RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the online questions posed to Hillary Clinton during the second presidential town hall debate in St. Louis on Sunday evening had to do with remarks she had reportedly made in private to a Wall Street audience, revealed by WikiLeaks, that she has “both a public and a private position” on such issues as Wall Street reform. The questioner wanted to know whether “it is okay for politicians to be two-faced.” Hillary Clinton rationalized her private remark to her audience of Wall Street benefactors as a reference to “Abraham Lincoln after having seen the wonderful Steven Spielberg movie ‘Abraham Lincoln.’”

The only association Hillary Clinton can legitimately claim with the memory of Abraham Lincoln was when the Clintons traded on his name and rented out the Lincoln bedroom to wealthy donors while she and Bill Clinton inhabited the White House.

Donald Trump was ready with the perfect retort: “She got caught in a total lie… She lied. And now she’s blaming the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln – Honest Abe. Honest Abe never lied. That’s the big difference between Abraham Lincoln and you. That’s a big difference.”

The latest releases from WikiLeaks revealed other disturbing dimensions of Hillary’s private/public dichotomy. For example, Hillary Clinton, in a bid to win over Bernie Sanders voters, reversed her previous support for free trade deals. Although originally a supporter of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Hillary has in more recent years publicly criticized it. During her primary campaign against Sanders, Hillary also came out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which she had called the “gold standard” while serving as Secretary of State. With respect to the issue of open borders, Hillary Clinton’s so-called fact-check website charges that “Donald Trump and his allies have falsely said Hillary Clinton wants to ‘create totally open borders.’” Yet, in a private speech to a Brazilian bank in 2013, Hillary extolled both “open trade” and “open borders,” according to this excerpt released by WikiLeaks: “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.”

Hillary has time and again publicly insisted that she did not place any classified information at risk from hacking by adversaries when using her private e-mail system and devices while Secretary of State. However, she acknowledged in one private speech, excerpts of which were released by WikiLeaks, that “at the State Department we were attacked every hour, more than once an hour by incoming efforts to penetrate everything we had.” Hillary also acknowledged security concerns with the use of blackberries for government business at the time she arrived at the State Department. Yet she would have the public believe that her unsecured private system, server and blackberry devices were somehow not vulnerable to enemy intrusion.

Paul Ryan told House Republicans Monday that he won’t defend Donald Trump’s campaign or his other behavior, and the Speaker advised Members to do what is best for their districts. This is not a new position so much as the latest restatement of a familiar strategy: to limit the 2016 electoral damage and preserve the GOP majority as a check on whoever wins the Presidency.

Defending down-ballot races isn’t the most inspiring goal, and it won’t satisfy those who want the moral validation of condemning Mr. Trump and all his works. But Republican leaders have real institutional obligations, and these include serving the country when their political choices are less than ideal.

At the current moment that means preventing Hillary Clinton from returning to Washington with a Democratic Senate and perhaps even House. One irony of this election is that as Mrs. Clinton has focused on disqualifying Mr. Trump’s character and temperament, she has also released about 112,000-odd words of little-noticed policy proposals that a Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be happy to rubber-stamp.

A new burst of liberal legislation could include a “public option” for ObamaCare that would be one more giant leap toward government-run health care. Energy from fossil fuels would become stranded assets. Government by and for the regulatory state would accelerate, and the Supreme Court would be lost to judicial conservatives for a generation. A final irony is that a Pelosi-Schumer Congress would readily pass the “amnesty” immigration bill that has animated Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
This prospect ought to concentrate Republican minds because House and Senate races are becoming more competitive as Mr. Trump slips. In the Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll published Monday, voters favored the generic Democratic ballot in Congress by seven points, 49% to 42%. Last month the spread was plus-three.

The same survey also shows the Trump predicament for GOP leaders. Some 67% of Republican voters said Congress should continue to support Mr. Trump, while 14% say they should call on him to drop out and 9% say they can’t support him personally. Mrs. Clinton is nonetheless widening her leads in swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Ohio.

The question for Congressional Republicans is how to distance themselves from Mr. Trump when he says the indefensible without alienating his loyal core. Like it or not, a 45% plurality of GOP primary voters nominated Mr. Trump, and they knowingly put him on the ballot because they concluded that his unconventional political profile was a risk worth taking.

That choice may not have been wise, but the GOP can’t renounce democracy and win elections. A successful party must acknowledge the voters that Mr. Trump has inspired and the legitimate problems he has identified. These voters aren’t “irredeemable” in Mrs. Clinton’s phrase; most are ordinary Americans frustrated by their diminished economic prospects. CONTINUE AT SITE

The second presidential debate was a Trump victory, no doubt about it, even though the timely leaking of his “locker room tape” should have given his opponent a clear advantage. Hillary’s problem is that she can’t go there, not with that satyr of a husband in the wings
We know who doesn’t want Trump to win. Hillary for one, along with the Democrats in general, the infamous 47% of tax-hoovers (who have probably grown to around 55% by now), to which, strangely, you can add many, if not most, of the wealthiest financial institutions across the world. There is then the media, and not just the journalists and reporters but the owners who are all-in for Hillary. And there’s a large proportion of the Republican Party which must include the #NeverTrumps who are the supposedly right-side conservative writers, bloggers and columnists, but who are part of the political establishment with no obvious allegiance to small government and the preservation of the American Republic.

And, of course, there are the dead citizens and non-dead non-citizens who will also be lining up to vote her in, along with those who vote early and often. Not to mention those who will vote for her because she is a woman irrespective of any other considerations whatsoever.

Formidable, almost impossible odds facing Donald Trump, in other words. Even after a flawless presentation against his Obama-clone opponent, in which he took Hillary apart despite each and every effort by the laughably “impartial” moderators, the bad news is that Donald Trump remains no better than 50-50 to win. But that is also the good news. He has not yet lost and might yet emerge victorious.

And why that is so is because he represents the last chance for the United States to save itself, and approximately 51% of the voting American public know it.

The supposed killer issue was a 2005 tape made of Trump discussing in crude terms his approach to women. And possibly in anyone else’s hands, this would have been the death blow it may still turn out to be. But for Hillary Clinton, married to a genuine sexual predator, this is an issue that can only be used carefully, as the blowback is so enormous. Whatever Trump has done is as nothing in comparison with what Bill Clinton has done, who was protected by Hillary in quieting the many and various “bimbo eruptions” (her term). I regret to have to deal with this, but since you’d have to have been born before 1980 to have an active memory of any of it. I will deal with only one, the story of Paula Jones, and I will include it only at the end.

I find all this repulsive, and the Paula Jones story is the least disturbing among the stories that surfaced at the time, and it is plenty disturbing since it was only one instance of what must have been nuch more common at the time. What is more repulsive is listening to others go on about Trump, as if Clinton were not orders of magnitude worse. But what is actually significant is that bringing that tape to light has enraged Donald Trump so that we ended up with the single most devastating, one-sided debate in American political history. With Bill’s past once again in everyone’s minds, Hillary could not truly exploit the tape to the full extent she might. Trump’s was a cold anger, but it was devastating.

One of the sillier post-debate comments comes from Nicholas Burns of Harvard’s Kennedy School, who tweeted: “Threatening to jail a political opponent is anti-democratic and anti-American.”

Donald Trump did memorably say that Hillary Clinton “would be in jail” if he were president; but what he actually vowed to do was appoint a “special prosecutor” to look into Mrs. Clinton’s “situation” — by which he was obviously referring to the e-mail scandal.

This is manifestly not a case of banana-republic criminalization of politics. Trump was not threatening to go after Clinton because she has the temerity to oppose him politically. He was committing to have a special prosecutor investigate Clinton for mishandling classified information, destroying government files, and obstruction of justice — criminal misconduct that has nothing to do with being a political adversary of Trump’s, and for which others who commit similar felonies go to jail.

The Obama administration investigated Mrs. Clinton, at least ostensibly, for over a year. Is Professor Burns saying a politician should only be investigated by her political allies and may otherwise violate the law with impunity?

To get a sense of what a banana-republic Justice Department looks like, Burns might want to have a look at the Obama administration’s prosecutions of Dinesh D’Souza and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. D’Souza is a political critic of the president’s who was subjected to a criminal prosecution (in which the Justice Department pushed for a severe jail sentence, which the judge declined to impose) for a campaign-finance violation of the petty sort that the Justice Department routinely allows to be settled by a civil fine. (For example, it declined to prosecute the Obama 2008 campaign for offenses that dwarfed D’Souza’s.) Nakoula, the producer of the anti-Muslim video the Obama administration falsely portrayed as the catalyst of the Benghazi massacre, was subjected to a scapegoat prosecution (under the guise of a supervised-release violation) intended to bolster the administration’s “blame the video” narrative.

Prosecuting a person who happens to be a politician for serious crimes is an affirmation of the American principle that no one is above the law. Gerald Ford may have lost the tight 1976 election due to his controversial pardon of Richard Nixon, there having been a strong sense, particularly among Democrats, that Nixon should have been prosecuted for his crimes.

Democrats and their media allies, joined by many Republicans, are calling on Donald Trump to withdraw from the presidential race after a newly released, decade-old tape of a frat-house-level conversation between Trump and television host Billy Bush in 2005, in which Trump boasted of his heavy-handed pursuit of females. Trump describes trying unsuccessfully to seduce a married woman by taking her furniture shopping, speaking in the crudest terms. He brags that because he was a star he could “grab [females] by the pussy” and claims to Bush that he starts kissing beautiful women “like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” Bush eggs him on: “Whatever you want!” (Bush being a more admiring confidante than Leporello to Don Giovanni).

The response has been swift and apocalyptic. Hillary Clinton tweeted: “This is horrific. We cannot allow this man to become president.” Vice Presidential candidate Tim Kaine told reporters: “It makes me sick to my stomach.” Slate’s science editor wrote that “I feel sicker after seeing it than I can remember feeling in a while.” Another Slate columnist writes that Trump and Bush “can’t see their female colleagues as anything but collections of fuckable or unfuckable body parts. They exhibit a complete disregard for women’s humanity, agency, and internal lives.”

Now why might it be that men regard women as sex objects? Surely the ravenous purchase by females of stiletto heels, push-up bras, butt-hugging mini-skirts, plunging necklines, false eyelashes, hair extensions, breast implants, butt implants, lip implants, and mascara, rouge, and lipstick to the tune of billions a year has nothing to do with it. Females would never ever exploit their sexuality to seek attention from men. Bush and Trump, driving to the set of Days of Our Lives on a studio bus, comment on the legs of actress Arianne Zucker who is coming to meet them: “Oh, nice legs, huh?” Trump says. “Your girl’s hot as shit, in the purple,” Bush says. How surprising that Trump and Bush noticed Zucker’s legs! As documented in the video, she is wearing a skimpy purple dress, with an extremely short hem cut on the bias, a low neckline and fully exposed back. She is in high heels to accentuate her bare legs. The ratio of exposed skin between Zucker, on the one hand, and Trump and Bush, on the other, is perhaps 100 to one. But all that bare flesh must simply be because Zucker has a high metabolism and gets exceedingly warm; she would never want to broadcast her sexuality to men or have men notice her. The fact that she swishes her hips when she walks must just be a quirk of anatomy.

“Last night’s debate was a clear triumph for Donald Trump. But to win our hearts and minds, the battle is not between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.The battle is between the shrewd, cunning and deceitful news media and the rest of America.”

Donald Trump came in with a preexisting condition, that of failure to communicate at the first debate against Hillary Clinton.

Last night in St. Louis he was given a second chance to go strong where earlier he had been weak in pointing out Clinton’s flaws, among them her soft approach to Islamic terror. Over the weekend Wikileaks revealed that she favored open trade and open borders.
This was where Trump had his opening to double down on his call to build walls against infiltrators who bring with them Islamic terror along with BDS and anti-Semitism. Within the past 24 hours two Israelis were murdered and more wounded in Jerusalem at the hands of jihadists.

That placed Trump in a perfect spot to further his cause against Radical Islam that affects everyone, everywhere. He took control.

He said, “We have to be able to name the problem – radical Islam. We can’t let people in we know nothing about.”

Clinton said, “I agree we need to take care of who enters this country.” But the rest of what she said amounted to gibberish. Likewise the rest of night.

He had facts. He had substance. She had political clichés.

Trump arrived a wounded man. Caught on tape debasing women (in 2005) in the most vulgar terms, Trump found himself cornered from Clinton and even from members of his own party. Even before the slugfest at this Town Hall setting, some GOP heavyweights demanded he drop out.

Clinton said, “Now we know who we are.”

Trump said, “Mine were words. Not action, like your husband’s.” He accused Bill Clinton of going beyond groping.

Gradually, the forced devil-may-care smile dissolved from Hillary’s face.