RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton has spent a lifetime in politics lying about matters both big and small. This is not exactly a revelation. Over twenty years ago, longtime New York Times political columnist William Safire wrote about his painful realization that then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was a “congenital liar” in his famous essay “Blizzard of Lies.” While most of time her tendency toward dishonesty manifests itself to cover up her own corruption and malfeasance, sometimes her fibs are intended to evoke sympathy. Other times — one suspects — she lies just for the fun of it.

It should be well established at this point that Clinton is not one to shy away from telling whoppers when the situation requires it. Her modus operandi these days in fact seems to be “lie big or go home.”

Which is exactly what she did on Fox News this weekend, earning herself four Pinocchios from the Washington Post.

“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace played a video of Clinton saying: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified materials. I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time. I had not sent classified material nor received anything marked classified.” Following the clip, Wallace said, “After a long investigation, FBI Director James Comey said none of those things that you told the American public were true.”

Clinton said in reply: “Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails.”

Unfortunately for Hillary, that wasn’t the end of it. Wallace then played a video of the exchange between Comey and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi:

GOWDY: Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails either sent or received. Was that true?

COMEY: That’s not true.

GOWDY: Secretary Clinton said, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” Was that true?

COMEY: There was classified material emailed.

Clinton stumbled a bit after that.

During last week’s Democrat National Convention there was one speaking engagement that was the epitome of mockery and hypocrisy. As a retired military officer I was appalled at this charade. That was the appearance by a gentleman Mr. Khizr Muazzam Khan and his wife, who lost a son in Iraq. I will say this once. I am extremely saddened for any family who loses a loved one in conflict fighting for this country.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media never gave a damn about Gold Star American mothers and their families over the course of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Global War on Terror and their suffering. Now, in just a single case, the case of immigrant Muslim parents who lost their son, there suddenly is extreme and massive interest…albeit, just for these parents.

What is more obvious and apparent, is the degree to which the Democrats and the Clinton campaign demonstrated and showed their hypocrisy by seeking to politicize their story totally for political purposes, to use this stunt to go after Donald Trump. Worst, it is abundantly clear, the parents without any reservation agreed to use their story, themselves, and the unfortunately loss of their son as political props in a made for TV political exhibition.

Again, it is time to speak out on the Anti-Trump Political Media show. What went on last weekend mainly on CNN and Sunday News/Talk shows is an outrage. The liberal media is in the tank for Hillary Clinton, and they know it. First of all the Khans stood on the stage of the DNC Convention and not only told their story, but savagely attacked Mr. Trump. They said two things that were way out of bounds; The First, that Mr. Trump has made no sacrifice, and the Second, that Mr. Trump never read the Constitution.

Mr. Khan’s first attack, presumes that a person needs to lose a child in war as a pre-condition to have an opinion on things. I served nearly 30-years in the U.S. military, through many wars, and have seen death, destruction, and I know many who have lost loved ones; son, daughters, husbands, and wives. In America, there is no pre-condition for opinion. In America there is one condition — it’s called the First Amendment.

Mr. Khan’s second attack on Mr. Trump has nothing to do with whether Mr. Trump has ever read, or did not read the Constitution. That was a clearly Democratic Party scripted stunt for this convention. His comment does however, have everything to do with Mr. Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims, from Muslim countries involved with, and or supporting terrorists and radical-Islamic terrorism.

What is one to make of the Democratic Convention speech of Khizr Khan, a Pakistani-born Virginia lawyer whose son Humayun was killed in action in Iraq in 2004?

According to Byron York:

Khan’s brief speech wasn’t a finely-detailed case. But he suggested that Trump’s Muslim ban and Mexican border wall proposals are unconstitutional. Specifically, Khan cited the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of the law’ in suggesting that Trump’s policies violate the Constitution.

But, in fact, “there’s simply no sense in which a border wall violates the Constitution.” There is also “nothing unconstitutional about deporting people who are in the United States illegally.”

York emphasizes that “[a]s far as a Muslim ban is concerned, Trump … amended his proposal to focus on immigration from countries ‘compromised by terrorism.’ But assume that Khan was addressing Trump’s original, more extensive, proposal: a temporary ban on foreign Muslims from entering the United States.”

In fact, the 14th Amendment of the Constitution applies to “all persons born or naturalized” in the United States. It does not refer to foreign persons in foreign countries. Trump made it clear that this ban “would not apply to U.S. citizens, members of the U.S. military and others with a legal right to be in the United States.” Whether one approves or disapproves of Trump’s building a wall, deporting illegal immigrants, and temporarily banning the entry of foreign Muslims, the fact is that Trump’s proposals are not unconstitutional.

In an effort toward clarification, Donald Trump released a statement:

Captain Humayun Khan was a hero to our country and we should honor all who have made the ultimate sacrifice to keep our country safe. The real problem here are the radical Islamic terrorists who killed him, and the efforts of these radicals to enter our country to do us further harm. Given the state of the world today, we have to know everything about those looking to enter our country, and given the state of chaos in some of these countries, that is impossible.

Moreover, Trump reiterated that “Captain Khan, killed 12 years ago, was a hero, but this is about RADICAL ISLAMIC TERROR and the weakness of our ‘leaders’ to eradicate it!”

“The truth is that Mr. Trump’s offense is in good part a creature of the campaigns Democrats have run against Republicans for decades. Sooner or later it was inevitable that voters, tired of both political correctness and playing defense, would opt for a Republican nominee who would give as ugly as he got. ”

For Donald Trump’s critics, it’s not just that they disagree with the man and his policies. It’s more that they find him offensive.

There’s a reason for this: Mr. Trump is a man who is perpetually on offense.

Think of him as the Kevin Kelley of politics. Mr. Kelley coaches football for Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Ark. He’s gained national fame as the coach who almost never punts. Coach Kelley believes that remaining on offense (keeping possession of the ball) is more important than defense (trying to deny an opponent field position).

So he goes for it on fourth down even in his own territory. As a result, Mr. Kelley gives his offense four plays to gain 10 yards instead of three. Just as important, his all-offense approach gives his Bruins a psychological edge.

The strategy is not without its risks. Though Mr. Kelley says the math bears him out, his approach means opponents will sometimes score or intercept when they might not have otherwise. Backfires can be messy.

Mr. Trump is playing the same game. Not only is he always on the attack, he hardly ever backs down—even when he’s demonstrably wrong. The result has been a number of busted plays, whether it’s declaring that John McCain was not a hero because he was captured by the North Vietnamese, questioning the impartiality of an Indiana-born federal judge because the jurist has Mexican blood or his campaign team’s initial denials that Melania Trump had cribbed some lines in her convention speech from Michelle Obama when the theft was clear and obvious.

Mr. Trump’s critics are quick to suggest these kind of things make him unfit for the Oval Office. Especially on the right, they frequently go on to add that any Republican or conservative who does not publicly pronounce him anathema will forever bear the mark of Cain.

It should be noted that his critics on the right are also invested in a big GOP defeat. If Mr. Trump loses by two or three points, they will be blamed for contributing to that defeat. If, by contrast, Mr. Trump loses by a landslide, they will look like prophets.

For the larger Republican Party, however, there’s a catch. If it turns out Mr. Trump loses by a narrow margin, Republican senators and congressmen still have a chance of keeping their seats. A blowout defeat for Mr. Trump, on the other hand, would likely translate into massive Republican losses in both the Senate and House. Even so, it’s a price the NeverTrump movement appears more than willing to pay to make their point.Hillary Clinton’s dilemma is somewhat different. And it points to the great X Factor of the 2016 election: Never before have Democrats faced a Republican nominee who is so relentlessly on offense. CONTINUE ON SITE

With the party conventions wrapped up, the contours of the final 100 days of the general election are becoming clearer. The country wants change, which should help Republicans. But Democrats are confident that Hillary Clinton will win if they can make the election about Donald Trump, and Mr. Trump seems happy to oblige.

Democrats revealed in Philadelphia that they’ve decided not to make the campaign a typical left-right ideological battle. Instead, they will try to disqualify Mr. Trump as temperamentally and morally unfit for the Presidency. From now until November, expect to hear a lot about three-a.m. phone calls and nuclear winter—and on the occasional lighter note, Mr. Trump’s well-documented vulgarity.

President Obama put this strategy crisply when he noted that “what we heard in Cleveland last week wasn’t particularly Republican—and it sure wasn’t conservative.” For eight years the worst thing Mr. Obama could say about somebody is that he’s a Republican. So calling Mr. Trump worse than a conservative Republican is, for him, really harsh.

The public desire for change is nonetheless real and growing, and Democrats know that Mrs. Clinton is the least convincing “change maker” in American politics, to quote her husband’s phrase. But they have built formidable money and organizational advantages, and they figure they can win with even a candidate as flawed as Mrs. Clinton as long as 2016 is a referendum on Mr. Trump, not on the Clinton-Obama agenda or the last eight years.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump seems thrilled that Democrats are trying to make the election about his favorite subject—Donald J. Trump. Were he as shrewd a politician as he claims to be a businessman, he’d explain how Clinton-Obama policies have failed and why his would be superior. Above all, he’d work overtime to reassure undecided voters that he is a risk worth taking. He can’t tap into dissatisfaction with the status quo if Americans can’t imagine him sitting in the Oval Office.

I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. With the possible exception of Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, for Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance. His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.

This interview I just did with Vance in two parts (the final question I asked after Trump’s convention speech) shows why.

RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” tells me why. Explain it to people who haven’t yet read your book.

J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.

What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by. Heroin addiction is rampant. In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes. The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad” only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on. And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.

The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below). Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.

From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth. Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis. More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.

Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears. He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.

The last point I’ll make about Trump is this: these people, his voters, are proud. A big chunk of the white working class has deep roots in Appalachia, and the Scots-Irish honor culture is alive and well. We were taught to raise our fists to anyone who insulted our mother. I probably got in a half dozen fights when I was six years old. Unsurprisingly, southern, rural whites enlist in the military at a disproportionate rate. Can you imagine the humiliation these people feel at the successive failures of Bush/Obama foreign policy? My military service is the thing I’m most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can’t help but tell myself: I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.

The Democrats’ convention ended after striving mightily to persuade most of America that Hillary Clinton is somehow more human, likable, caring, and accomplished than the public record of her scandals and behavior would suggest. Unfortunately for the Dems, not Bill, not Obama, not Hillary herself can transform Hillary. There is no political alchemy that can turn that base metal into gold.

For years, armies of political consultants, publicists, and marketing geniuses have not been able to make people like Hillary. We’re on at least the fifth version of Hillary, and all the oxymoronic advice like “act naturally” or “be likable” has not been effective. She’s still inauthentic and unlikable, and 56% of voters disapprove of her. She’s like New Coke or Betamax, a bad product no amount of advertising could sell in the real world of market accountability. Yet the mainstream media have labored like Trojans on this project, downplaying her crimes and failures, believing her lies, and rationalizing her faults.

We had a representative example recently in Scott Pelley’s interview with Hillary on 60 Minutes. After she whined and whined about the invidious “Hillary Standard” –– the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy version 2.0––Pelley gently asked in therapeutic Oprah tones, “Why do you put yourself through it?” In other words, he accepted the ridiculous premise that her negative image is the consequence not of her actions, but of “Unfounded, inaccurate, mean-spirited attacks with no basis in truth, reality,” as she put it. A real journalist would have challenged her by asking about the long catalogue of financial improprieties from the Whitewater scandal to the Clinton Foundation, or the self-serving lies from “landing under sniper fire” in Bosnia to telling the grieving parents of the four Americans murdered in Benghazi that an obscure Internet video was responsible. But skilled courtiers know that royalty can’t stand too much reality.

This year’s Democratic Convention speakers didn’t do much better, when they could be heard above the Berniacs’ booing and jeering. Their catalogue of lies about Hillary’s résumé––her alleged achievements on Middle East peace, “climate change,” getting Iran to negotiate over its nuclear weapons program––smacks of desperation, given how many light-years from the truth they are. The Middle East has descended into a Darwinian jungle in which ISIS, Russia, and Iran are the alpha predators. Even if Anthropogenic Global Warming is true, all the much touted international agreements from Kyoto to Paris have done and will do nothing to cool the planet. As for Iran, it takes remarkable shamelessness to tout this disaster, given the mounting evidence that the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism has been serially cheating and is likely to obtain nuclear armaments within a couple of decades.

Bill Clinton, the fading Big Dog of the party, gave a tedious convention speech that spent a lot of time trying to “humanize” Hillary by talking about their courtship and marriage and other random acts of compassion and caring. Apart from the preposterous premise that they have had a happy and loving marriage (see Crisis of Character), humanizing Hillary is a fruitless task. She obviously lacks her husband’s political brilliance and powers of empathy. Of course, his empathy is phony, but like Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly, Bill is a real phony. He believes all this crap he believes. Hillary has been in the public eye for 25 years, and in all that time she has consistently appeared mean, entitled, insincere, vindictive, petty, elitist, money-grubbing, and insatiable for power.

The mainstream media is wild with enthusiasm these days over Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim soldier, Humayun Khan, who was killed fighting in Iraq in 2004. Khizr Khan, brimming with self-righteous anger, spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where he delivered what the Washington Post dubbed a “brutal repudiation of Donald Trump.” Trump responded, elevating Khizr Khan to the status of full-fledged flavor-of-the-moment media celebrity. There’s just one catch: Khizr is using his son’s memory not to advance the cause of the United States, as his son apparently died trying to do, but to advance a quite different cause: that of the global umma.

The well-heeled and powerful backers of the global jihad – those who have enabled the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda, and other jihad groups to grow as powerful as they have today — are enraged at Donald Trump. They are deeply worried by his call for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration into the United States, as that will make it much more difficult for jihadis to get into this country. They are anxious to stigmatize any and all resistance to jihad terror – and so, happily enough for them, is the Democratic Party, which has eagerly signed on to the longtime strategy employed by Islamic supremacist advocacy groups in the U.S., to demonize all effective measures against jihad terror as “bigoted” and “Islamophobic.”

So it was that Khizr Khan, in the full fury of his indignation at the DNC, trotted out a straw man, falsely claiming that Trump wanted to “ban us from this country.” Trump has said nothing about banning Muslim citizens of the U.S. from the country, only about a temporary moratorium on immigration from terror states. Even worse, all the effusive praise being showered on Khizr Khan in the last few days overlooks one central point: he is one man. His family is one family. There are no doubt many others like his, but this fact does not mean that there is no jihad, or that all Muslims in the U.S. are loyal citizens.

Khizr Khan is enraged at Donald Trump, but is Trump really the cause of his problem? Jihad terrorists, not Donald Trump or “Islamophobes,” killed his son in Iraq. And if Donald Trump or anyone else looks upon Muslims in the U.S. military with suspicion, it is with good reason: does any other demographic have as high a rate of treason as Muslims in the U.S. military? In 2003, a convert to Islam, Sgt. Hasan Akbar, murdered two of his commanding officers in Kuwait. In 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 Americans at Fort Hood.