conversation with GHW Bush’s nephew, Billy Bush. If, like a toddler, you are easily distracted by shining objects you’ll fall for it. If you’re a grownup who realizes the fate of the world and this country depend on your vote you won’t.

1. How Hillary Broke the Law and Destabilized North Africa, creating a Refugee Crisis and a catastrophe in Libya and Syria

General Mike Flynn laid out the catastrophic results of then Secretary of State Clinton’s actions in Libya, based on false claims that Qaddafi was engaged in widespread attacks on civilians.

While no saint, Qaddafi was key to our counterterrorism efforts in the area. Ignoring the advice of the secretary of defense and lawyers in her own department, she allowed 18 shipments of arms from Qatar to Libyan jihadis who were on the State Department’s own list of foreign terrorists, in apparent violation of federal law (28 U.S. Code 2339A and 2339B). The arms shipments were funneled through a Qatar cleric “who brokered their release from prison” after Clinton persuaded the President to grant the terrorists full diplomatic recognition,

If that wasn’t bad enough, Flynn underscored the connection to the Clinton foundation in her otherwise puzzling conduct:

Qatar has donated anywhere from $1 to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, and emails reveal members of the Qatari royal family were privileged with back channel meetings with Secretary Clinton at the State Department. While whipping up support for the Libya military campaign, Clinton told Arab leaders, “it’s important to me personally,” the Washington Post reported.

Hillary Clinton’s prosecution of foreign policy in Libya crossed several lines: she showed extremely bad judgment by ignoring military and intelligence officials, she let personal interests conflict with U.S. foreign policy and, most importantly, she may have broken the law — again.

2. Hillary’s speeches to Big Donors Reveal clearly her Deceptive nature and her view of Trump and Sanders supporters

Wikileaks revealed a batch of new hacked emails involving Hillary this week. As people sort through them, some gems from the well-paid speeches she gave to big corporate donors showed up.

“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.” [05162013 Remarks to Banco Itau.doc, p. 28]”

The more information that drips out about the Clinton e-mail investigation, the more we learn that two key subjects, Hillary confidants Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, got extraordinarily special treatment — concessions that would never be given to subjects in a normal investigation. The primary reason for this is that the Obama Justice Department was never going to charge Hillary Clinton and her accomplices with crimes.

The guise under which Mills and Samuelson got the kid-glove treatment was their status as lawyers. Crucially, this status was the Justice Department’s pretext for resolving that potentially incriminating evidence against them, and against their “client,” Mrs. Clinton, had to be shielded from investigators pursuant to the attorney-client privilege.

Except neither Mills nor Samuelson was eligible to represent Clinton in matters related to the e-mails, including the FBI’s criminal investigation. Moreover, even if they had arguably been eligible, attorney-client communications in furtherance of criminal schemes are not privileged.

I wrote on Tuesday about the jaw-dropping allegation by House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R. Va.) that the immunity deals given to Mills and Samuelson were accompanied by at least two “side agreements.” One severely hampered the FBI’s examination of Mills’s and Samuelson’s laptop computers — the ones used to vet e-mails on Hillary Clinton’s server in order to determine which ones would be turned over to the State Department and which ones Clinton would hoard and destroy, falsely claiming that they were all “personal” in nature. The other side deal, astonishing if true, is said to have called for the FBI to destroy the laptop computers after the Bureau’s limited examination was concluded.

In congressional testimony last week, FBI director James Comey did not mention the side deals but did attempt to defend the immunity grant. He claimed it was justifiable because it is always very complicated for investigators when a lawyer’s computer becomes evidence in a criminal probe — it’s “a big meghillah” as he put it.

However colorfully expressed, Comey was making a category error. When a lawyer is implicated in a criminal investigation, which is not all that unusual, searching the lawyer’s computer tends to be complicated because there are likely to be privileged attorney-client communications on it. If the lawyer has a busy practice, many of those communications will have nothing to do with the investigation in which the lawyer is a suspect. That is not an immunity issue. It is a privilege issue. The problem is routinely addressed, without a grant of immunity, by a screening procedure that prevents the prosecutors and agents investigating the case from getting access to any communications that are legitimately protected by attorney-client privilege.

Chairman Goodlatte’s letter indicates that just such a procedure was employed in the limited search of the Mills and Samuelson computers. This underscores that the immunity grant was wholly unnecessary. Granting immunity does nothing to resolve attorney-client privilege complications, just as the screening procedure does nothing to shield the lawyer from prosecution for any non-privileged incriminating evidence.

Mills and Samuelson were given immunity in exchange for surrendering their laptops not because searching lawyers’ computers is complicated, but because the Justice Department had no intention of prosecuting them. That is also why Justice severely limited the FBI’s search of the laptops, just as it severely limited the FBI’s questioning of Mills. Mills and Samuelson were given immunity because Justice did not want to commence a grand-jury investigation, which would have empowered investigators to compel production of the laptops by simply issuing subpoenas. Justice did not want to use the grand jury because doing so would have signaled that the case was headed toward indictment. The Obama Justice Department was never going to indict Hillary Clinton, and was determined not to damage her presidential campaign by taking steps suggestive of a possible indictment.