RUTHFULLY YOURS

There can be no doubt now: The U.S. economy is struggling, inequality is on the rise and too many Americans feel uncertain about their future.

On the campaign trail, I have met many of these men and women, who sit at the kitchen table each week, straining to stretch their dollars from shrinking paychecks. Families who can’t save for retirement with near-zero interest rates. Young parents who are being crushed by their student debt. Shop owners who can’t get a loan because their community bank went out of business.

We’ve had more than six years to watch the left’s prescriptions in action and the verdict is in: They don’t work. Under President Obama, the economy has been hobbled. The 73,000-page tax code is too complex to navigate without an army of accountants. The administration has added $7 trillion in new federal debt, and has doubled down on environmental regulations that crush business owners and farmers while raising energy prices.

Greenburgh, a town in Westchester, an area which has some of the fastest growing Jewish suburban communities in the country, is an unlikely place to find hate groups holding forth in its Town Hall auditorium. It’s certainly not the place where you expect a man linked to a shadowy terrorist bank to be promoting hatred against Jews and Israel with the acquiescence of the town supervisor.

And yet, bomb-sniffing dogs and metal detectors were the order of the day in the Greenburgh Town Hall as Jewish protesters gathered outside while inside opponents of Israel denounced the Jewish State.

The Jewish Rapid Response Coalition had come to stand up to hate, but found itself blocked and harassed while hate groups enjoyed the use of a taxpayer funded building. The event went ahead against the recommendation of Police Chief Chris McNerney. It went ahead even though its main speaker had defended terrorism and had authored an article titled, “Did Israel Really Think Hamas Would Turn the Other Cheek?”

She lied to the nation in 2012, and she’s lying again now. You don’t look surprised.
‘We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

Those words, depraved words, were spoken by then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton, with President Obama by her side, on September 14, 2012. This was at Joint Base Andrews, during the most sacred of rites: the return of the remains of Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, and Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, all slain in the line of duty in Benghazi.

And all slain, it must never be forgotten, by jihadists carrying out what Clinton, Obama, and high-ranking national-security officials throughout the United States government knew full well was a planned terrorist attack, not a “protest” run amok and incited by “an awful Internet video.”

That obvious fact is now explicit after Mrs. Clinton’s galling testimony on Thursday before the House select committee investigating the Benghazi massacre.

The American people continue to tell pollsters that they want a candidate to talk issues and substance rather than attack opponents.This is a load of crap. Americans may “want” that kind of campaign, but the kind of contest they respond to is the slash-and-burn, take-no-prisoners approach of candidates like Donald Trump.

Hillary Clinton’s recent rise in the polls has Senator Bernie Sanders playing catch-up. And many politicians believe that the best way to do that is not so much elevate your own numbers, but drag your opponents’ ratings down.

Sanders appears to have opened a new chapter in his campaign that employs a modified strategy of attacking Hillary Clinton’s record, and by extension, Clinton herself.

Bob Woodward disagrees with Judy Woodruff of taxpayer funded PBS and most of the Democratic Party, and thinks that it matters when a secretary of state and prospective commander in chief says different things publicly and privately over a major terror attack.

Pam Key of Breitbart reports:

On this week’s “Fox News Sunday,” in discussing Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton’s testimony at the hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last week, veteran journalist Bob Woodward said, “It better bother us” that Hillary Clinton different things publicly and privately.

Woodward said, “There are legitimate questions here … here’s the issue. you have inconsistencies. This is a tragedy, and it should be investigated.”

He added Clinton didn’t commit a crime and said, “People say one thing privately and saying something different publicly.” (snip)

Woodward said, “It better bother us. And this is the question we’re going to look at. And, you know, if she’s the nominee, she’s going to get a full field investigation by everyone. So will the Republicans. So we don’t get what we got with Nixon, which we didn’t know about, quite frankly. I mean, this was hidden. So I think there’s a big burden on journalists, on television and in the newspapers, bloggers. so when we get to election day next year, people can say, ‘you know what, I know or I had the chance to know everything possible about these people.’ And so, this hearing is one of the pieces of the puzzle.”

“If Jeb Bush’s campaign is struggling to stay afloat, he didn’t show it on Saturday,” CNN reports from Daniel Island, S.C. “A day after slashing salaries and cutting campaign staff, the former Florida governor got an enthusiastic reception and delivered one of his strongest campaign performances to date.”

Well, that’s one way of looking at it, but we have another. Consider the most widely discussed passage from his Daniel Island remarks:

Bush got one of his biggest responses from the crowd when he lamented the state of politics in Washington and argued that [Donald] Trump is not the kind of leader that could break through the gridlock.

“If this election is about how we’re going to fight to get nothing done, then . . . I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation,” he said.

“I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that,” Bush added.

Thanks to Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony on Thursday, we now understand why the former secretary of state never wanted anyone to see her emails and why the State Department sat on documents. Turns out those emails and papers show that the Obama administration deliberately misled the nation about the deadly events in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.

Don’t forget how we came to this point. Mrs. Clinton complained in her testimony on Capitol Hill that past Congresses had never made the overseas deaths of U.S. officials a “partisan” issue. That’s because those past deaths had never inspired an administration to concoct a wild excuse for their occurrence, in an apparent attempt to avoid blame for a terror attack in a presidential re-election year.

The early hints that this is exactly what happened after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans cast doubt on every White House-issued “fact” about the fiasco and led to the establishment of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s select committee.

Let down by her overconfidence that the homebrew server would remain secret.

No wonder Hillary Clinton feels aggrieved by her congressional grilling on Benghazi. She had the hard luck to be secretary of state in the Internet era, when digital secrets escape despite the best efforts to keep them hidden. Unintended transparency is better than none.

In an earlier era, the American public would never have learned Mrs. Clinton knew during the attack that it was a planned operation by terrorists and not a spontaneous protest as the administration insisted.

Mrs. Clinton kept her more than 60,000 emails off the State Department’s server. They came to light only because the House Select Committee on Benghazi discovered her secret email system. Those emails—not Mrs. Clinton—were the star witness at last week’s hearing, disclosing with precision who knew what when.

Publicly, Mrs. Clinton issued a statement at 10:32 p.m. Sept. 11, 2012, the evening of the attack, blaming the YouTube video. But the committee disclosed that at 11:12 p.m., she told her daughter, Chelsea, by email: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Qaeda-like group.” At 11:49 p.m., according to a State Department email, she told the president of Libya: “There is a gun battle ongoing, which I understand Ansar [al] Sharia”—the local al Qaeda affiliate—“is claiming responsibility for.”

In 2016, there are 14 Republican presidential candidates for whom Ronald Reagan is both the benchmark for conservative values and the lodestar of conservative ideas. There’s also one who wrote, in the second to last year of Reagan’s presidency, that he had been “so smooth, so effective a performer” that “only now, seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.”

The gadfly was Donald Trump, writing in his book The Art of the Deal. But it wasn’t just a glancing blow; to promote the book, Trump launched a political campaign that tore into Reagan’s record, including his willingness to stand up to the Soviet Union. Advised by the notorious Roger Stone, a Nixon-era GOP trickster, in 1987 Trump took out full-page ads in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and theWashington Post blasting Reagan and his team.

In the text, which was addressed “To the American people,” Trump declared, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” The problem was America’s leading role in defending democracy, which had been fulfilled by Republicans and Democrats all the way back to FDR. Foreshadowing his 2015 argument that would have Mexico pay for an American-built border wall, Trump then said that the United States should present its allies with a bill for defense services rendered.