RUTHFULLY YOURS

New Hampshire’s largest newspaper picked from a crowded field to anoint their pick for the first-in-the-nation GOP primary, but didn’t leave the editorial board’s losers unscathed in announcing their favorite.

The Union-Leader endorsement might give a shot to the campaign of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who’s polling at seventh in New Hampshire but is focusing his attention on the early state 10 weeks away from the vote.

“As a U.S. attorney and then a big-state governor, he is the one candidate who has the range and type of experience the nation desperately needs,” wrote the paper’s publisher, Joseph McQuaid.

“We don’t need another fast-talking, well-meaning freshman U.S. senator trying to run the government. We are still seeing the disastrous effects of the last such choice. Chris Christie is a solid, pro-life conservative who has managed to govern in liberal New Jersey, face down the big public unions, and win a second term. Gov. Christie can work across the aisle, but he won’t get rolled by the bureaucrats. We don’t need as President some well-meaning person from the private sector who has no public experience.”

Think of Chris Christie as one of 14 Republicans vying for the presidential nomination and the odds appear insurmountable. But think of him as a defensive lineman with a talent for stripping the ball from an opposing quarterback and the race now becomes far more interesting.

Back in the October CNBC debate, the quarterback was Jeb Bush, who fumbled when asked whether the feds should regulate fantasy football. Mr. Christie gave the answer Mr. Bush should have: “Fantasy football? We have ISIS and al Qaeda attacking us and we’re talking about fantasy football?”

Cue to Paris, where world leaders are meeting this week to discuss . . . climate change. This time the hapless quarterback is President Obama, who declares the conference a show of “resolve” against Islamic State terrorists.

“This is the president once again living in his fantasy world rather than the world as it actually is,” says Mr. Christie, calling in from the campaign trail in New Hampshire. “He really believes that folks are worried about climate change when what they really care about now is the Islamic State and Syria and terrorism.”

On Meet the Press this morning, Donald Trump insisted that:

he was “100 percent right” when he said he saw thousands of Muslims in Jersey City, New Jersey, cheering the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, even though fact-checkers have debunked his assertion.

In a phone interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said he has heard from “hundreds of people that agree” that there were televised Muslim celebrations of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which he used as evidence to show his remarks were true.

“I saw it. So many people saw it,” said Trump, who, in the race for the November 2016 election, has been among the most vocal of the Republican candidates in expressing skepticism about Muslims in the United States. “So, why would I take it back? I’m not going to take it back.”

When NBC anchor Chuck Todd suggested the people Trump heard from are supporters and might want to agree with him, Trump interrupted to note the “huge Muslim population”

The ISIS Threat Represents a Clash of Civilizations, and Hillary Won’t Admit It

Has Hillary Clinton separated herself from President Obama by taking a tougher and more realistic position on the threat from ISIS? That’s what many in the news media are saying based on some of her recent foreign-policy statements, such as her remarks in a November 19 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations:

ISIS operates across three mutually reinforcing dimensions: a physical enclave in Iraq and Syria; an international terrorist network that includes affiliates across the region and beyond; and an ideological movement of radical jihadism. We have to target and defeat all three, and time is of the essence.

This portrayal of the ISIS threat sounds like an improvement over the awkward rhetoric used by President Obama to discuss what he insists on calling ISIL or Daesh, and his refusal to use words such as “jihad” and “jihadism.” But Hillary’s rhetorical improvements were offset by caveats indicating that she actually has not moved very far from the president and has a worldview that is just as incoherent.

For example, Clinton criticized “the obsession in some quarters [meaning Republicans] with a clash of civilizations.” Clinton also echoed Obama’s frequent claims that the United States is not at war with Islam when she said, “I don’t think we’re at war with all Muslims. I think we’re at war with jihadists.”

Even as Hillary Clinton is upping her anti-Wall Street rhetoric, here comes word that the Clinton Foundation is running a private-equity company down in Colombia.

The private-equity field is where Mitt Romney earned his fortune — and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads from the Obama campaign back in 2008.

The foundation’s Bogota-based firm, Fondo Acceso, was started in 2010 by Bill Clinton, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and mining magnate Frank Giustra, with seed funding of $20 million from the foundation’s Clinton-Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative and the SLIM Foundation, the Washington Free Beacon reports.

Anything to hide here? Well, Fondo Acceso took down its website once the Beacon broke the story. And the venture wasn’t even registered as a private-equity fund in Colombia, thereby skirting government oversight. A good move for an investment firm linked to the US secretary of state.

Ken Boehm, a watchdog with the National Legal and Policy Center, notes, “At the minimum, the Clinton Foundation should disclose every company that received investment funds from them, because the public is entitled to know whether those companies benefited from any State Department foreign-aid programs.”

To hear Hillary Clinton tell it, she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest — even though she was already 6 years old when he made his famous ascent.

On a visit to war-torn Bosnia in 1996, she claimed she and her entourage landed under sniper fire and had to run “with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base” — although videos of her arrival show her waltzing serenely across the tarmac, waving to the crowd.

She blamed the 2012 attack on American diplomatic and intelligence-gathering installations in Benghazi on “a disgusting video” when she knew almost from the first moment that it was a jihadist assault that took the lives of four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya.

No wonder the late William Safire, writing in The New York Times in 1996, at the height of the Whitewater investigation, called her a “congenital liar.” Said Safire: “She is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.”
Photo: Reuters

Baron Munchausen has nothing on Hillary Rodham Clinton.

(Reuters) — U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s support among Republicans has dropped 12 points in less than a week, marking the real estate mogul’s biggest decline since he vaulted to the top of the field in July, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

“It’s clear at this point that Donald Trump acts more like a bully than a ‘traditional’ presidential candidate,” observed New York magazine’s Jesse Singal in September:

The current leader in the GOP polls gleefully flouts all of the usual rules of political and social decorum, constantly launching attacks—many of them rather offensive—against both his political rivals and members of the media he believes have treated him unfairly. . . .

Part of what’s been strange about the trajectory of the campaign so far is that Trump hasn’t been punished, in any real sense, for engaging in the sort of behavior that almost everyone agrees is terrible in any setting. Yes, each gross incident is followed by a wave of denunciations, but they don’t seem to have an impact—if anything, Trump seems to be gaining popularity by bullying.

Singal consulted with a “bullying expert,” a UCLA psychologist, who advised Trump’s Republican rivals to counter his bullying by ganging up against him.

“As of yet,” Singal observed, “that united force hasn’t quite emerged in the GOP primary.” As of now, however, it does seem to have emerged in the media, thanks to a dust-up between Trump and a reporter named Serge Kovaleski.

In 2001, Kovaleski was working for the Washington Post. On Sept. 18 of that year, he shared a byline on a story titled “Northern New Jersey Draws Probers’ Eyes.” The story noted that Jersey City had been the base of operations for Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who directed several terrorist attacks and conspiracies, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. “Law enforcement officials said northeastern New Jersey could be potentially fertile ground” in investigating the 9/11 attacks, the Post reported. The story included this tidbit: