RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a communique to donors (who else?) Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta tried to exculpate his candidate’s lawbreaking in the E-mailgate scandal. Alas for Hillary, Podesta’s attempt at exoneration has more holes than a golf course.

“ . . . we know that our opponents will continue to try to distract us with attacks,” Podesta wrote on May 28. But State Department Inspector General Steve Linick is no right-wing Clinton hater. The man behind last week’s brutal report on Clinton’s misdeeds was appointed by President Obama. Linick also served as an assistant U.S. attorney, starting in 1994 — during the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton.

“Secretary Clinton has said her use of a personal email server was a mistake,” Podesta asserted.

A “mistake” is when one hits “reply all,” and dozens or hundreds of people unwittingly receive an embarrassing e-mail meant for one person.

E-mailgate was no such casual gaffe. It was a deliberate and planned conspiracy in which Hillary evaded standard State Department procedures, installed an outlaw personal computer server in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y., mansion — 267 miles northeast of Foggy Bottom, and then reportedly paid aide Bryan Pagliano $140,000 to maintain that illicit equipment. Pagliano’s supervisors, the IG discovered, “were unaware of his technical support of the Secretary’s e-mail system,” including “during working hours.”

After leaving State, Hillary had her server shipped to a facility in New Jersey associated with Platte River Networks, a Denver-based firm that lacked the security clearance to handle such sensitive gear. She then had the company try to wipe the server clean.

Some “mistake.”

“She believed she was following the practices of other Secretaries,” Podesta further claimed.

Ouch:

It’s zombie time at campaign Hillary. Behold the dead men walking! It was with strangely slow, narcotized numbness that the candidate and her phalanx of minions and mouthpieces responded to last week’s punishing report by the State Department’s Inspector General about her email security lapses. Do they truly believe, in the rosy alternate universe of Hillaryland, that they can lie their way out of this? Of course, they’re relying as usual on the increasingly restive mainstream media to do their dirty work for them. If it were a Republican in the crosshairs, Hillary’s shocking refusal to meet with the Inspector General (who interviewed all four of the other living Secretaries of State of the past two decades) would have been the lead item flagged in screaming headlines from coast to coast. Let’s face it—the genuinely innocent do not do pretzel twists like this to cover their asses.

There are fewer sharper critics of the American politico-cultural scene than Camille Paglia; that she generally comes to the wrong conclusions with her heart (she’s a Sanders supporter), her head does formidable work nailing the candidates’s strengths and weaknesses.

She’s right about Hillary, of course. Mrs. Clinton is the worst, and least-qualified, major party candidate in eons: a career criminal whose flouting of the law and nose-thumbing at the American people are finally coming to the ignominious end she so richly deserves. And — equal time! — she’s also spot-on regarding Donald Trump:

Over on the GOP side, Donald Trump continues to gain strength, despite the nonstop artillery barrage of Democratic operatives and their clone army in the mainstream media. Trump just rolls on and on, despite every foot-in-mouth gaffe that would stop a normal campaign cold. He’s terrific on the radio, I must say. Even though I do like Elizabeth Warren (I even believe she has Native American ancestry, although certainly not enough to qualify her for affirmative action), I burst out laughing in my car last week when I heard Trump confidingly say (like a yenta at Zabar’s deli), “She’s a woman that has been very ineffective—except that she has a big mouth.” His New York comic timing was spot on. I laughed out loud again this week when I heard Trump interrupt his press conference to tag an ABC reporter as “a sleaze”—at which I am sure thousands of other radio listeners heartily cheered. It’s been a long time since any major politician had the chutzpah to tell the arrogant, double-dealing East Coast media what most of the country thinks about them.

The news out of last week’s Cheryl Mills deposition was that the Clinton confidante didn’t say much about Hillary’s email server. Which only goes to show that Mrs. Clinton has a serious problem—and she knows it.

This is, after all, Cheryl Mills. For more than 20 years, she has served as the Clintons’ very own Winston Wolf ( Harvey Keitel in “Pulp Fiction”)—their fixer, their problem-solver. From impeachment right up through Benghazi and the server, Ms. Mills is the one constant in the behind-the-scenes obstruction. The less she talks, the more alarm bells ought to ring.
This was the measure to watch when Ms. Mills arrived last Friday to sit for an interview with attorneys for Judicial Watch, which has sued the State Department over missing federal records.

In early May the oversight group convinced a federal judge to order discovery into the creation and operation of Mrs. Clinton’s private server. Judicial Watch was granted permission to depose seven central figures, including Ms. Mills, who served as Hillary’s aide at the State Department and later as her private lawyer.

Mrs. Clinton claims she set up the home-brew server in an innocent act aimed at convenience, so it was notable that Ms. Mills marched into her deposition accompanied by no fewer than seven lawyers—three representing Ms. Mills herself, and two each from the Justice and State departments. Two of the government lawyers made clear that they were not only representing their departments but also guarding Ms. Mills in her capacity as a former federal employee. This is President Obama’s assist for Mrs. Clinton.

The lawyers earned their pay. The entire 270-page transcript of the deposition, which Judicial Watch released Tuesday, has an almost eye-glazing repetition about it.

A persistent Judicial Watch attorney attempts to ask Ms. Mills a straightforward question. Before she even finishes, Ms. Mills’s army of attorneys falls all over itself to object, to insist that the query is outside the “scope” of the inquiry or too vague, and to instruct the witness not to answer.

Bernie Sanders started out by running against Wall Street. These days he’s running against Israel.

Running against Wall Street was hard. The Sanders campaign had to produce actual numbers. Americans were shocked to learn the higher taxes they would be facing in the People’s Republic of Bernie. Prominent economists on the left and the right tore his economic plans to shreds. The Sandernistas responded by touting the support of the country’s most prominent Marxist economist, the son of the Rosenberg Stalinist atom bomb traitors and an instructor at Chemeketa Community College.

Bashing Israel is a lot easier and appeals to the same conspiratorial bigoted contingent of the left.

And the facts don’t matter.

Bernie Sanders lied and claimed that Israel had killed 10,000 innocent people in Gaza. That statement was false in every possible way. As Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, “every word… is a lie including the ‘and’ and ‘the’.” But the Sanders base, which had gleefully eaten up his conspiracy theories about Goldman Sachs, loved every minute of it.

Like the Manchurian Candidate’s Senator Iselin, Senator Sanders gleefully threw around false numbers in the fashion of a cheap bigoted demagogue knowing that the resulting debate would not be about whether Israel had killed innocent people in Gaza, but how many innocent people it had killed in Gaza.

Bernie’s ugly pandering to left-wing anti-Semitic bigots lost him the Jewish vote from Massachusetts to New York. By the time he got to New York, polls showed that Catholics were more likely to vote for the “son of a Polish immigrant” than Jews. And that was before he appointed radical anti-Israel activist Simone Zimmerman, from anti-Israel hate group If Not Now, as his Jewish outreach coordinator.

Political markets are weird: They cry out for something and yet politicians, with their enslavement to conventional wisdom and careerist caution, are unwilling to supply it.

Then along comes Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump, in his set-piece energy speech on Thursday, did something that might outlast his presidential hopes. In his anti-intellectual way, he made an intellectual contribution. For decades, poorly justified scientific fears of future warming have hovered as an incubus over U.S. energy development. These fears, you’ll notice, have not actually blocked much of anything: Fracking happened. The U.S. continues to export coal to China. But these fears fill America’s leadership class with guilt and cognitive dissonance.

Give Mr. Trump credit for trying to break the spell.

In a speech the media has done its best to ignore or debunk, he said, “From an environmental standpoint, my priorities are very simple: clean air and clean water.” With these words, he relegated back to the land of abstraction the abstraction known as climate change.

His was a model political speech, one that Hillary Clinton might learn from. It set an agenda, with a minimum of windy rationalization, that voters can assess. Mr. Trump, as all politicians do, offered a prayer to the false deity of energy independence but he also offered a perfectly serviceable vision of Americans freely competing in global energy markets based on our own natural and (note) renewable resources and technology.

Mr. Trump hit the climate moment squarely. CONTINUE AT SITE

When a federal judge ruled against Donald Trump this week in a lawsuit against Trump University, he inadvertently unleashed a bombshell involving Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel unsealed documentsrelating to the Trump U for-profit real estate program. The documents include information used by the school to convince prospective students to join the program.

Curiel is the same judge the presumptive GOP nominee has called “hostile” and biased against him.

“I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater,” Trump said Friday at a campaign rally in San Diego. “He’s a hater. His name is Gonzalo Curiel.”

And a bombshell report from American Spectator seems to lend credence to that claim.

The conservative magazine said that one of the firms picked by Judge Curiel to represent plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit against Trump University have financial ties to Hillary and Bill Clinton.

Financial ties to the tune of half a million dollars.

Inside the Beltway and along the Washington-to-Boston corridor, #NeverTrump has won the hearts and minds of conservative intellectuals and the high-toned media. The dissenters—yes, there are some—make a lot less noise.

But move away from the East Coast and it’s a different story. Out there, the conservative intelligentsia isn’t aligned against Donald Trump—quite the contrary. Roger L. Simon, the screenwriter, novelist, and former CEO of PJ Media, predicted last August that Trump would win the presidency. Nine months later, in May, he wrote that “it still holds true.”

“Like others, I want things to change .  .  . and Donald seems like the man with the courage and will to do it,” Simon writes. “He’s unafraid. He’s upbeat. He’s funny. He despises political correctness (as anybody with a brain does). .  .  . I can think of no greater antidote to Obama than a Trump presidency.”

Simon is only the most enthusiastic of the conservative highbrows not mired in the East who have grappled with the Trump phenomenon. Their views cover a wide range: from mere opposition to #NeverTrump to mildly pro-Trump to recognition of Trump’s strengths to disclosing they intend to vote for him.

Dennis Prager, the L.A.-based syndicated talk radio host and columnist, said when the presidential debates started “that if Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, I will vote for him over Hillary Clinton, or any Democrat for that matter.” Last week, he took on #NeverTrump conservatives.

He disputed their “conscience” argument. “I don’t find it compelling because it means that your conscience is clear after making it possible for Clinton or any other Democrat to win,” he writes. “But if you wish to vanquish the bad, it’s not possible—at least not on this side of the afterlife—to remain pure.”

The most sweeping and impressive appraisal of Trump appears in the spring issue of the Claremont Review of Books, written by its editor Charles Kesler, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University. Kesler, too, disses the #NeverTrump movement. “Conservatives care too much about the party and the country to wash our hands of this election,” he writes. “A third party bid would be quixotic.”

Two people are currently vying for the highest office in the world: one an alleged criminal with no achievements to her name during a lifetime of public disservice save for audaciously and adroitly “monetizing” her political capital; and the other a demagogic, narcissistic lothario with no apparent ideological principles but an unquenchable thirst for power and self-aggrandizement during a lifetime of public showmanship — one whose populist appeal stems largely from proposing politically incorrect policies (from which he has readily backed away when challenged).

One would think that such a contest might cause Americans to take pause and think through just how it is that in a nation of over 300 million people, either Hillary Rodham Clinton or Donald J. Trump will be the next steward of the republic.

Sure, one could make the case that Hillary and Donald are representative of 21st century America: Clinton as an identity politics-playing “victim” who has made an art of achieving higher and higher offices without accomplishment as is emblematic of our societal move towards politics over merit; and Trump as a reality TV star who has made millions of Americans part of the show, and who like many actors in the American economy has made his fortune off of an “asset-lite” strategy built on leverage and brand value.

But this cynical view aside, a rational response to Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump might entail asking some fundamental questions about politics itself — fundamental questions that are ignored in the day-to-day hurly-burly of a campaign in the era of social media.

There are three deeper questions for those who lament our current predicament:

Why is it that politics seems to reward most those who are so personally flawed and power-hungry?
Why do those who are so personally flawed and power-hungry seek out high office in the first place?
Given these political realities, would we not want to limit the power of the state and thus the appeal of public office to such people?

If you want to win election and stay in office, your singular goal is to ensure 50 percent-plus-one support at all costs.

In evaluating Hillary Clinton’s competence, a good place to start is to take a close look at her tour of duty as Secretary of State. Is the U.S. safer and/or held in higher regard around the world as a result of her efforts?

Perhaps it might be worthwhile to note why she got that appointment: Not because of either her acumen or experience. Rather it was Barack Obama extending the olive branch in order to bring a fractured Democratic Party together — fractured because of a very heated and divisive Democrat primary.

That said, even a cursory examination of her service in this position yields up a resoundingly negative answer to that question. As has already been frequently noted, her tour began with her screwing up the Russian reset button, and it ended with her Benghazi dereliction, leading to the death of 4 Americans. What happened in between these bookends, and what are the consequences of those happenings?

Let’s start with the Middle East, that boiling cauldron of infidel hatred. Syria, where, you may recall, President Obama drew a red line (apparently in invisible ink) should Assad use chemical weapons against the insurrectionists, is in chaos — after Syria did use chemical weapons and Obama failed to act on his red line. And now, long after Obama declared the importance of taking down the Assad government, Russia is in the country, providing support for Assad remaining in power (and thereby providing the Russians with a Mediterranean access).