RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Donald Trump. The campaign was temporarily sidetracked with ancillary issues involving the ethnicity of a judge presiding over an obscure case that no one really cares about. After scoring significant momentum following his clinching of the GOP nomination, his polling numbers dipped markedly with some polls giving Hillary Clinton a double digit lead. And this week, Nate Silver, who accurately predicted the 2008 and 2012 electoral outcomes, gave Clinton an 80% chance of winning the general election.

But Clinton acolytes should temper their excitement. Those who underestimate Trump’s chances of securing the White House may be in for a rude awakening. Trump is perhaps one of the most resilient personalities in modern American politics who has demonstrated an uncanny ability to overcome insurmountable odds. Time and again he has defied the professional pundits — Nate Silver included — and has accomplished the seemingly impossible. He is anything but conventional and the normal rules of politics do not apply to him and that is precisely why this election cycle is still anyone’s game.

Buttressing this view, a new Quinnipiac University survey released on Wednesday suggests that Trump and Clinton are in a statistical dead heat, with 40 percent supporting Trump and 42 percent backing Clinton. That minor differential is well within the margin of error. Those surveyed saw Trump as being better equipped to deal with the economy and tackle terrorism. He also beat Clinton on leadership and honesty.

Clinton has been struggling with gaining the trust of voters, who overwhelmingly view her as untrustworthy. The recently released Benghazi report, which highlights Clinton’s role in advancing a fraud, will further tarnish voter’s perceptions of her. The FBI probe of her use of an unsecured bathroom server to send and receive classified emails and the prospect of being charged for related offenses still clouds her campaign and looms over her like an anvil swinging precariously above her head.

But Clinton’s campaign troubles go far beyond trustworthiness and FBI probes. As highlighted by a fascinating piece in Politico, life-long, card-carrying, blue collar Democrats are leaving the party in droves and switching sides. The situation is particularly acute in the Rust Belt where bad trade deals, including NAFTA and eight years of Obama have laid waste to industry and displaced or otherwise negatively impacted hundreds of thousands middle class, union workers, the bread and butter of the Democratic Party.

Elizabeth Warren has been coddled ever since Fordham Law Review insisted on believing that the blonde blue eyed woman was Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color”.

She has as much “color” in her pale face as she does principles, ideas, wit, ethics and speaking skills.

Warren isn’t a good speaker. Her speeches are inept, her cadence is uneven and she ends sentences on a squeak. She stumbles breathily through prepared texts, seemingly confused to be up on stage as if she’s waiting for everyone to realize that there was a mistake and replace her with someone competent.

Sadly that never happens. All this might be excusable if she had something to say, she doesn’t.

If Elizabeth Warren ever had a single original thought in her head, it long ago died of starvation. She achieved national fame by claiming that no one got rich on their own because the police protect factories. That was probably a more compelling argument back when the stereotypical millionaire got rich from factories. But Warren was cribbing from the twenties because she has no new ideas.

Either that or she imagines that Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and Mark Zuckerberg became billionaires by having a lot of factories in Lowell.

These days she tours as Hillary Clinton’s attack Chihuahua lobbing piercing insults at Trump. Like the time she accused Trump of being “greedy”. Then she charged him with having a “goofy hat”.

But the media cheers every squeaky insult from the former Republican turned Democrat and class warrior turned millionaire as if she were the anemic half-assed second coming of Don Rickles.

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the State Department to produce the e-mail records of Hillary Clinton’s scheduler during her tenure as secretary of state, expanding an investigation being pursued by conservative nonprofit Citizens United into the overlap between Clinton’s official travel and her meetings with foreign Clinton Foundation donors.

Citizens United is slated to receive all e-mails sent to and from Lona Valmoro, Clinton’s State Department scheduler, in the two-week periods before each of 14 international trips Clinton took during her four years in office. David Bossie, president of Citizens United, hopes to confirm suspicions that Clinton maintained an off-the-books schedule, meeting with Clinton Foundation donors on the taxpayer’s dime. “Citizens United wants to know how many overseas dinners Secretary Clinton attended with Clinton Foundation donors that didn’t make it on her schedule,” he says.

Judge Rosemary Collyer, the federal judge presiding over a public-records case brought by Citizens United, was initially hesitant to allow the release of Valmoro’s e-mails, and asked the group to provide one example of an off-the-books meeting with Clinton Foundation donors. As part of a joint filing with the State Department on Monday, Citizens United presented the judge with several pieces of evidence suggesting Valmoro deliberately struck from the official schedule a December 6, 2012, dinner in Dublin, Ireland, with several Clinton Foundation and Clinton campaign donors, organized by Teneo co-founder Declan Kelly. Though Valmoro was made aware of the Dublin meeting through an earlier e-mail chain, neither Clinton’s archived daily calendar nor her detailed official schedule make any note of it.

Hillary Clinton’s brief and lackluster tenure as secretary of state can best be summed up as scandal-ridden. But of all the scandals swirling around the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, none resonates more than the Benghazi fiasco, which resulted in the needless deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, the first U.S. ambassador to die in the line of duty since 1979.

After 25 months of work which included interviews with over 100 witnesses and the examination of thousands of documents and emails, including those obtained off Clinton’s unsecured bathroom server, the Select Committee on Benghazi has finally released its lengthy report which includes detailed findings that reflect poorly on the Obama White House and Ms. Clinton. Among its many damning conclusions, the report portrays a deceitful administration obsessed with pushing a false narrative on to the American people in an effort to deflect attention away from the administration’s glaring foreign policy failings.

The September 11, 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi came just 56 days before the general election at a sensitive time when Obama’s reelection campaign was in full swing. At the time, Obama was touting his “success” in liquidating Osama Bin Laden and was pushing the storyline that Al-Qaida was retreating and the worldwide terror threat was diminishing. But the well-organized, well-planned Benghazi terrorist assault, likely timed to coincide with the anniversary of the 9-11 terror attacks, threw a wrench in Obama’s narrative, shattering the mendacious tale he was peddling.

The delay in deploying military assets to the theater, attributed by the committee to needless bureaucratic bungling, almost certainly cost those men their lives. The committee also found that some two-dozen people, who were saved during the assault, were rescued with the assistance of a unit known as the Libyan Military Intelligence, which was composed of fighters and officers loyal to the regime headed by the deposed Qaddafi. In other words, the army that the Obama/Clinton duo helped defeat was also instrumental in saving Americans, a bitter irony.

I like and respect George Will, and over the years I’ve been one of his fans. With the rise of Donald Trump, Will has decided to resign from the GOP, along with Mitt Romney and the other folks we might call “decorative conservatives” — the people who look good on the outside, but who have none of the fire in the belly that marked Teddy Roosevelt or Lincoln — not to mention the Founders, who were pretty robust and argumentative.

I believe Mr. Will has a genuine distaste for what may become Trump Conservatism. Trump represents a kind of happy warrior style of American politician, similar to Harry Truman and Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt. It’s obviously too low-class for Will, Romney and Jeb Bush, who are all too delicate for the political blood sport that the Left has imposed on our politics. Nothing is too low for the Left. Literally nothing.

The national GOP has been in decline for years, running decrepit candidates like Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney — who actually did flinch in the last debate with Obama, as Trump points out. Candidates like Dole and McCain were picked for their seniority, which is what made them weak and doddering candidates.

On the other side, the hard Left is back in charge of the Democrats, and they are killers. Their purpose is to destroy their opponents. In response, the GOP has run certain losers.

But then we see the killer thugs of the Washington Post and New York Times hiring a decorative conservative like George Will for “balance.” Balance, my foot. George Will is protective coloration for the WaPo’s inner mafia. The WaPo doesn’t play by any rules except its own. You may not see the glint of the daggers they all carry into the fight, but come election time, every honest conservative gets the shaft.

This is going to be a nasty, vicious election, and winners have to give as good as they get. I’m sorry. Reality.

The WaPo has carried off the complete myth of Watergate to destroy a Republican President who was no worse than LBJ or Robert Kennedy, or Carter, Clinton and Obama. American journalism is now based on a deliberate lie, the false mythology of Watergate — actually a power struggle between the Permanent Government in DC and an elected President, Richard Nixon. Watergate’s Deep Throat (Mark Felt, the Assistant Director of the FBI) plotted with the Washington Post to destroy Richard Nixon. That’s all there was to it. Everything else is lies.

Nixon was destroyed because he was an anti-Communist, and today, the Democrats have racialized Communism just like Dixiecrat Huey Long did long ago. They have placed one of their own in the White House, and the policy results are disastrous. People are dying in Syria and Libya because Barack Obama is still steeped in the phony socialism of Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya. But Kenyatta was too practical to be a Marxist in an underdeveloped country like Kenya. Obama Sr., Barack’s father he never knew, preached radicalism and world revolution, so Kenyatta threw him out. Barack Obama is therefore playing out a childhood drama in his mind, a drama that lost any practical relevance half a century ago.

It’s strange how the Left always repeats the past, time after time after time, all in the cause of “Progressivism.”

Trump is the first Republican candidate we have ever had who has the temperament to fight back against the Dems’ shameful racial lies and ask blacks and Hispanics for their votes.

This election cycle is dominated by Democrat race-baiting as usual. Trump’s massively popular nationalist platform to stop illegal immigration and suspend Muslim immigration is labeled racist. What is new are perfidious Republican leaders and pundits rushing to join Democrats in their false accusation against Trump. Democrats have called every Presidential candidate for decades racist. They have to.

Telling blacks that Republicans wish them ill keeps Democrats in power. They don’t care about the damage they are doing to the country and to black lives. Blacks are cannon fodder in the Democrat war for power.

There is something profoundly depressing and pathetic that until Trump, our Republican leaders have been willing to write off the black vote and accept the Democrat poison that our party is made up of racist white people.

As I wrote on AT at the height of President Obama’s race-baiting on the Zimmerman trial:

Democrats have successfully re-written history to give themselves the starring role in the fight against racism — something they didn’t earn in the Civil Rights era and are not earning now. (snip)

Democrats cynically inflame racial fear and anger for political gain. They create false dramas of racial injustice, such as the Zimmerman trial, even though it wounds and damages blacks and the entire the country.

(snip) When the War on Poverty programs backfired, mortally wounding black families and creating nightmarish conditions for black children, Democrats found their party couldn’t do without the federal money, and the power and control it gave them over black voters.

The most recent polls on the Trump-Hillary fight show the crucial importance to Democrats of making blacks and Hispanics feel Trump, and all Republicans, are against them. Without a hurt and angry black and immigrant electorate, there would be no Democrat party, according to this analysis by John Hinderaker of why race relations in our country have deteriorated.