RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the ever more astounding Clinton email striptease, which has now hooked up with the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, a player who deserves a lot more mention than he’s been getting is President Barack Obama. True, it was Hillary Clinton, not Obama, who squirreled away State Department business on a private server, and then brought us the contortionist performance of denials, deletions, evasions and professed ignorance that “(C)” on a State Department document stands for “classified.” It is Clinton’s longtime top aide, Huma Abedin, who has some explaining to do about how emails pertinent to the Clinton server saga arrived on the computer of her now-estranged husband, Weiner, who is currently under FBI investigation for allegedly sending sexually suggestive messages to a teenage girl.

But it is Obama who presides over the administration whence came this mudslide of wayward emails, classified information, pay-for-play opportunities and a Justice Department that has itself become part of the scandal. And it is at the president’s desk that the buck — or the mudslide — is supposed to stop.

It was Obama who tapped Hillary to be secretary of State. It was Obama’s administration that apparently shrugged off at the time Clinton’s extensive use of a private server (though Obama himself was among those who corresponded with her on her private account). It was Obama’s administration that allowed Hillary and Bill Clinton to spin the tangled web of connections between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.

It is Obama who presides over an administration that failed to police a setup in which — as FBI Director James B. Comey finally told the press this July — Clinton or her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” As we now know, Clinton used her personal domain extensively while traveling abroad, and according to Comey, the FBI assesses “it is possible that hostile actors gained access.”

On all these fronts, the Clinton email saga is yet another of Obama’s legacies, along with the unaffordable Affordable Care Act, and an Iran nuclear deal that paves Iran’s way to the bomb. And what, precisely, does this Clinton-email legacy help to enshrine in America’s political culture? There are plenty of big things in play here: a self-interested disregard at high levels for matters of national security; the reek of crony favors; the subordination of rule of law to an amorphous official narrative, with corrosive effects on the American system of justice.

But if we look for a bottom line, it’s a code ruinous to the foundations of the American republic, and neatly summed up by George Orwell more than 70 years ago, toward the end of Animal Farm: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

Take, as one of the most glaring aspects of this tale, the administration’s approach to the handling of classified information. Let us specify that even in a free society, there is some information that for reasons such as national security must be kept secret. But the temptation for any administration is to exploit that authority to impose and enforce secrecy in service not of the American people, but of the political agenda or self-interest of those in charge.

Obama took office in 2009 promising to run the most transparent administration ever. Instead, he has run an administration so secretive that in 2013 the Committee to Protect Journalists released a report on “The Obama Administration and the Press,” documenting a Washington climate in which “government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press.” Why? Because “those suspected of discussing with reporters anything the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and email records.” Among 30 veteran journalists interviewed in Washington for this CPJ report, not one could recall any precedent rivaling the aggressive nature of “the administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information.”

Exhibit A in this Obama administration campaign to control information is the case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former contractor with the State Department, who, in the face of a possible 15-year sentence had he been convicted at trial, pled guilty in 2014 to leaking classified information to Fox News reporter James Rosen, and was sentenced to 13 months in prison.

The Stephen Kim case dated back to 2009, Obama’s first year in office. That spring, North Korea carried out its second nuclear test, as well as a ballistic missile test. On June 11, 2009, Rosen published an article describing how the CIA, based on information from “sources inside North Korea,” expected North Korea might respond to a Security Council resolution condemning its actions. CONTINUE AT SITE

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are October Lucy Ma “Anne of Green Gables” 1908

The election, Mosul, Yemen, Hurricane Matthew, Bob Dylan, Chicago Cubs, Tom Haydn. They all made news in October. Apart from the Cubs and Bob Dillon, most of the news (as is so often the case) was bad. In the case of the election, it was dispiriting. On a happier note, October is leaf season in New England. This year, at least in my part of Connecticut, it was vibrant. The DEEP (Department of Energy and Environmental Protection), which publishes every year “The ten best places to see fall foliage in Connecticut,” did not this year include Essex, Lyme or Old Lyme among their recommendations. Not to take anything away from other parts of the State, but it is hard to beat the contrast between the blue of the Connecticut River and the green of evergreens that line its bank, with the golds and reds of our color guard – Oaks, Maples, Beeches, Hickories, Sumacs and Birches.

The October “surprise” was the bombshell emanating from a letter FBI Director James Comey sent, after first alerting the Department of Justice, to senior members of Congress. In the letter he asserted that, after submitting a laptop that belonged to Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin to metadata analysis, his only choice was to re-open the e-mail case against Hillary Clinton. While Democrats rose up in alarm, they have no one to blame but themselves. Mrs. Clinton chose to use a private e-mail account and server. She chose to lie about its use and chose to cover-up what she had done. She had e-mails destroyed. Her husband met covertly with Attorney General, Loretta Lynch. The Administration went along with her shenanigans, as did the Democrat establishment. These revelations not only expose Clinton corruption and the immorality of the Administration and the Justice Department, they could well determine the outcome of the election. Regardless, this “surprise” is symptomatic of an awful election year. If Hillary wins and the data shows she is indictable, what happens? If she loses and the data exonerates her, what happens?

The President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, used a pseudonym to communicate with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her private, unsecured email server. As Andrew McCarthy contended, that was the reason the FBI declined to prosecute Clinton, because the president would have been part of the same action, and that wouldn’t be politically correct.

The current president of the United States is also on record that, contrary to custom, he will linger in Washington DC for a few years. Wherever he chooses to live, the email intrigue suggests continuing back-channel communications with Hillary Clinton, should she become president. That invites a look at what the man the New York Times dubbed “Obama’s narrator,” the White House adviser who sat closest to the president and signed off on his every word, had to say about the president’s vision of the future.

“Few of the decisions he had made would satisfy the politics of the moment,” David Axelrod explained in his massive 2015 Believer. “But at home and abroad, Obama was playing a longer game.” As he explained in Columbia, Missouri, on October 30, 2008, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

If this man was a liberal, as Barry Rubin wondered in Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance, why did he see a need fundamentally to transform a nation shaped by liberals such as Franklin Roosevelt with his New Deal and Lyndon Johnson with his Great Society? He saw the need because he was not a liberal but a lifelong leftist radical.

As David Horowitz explained in Volume 7 of the Black Book of the American Left, the president was “born, bred and trained in the progressive movement.” His mentors were “Communists and their progressive successors,” so no wonder he presided over “the institutionalizing of the policies of the left in government” for eight years. What that means in practical terms is becoming painfully evident.

The economy remains sluggish and under Obamacare, the president’s signature plan, premiums are skyrocketing. This suggests that, as many believe, Obamacare was simply a demolition plan. In the “longer game,” designated successor Hillary Clinton will impose government monopoly healthcare, what some candidates erroneously call “socialized medicine.”

LAS VEGAS — President Obama’s motorcade was still hurtling through Las Vegas traffic when the Rev. Anthony Harris took the microphone to deliver the opening prayer at a rally here for Hillary Clinton.

He looked out on the crowd of 3,000 in the high school gymnasium, waiting for the president to arrive. The feeling was different now than it had been eight years earlier, when Obama had just been elected and Harris led his congregation in prayer for the president. Then, there had been crying and cheering in his tiny storefront chapel and a sense that anything was possible.

Now, Harris, 47, took a deep breath. He hoped his words would rise above the anger and divisiveness of an election season unlike any in his lifetime.

“We pray that at the end of this political process we can learn to love each other, bless each other and trust each other,” he told the crowd, but that noble sentiment did not survive the rally’s first speaker.

Taking the microphone, Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) blasted Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as a “liar,” a “racist” and a “fraud.” Lock him up! Lock him up!” the pro-Clinton crowd in the gym started to chant, echoing the anti-Clinton chants of “Lock her up!” that have become common at Trump rallies

“I know people are frustrated,” Harris recalled, thinking as he returned to his seat. “But what does ‘lock him up’ even mean?”

In the week leading up to Election Day, the president will crisscross the country in an effort to help Clinton win the White House and safeguard his legacy. If those events are anything like last week’s campaign stop in Las Vegas, Obama will be met by rowdy, cheering throngs eager to see him one last time before he leaves office.

For many, who will wait hours in line to hear him speak, Obama’s 2008 election represented one of the most hopeful moments in American politics in decades. He was not only the first African American president but a relative newcomer to national politics with a remarkable life story who promised to bridge the country’s historic divides. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” Obama said that election night in Chicago’s Grant Park.

As if facing down violent Islamist fanatics isn’t enough, Muslim reformers now have to dodge attacks from the American left. Consider the Southern Poverty Law Center’s decision last week to brand two such reformers, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Britain’s Maajid Nawaz, as “anti-Muslim extremists.”

Founded in 1971 by civil-rights activists, the Montgomery, Alabama-based law center says it’s committed to “fighting hate and bigotry and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society.” That apparently doesn’t include civil rights in the Muslim world or among Muslims living in the U.S.

Ms. Hirsi Ali, who sometimes writes for these pages, is a native of Somalia who later immigrated to the Netherlands and then the U.S. She has braved death threats from jihadists for criticizing female genital mutilation, blasphemy laws, and repression of women and minorities in the Muslim world.

The report attempts to cast doubt on her personal story. Ms. Hirsi Ali, the group sneers, “says she endured female genital mutilation.” It goes on to call her “toxic” for arguing that there is an ideological and theological dimension to what used to be called the war on terror. By that measure France’s Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls is also an extremist.

Mr. Nawaz is a British-Pakistani former Islamist who now campaigns against jihadist ideology. He has opposed Islamist movements in the U.K. as well as far-right parties such as the English Defence League. Among the law center’s evidence for its anti-Muslim claim: Mr. Nawaz once posted a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad on Twitter “despite the fact that many Muslims see it as blasphemous.” The Ayatollah Khomeini would agree.

The unstated premise of the report is that criticizing Islamist movements, ideologies and regimes, and Islam itself, is the same as hating Muslims. If the Western left believes this, then already-embattled reformers in the Muslim world will be even more isolated.