RUTHFULLY YOURS

The election of Hillary Clinton would mean final defeat for American conservativism — for at least a generation and almost certainly for much longer than that. The demographic changes certain to flow from eight more years of open borders, general amnesty, and distribution of the newly arrived statist voters to electorally vulnerable states would make the Left’s presidential victory this fall, for all practical purposes, permanent.

And that’s without considering the effect on the electorate of the increasingly intolerant and repressive educational and political environment, an environment that for eight more years would continue driving substantial segments of the populace, especially the vulnerable young, into the ever more mandatory belief systems of the Left.

But don’t worry: After Clinton’s election the elegant and witty columns of George Will, William Kristol and Jonah Goldberg, aided by the surpassing political skills of the Bush and Romney families, will save us all from both these calamities, and from all the other unnamed ones that Hillary and the Left will bring.

Uh, maybe not.

If Clinton prevails there will be no conservative (or Republican) president during the lifetime of any adult member of the feckless Republican royal families, or of Mr. Goldberg or the children of George Will or William Kristol. Their prediction that the presidency will be recovered in short order is a pipe dream. Over the medium term, twenty to twenty-five years, that recovery would approach demographic impossibility.

Despite the inarguable magnitude of the coming Clinton/Left disaster, Republican/conservative turncoats, led by these and other members of what Peggy Noonan aptly terms the “protected classes,” are working for Clinton’s election.

In unalloyed self-destructive irrationality, the support of Hillary Clinton by Never Trump commentators and Republican politicians is sui generis.

Never before in American history have intellectual and political leaders of a major party deliberately attempted to open the gates of enduring power to an enemy sworn to their eradication.

Are they moved by general snobbery, confusion caused by overwork, East Coast social pressure? I’ve stopped trying to figure it out and stopped caring.

But on a different level, on the level of their own personal careers and perceived short-term well-being, I’m absolutely certain what they think:

“We’ll do fine under Clinton and the Left. Under Obama we’ve experienced all of what Clinton will bring and we’ve flourished. Under Clinton we’ll do it again. We’ll continue speaking out, politely and carefully of course, and they won’t touch us; we won’t lose our jobs, our children won’t be expelled, there’ll be no unpleasant changes in our expensive neighborhoods or our children’s toney private schools, we’ll drink with the same refined people in our clubs and cocktail parties. Through it all, we’ll continue making an excellent living as the articulate opposition to the wretchedness the Left will be imposing on the American working and middle classes. The little people, the unprotected people, will endure the downside — low wages, high taxes, unsafe and decaying neighborhoods, destroyed public schools, and violent racial animosity. We’ll be the Left’s safe and well paid critics.”

What an appalling betrayal of the vast majority of Main Street voters who elected two Bush Presidents and made conservative intellectuals ‘cushy lives possible!

This is clear: Trump’s defeat, if it occurs, will be the work of the NeverTrumps.

A criminal organization masquerading as a political party, as the saying goes, Bubba Division. How would you like to make $18 million for a do-nothing job?

The guest list for a private State Department dinner on higher-education policy was taking shape when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a suggestion.

In addition to recommending invitations for leaders from a community college and a church-funded institution, Clinton wanted a representative from a for-profit college company called Laureate International Universities, which, she explained in an email to her chief of staff that was released last year, was “the fastest growing college network in the world.”

There was another reason Clinton favored setting a seat aside for Laureate at the August 2009 event: The company was started by a businessman, Doug Becker, “who Bill likes a lot,” the secretary wrote, referring to her husband, the former president.

Nine months later, Laureate signed Bill Clinton to a lucrative deal as a consultant and “honorary chancellor,” paying him $17.6 million over five years until the contract ended in 2015 as Hillary Clinton launched her campaign for president.

I know, I know: there’s “no evidence” of a quid pro quo (as if there naturally would be) and we can’t prove there is. So let the Washington Post hastily assure you of same:

There is no evidence that Laureate received special favors from the State Department in direct exchange for hiring Bill Clinton, but the Baltimore-based company had much to gain from an association with a globally connected ex-president and, indirectly, the United States’ chief diplomat. Being included at the 2009 dinner, shoulder to shoulder with leaders from internationally renowned universities for a discussion about the role of higher education in global diplomacy, provided an added level of credibility for the business as it pursued an aggressive expansion strategy overseas, occasionally tangling with foreign regulators.

“A lot of these private-education guys, they’re looking to get into events like this one,” said Sam Pitroda, a higher-education expert who was representing a policy commission from India at the State Department dinner. “The discussion itself is irrelevant. . . . It gets you very high-level contacts, and it gets you to the right people.”

HAMPTON, Ill.–Democrat Hillary Clinton strongly suggested Monday that the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin are using cyberattacks to try to tilt the race for her opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Mrs. Clinton cited what she described as official assessments that Russian intelligence services are behind the recent hack of computers at the Democratic National Committee. Thousands of stolen emails were released publicly this summer on the eve of the Democratic Party convention, in some cases embarrassing Democratic officials. The Democratic nominee compared the hacks to an electronic version of Watergate, when Republican operatives sent burglars to break into the DNC offices in the early 1970s.

Mrs. Clinton also pointed to Mr. Trump’s comments in late July urging the Russians to find emails that her office deleted, remarks his campaign later said were misconstrued. And she cited his warm words for Mr. Putin, and noted places where his positions that line up with Russian interests, such as pulling back the U.S. commitment to NATO members.

“We’ve never had a foreign adversarial power be already involved in our electoral process with the DNC hacks,” she said. “We’ve never had the nominee of one of our major parties urging the Russians to hack more. So I am grateful that this is being taken seriously and I want everyone—Democrat, Republican, independent—to understand the real threat that this represents.”

Representatives for the Trump campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mrs. Clinton’s comments came during a 25-minute question-and-answer session aboard her new campaign plane, which for the first time this year accommodates both the candidate and her traveling press corps.

It has been months since Mrs. Clinton gave a full-fledged news conference, so there was considerable pressure on her to engage an extended back-and-forth like she did on the plane. She last took questions from reporters on July 31, but that was a more brief exchange that covered fewer serious topics. CONTINUE AT SITE

Thousands of pages of Hillary Clinton’s official records are set to be released in coming weeks, testing the Democratic presidential candidate as she looks to maintain her advantage in the final two months of the campaign.

On the heels of recently released Federal Bureau of Investigation documents on Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email account at the State Department, the coming disclosures are likely to provide fodder for Republican Donald Trump. While Mrs. Clinton has held a durable if narrower lead over her rival in polls, there are signs that recent records releases have raised issues of trust with voters.

Dozens of lawsuits, mostly brought by conservative groups and Republican operatives against the State Department, are being heard in federal courts. Many of the documents still to come are expected to involve correspondence between Mrs. Clinton, her aides and employees at her family’s charitable foundation.

Similar releases over the summer generated days of news coverage about the relationship between Mrs. Clinton and the foundation’s corporate, foreign and individual donors. In September alone, government agencies are expected to hand over thousands of pages of records from Mrs. Clinton’s time in office.

The two candidates, meanwhile, spent Labor Day hopscotching around the battleground of Ohio, as did both of their vice-presidential picks. Mrs. Clinton, speaking to reporters on her new campaign plane, strongly suggested that the Russian government was trying to tilt the race for Mr. Trump.

What makes us any different from Venezuela now?

It’s a matter or record. Americans now populate the largest, wealthiest and most powerful banana republic in the world. The differences between Obama’s America and Maduro’s Venezuela are defined only by degree.

The defining characteristics of banana republics are a matter of history. First, the law is not enforced against a chosen class in a banana republic, usually the allies of the autocrat in charge. Second, foreign policy is always performed in the autocrat’s interests and often in disregard of the nation’s actual interests. This describes how America functions in the era of President Obama.

The newly-released FBI documents on the investigation of Hillary Clinton make it clear beyond argument that the fix was in and that the FBI never had any intention of recommending that she should be prosecuted for her crimes.

That is very hard to write. I have had very good friends among the agents of the FBI, men of unshakeable dedication to the fair enforcement of the law. But that is no longer the FBI’s goal, as just a few references to the documents published last week reveal.

First, you had to notice that the FBI agreed that there would be no videotape of its interview of Clinton. Not only would there not be a videotape, but no court reporter would be present to record a transcript. That itself is highly unusual, but there is far more, and far worse.

Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, had to have participated in sending classified material to Clinton on her private and unsecured “clintonemail.com” email system. Yet when the FBI questioned Clinton, Mills was permitted to attend as one of Clinton’s lawyers. That is not only unethical under the Bar’s unenforced ethics standards, but obviously a huge violation of the most elementary of FBI procedures that requires witnesses — and possible suspects — to be questioned separately in isolation from one another.

Clinton told the FBI that she relied on others’ judgment in sending her sensitive information on the unsecured email system. She also claimed that as a result of a head injury she didn’t recall key events such as being trained by the State Department on handing classified information or retaining records in accordance with federal law.

The liberal media are too quick to rubbish Donald Trump Credit:

Just two months before the free world elects its next leader – if you believe America leads the free world, that is – the world’s liberal media seem united on two things. The first is that Donald Trump is a monster. The second is that he will lose the US presidential election on November 8.

The first contention may well be true. I am not sure I would want Mr Trump to marry my daughter (if I had one), and he has said and done things both as a businessman and as a politician of which most civilised people would not be proud. However, as I have been writing here since last autumn, his defeat is no certainty.
It is one thing for an army of pundits, mainly in America but also here, to decide that because they think a man is vile, with opinions to match, he cannot win an election. But there is no logic behind that assertion. One need only look at some who hold high elected office in our own and other democracies to work that out. The present leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, for example – about to be returned to that position by a thumping majority – has feted the Irish Republican Army and associated with some of the vilest anti-semites.

Mr Trump defies gravity. Every time he says something that would end the career of a politician in most of the Western world, his poll ratings rise. A crude attempt to libel his wife has just spectacularly backfired. Mrs Clinton leads in the polls, but the gap is closing. After the conventions she led in a Fox News poll by 9 per cent. Now she leads in the same poll by 2 per cent. Her leads have particularly shrunk in swing states. The liberal establishment in America, while pretending Mr Trump is toast, quakes with fear at the thought that he just might pull it off.
Earlier in the summer The New Yorker, the parish magazine of East Coast liberalism, published an issue in which every cartoon ridiculed Mr Trump. Its readers were not entirely charmed, one or two pointing out that if Mr Trump really was irrelevant, what was the point in emphasising his existence in this way? Since then it has avoided saturation coverage, but most editions of the magazine include something painting Mr Trump as deeply undesirable, or highlighting elements of his campaign as if it were a freak show. The daily email the magazine sends its subscribers also routinely contains another exercise in solemn vilification of the Republican candidate. These boys are clearly worried.

“One or two readers of The New Yorker pointed out that if Mr Trump really was irrelevant, what was the point of an issue with every cartoon ridiculing him?”

And they are right. First, Mrs Clinton remains unappealing to a vast body of Americans, including to many Democratic party supporters. The question of the potential security breach for which she was responsible in using a private email server has harmed her character. The FBI documents just published exposing her carelessness with classified information reinforce the impression that when it comes to important regulations, there is one law for her and one for everybody else.

If she wins, all those conservative Never Trumpers- David French, Krauthammer, Bret Stephens, George Will, Kevin Williamson, and you Mr. Tuttle, to name only a few, should hang your heads in shame for enabling her victory. Your silly hopes for 2020 will have been dashed by a loaded Supreme Court, unlimited and unvetted immigration of Jihadists, and a completion of the fundamental transformation of America by an Alynsky acolyte. Most painful of all, no matter who wins, you and those other conservatives will have lost all your standing and influence….Have a nice day….rsk

“A Clinton restoration will leave Americans looking for alternatives — will conservatives be ready?

A new Washington Post/ABC poll, released on Tuesday, shows that Hillary Clinton’s post-convention era of good feelings lasted approximately three weeks. Despite months of relentless media coverage of Donald Trump, his endless string of campaign calamities (including a weeklong spat with the family of a fallen American soldier), and the increasingly widespread view that Trump is a bigot — the worst thing you can be in American public life — the two candidates are about equally unpopular. He’s viewed unfavorably by 60 percent of registered voters; she’s at 59 percent.

Which is to say that, if Hillary Clinton is elected in November, she is in for a miserable four years. Because none of the sources of her unpopularity are going away.

First are the scandals. Ongoing litigation surrounding Clinton’s e-mails and her use of a private e-mail server would stretch into her first term in office, and is certain to yield further embarrassing revelations (like this week’s discovery that Clinton failed to turn over several e-mails related to the Benghazi attacks), and it was recently reported that field offices of the FBI are considering investigating the e-mail scandal in conjunction with various U.S. Attorneys’ offices. Even if those inquiries turned up nothing, their presence would continue to prompt questions about how seriously Clinton is taking security and transparency concerns as president (having spent her several years as secretary of state evading both). And, of course, looming over all of this will be the question of the Clinton Foundation. Given everything we know already about the way the Clinton Foundation operated during Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, could we trust that the foundation and her White House would be truly separate? Hillary Clinton’s presidency would almost inevitably sit under a cloud of suspicion.

After two weeks spent waffling on immigration, and making noises on the subject largely indistinguishable from those of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, Donald Trump has settled on a hawkish position — and a practical one. Trump’s crowd-pleasing antics aside, in his immigration speech in Phoenix, Ariz., on Wednesday he laid out a sensible, realistic path forward on genuine immigration reform.

Trump’s plan, even in its most primitive iterations, always has been based on the entirely commonsensical principle that America’s immigration policy should serve American interests. Taking this as a starting point, Trump laid out a ten-point policy that emphasizes securing the border, enforcing immigration laws, prioritizing the removal of criminal aliens, and creating the legal and economic disincentives necessary to reduce illegal immigration in the long term.

These are the right priorities. On border security, Trump renewed his commitment to a “physical” wall on the southern border (as well as, alas, his absurd promise that Mexico would pay for it), pledged to swell the ranks of the understaffed Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agencies, and vowed to deploy technology, such as below-ground sensors, to aid them. He also promised an end to the catch-and-release policies that have defined the Obama-era commitment (or lack thereof) to border security and to defund sanctuary cities (an initiative that would, of course, have to come out of Congress). And as Trump noted, about half of America’s illegal-immigrant population overstayed legally gotten visas, meaning that a comprehensive visa-overstay tracking system of the sort he is proposing is also crucial part of any real enforcement agenda.

Trump would add to this an expanded use of E-Verify, which would help prevent employers from exploiting illegal labor and so make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to find work. “Turning off the jobs and benefits magnet,” to use Trump’s words, would make the prospect of entering and residing in the country less enticing for foreigners. If immigration trends at the height of the Great Recession are any indication, a sizable number of illegal immigrants are likely to return home when jobs are not readily available.