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?

Think the Soviets were the only ones to invert reality?

—“The Post-Constitutional Election, Part 24,” is here.

The world has left merely-bonkers behind when Clinton, Inc., the most corrupt, corruptible and corrupted political duo in modern history, is held up as the nation’s bulwark against the Russian Bear; when Donald Trump, the man who seeks to save US sovereignty, the military, the 2nd Amendment and to stop Muslim immigration is smeared as “a Russian stooge.”

Welcome to the Democrats’ last stand.

It really is desperation-time for the Left (which includes much of the Right) when the only way to spin the most recent Wikileaks’ email dump showing unabashed MSM-DNC collusion to rig the presidential nomination for Hillary Clinton is to try to ignore the systemic corruption the leak reveals, and instead blast the leak itself as a Russian hack that is evidence that Donald Trump is “Putin’s candidate.”

But let’s imagine that this Wikileak gusher is proven to be a Russian hack. How can any self-respecting intelligence student not at least consider whether Putin is in fact throwing a lifeline of an issue — Trump as “Russian stooge” — to his own ever-pliable but catastrophically damaged candidate, Crooked Hillary?

All leaks aside, however, it is a fact that it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who gave her required approval to the sale of a Canadian company holding 20 percent of U.S. uranium stocks to Putin’s Russia — after nine members of the company’s board kicked $145 million into the Clinton Foundation. (Thank you, Peter Schweitzer.) That’s not “promoting Putin’s polices,” as the rap on Trump goes; that’s executing them.

What Russian strongman could possibly want a President of the United States more pliable, or, as Barack Obama, mentored and advised by a troika of Communist progeny himself, might say, more “flexible” than that?

Only by omitting such a “link” between Clinton and Putin’s Russia (and $145 million for the Clinton Foundation) can the media-political complex possibly paint Hillary as some kind of latter-day J. Edgar Hoover, anti-Communist firebrand — and never, ever the Alinskyite candidate. So omit it they do.

Here’s their storyline:

Supposedly, because of Trump’s (failed) attempts to do business in Russia; supposedly, because, as described, for example, by Anne Applebaum, among Trump’s advisers are 1) Carter Page, who, she writes, has “long-standing connections to Russian companies, including Gazprom, and has supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine”; and 2) campaign manager Paul Manafort, who “worked for many years in Ukraine on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president ousted in 2014,” Donald Trump is “finally” America’s honest-to-goodness “Manchurian candidate.”

Applebaum writes: “But now it is 2016, truth is stranger than fiction, and we finally have a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, with direct and indirect links to a foreign dictator, Vladimir Putin, whose policies he promotes.”

“Finally”? This presumes US presidential candidates and, by extenstion, their administrations, have had no such “links” before. This is like saying FDR didn’t have Harry Hopkins et al (to the max); as if FDR’s Veep and 1948 presidential candidate Henry Wallace didn’t have at least two top Soviet spies in waiting to fill top cabinet posts (FDR alumni Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White); as if Harry Truman, with full knowledge from the FBI, didn’t appoint Soviet agent White to head the IMF; as if Robert Kennedy didn’t have an ongoing “back-channel” relationship with Soviet agent Georgi Bolshakov; as if Bill Clinton didn’t mysteriously vacation in Brezhnev’s Moscow in December 1969 and Prague less than a year after Soviet tanks crushed Prague Spring; as if Obama wasn’t mentored and guided by a troika of Soviet-linked Communist progeny, and more.

PHILADELPHIA — Democrats put in plenty of good words for Hillary Clinton during their convention yesterday but they focused most of their energy on trying to assassinate the character of Donald Trump.

The Left is now going after the Republican nominee with brass knuckles. The latest Democrat attack line accuses Trump of committing treason for asking Russia or any other governments that may have Clinton’s mountain of missing emails in their possession to return them to the United States.

Meanwhile, the prospect of Democrat unity going into the November election fades with every passing hour. Hatred, discord, and disgust are everywhere. The Bernie Sanders people don’t trust the Hillary Clinton people. The Hillary Clinton people are growing increasingly angry at a good chunk of the Bernie Sanders people for not falling in line and backing the nominee. Just as internal dissent is roiling the Republican Party, a civil war is brewing among Democrats. In the end most Democrats will probably support their nominee. The question is what fraction of the party will sit the election out, defect to Trump, or embrace the Green or Libertarian parties. The burning hatred of Hillary is still palpable in many state delegations.

All the convention talking points about how brilliant, kind, compassionate, visionary, selfless, humble, and tough Clinton is are wearing thin as the delegates keep clapping their hands like trained seals in the Wells Fargo Center. Democrats want to take the focus off Hillary, who is both a terrible candidate and a terrible person and throw the spotlight on the sometimes erratic Donald Trump.

That is the current state of the party that invented the politics of personal destruction and that during the Obama years has been laser-focused on fundamentally transforming, that is, destroying, what’s left of America.

Amidst the continuing heatwave, delegates were still deeply divided, caught up in factional fights during Day Three of the Democratic National Convention here. Disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters were still protesting and booing during speeches Wednesday.

And on the way out the door Sanders stuck it to the party with which he briefly aligned himself. After getting what he wanted from Democrats, the self-described socialist abruptly announced he is leaving the party. Despite his pleas from the convention floor for party unity and an impassioned endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, Sanders said at a Bloomberg News-hosted breakfast that he will return to the U.S. Senate as an Independent.

“I was elected an Independent,” he told reporters.

So that apparently closes the book on Bernie’s adventures in the Democratic Party.

The Trump-bashing fest was long and loud.

Right now, prisoner #47042-083, Abdurahman Alamoudi, sits in his cell in a federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky.

It’s a long way down from being one of Hillary Clinton’s favorite colleagues. Alamoudi organized White House events during the Bill Clinton administration. Under Hillary’s supervision, he held official positions: Alamoudi was strategically placed at the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department.

That is, until he was arrested and convicted in a bizarre Libyan intelligence/al-Qaeda assassination plot to kill the Saudi crown prince.

Later, he was identified by the Treasury Department as an Al-Qaeda fundraiser who had operated inside the United States.

Hillary Clinton and Abdurahman Alamoudi were no mere acquaintances. According to an affidavit filed in court by Georgetown professor John Esposito, Alamoudi was asked by Hillary Clinton to arrange the first White House Ramadan iftar dinner in 1996:

Hillary – Alamoudi iftar (Esposito)

It appears that no media outlet has ever asked Hillary Clinton about her relationship to Alamoudi.

Under the Clinton administration, Alamoudi was tasked with founding and developing the Defense Department’s first-ever Muslim chaplain program. Alamoudi himself handpicked the Pentagon’s Muslim chaplain corps.

As I reported in 2010, one of those chaplain trainers was al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

The State Department, during the Clinton administration, appointed Alamoudi as a goodwill ambassador and sent him on six official taxpayer-funded trips to the Middle East. Remarkably, after Alamoudi’s 2003 arrest a federal agent testified in an affidavit about a recording of Alamoudi complaining to an audience that the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania did not kill enough Americans.

Years before he was helping Hillary Clinton arrange official dinners at the White House, Alamoudi had already been known to the FBI for al-Qaeda fundraising.