RUTHFULLY YOURS

It wasn’t enough that Hillary Clinton, if elected president, would inevitably be under a non-stop deluge of subpoenas for her and her minions over the myriad (and still growing) unresolved issues surrounding her private email server and the Clinton Foundation. Should she really be in the White House or behind bars?

On top of this, we now know for certain that, whatever half-baked apology she has given, Hillary thinks roughly a quarter of the population she would be governing are misogynists, racists, homophobes, Islamophobes (whatever that means) and the like — aka, in her now immortal words, a “basket of deplorables.” How she expects to bring the country together remains to be explained.

In the real (non-Hillary) world, these “deplorables” would be called the American middle class, those folks who are supposed to be suffering at the hands of the one percent — you know, the victims of the endlessly trumpeted (by the Democrats) “income inequality.”

Hillary deemed these people “irredeemable” at a fundraiser while introducing Barbra Streisand to a giddy audience, some of whom undoubtedly have net worths upwards of fifty million — like Hillary, Barbra, and just about every Democrat I know.
Well, not every, but many. Admittedly I live in Hollywood, a wildly skewed demographic, but unlike most denizens of Tinseltown, I have spent a considerable amount of time recently among these so-called “deplorables,” aka, in movie parlance, “flyover people.” I can report observing absolutely no misogyny, racism, homophobia, or even Islamophobia — unless you count the occasional poster condemning radical Islam, not very phobic in my book, especially on the anniversary of 9/11.

I can also report — and this is the interesting, although perhaps not surprising, part — that these “deplorables” were almost always a helluva lot nicer than the people I have run into over the years in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, including, one can safely say, most of Hillary’s fundraiser audience Friday night.

Folks in the South and the Middle West are just a lot easier to be around, “deplorable” though they may be. They also make you feel welcome, even those of us from Tinseltown who may not deserve it.

Which leads me to a touching story, at least I think it’s touching. One time during my peregrinations following the Trump campaign–I’m not going to say where to protect the privacy of the individuals involved–my wife and I were straining up against the rope of the press section, trying to hear what the actual people were saying. (The press is segregated off for most of these events.) CONTINUE AT SITE

“I know there will be some who object, “But how do you know he will do all things things.” The answer is, I don’t. But I do know what Hillary would do: Obama on steroids. She’s a known-known. She would, as Publius warns, complete the “fundamental transformation” of this country into a third-world, politically correct socialist redoubt.”

There is a scene in the first episode of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s Jeeves and Wooster series that bears on the current presidential election. Bertie Wooster, at the direction of his Aunt Agatha, has motored down to Ditteredge Hall, seat of Sir Roderick and Lady Glossop, to cozy up to their hearty daughter Honoria. The former head-girl at Girton is not keen on the match: “He doesn’t shoot, he doesn’t hunt, . . . he doesn’t work even.” But Lady Glossop points out that Honoria will be twenty-four the following week. “He is not all your father and I would have hoped for you, I agree, but . . .”

But consider the alternative.

Regular readers know that I have not been part of the Donald Trump Cheerleading Cavalcade. I first wrote about him a year ago July. After saying that I didn’t think he would be the candidate, I concluded with this advisory:

He has raised some issues that the high and mighty dispensers of conventional wisdom would do well to ponder. Moreover, he has done it in a way that, though terribly, terribly vulgar, is catapulting Trump to first place in the polls. What does that tell us? That the people are stupid and need to be guided by the suits in Washington? If you believe that, I submit, you are going to be profoundly disappointed come November 2016.

Well, as Samuel Goldwyn remarked in another context, we’ve passed a lot of water under the bridge since then.

Back in June, Donald Rumsfeld summed up the position that, in subsequent weeks, many (not all) anti-Trump conservatives have come to adopt. Reprising his famous epistemological mot that distinguished between “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns,” Rumsfeld said that, of course he was voting for Trump. Trump was an “unknown known,” perhaps dubious in some ways, but all the world knew exactly what Hillary Clinton represented.

This was the essential point made in a more colorful way in the most remarkable essay I have read in some time, “The Flight 93 Election,” which appeared a few days back in that indispensable journal, the Claremont Review of Books. I have no idea who “Publius Decius Mus”—the putative author—really is, though I speculate on stylistic and philological grounds that he is not unacquainted with the works of Leo Strauss. The historical Decius Mus was a Roman consul during the first Samnite and Latin wars. In 340BC, he sacrificed himself at the Battle of Vesuvius in order to secure a great victory for the Romans. That story, for those who are interested in such things, is told in Book 8 of Livy’s The History of Rome.

FoxNews.com

Last month, I retired from the State Department after 25 years of public service as a Foreign Service officer. As the Deputy Chief of Mission for Libya, I was the last person in Tripoli to speak with Ambassador Chris Stevens before he was murdered in the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on our Benghazi post. On this, the fourth anniversary of the Benghazi tragedy, I would like to offer a different explanation for Benghazi’s relevance to the presidential election than is usually found in the press.

Just as the Constitution makes national security the President’s highest priority, U.S. law mandates the secretary of state to develop and implement policies and programs “to provide for the security … of all United States personnel on official duty abroad.”

This includes not only the State Department employees, but also the CIA officers in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. And the Benghazi record is clear: Secretary Clinton failed to provide adequate security for U.S. government personnel assigned to Benghazi and Tripoli.

The Benghazi Committee’s report graphically illustrates the magnitude of her failure. It states that during August 2012, the State Department reduced the number of U.S. security personnel assigned to the Embassy in Tripoli from 34 (1.5 security officers per diplomat) to 6 (1 security officer per 4.5 diplomats), despite a rapidly deteriorating security situation in both Tripoli and Benghazi. Thus, according to the Report, “there were no surplus security agents” to travel to Benghazi with Amb. Stevens “without leaving the Embassy in Tripoli at severe risk.”

Had Ambassador Stevens’ July 2012 request for 13 additional American security personnel (either military or State Department) been approved rather than rejected by Clinton appointee Under Secretary of State for Management Pat Kennedy, they would have traveled to Benghazi with the ambassador, and the Sept. 11 attack might have been thwarted.

Donald J. Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is racist. What seemed like an inclusive, inspiring call to national renewal really is a cry for Caucasian power.

How do we know this? Bill Clinton said so.

“If you’re a white Southerner, you know exactly what it means, don’t you?” Clinton told voters in Orlando, Fla., on Wednesday. “What it means is, ‘I’ll give you the economy you had 50 years ago, and I’ll move you back up on the social totem pole, and other people down.”

But wait.

On Friday morning, Fox & Friends excavated several examples of when this divisive, cruel, ugly motto was deployed to whip up white hate by none other than . . . William Jefferson Clinton.

“I believe that, together, we can make America great again,” Bill Clinton said in Little Rock, Ark., in 1991.

Standing before a flapping American flag, with his appropriately white shirt sleeves rolled up, Bill Clinton addressed voters in 1992. He promised “to secure a better future for your children and your grandchildren and to make America great again.”

Clinton also looked straight into a camera that year and said, “I want to attack these problems and make America great again.”

“It’s time for another comeback,” Bill Clinton said in a radio ad for his wife’s 2008 U.S. Senate campaign. “Time to make America great again.”

Now that my Fox News Channel colleagues have hog-tied Bill Clinton with archived video and audio tape, perhaps he will dump his utterly absurd and disgusting charge that there is anything even microscopically racist, biased, or even snooty about the words “Make America Great Again.” This phrase is perfectly innocuous, and Trump is just the latest of many candidates to use it.

While Clinton, his wife, and their Democratic surrogates may drop this one foolish argument, they most assuredly will not stop trying to split the country with grotesque ethnic appeals and ludicrous “updates” on how Trump and the GOP are itching to advance white supremacy, if not reinstate segregation.

The Democrats play the race card, again and again, since it’s the last one left in their deck.

The Democrats cannot run on the Obama-Clinton economy, which is growing at an annual rate of 0.95 percent. The Democratic recovery is the weakest in 67 years. That is, since 1949.

The Democrats cannot run on Obamacare, which Hillary Clinton calls “one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic party, and of our country.” Premiums have soared 26.4 percent, on average, in the 14 states that have approved next year’s prices. Among 23 state-level Obamacare co-ops, 16 have collapsed, from Oregon to South Carolina. Health insurers are stampeding out of Obama’s vaunted exchanges, leaving Obamacare consumers with a choice of exactly one carrier in 31 percent of U.S. counties. (The map below notwithstanding, Pinal County, Ariz. had zero Obamacare plans lined up for 2017, until Blue Cross Blue Shield changed its mind and decided to stick around, lest that jurisdiction’s residents face no Obamacare coverage.) Miles from its stated destination, the Obamacare jalopy is careening into a ravine.

John Lester, the Air Force vet who buzzed Hillary Clinton at this week’s candidate forum with a tough question on her mishandling of classified information, is a smart guy. And that’s not the only reason he’s got me jealous. I have been trying since the e-mail scandal broke 18 months ago to think of a good example to convey the fatuousness of Mrs. Clinton’s “I never sent or received anything ‘marked classified’” talking point (which, as I explain here, she has now morphed into “I never sent or received anything with a ‘header’ labeling it ‘classified’”). While I’ve been spinning my wheels, Lieutenant Lester has come up with a great example.

He posited it Thursday in an interview on Fox with Neil Cavuto (aside: How great to have Neil Cavuto back, and looking so fit). Since I have a bit more time and space to develop Lieutenant Lester’s example, I’ll be more expansive.

Let’s say you are the chief executive officer (CEO) of a publicly traded company. You’re sitting at your desk when an e-mail from the chief financial officer (CFO) comes in. It says: “The company had a great quarter! Huge — way, way better than projected! Plan is to announce the results at presser next Tuesday.”

After a fist pump or three, you then e-mail your son, explaining, “Sorry, I need to cancel that lunch we were going to have next Tuesday. It’s quarterly-report time and my company’s got unbelievably great news to break. We’ve got a press conference that day to announce it. Gonna be a bombshell!”

Your son reads the e-mail. He picks up the phone and calls a broker with instructions to buy 20,000 shares of stock in your company. The broker buys the stock. Then, on Tuesday, shortly after your company holds its big press conference announcing far-better-than-expected quarterly earnings, the stock price zooms through the roof. Your son promptly sells the stock at a mega profit. He’s so thrilled, he even buys you that BMW you’ve been eyeing.

On these facts, which are hardly unheard of, is there any chance that the FBI, the SEC, and the Justice Department would not come a-hounding? Any chance you and your son would not be hit with a felony-laden indictment for trading stock based on confidential insider information?

Well, let’s think about this.

What if the FBI asks to interview you before deciding whether to recommend felony charges. You tell the Feebs, “Gee, I had no idea the information in the CFO’s e-mail was confidential. Have a look at the e-mail: it isn’t marked ‘confidential’ anyplace. In fact, there isn’t even a ‘(C)’ in the margin, and there certainly isn’t a big, bold ‘confidential’ header on top. How could I possibly have known it was confidential information that I wasn’t allowed to transmit in casual e-mail exchanges with my son? And how could I have known he’d use the information to make a killing in the stock market?”

Donald Trump’s so far successful presidential run has raised a heretofore unnoticed irony. On the one hand, the GOP establishment has long called for a “Big Tent” strategy to attract African Americans, Hispanics, even gays plus other “minorities” currently in the Democratic camp. Ironically, Trump has indeed embraced the outreach strategy but his target has never been on the “official” GOP outreach list, namely lower-class whites, typically with only a high school degree or, to be a bit crude, Hillbillies, trailer court trash, rednecks, yahoos, hicks, and others who Trump correctly calls the “forgotten men” of American politics (perhaps the least offensive name would be Appalachians).

Now the politically critical question: if and when Trump holds his farewell election — in 2020 for his second term — will the GOP establishment continue to mine, courtesy of Trump, this newly energized voting bloc? Or, with the iconoclastic Trump gone, revert to the more familiar outreach directed at blacks, Hispanics, gays, and women. Will all those animated white folk filling up auditoriums to hear Donald return home when Trump finally departs the stage?

Let me suggest that even if Donald wins in a landslide, the GOP movers and shakers (including it’s affiliated “donor community’) will shun those who recently waited hours to attend a Trump rally. The doormen at the heralded GOP Big Tent will find a way to send his enthusiasts to the end of the line.

There are two reasons for this upcoming divorce. First is social compatibility: the well-educated, sophisticated folk who comprise the Republican Establishment barely acknowledge the existence of these “rustic” white folk, let alone have any intuitive feel how to appeal to them politically. A visit to the RNC website displays multiple outreach programs but nothing for poor, white high school graduates (the closest targets “America’s faith-based community”). This neglect is no accident.

Actually, though blacks reliably vote nearly 100% Democratic, I’d guess that the GOP elite believes it has a better finger on their pulse than on the Weltanschauung of poor whites. Given a choice of hustling votes at a black Baltimore church, surely a low-yield operation, versus pressing the flesh at a weekend gun and knife show, the choice is no contest. Upscale Republicans have the black church script down pat — reiterate historical injustices, celebrate the strength of black congregations, quote The Reverend Martin Luther King, and propose a Marshall Plan of federal assistance to re-build inner cities. Indeed, the RNC probably has that generic, often borrowed speech on file.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-speaks-out-against-iranian-ships-harassing-u-s-sailors-1473477999

PENSACOLA, Fla.– Donald Trump said in this military-friendly town that Iranian sailors who make inappropriate gestures at American sailors would be “shot out of the water” if he were president, apparently referring to an incident about two weeks ago when four Iranian ships harassed a U.S. destroyer near the Persian Gulf.

The Republican candidate’s remarks were followed by roaring applause from the nearly sold-out crowd at the 12,000-seat Pensacola Bay Center and chants of “USA! USA! USA!”

As he spoke about building up the armed forces, Mr. Trump added: “By the way, with Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn’t be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water.”

On Aug. 23, a U.S. guided-missile destroyer was in international waters near the Strait of Hormuz when four ships from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps approached at high speed and failed to respond to numerous warnings, according to a military spokesman. After two of the Iranian vessels came within 300 yards of the destroyer, the four ships departed. The incident was one of many interactions between Iranian and American ships in and around the Persian Gulf in recent months but one of the few that the U.S. Navy has deemed unsafe and unprofessional.

At Friday’s rally, minutes after Mr. Trump made the hawkish comments about Iran, he described Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as “trigger happy.” He said, “Personally, I think she’s an unstable person.” CONTINUE AT SITE