RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Trump’s critics continue to search for dubious reasons to justify sitting out the election or even voting for Hillary. There may be many reasons not to vote for Trump, but criticizing NATO isn’t one of them.”

The Never Trump crowd has found another example of The Donald’s disqualifying ignorance: comments he made about NATO. He has said that our contributions to NATO are “unfair,” that they are “costing us a fortune,” that we are “getting ripped off,” and that they are “getting a free ride.” By the way, Obama in his Atlantic interview also called the Europeans “free riders,” but I don’t recall a lot of sneering at the president for his “alarming” and “dangerous” remarks, as one critic put it.

Trump also implied that he would put the European NATO members’ feet to the fire about meeting the 2006 requirement that they spend 2% of GDP on their militaries, and suggested he would negotiate a new contribution schedule. Few NATO members have met that requirement, which is a violation of Article 3 that requires member states to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.” According to NATO’s own report, only five countries are estimated to meet the 2% requirement in 2016. France, Germany, Italy, and Spain­­––the first, third, fourth, and fifth largest economies in the EU––are not among them. The richest, Germany, is expected to remain at 1.19%. In contrast, the US will spend 3.9%. As Lord Robertson, NATO Secretary General from 1999-2004, put it, European nations are “military pygmies.”

Critics of Trump are technically correct to say that he exaggerates when he claims that the US pays the “lion’s share” of NATO funding. In fact, the US pays under a fifth (22%). But the complaints about European NATO members, which predate Trump by decades, take into account more salient deficiencies. “Common funding,” of which the US covers a fifth, is “used to finance NATO’s principal budgets: the civil budget (NATO HQ running costs), the military budget (costs of the integrated Command Structure) and the NATO Security Investment Programme (military capabilities),” according to NATO. In other words, mostly institutional bureaucratic infrastructure.

“Indirect spending” covers what each nation voluntarily contributes to an operation. NATO acknowledges the greater share the US spends on indirect spending: “there is an over-reliance by the Alliance as a whole on the United States for the provision of essential capabilities, including for instance, in regard to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; air-to-air refuelling; ballistic missile defence; and airborne electronic warfare.” We could also mention transport aircraft, cruise missiles, and other matériel that the European countries simply don’t have much of. For example, in the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya, there were 246 cruise missiles launched. The US fired 228 of them. At $1.5 million apiece, that adds up to $342 million taxpayer dollars spent to destabilize a country and get four of our citizens killed.

This discrepancy in indirect spending and military capability was already obvious in the 1990’s when NATO intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo to stop a vicious war. During the 1999 crisis in Kosovo, the Europeans had to make “heroic efforts” just to deploy 2% of their two million troops, according to the British foreign secretary. Historian William Shawcross writes of the bombing campaign, “The United States flew the overwhelming majority of the missions, and dropped almost all the precision-guided U.S.-made munitions, and most of the targets were generated by U.S. intelligence.”

So Trump’s complaints, as blustering and exaggerated as they may be, are legitimate. Operations conducted by NATO are overwhelmingly American funded and directed, and NATO is a diplomatic fig-leaf for American power.

“Hillary Clinton took me through Hell.”

Those were the words of a woman who was raped and beaten into a coma when she was twelve years old. Instead of helping that twelve year old girl, Hillary Clinton aided her rapist. She falsely accused the abused child who would never be able to have a family of her own after the assault of “a tendency to seek out older men”. Then Hillary Clinton was recorded on tape laughing at how her client had failed a lie detector test while relishing describing how she had gotten him off.

Tonight’s Democratic National Convention theme was “A Lifetime of Fighting for Children and Families”. But this was how Hillary Clinton’s “fight” for children and families really began. And Tuesday’s highlight was an address by a career sexual predator whom she covered up for and whose victims she smeared.

That sexual predator was her husband, Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton put even more women through hell than Hillary did. And he isn’t done just yet. Amid the freakshow of the Carter mummy phoning in, the mothers of criminals, random mildly famous celebrities, the Sandernista walkout and Howard Dean doing the scream that ended his career one more time, the other Clinton took the stage.

In an evening featuring discussions about sex trafficking, the highlight was a sexual predator. In an evening that featured 9/11 victims, the highlight was the man who left America vulnerable to 9/11 and refused to take out Osama bin Laden.

And Bill being Bill, the lying didn’t take too long to get started.

Bill Clinton told the hooting and yapping DNC audience that Hillary Clinton wanted to help child abuse victims. But a child rape victim back home knows the truth and we know the truth. He got up on stage and lied again about the Children’s Health Insurance Program, one of those things which, like bringing peace to Northern Ireland and landing under fire in Bosnia, Hillary Clinton can’t stop lying about.

In Bill Clinton’s new version, Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch didn’t exist and Hillary Clinton got it all done.

But the Clintons always have a thousand new versions of every lie that they tell. And Bill’s entire speech was one big lie. The version of Hillary Clinton that he describes, an obsessive crusader for children who is also a devoted wife and mother has only one tiny problem with it. It’s an expert work of fiction.

On Friday, Hillary Clinton’s choice of Tim Kaine as her running mate projected confidence. By Monday, it looked more like overconfidence.

For more than a month, Mrs. Clinton and her allies have been running campaign ads in battleground states, and Mr. Kaine, a senator from one such state (Virginia), is a potential plus in nearly all of them. His bilingualism could enhance her appeal among Hispanic voters in places like Florida and Colorado. His Roman Catholicism could help her in swing states with large Catholic populations such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. As a former governor of Virginia, Mr. Kaine brings executive experience and regional appeal in adjacent North Carolina, a state that Barack Obama carried in 2008 and that could be in play again this cycle.

Tapping Mr. Kaine also demonstrated that Mrs. Clinton was looking past Election Day. The senator has been a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and is respected on both sides of the aisle, which could come in handy if Democrats win the White House but not control of the House and Senate. Mrs. Clinton wanted someone with a centrist reputation who could increase her appeal among independent voters and disaffected Republicans who can’t stomach Donald Trump.

But for the Kaine choice to be met with minimum blowback, at least two preconditions had to be met. First, supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist who dogged Mrs. Clinton all the way to this week’s Philadelphia convention, had to be sufficiently appeased. Second, Mrs. Clinton had to convince throngs of liberal activists obsessed with racial and ethnic diversity that her choice of a white male was not a snub. This is where Team Clinton may have become too confident. CONTINUE AT SITE

Many have weighed in on whether Donald Trump’s agendas — to the extent that they are different from what are now ratified Republican policies — are crackpot, unworkable, or radical: e.g., building a wall to enhance border enforcement (“And make Mexico pay for it!”), renegotiating trade deals with China, promoting Jacksonian nationalism rather than ecumenical internationalism, suspending immigration from Middle East war zones (after Trump dropped his call for complete Muslim exclusion), and disparaging an Eastern-corridor elite that derives privilege from the intersection of big politics, money, and the media.

No doubt, some of Trump’s flamboyant invective is isolationist, nativist, and protectionist. Certainly, we are in the strangest campaign of the last half-century, in which members of Trump’s own party are among his fiercest critics. In contrast, the ABC/NBC/CBS Sunday-morning liberal pundits feel no need to adopt NeverHillary advocacy. They apparently share little “Not in my name” compunction over “owning” her two decades of serial lying, her violations of basic ethical and legal protocols as secretary of state, her investment in what can be fairly termed a vast Clinton pay-to-play influence-peddling syndicate, and the general corruption of the Democratic primary process.

Amid the anguish over the Trump candidacy, we often forget that the present age of Obama is already more radical than most of what even Trump has blustered about. We live in a country for all practical purposes without an enforceable southern border. Over 300 local and state jurisdictions have declared themselves immune from federal immigration laws — all without much consequence and without worry that a similar principle of nullification was the basis of the American Civil War or that other, more conservative cities could in theory follow their lead and declare themselves exempt from EPA jurisdiction or federal gun-registration laws. Confederate nullification is accepted as the new normal, and, strangely, its antithesis of border enforcement and adherence to settled law is deemed xenophobic, nativist, and racist.

To understand the sheer scale of the Democratic national-security collapse, ponder this horrible fact: In the 2012 presidential election, for two months the key debate was whether the murder of four Americans in Benghazi meant that President Obama was exaggerating his success against al Qaeda. In 2016, the news cycle has already moved on from the murder of 49 Americans in Orlando six weeks ago.

It’s moved on in part because of terror attacks that have killed more than 100 men, women, and children in France, Germany, and Turkey. In the last two months, terrorists have used guns, axes, knives, bombs, and even a truck to snuff out the lives of innocents in great cities on three continents. In the last year, jihadists have killed or injured Americans in Tennessee, California, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

Terror has become the new normal. We can’t dwell on the Chattanooga shootings because San Bernardino happened. We can’t dwell on San Bernardino because Orlando happened. In Europe, we can’t dwell on Paris because Brussels happened. We can’t dwell on Brussels because Istanbul happened. We can’t dwell on Istanbul because Nice happened. We can’t dwell on Nice because Munich happened.

And to think, last week the media actually mocked Republicans for emphasizing the terror threat. Yet the media is only following President Obama’s lead. This is a man, after all, who minimizes terrorism so much that he’s fond of describing bathtubs as a greater threat than ISIS.

Meanwhile, Jihadists are laughing all the way to the bloody bank. Grant them safe havens, and they’ll use their resources to recruit, train, and inspire the next wave of jihadists. Open borders to migrants, and they’ll infiltrate the ranks of refugees. Treat any concern about terror as “Islamophobia,” and they’ll exploit the resulting complacency and political correctness.

Deeply divided Democrats spent the first day of their unruly convention here desperately trying to reassure everyone that their fractured, out-of-touch party is united heading into the November election.

The chaotic convention begins after a hotly contested primary season and as signs emerge that Republican Donald Trump could be cruising to victory in November. Famed statistician Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight said if the election had been held yesterday, Trump would have had a 57.5 percent chance of winning the presidency versus Clinton’s 42.5 percent. According to Silver’s “Now-cast” model, Trump would win the battleground states of Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

“Don’t think people are really grasping how plausible it is that Trump could become president. It’s a close election right now,” Silver tweeted July 22.

Bernie Sanders supporters made their displeasure known, booing and interrupting speeches for hours. They even booed and chanted “Bernie” during the opening invocation.

Their fanatical devotion makes sense. As Jamie Weinstein of the Daily Caller astutely observed a few hours later on Fox News Channel, to his followers Sanders is more like a religious figure than a politician.

In the early part of the first day of the convention, loud boos rang out over and over again when Hillary Clinton or running-mate Tim Kaine’s names were mentioned. Sometimes the boos drowned out the speakers. Some angry Bernie Sanders supporters taped their mouths shut to protest how the party treated their candidate. At other times, the noise generated by Sanders delegates shook the Wells Fargo Center.

In Philadelphia the official theme of Day One was “United Together,” which ought to set off alarm bells.

The statement about party unity, it turns out, was aspirational, not factual. Monday was a down-and-dirty, raucous affair. Delegates sat through seven hours of speeches, live music, and videos extolling the virtues of Clinton and ridiculing Trump. Throughout the home base of the Philadelphia Flyers, 76ers, and Soul, there are “all-gender” bathrooms. Delegates displayed smartalecky signs reading “love trumps hate.”

Protesters arrived in seemingly greater numbers than at the GOP convention in Cleveland last week. They were angrier and more physically aggressive than in Cleveland. More than 50 of them associated with something called Democracy Spring were detained by police and issued citations for disorderly conduct. Some held a sit-in at an entry point to the convention site while others climbed barricades erected for crowd control.

And inside the convention hall the knives were out for those who resisted the so-called revolution led by Sanders, a self-described socialist.

As the City of Brotherly Love roasted in 100-degree heat, Democrats unceremoniously dumped the administrative head of the party, Democratic National Committee chairman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. She had been booed by fellow Democrats at events leading up to the convention — and for good reason.

In Hillary’s term at State, wealthy crooks, influence-seekers and tyrannical governments rushed to donate millions to the Clinton Foundation, its spin-offs, Bill Clinton personally or vague combinations of all/any of them. Figuring large on the donor list, Australia’s taxpayers.
Australian governments’ $85 million aid to the Clinton Foundation is a bit surprising, given that ex-President Bill and presidential candidate Hillary are synonyms for financial and personal sleaze. That total sum was paid by both Coalition and Labor governments over the past decade. Coalition and Labor have also despatched and committed $460m to the Clinton-affiliated Global Partnership for Education, chaired by our ex-PM Julia Gillard. Abbott’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop threw Gillard’s show a lazy $140 million of taxpayer money in 2014, no questions asked. That aid was in the teeth of Gillard’s lusty presidential campaigning for Hillary against Trump.

Ostensibly charitable, the Clinton Foundation is the centerpiece of the couple’s amassing of a vast personal fortune. Bill was president from 1993-01. Hillary was Secretary of State for Obama from 2009-13.

In Hillary’s term at State, every variety of wealthy crook, influence-seeker and tyrannical government rushed to “donate” millions to the Clinton Foundation, its spin-offs, Bill Clinton personally or vague combinations of all/any of them. Lots of those crooked donors later scored disgrace, convictions and/or gaol on unrelated matters. Amid the sleaze, of course, the Clinton Foundation did manage to do some genuine charity work.

The Australian’s Greg Sheridan reported last February that the Coalition and Labor governments aided the Clinton foundations by more than $75 million in the past decade. The aid was via partnerships with the Clintons’ outfit as ‘technical implementing partner’. There are still three deals involving the foundations aiding Indonesia, PNG and Vietnam. Australia appears to be the biggest single foreign-government source of Clinton Foundation funds, he said. Annual aid has ranged from $6.5 million to a peak $10.3 million in 2012-13, the final Labor year.

However, Sheridan and/or his US source overlooked $10 million in a direct donation by a Rudd government entity to the Clinton Foundation in 2009-10. Rudd in 2008 set up the Global CCS Institute for research into carbon capture and storage with $100 million of taxpayer money. “The Institute provided AU$10 million to the Clinton Foundation to support the work being conducted through the Clinton Climate Initiative to accelerate key ‘early mover’ CCS projects around the world,” the Institute said.

According to the ABC, Rudd’s little venture actually involved a further commitment of $215m, at the rate of $100m a year. Other countries were supposed to tip in money too but by 2012 that amounted to a tiny $4.5m from the US and EU. The Institute itself had no idea what to spend its money on, actually complaining to the ABC that “the Rudd Government funding was too much, too soon.” After two years, Rudd’s institute had spent $7.4 million on travel and meetings, $11.3 million on contractors and consultants, and almost $6 million on administration. It had donated only $37m to carbon capture projects around the world but had $145m sitting idle in the bank. The $10 million thrown to the Clinton Foundation appears to be part of the institute’s desperate attempts to spend its piggy bank. Carbon capture of course has proved to be a total turkey.

It has always been taken for granted that presidents appoint wealthy donors to commissions, ambassadorships, and other honors. But we have never before seen evidence of the way the transactions are carried out. However, thanks to Wikileaks, we have an actual spreadsheet listing donors and possible purchases of office being circulated among DNC officials.

Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller has the story.

The spreadsheet — which was accompanied by emails sent between officials with the DNC’s finance team — contains 23 names of little-known corporate executives and professional fundraisers who have donated to the committee and various Democratic political action committees.

(snip)

The donor spreadsheet is included in an email chain in which Jordan Kaplan, DNC’s national finance director, asks other officials to provide names of donors they want to propose for federal commissions.

“Last call for boards and commissions,” Kaplan wrote on April 20.

“If you have someone, send to [DNC finance chief of staff Scott] Comer – full name, city, state, email and phone number. Send as many as you want, just don’t know how many people will get to.”

The email confused at least one official involved in the exchange.

“Boards and commissions? Sorry, I’m lost,” wrote Jordan Vaughn, the national finance director for the DNC’s African American Leadership Council.

Comer explained: “Any folks who you’d like to be considered to be on the board of (for example) USPS, NEA, NEH. Basically anyone who has a niche interest and might like to serve on the board of one of these orgs.”

“I should say, though, that the likelihood of landing a spot on ones as prestigious as NEA/USPS is unlikely,” Comer added, referring to the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Postal Service.

At last it’s beyond dispute: This time the Republican Party’s presidential nominee is someone chosen by full throated roar from its augmented voter base, not by the timid and failed leadership that’s gripped the Party since Reagan.

And just as importantly, despite furious howls from “We prefer Hillary” turncoats scattered among Republican elites and conservative intellectuals, it’s now also indisputable that Donald Trump is fighting for the major part of the Republican Party and American conservatism’s Reagan agenda: unapologetic patriotism and belief in American exceptionalism, a freer, less regulated economy, a Supreme Court that respects the Constitution, unrestricted freedom of expression, unambiguous condemnation of all domestic violence, especially against the police, and a muscular defense of America, its people and allies against increasingly murderous enemies.

Not good enough, say the allegedly Republican and conservative turncoats … we prefer Hillary Clinton and all that comes with her.

An important aside: In law as in logic, the absolutely certain consequences of actions that are known to the actor beforehand … are consequences that he intends. If he fires an automatic weapon into a crowd, he will not be heard to say he did not intend to kill or seriously wound.

Those members of the Republican elite now denouncing Donald Trump and proclaiming he will not get their votes, or failing to endorse and campaign for him when by resume they would be expected to, are actions they know — to an absolute certainty — will help elect Hillary Clinton.

Thus, the entire gaggle of Republican and conservative disloyalists — from former presidents and failed presidential candidates all the way down to obscure scribblers — are intentionally working for the election of Hillary Clinton and the now radical Left Democratic Party.

If Hillary Clinton is elected, especially if by a narrow vote, the turncoat disloyalists will forever own all of the utterly predictable consequences of her Leftist presidency (see below for a partial list).

The reasons for this astonishing betrayal of their own voter base? A mixture of motives is on display. Much social and intellectual snobbery, selfish wound licking, and sinecure protecting are all unsuccessfully seeking cover behind alleged issue or character criticisms.

The soreheads’ issue gripes with Trump focus on those positions that indisputably have expanded the potential voter base of the Republican Party: In addition to embracing much of core conservatism and Republicanism, Trump has responded favorably to two pleas from huge and long-standing majorities of Republican and conservative voters — and from large numbers of working and middle class Americans who are neither: