RUTHFULLY YOURS

PHILADELPHIA — The legendary congenital liar Hillary Clinton accepted her party’s nomination for the presidency last night mercifully bringing the boisterous, chaotic freakshow that was the 2016 Democratic National Convention to an end.

A day of rain finally broke the oppressive heat wave enveloping the Wells Fargo Center complex which was surrounded by miles of temporary black metal walls, layers of police, and Secret Service checkpoints manned by TSA employees. Inside the conventional hall, Democrats railed against border walls, the supposed systemic racism of police and the justice system, and having to show any kind of identification to vote.

Chelsea Clinton introduced her mother on the stage. It was an unremarkable speech not worth detailing here. Next followed a slick video about Hillary that was narrated by actor Morgan Freeman. The final words Freeman says are “How many ways will she light up the world? This is the woman.”

Hillary’s speech itself was interspersed not so much by boos but by anti-war chants and heckles by the legions of disgruntled Bernie Sanders fans. Her supporters came to her aid most of the time drowning out the dissenters by chanting “Hillary” and “U-S-A.”

The speech was like fingernails on a chalkboard. It was a poorly written address made worse because of Clinton’s stilted and at times strident delivery. Dressed in a white pantsuit, the former secretary of state over-pronounced her words as if she were a special education teacher or a singer in the Swedish band Abba. It had a slight air of condescension about it. And her cadence was weird, to say the least.

She is afflicted by her own special psychopathology. It is a mixture of sociopathy, incompetence, hubris, and contempt. She is our better so we’d better get with her. As David Horowitz tweeted during the speech, Clinton’s problem is that “most Americans know exactly what to make of her. This speech is so empty.”

ABC News footage seemed to show Bill Clinton dozing off momentarily during the long oration.

But Hillary gave the audience members what they wanted. It was a stroll through a liberal-progressive fantasy land, a place where money materializes out of thin air.

“This was a speech that could have been given in Moscow during the Cold War. Instead it was delivered to an enthusiastic audience of Democrats who love the idea of taking away someone else’s money. Beneath all the distractions, the celebrities and family stories, is the fundamental idea that Hillary has more of a right to your money than you do because she is “humbly” more enlightened than you are.”

Hillary made a mistake by wearing a white pants suit to her coronation. She should have worn red.

Wearing a white pantsuit, Hillary Clinton plodded out on stage to accept the nomination that she had schemed, plotted, lied, cheated, rigged and eventually fixed a series of elections to obtain.

Then she claimed that she was accepting the nomination of a race she had rigged with “humility”.

Humility is not the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Hillary Clinton. It is not even the last word. It is not in the Hillary dictionary at all. But this convention was a desperate effort to humanize Hillary. Everyone, including her philandering husband and dilettante daughter, down to assorted people she had met at one point, were brought up on stage to testify that she really is a very nice person.

This wasn’t a convention. It was a series of character witnesses for a woman with no character. It was an extensive apology for the Left’s radical agenda cloaked in fake patriotism and celebrity adulation.

Sinclair Lewis famously said, “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”. More accurately, when Communism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. That’s what the Democratic National Convention was.

This night presented Hillary Clinton as all things to all people. She was a passionate fighter who found plenty of time to spend with her family. She is for cops and for cop-killers. She likes the Founding Fathers and political correctness. She wants Democrats to be the party of working people and of elitist government technocrats. And, most especially, she cares about people like you.

The convention, like everything about Hillary, was awkward and insincere.

There was Bernie glaring into the camera just as Hillary was thanking him for rallying a bunch of young voters whom she hoped to exploit. There was Chelsea Clinton reminding everyone that the Clintons are a dynasty and that everyone in it gets a job because of their last name, right before introducing her mother whose only real qualification for her belated entry into politics was her last name. And there was Jennifer Granholm who got an opportunity to have an incoherent public meltdown at the convention.

That the national security threat we are talking about today is Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton illustrates the wayward state of our politics.

Mrs. Clinton operated unlawful, amateurishly non-secure email servers and mishandled classified information – including the nation’s most closely guarded defense secrets, involving deep-cover informants and highly sensitive intelligence-gathering methods. She did these things in such a criminally reckless manner that it is virtually certain the ruthlessly adept Russian intelligence services (to say nothing of the Chinese, the Iranians, other sinister regimes, and cyber savvy jihadist organizations) have easily penetrated her communications and obtained our intelligence. In addition, though her emails were government records, she destroyed thousands of them.

Clinton has thus committed serious felony violations of federal law. These violations are flagrant betrayals of her public trust, the essence of high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment.

Nevertheless, tonight, one of our country’s two major political parties will nominate her to be the next president of the United States. That is atrocious … yet the story dominating today’s news is not Mrs. Clinton’s criminal and impeachable offenses; it is whether Donald Trump is guilty of treason.

Yes, treason – it’s apparently okay to use the word now. It is a word Republicans and their fellow ruling class Democrats would heretofore condemn any national security-minded American for using to describe the aid and comfort President Obama has given to our Iranian enemy. It is a word we still dare not utter in connection with the Obama/Clinton embrace of anti-American Islamists. But Trump’s own lack of restraint has evidently licensed Trump critique as a restraint-free activity.

And what on this occasion makes Trump guilty of treason rather than all-too-familiar Trumpian bombast? It is claimed that he has encouraged a hostile nation, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to conduct espionage against Mrs. Clinton for the purpose of influencing an American election.

This claim, it should be noted, comes from Democrats and Republicans who – it seems like only yesterday – have told us that Russia, far from being hostile, was our strategic partner. It comes from a Democratic nominee who, as secretary of state, enabled Russia to take control of one-fifth of the uranium production capacity of the United States while millions in relevant donations and speaking fees flowed to the Clinton Foundation and her husband. And as for the scourge of foreign influence on American elections, the money that came the Clintons’ way thanks to the Russian uranium deal is but a small fraction of the foreign “donations” that have poured into their “charitable” foundation – influence purchases from what donors hope will be the next Clinton administration.

The world is upside down.

Here is what Trump said:

Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press… By the way they hacked, they probably have her 33,000 e-mails. I hope they do. They probably have her 33,000 e-mails that she lost and deleted because you’d see some beauties there. So let’s see.

On their face – silly as I feel for taking the time to analyze something this stupid – Trump’s remarks did not, even in a jocular way, do what his hair-trigger critics accuse him of.

Conventions are useful for clarifying elections, and this week’s Philly confab notably so. A week of speakers—Democrat after Democrat beseeching the nation to please know that Hillary Clinton really is a good gal—has made something clear: This is, essentially, a one-person presidential race.

It’s Hillary against Hillary. This November is about whether Americans can look at 40 years of Clinton chicanery and nearly a decade of broken Obama promises, and still pull the lever for her. Not that Donald Trump doesn’t matter. He does, in that he can help sharpen those concerns. But Hillary is the main event.

The polls bear this out. Aside from his recent convention bump, Mr. Trump’s numbers have been largely consistent. Whether he leads or trails, and by how much, is mostly a function of voters’ shifting views on Mrs. Clinton. Lately her poll numbers have been devastating.

A CNN survey this week showed 68% of voters say she isn’t honest and trustworthy—an all-time high. CBS found virtually the same number: 67%. In the CNN poll, meanwhile, only 39% of voters said they held a favorable view of Mrs. Clinton. This is lower than any time CNN has polled Hillary since the spring of 1992—before she was first lady.

Mr. Trump’s poll numbers also bear this out. He is currently leading in the Real Clear Politics average despite no real ground game, little real fundraising, little policy message, a divided conservative electorate, and one of the messiest conventions on record. As of June 30, Mrs. Clinton and her allies had raised a stunning $600 million, which is already being spent to trash Mr. Trump. Yet to little or no effect. Mr. Trump is hardly a potted plant, but even if he were . . .

Mrs. Clinton’s problem is Mrs. Clinton. She is running against her own ethical morass. Already she was asking voters to forget about cattle futures and fake sniper fire and Whitewater and Travelgate. Then she chose to vividly revive the public nausea with her self-serving email stunt and her Clinton Foundation money grubbing.

Oh, she tried to roll out the usual Clinton defense: that this was just part of a renewed attack by political enemies. Yet the neutral inspector general of the State Department slammed her handling of official email; the FBI director (who works for Barack Obama) attested that she was careless with classified information; and she was caught on tape telling a series of lies about the situation. All of which makes it tough to blame the vast right-wing conspiracy. Tim Kaine’s many assurances that he “trusts” Mrs. Clinton was the campaign’s public acknowledgment that almost no one else in the nation does.

Hillary is running, too, against the reality of President Obama policies, which she promises not only to continue, but to build on. The president’s glowing appraisal Wednesday night of his time in office bore no relation to the country most Americans see—one in which health care costs more than ever, they struggle to pay the bills, and terror attacks on Western democracies are a weekly event. The state of the country might not be quite so grim as Mr. Trump painted it in Cleveland, but the mood is much closer to that grimness than to Mr. Obama’s forced optimism.

The president’s policies, which Mrs. Clinton now owns, have alienated significant tranches of voters that she needs this fall—in particular blue-collar Democrats. Coal communities are rejecting Hillary outright. Many union workers are too, whether they be Teamsters for Trump, or police officers appalled by the Democratic Party’s attacks on their profession. CONTINUE AT SITE

Democrats in Philadelphia extolled Hillary Rodham Clinton as a tireless warhorse with a lifetime of hard experience who also happens to be fresh and modern and historic. The contradiction shows how hard it is to sell a candidate who has been a national figure for 25 years when the public wants change.

The truth is that Mrs. Clinton accepted the nomination Thursday night as the most predictable Democrat in generations. Democrats have tended to nominate relative unknowns with strategically ambiguous goals, like Bill Clinton in 1992 or Barack Obama in 2008, who ran on hope and change and revealed his true ambitions in the White House.

By contrast, Mrs. Clinton has been clear. She wants to serve as Mr. Obama’s political and policy heir, as she and he now admit. This won’t mean “change” unless the Clintons have an unusual personal definition of that word, as they do for “classified material.” A de facto third Obama term will mean the status quo, only more of it.

Also changeless will be Mrs. Clinton’s political and private character. Voters have seen enough of this national figure since 1992 to understand how she cuts ethical corners and then stonewalls and dissembles when discovered. This is why some 68% of the country believes she isn’t honest or trustworthy.

As divergent in temperament and worldview as Mrs. Clinton and Donald Trump are, her average unfavorable rating (55.4%) is nearly as high as his (56.9%). If voters do decide they’re “with her,” no one can claim they didn’t know what they were getting—the same policies that have produced slow growth and stagnant incomes, and no doubt more scandal.

On July 24, 2016, Hillary Clinton joined Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, her Vice-Presidential candidate for a joint interview by Scott Pelley, correspondent for the CBS News program, 60 Minutes. That interview has been posted under the title, “The Democratic Ticket: Clinton and Kaine.”

During that interview, when asked about her goals she said, in part:

“I want an economy that creates more jobs. And that’s a lot of jobs. I want an economy that gets back to raising incomes for everybody. Most Americans haven’t had a raise. I want an economy that’s going to help lift millions of people out of poverty. Because, given the great recession, we have fallen back in the wrong direction.”

Pelley should have asked how her adamant support for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) would help unemployed Americans find jobs and raise the wages of millions of American workers who are fortunate to still have jobs. CIR would result in the dumping of millions of newly authorized foreign workers into an overflowing labor pool that, by Clinton’s own admission, has not seen incomes rise, with millions of people currently live in poverty.

In point of fact, already the number of authorized foreign workers who enter the United States each month exceeds the number of new jobs that are created.

Clinton frequently has called for achieving “wage equality.” When making this goal the topic of her discussions, she invariably links achieving wage equality to raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. If you do the math, this works out to just $21,008 annually. Raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour results in an annual wage of $31,200. This is certainly not a middle-class wage.

The question never asked about wage equality is with whom would she make American workers equal?