RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the light of day she mouths the pablum and platitudes her supporters want to hear. It’s not the Islamist holding the gun that is the problem, she says, but the gun itself. And the crowds cheer, which is no less than her due. All that midnight work erasing an inconvenient record deserves some acclaim.
In the aftermath of December 2, 2015, San Bernardino massacre, Democratic Party frontrunner Hillary Clinton paid careful attention to her PC-observant supporter base: “I refuse to accept this as normal. We must take action to stop gun violence now.” However, she did begin to speak more frequently about the perils of terrorism, especially after the March 22, 2016, Brussels carnage. Clinton presented herself as the sensible alternative to Donald Trump and his fellow Republican presidential candidates, who she disparaged for using inflammatory terms such as “radical Islamic terrorism”, rather than her less jarring descriptor, “radical jihadist terrorism”.

After the horrific Orlando atrocity, in the early hours of Sunday, June 12, Hillary Clinton has again depicted herself as the presidential candidate with the no-nonsense, effectual wherewithal to combat both domestic and international terrorism.

Politicians are frequently casual with the truth. Maybe it goes with the territory of wanting to appear sincere about an issue in the glare of the media spotlight, only to be caught out when the situation changes and public opinion shifts to a different position. Hillary Clinton is not the only candidate for high office who could be embarrassed by a visual record of policy reversals, as in this awkward collection, and yet is there not something disturbing about the high-handed manner in which she relentlessly insists that day is night?

In the same vein, a new paperback edition of Clinton’s memoir, Hard Choices, omits passages containing views that are no longer expedient. In the hardback Hard Choices (2014), Hillary Clinton supported President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and wrote favourably about his 2011 military intervention in Libya. However, to neutralise Bernie Sanders’ left-populist (or “democratic socialist”) challenge during the Democratic Party primaries, Clinton jettisoned these and a range of other, suddenly unhelpful opinions championed in the hardback version of her memoirs. The expurgation visited upon the new edition of Hard Choices is, according to publisher Simon & Schuster, “to accommodate a shorter length” – or, more accurately perhaps, the disposing of inconvenient truths in the memory hole.

Is there a pattern here? Take the case of the relatives of three of those killed in the second 9/11, the 2012 Benghazi bloodbath, C.I.A. contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty and Foreign Services officer Sean Smith. Most of them are emphatic that in their various encounters with Hillary Clinton, the then-Secretary of State blamed an online video made by an Egyptian Copt living in the U.S.A. for the murder of the men. For instance, Tyrone Woods’ father, who took notes at his meeting, said this: “I gave Hillary a hug and shook her hand. And she said we are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of my son.” Hillary Clinton continues to deny this.

On Sunday morning, the nation awoke to the news that nearly 50 innocent people had been murdered by a gunman at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando. Soon they would learn the shooter was 29-year-old Omar Mateen, born in America to parents of Afghan origin.

In other words, a heavily-armed man with Afghan parents and a Muslim name had targeted a gay nightclub for his bloody rampage. And yet as the American people watched those Sunday press conferences on their TV sets, they were treated to a parade of officials, including the obligatory imam, all reluctant to connect the killer with anything suggesting Islam.

At 1:59 p.m. it was the president’s turn.

Though he did call the slaughter at Pulse an “act of terror,” anyone relying on Barack Obama for a read of the situation would have had no idea that the killings at a Florida nightclub might have been inspired by the same ideology behind the forces still confronting American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now ask yourself: Does this undermine the Trump message or fuel it?
On Monday, after a security briefing, President Obama conceded the shooter was “inspired by various extremist information” online. His sole reference to what this might be was a line about the “perversions of Islam that you see generated on the internet.”

Characteristically Monday found Mr. Trump repeating his call for a temporary ban on Muslims. Let’s stipulate this call is all his critics say it is: overly broad and not well thought out, given, for example, that to defeat the Islamists making war on America we will need the full assistance both of Muslim nations and individual Muslims, not least Muslim Americans.

But Mr. Trump’s comments are not received in a vacuum. They come in the context of an Obama administration and a Hillary Clinton campaign that, 15 years after al Qaeda hijackers flew civilian airliners into buildings in New York and Washington, still have trouble acknowledging radical Islam as a motivating force. CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump’s speech on national security, which he delivered today, will change the dynamic of this election. The speech was specific, detailed and on the money. Trump showed how strategic securing the border is, how important stopping immigration from terror zones like Syria is, and how deadly political correctness has become. Political correctness – which transforms the Islamic world, which has a lot to answer for, from aggressors into innocent victims – functions as a shield for Islamic terrorists, and handcuffs law-abiding citizens prompting them not to report suspicious activities by Muslims for fear of being called racist.

Trump was especially courageous (and politically incorrect) in pointing out that the Muslim communities in which the terrorists operate know what is going on but don’t say anything. What a contrast with Hillary’s speech today, which focused on reinforcing political correctness – attacking so-called assault rifles, as though guns and not fanatics were the problem, and emphasizing the importance of not alienating Muslims by acknowledging that a large and growing segment of the Islamic world is at war with us. What contempt for Muslims who are also victims of Islamic terror! Does denying reality encourage non-belligerent Muslims to help us? For seven and a half years the Obama administration has closed its eyes to the Islamic dimensions of the terrorist threat, has refused as long and as much as possible to even use the word “terror.” And what has been the result? Muslims in San Bernardino and St. Lucie – as Trump had the political courage to point out – saw something but said nothing about the atrocities brewing in their communities. At the same time the progressive enablers of Islamist terror have been busy blaming Christian conservatives for the anti-gay hatred that is a core belief of the Islamists, rooted not only in their religious texts but relentlessly broadcast through their Imams and mosques.

The attacks on Trump supporters at a rally in San Jose last week were another example of the left’s violent assaults on free speech and association. Before the election there is likely to be more thuggery, as an emboldened left lets slip their dogs of war to foment disorder to continue Obama’s aim to “fundamentally transform” America. As the long history of political philosophy teaches, this undermining of law by violence is an important sign of democracy’s impending doom.

Over 2100 years ago, the Greek historian Polybius described how democracy dies:

So when [the rich] begin to hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits, they begin to seduce and corrupt the people in every possible way, and thus ruin their estates. The result is that through their senseless craving for prominence they stimulate among the masses both an appetite for bribes and the habit of receiving them, and then the rule of democracy is transformed into government by violence and strong-arm methods. By this time the people have become accustomed to feed at the expense of others, and their prospects of winning a livelihood depend upon the property of their neighbors, and as soon as they find a leader who is sufficiently ambitious and daring . . . they introduce a regime based on violence.

It takes only a few revisions reflecting the modern world to see how closely Polybius’s analysis describes how the ideology and policy of the progressives are degrading America’s democratic republic.

First, the progressives have “seduced and corrupted” the people not, like the aspiring tyrants of old, by spending their own money, but by redistributing the property of other citizens via the 16th Amendment, which instituted the federal income tax. Over the next century the funds appropriated by the IRS have financed the “bribes” for the people: the various social welfare programs and transfers that relentlessly have escalated in number, scope, and cost––in 2014 these programs ate up two-thirds of the federal budget.

These transfers have indeed “stimulated” both the “appetite” of the people for even more government programs, and the “habit” of receiving them. That is why today the biggest problem facing our economy––the unsustainable entitlement spending that threatens in decades to gobble up every dollar collected by the feds––got only cursory attention in all the speeches of the presidential candidates from both parties. Indeed, the Democrats want to create even more programs and spend even more money on these “bribes.”

Looking at the morning paper last Monday gave me a start, and not just because color photos of a wild-eyed Hillary Clinton with a pasted on smile still shock. The Washington Post headline screamed that Hillary had won the Democratic nomination, with stories following on the “historic” achievement. What’s this? I thought – did I sleep for three days? Is it Wednesday, with the results from the California primary already in?

The Post along with the rest of the mainstream media anointed Clinton the winner without giving poor Bernie Sanders a last-gasp West Coast chance. And, generally speaking, what critical analysis there was about Hillary’s sudden historic victory assumed that it was created by unallocated superdelegates to pre-empt a possible Sanders victory in California. That is almost certainly true. The other thing Clinton and her supporters in the media want to do by anointing her as early as possible is to pre-empt Hillary’s other nemesis, the FBI.

There was never much doubt that Hillary would win the nomination even if Sanders pulled out a victory in California. So whatever damage control the early victory announcement produced would have been cosmetic in any event. However, with respect to the FBI’s ongoing investigation of Clinton’s home-brewed email server, the stakes are far higher and the early claim of victory more significant. The FBI is investigating likely violations of federal laws governing official record-keeping, maintaining classified information, evidence-tampering, obstruction of justice, and possible pay-for-play bribery through the Clinton foundation. Prosecution of any one of these infractions could reroute Hillary’s march to the Oval Office into a penitentiary.

Hillary knows that actual prosecution by the Obama administration’s Justice Department is a very long shot, even assuming that the FBI refers charges. Nonetheless, the mere referral of charges by the FBI to Justice would damage her campaign and increase doubt among a voting public that already overwhelmingly regards her as dishonest.

What FBI director James Comey intends is perhaps the greatest conundrum in Washington these days. Is he playing Hamlet to Hillary’s Claudius, introspective, doubtful, and unwilling to strike the killing blow? Is he just being a careful apolitical policeman? Or is he a political hack who will do what’s best for Jim Comey? Perhaps it’s a bit of all three. Whatever the truth, it is in Hillary’s best interest to discourage Comey as much as possible. Her early claim to be the Democrat nominee serves that purpose.

If Comey is an honest policeman, the best time for him to have acted was before Hillary claimed the nomination. Then he would only have been referring charges against another – albeit notorious – private citizen. After the nomination, Hillary becomes not only the standard bearer of one of America’s two great political parties, but a “historic” figure as the first woman to do so. As such, it behooved both Hillary and her backers in the media to reach that point ASAP.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Democratic Party’s platform drafting committee tussled over whether to use the word “occupation” in addressing the Israeli-Palestinian issue, reflecting divisions between the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton camps that could play out at the convention.

The Democratic National Committee held two days of open hearings this week in Washington, D.C., on the platform, inviting experts to testify. The hearings, which will also take place in other cities, got underway the same week that it became clear that Clinton had secured her position as the party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

Much of the back and forth Thursday afternoon, when the committee considered foreign policy, was about whether the committee should describe Israel’s presence in the West Bank as an “occupation.”

Sanders, the Independent senator from Vermont who remains in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, appointed five members to the 15-member committee, including three who have advocated for Palestinian rights in the past: Cornel West, a philosopher who backs for the boycott Israel movement; James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, and Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn. Clinton appointed six committee members.

West said during the hearing that the party’s platform should include the word “occupation,” suggesting that to do otherwise would mean being “beholden” to American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC staffers were in the room, as were staffers from other pro-Israel groups, including J Street.