RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

PHILADELPHIA, PA — Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders may have endorsed Hillary Clinton in the race against Donald Trump, but his supporters are more rabid than ever. On Tuesday, the second day of the Democratic National Convention, after Sanders gave his speech to support Clinton, a group of Sandersnistas made their voices known.

The “Bernie or Bust” crowd actually moved to be more visible to the Democratic delegates as they entered the convention to cast their votes for the nominee.

Here are the 16 photos and videos that best capture the “Bernie or Bust” movement, right as the Democrats were officially nominating Hillary. Enjoy!
18. Hillary is a Mother Fracker!

Michelle Obama’s 2016 speech to the DNC stands in sharp contrast to an essay written in the early 1990s by Glenn Loury titled “Free at Last? A Personal Perspective on Race and Identity in America.” Loury recounts how, as a young black man growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he lacked the courage to stand up for a friend named Woody, who had “a Negro grandparent on each side of his family but looked like a typical white boy.” Woody never chose to pass as a white person yet, when both young men attended a political rally and Woody stood to speak “[h]e was cut short before finishing his first sentence by one of the dashiki-clad brothers-in-charge, who demanded to know how a ‘white’ got the authority to have an opinion about what black people should be doing. That was one of [the] problems, the brother said, we were always letting white people ‘peep our hole card,’ while we were never privy to their deliberations in the same way.” Loury explains that a

silence then fell over the room. The indignant brother asked if anyone could ‘vouch for this white boy.’ More excruciating silence ensued. Now was my moment of truth; Woody turned plaintively toward me, but I would not meet his eyes. To my eternal disgrace, I refused to speak up for him. He was asked to leave the meeting, and did so without uttering a word in his own defense.

In recalling this painful memory of “betraying someone he had known for a decade,” Loury describes how “…this desire to be regarded as genuinely black… dramatically altered [his] life. It narrowed the range of [his] earliest intellectual pursuits, distorted [his] relationships with other people, censored [his] political thought and expression, informed the way [he] dressed and spoke, and shaped [his] cultural interests. Some of this was inevitable and not all of it was bad, but in his experience the need to be affirmed by one’s racial peers can take on a pathological dimension.”

So what does this have to do with Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama? She and her husband have never evolved from their strident, all-consuming race-consciousness and “addiction to indignation.” As a student, “Miss Robinson wrote a senior thesis entitled ‘Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.'” Some excerpts from the thesis include the following:

“Predominantly white universities like Princeton are socially and academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their enrollments.”
“[My Princeton experiences] “will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.”
“I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”
“In defining the concept of identification or the ability to identify with the black community… I based my definition on the premise that there is a distinctive black culture very different from white culture.”

Bill Clinton on Tuesday portrayed his wife as a “change maker” whose life has overflowed with good intentions and commitment to others. No one can spin a yarn like Bill, and for the believers it was a touching portrait. But if it’s true, why do the polls show that 68% of Americans don’t trust Hillary Clinton? That has to do with the rest of the story, which is how the Clintons have used politics to enrich themselves and retain power.

Nowhere is this clearer than at the words you didn’t hear Mr. Clinton speak: the Clinton Foundation. This supposedly philanthropic operation has become a metaphor for the Clinton business model of crony politics. The foundation is about producing a different kind of “change.”

No doubt the foundation does some charitable good, but this is incidental to its main purpose of promoting the Clinton political brand. Since its creation in 1997, the nominal nonprofit has served as a shadow Super Pac, designed to keep the Clintons in the national headlines, cover their travel expenses, and keep their retinue employed between elections.

The payroll has included Huma Abedin, who drew a State Department salary even as she managed politics at the foundation and is now vice-chairwoman of the Clinton campaign. Dennis Cheng raised money for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 bid, then became the foundation’s chief development officer and now leads Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 fundraising. Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s chief of staff at State, sat on the foundation board. And don’t forget Sid Blumenthal, the longtime Clinton Svengali who was secretly advising Mrs. Clinton at State while drawing a foundation salary. This may not be illegal but the charity here is for the Clintons’ benefit.
The funding for this political operation has come from nearly every country and major company in the world. These contributors have the cover of giving to charity, when everybody knows the gifts are political tribute to a woman determined to be President. Donations to a charity aren’t governed by the same caps or restrictions as those that go to a traditional Super Pac. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren somehow overlooked this in their Monday night riffs against money in politics. CONTINUE AT SITE

A lot can still happen at the Democratic convention, but nothing is likely to matter as much as Hillary Clinton’s look and tone, what she says—or perhaps more important—what she doesn’t say as she takes the stage Thursday night. Donald Trump, a man of iron predictability, faced no such test last week and delivered no surprises.

Not that there weren’t some striking moments in the glum enterprise that concluded in Cleveland, among them Melania Trump’s quickly famous speech. Also the contribution of Chris Christie, who functions periodically as the governor of New Jersey. Mr. Christie used his speaker’s spot to conduct a lengthy mock trial of Mrs. Clinton distinguished mainly for its unremitting tone of hysteria. It was a spectacle many Americans may remember should Mr. Christie become, as he apparently hopes, attorney general under Mr. Trump.

The Republican presidential candidate has one obvious advantage over Mrs. Clinton: He has never been in a position to absorb, as she has, the language, reflexes, certitudes, and high principles ready to be deployed on all occasions that are peculiar to the world of the Obama administration.

Not that Mr. Trump isn’t capable of embracing certain of the president’s views on America, first revealed in 2009 during Mr. Obama’s now-famous trip abroad to see heads of state and express regret for America’s offenses, known to history as the Obama apology tour. Those views of America as a nation in decline, virtually without allies, emerged ever more conspicuously during the president’s first term.

Last week Mr. Trump lashed out at NATO, then went on to argue that the U.S. shouldn’t be interfering in the business of other nations. And that we had so many failures of our own at home: Ferguson, the killing of police—so much. Who are we to tell the butchers and mass murderers of the world what to do?

Unlike Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump doesn’t know Obama-speak and doesn’t need deprogramming. He hasn’t absorbed the language that Americans recognize well after eight years. They have heard through all these years the nostrums, the reflexive high-minded oratory, that have come with every terror attack. They can hear it all over again in Mrs. Clinton.

Never was this clearer than in the days following the terrorist assault in Nice, when she described the attack as cowardly and vowed that we would never allow terrorists to undermine our egalitarian and democratic values. Such assertions always feel, and are, strangely off the point, which is the horror of the atrocity that has taken place.

If only we could get to know the real Hillary Clinton.

Unveiling the Hillary we supposedly don’t know has been the perpetual, elusive goal of Clinton’s handlers for decades, with the Democratic convention in Philadelphia the latest stab at it.

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook hopefully maintained that a lot of Americans simply “don’t understand” Hillary’s devotion to others, and the convention aims to give them this “fuller picture.” Or as a CNN headline put it, “Hillary Clinton prepares to reintroduce herself to America.”

Again. Hillary has made more reintroductions than should be allowed for a person who has never gone away.

Political writer Jonathan Rauch has a 14-year rule that posits no one is elected president more than 14 years after winning election as a governor or senator (the traditional jumping-off points for the presidency). Elected to the Senate from New York in 2000, Hillary is technically only a couple of years past this benchmark for staleness — except this doesn’t do justice to how long she has been around, and especially how long it feels she’s been around.

Bill Clinton announced his campaign for president in October 1991. Hillary has been with us ever since. During that campaign, Bill famously told us we’d get two for one. It’s been more than 14 years since she vouched for Bill Clinton on 60 Minutes after the allegations of an affair with Gennifer Flowers surfaced (1992), tried to remake American health care (1993), wrote the book It Takes a Village to soften her image (1996) and vouched for Bill in yet another sex scandal (1998).

It has been more than 14 years just from one Hillary scandal with a wholly implausible explanation (her amazingly lucrative cattle trades that were first reported in 1994) to another (her private server as secretary of state that was first reported in 2015).

Faced with a GOP nominee like no other in modern political history, the Democrats have a problem: They lack the words to describe him. Donald Trump is a unique threat to American democracy? That’s how they describe every Republican nominee. He’s divisive, racist, and plutocratic? Ditto.

The Democrats have cried wolf so often that they don’t know how to effectively attack Trump, an actual beast growling at the door. Doubt me? Consider this infamous NAACP campaign commercial from 2000. The ad is directed at that notorious racist monster George W. Bush. Its voiceover is done by Renee Mullins, daughter of murder victim James Byrd:

On June 7, 1998 in Texas my father was killed. He was beaten, chained, and then dragged three miles to his death, all because he was black.

So when Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate-crime legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.

Call Governor George W. Bush and tell him to support hate-crime legislation.

We won’t be dragged away from our future.

The images accompanying Mullins’ narration were dark and disturbing, showing the back of a pickup truck with chains leading off the screen. A radio version of the ad was even more vivid, with Mullins describing her father’s death: “I can see skin being torn away from his body. I can hear him gasping for air. I can feel the tears in his eyes.”

It’s horrifying stuff. And reading or hearing it could easily give you the impression that Bush let white supremacists get away with murdering a black man. In reality, two of the three perpetrators in the Byrd case were sentenced to death, and one was sentenced to life in prison.

The NAACP flogged Bush with the most inflammatory language imaginable. Never mind that the hate-crime legislation at issue could not possibly have punished Byrd’s killers more, because they were already receiving the law’s ultimate penalty. There was an election to win, and that meant boosting black turnout. If that meant painting Bush as a monstrous racist, so be it.

Such inflammatory dishonesty is a common Democratic campaign tactic. Remember this, from “Uncle” Joe Biden in 2012?

Yep, Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney — was going to put black Americans “back in chains.” Even worse, Romney would kill those same Americans without compunction: