RUTHFULLY YOURS

“I’ve got Republican friends who don’t think or act the way Donald Trump does,” President Obama said Wednesday at a Raleigh rally for Hillary Clinton. That’s totally believable except the part about his having Republican friends. The president continued: “This”—meaning Trump, not Mrs. Clinton—“is somebody who is uniquely unqualified. I ran against John McCain. I ran against Mitt Romney. I thought I’d be a better president, but I never thought that the republic was at risk if they were elected.”

National Review’s Charles Cooke finds Obama’s remarks vexatious. “Democrats really have limited their ability to credibly warn against the dangers posed by Trump,” he argues, noting that Obama and his supporters treated Romney quite viciously in 2012:

Then? Romney was dangerous and represented a departure. Then? He was no John McCain, that’s for sure! Now? Pah. Romney was a gentleman. A scholar. A safe pair of hands. Sure, in 2012 Obama ran a commercial arguing that Romney wasn’t “one of us.” Sure, Obama was so worried about Romney’s being in the White House that he tried to impose restraints on the drone program that he had run without restrictions. Sure, Joe Biden said that Romney would put African Americans “back in chains.” Sure, Harry Reid accused Romney of being a tax-cheat and a scoundrel. Sure, Obama’s campaigners repeatedly claimed that if Romney were elected he would continue his dastardly spree of killing people with cancer. Sure, the Atlantic characterized Obama’s approach toward Romney as being “My Opponent Is a Dangerous Radical (with a dash of My Opponent Is a Strange Weirdo thrown in).” But in retrospect? He was fine. In fact, he was no threat at all. Chill.

If we understand Cooke correctly, he is frustrated with liberals because he largely agrees with them about Trump—note he accepts the premise about the “dangers posed” by the GOP nominee—and finds the case more difficult to make persuasively because their lack of credibility tends to discredit his argument. To put it in fabulous terms, liberals cried wolf, and now that there really is a wolf, nobody is listening to Cooke’s cries.

To judge by the Twitter exchanges we read yesterday, Cooke did not find a receptive audience on the left. Some detractors argued that Romney was a dangerous radical, which illustrates Cooke’s point without conceding it. Others claimed that the anti-Romney rhetoric then was not actually as harsh as the anti-Trump rhetoric now. CONTINUE AT SITE

The most obnoxious spin of the 2016 campaign came this week, as Democrats, their media allies and even President Obama accused the FBI of stacking the election. It’s an extraordinary claim, coming as it does from the same crew that has—we now know—been stacking the election all along in the corridors of the Justice Department.

This is the true November surprise. For four months, FBI Director James Comey has been the public face of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. He played that role so well, putting the FBI so front and center, that the country forgot about Mr. Comey’s bosses. Revelations this week build the case that President Obama’s politicized Justice Department has been pulling strings and flacking for Mrs. Clinton all along.

One piece of evidence comes from WikiLeaks, in a hacked email between the chairman of the Clinton campaign, John Podesta, and Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik. It was sent in May of 2015 via a private Gmail account, which has become the favored way for Obama employees to hide communications from the public. “Heads up,” Mr. Kadzik warned, informing the campaign about a coming hearing and a recent legal filing about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Don’t let Mr. Kadzik’s fancy title fool you: He is a Clinton partisan. Before joining the Justice Department in 2013, Mr. Kadzik spent 30 years at the (now-closed) law firm Dickstein Shapiro, engaging Democratic causes—and Clinton causes. Mr. Kadzik’s wife, Amy Weiss, was deputy press secretary in Bill Clinton’s White House and a communications director for the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Kadzik also represented the DNC. Campaign-finance records show the two variously donated to Hillary’s Senate leadership PAC, to her 2008 presidential campaign and to her current campaign.

Mr. Kadzik is also an old buddy of Mr. Podesta’s. The two go back to Georgetown Law School. When Marc Rich was lobbying Bill Clinton for a pardon, according to a 2002 House Oversight Committee report, the fugitive financier recruited Mr. Kadzik “because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.” Mr. Kadzik even represented Mr. Podesta, during the Monica Lewinsky saga.

WikiLeaks emails show the two chatting about birthday parties and dinner meetings with fellow Democratic power players. A 2014 email lists donors for a fundraiser that Mr. Podesta held for his daughter, running for a school board in California. Mr. Kadzik (as he sat at the Justice Department) is shown giving $250. Also appearing are the usual Clinton glitterati: Doug Band, Harold Ickes, Neera Tanden, Betty Currie, Madeleine Albright, Carol Browner. This is Mr. Kadzik’s social circle.

The Justice Department has tried to dismiss Mr. Kadzik’s tip-off to the Clinton campaign as a note “about public information,” sent “in his personal capacity, not during work hours.” But Mr. Kadzik is a senior government official. He does not get to feed any information to a potential target of an investigation, at any hour of the day or night. CONTINUE AT SITE

By now, Hillary Clinton is as polished as politicians come. At 69, her hair is perfectly coiffed and colored, her makeup is subtle and her clothes are expensive. A trained debater, educated at Wellesley and Yale Law School, with decades of public life, she speaks well.

In an election that she has framed around temperamental fitness for the presidency, her deliberate comments and careful parsing of words suggest that she possesses the steadiness and judgment required. That is the image we saw when she stood on a debate stage with the far less controlled, more hot-tempered Donald Trump.

Clinton’s public persona is a façade, though a well designed one, held up by her staff, masters of television illusion and a collaborating national media. With the release of WikiLeaks emails, it has become clear that her senior staff questions that image among themselves.

To understand what she is likely to do with the enormous, now largely unchecked power of the American presidency requires seeing the reality behind that façade. Judging by her actions over the past 35 years in Washington and Arkansas, in roles from governor’s wife to First Lady, senator to secretary of state, it is clear that Hillary’s deep character flaws and temperamental shortcomings, while better hidden than Donald Trump’s very visible ones, present a much greater danger to our democracy.

Clinton’s character-revealing behavior includes incessant lying to the public; vast personal greed leading to corruption in high office; abuse of power on behalf of herself and against private citizens and political rivals; disregard for the law, and the very idea of the Rule of Law; disdain for the “deplorable” half of her opponent’s supporters, and the confession, made during a private Goldman Sachs speech revealed by WikiLeaks, that she typically offers one position on policy and politics in private and another, often very different one, for public consumption.

This admission alone makes it impossible to know whether any policy agenda she has campaigned on reflects her intentions. Or is she actually planning to implement unwelcome policies voters would reject if she were honest about them?

Nor is the media helping find the truth. As we have learned lately, some top-tier news organizations have offered her staff questions before interviews and debates, so that she can rehearse, and her staff can veto uncomfortable questions. Reporters have run copy past her campaign staff. The press seems happily complicit in this corruption, but it makes any reporting hard to trust.