RUTHFULLY YOURS

It wasn’t enough that Hillary Clinton, if elected president, would inevitably be under a non-stop deluge of subpoenas for her and her minions over the myriad (and still growing) unresolved issues surrounding her private email server and the Clinton Foundation. Should she really be in the White House or behind bars?

On top of this, we now know for certain that, whatever half-baked apology she has given, Hillary thinks roughly a quarter of the population she would be governing are misogynists, racists, homophobes, Islamophobes (whatever that means) and the like — aka, in her now immortal words, a “basket of deplorables.” How she expects to bring the country together remains to be explained.

In the real (non-Hillary) world, these “deplorables” would be called the American middle class, those folks who are supposed to be suffering at the hands of the one percent — you know, the victims of the endlessly trumpeted (by the Democrats) “income inequality.”

Hillary deemed these people “irredeemable” at a fundraiser while introducing Barbra Streisand to a giddy audience, some of whom undoubtedly have net worths upwards of fifty million — like Hillary, Barbra, and just about every Democrat I know.
Well, not every, but many. Admittedly I live in Hollywood, a wildly skewed demographic, but unlike most denizens of Tinseltown, I have spent a considerable amount of time recently among these so-called “deplorables,” aka, in movie parlance, “flyover people.” I can report observing absolutely no misogyny, racism, homophobia, or even Islamophobia — unless you count the occasional poster condemning radical Islam, not very phobic in my book, especially on the anniversary of 9/11.

I can also report — and this is the interesting, although perhaps not surprising, part — that these “deplorables” were almost always a helluva lot nicer than the people I have run into over the years in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, including, one can safely say, most of Hillary’s fundraiser audience Friday night.

Folks in the South and the Middle West are just a lot easier to be around, “deplorable” though they may be. They also make you feel welcome, even those of us from Tinseltown who may not deserve it.

Which leads me to a touching story, at least I think it’s touching. One time during my peregrinations following the Trump campaign–I’m not going to say where to protect the privacy of the individuals involved–my wife and I were straining up against the rope of the press section, trying to hear what the actual people were saying. (The press is segregated off for most of these events.) CONTINUE AT SITE

“I know there will be some who object, “But how do you know he will do all things things.” The answer is, I don’t. But I do know what Hillary would do: Obama on steroids. She’s a known-known. She would, as Publius warns, complete the “fundamental transformation” of this country into a third-world, politically correct socialist redoubt.”

There is a scene in the first episode of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s Jeeves and Wooster series that bears on the current presidential election. Bertie Wooster, at the direction of his Aunt Agatha, has motored down to Ditteredge Hall, seat of Sir Roderick and Lady Glossop, to cozy up to their hearty daughter Honoria. The former head-girl at Girton is not keen on the match: “He doesn’t shoot, he doesn’t hunt, . . . he doesn’t work even.” But Lady Glossop points out that Honoria will be twenty-four the following week. “He is not all your father and I would have hoped for you, I agree, but . . .”

But consider the alternative.

Regular readers know that I have not been part of the Donald Trump Cheerleading Cavalcade. I first wrote about him a year ago July. After saying that I didn’t think he would be the candidate, I concluded with this advisory:

He has raised some issues that the high and mighty dispensers of conventional wisdom would do well to ponder. Moreover, he has done it in a way that, though terribly, terribly vulgar, is catapulting Trump to first place in the polls. What does that tell us? That the people are stupid and need to be guided by the suits in Washington? If you believe that, I submit, you are going to be profoundly disappointed come November 2016.

Well, as Samuel Goldwyn remarked in another context, we’ve passed a lot of water under the bridge since then.

Back in June, Donald Rumsfeld summed up the position that, in subsequent weeks, many (not all) anti-Trump conservatives have come to adopt. Reprising his famous epistemological mot that distinguished between “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns,” Rumsfeld said that, of course he was voting for Trump. Trump was an “unknown known,” perhaps dubious in some ways, but all the world knew exactly what Hillary Clinton represented.

This was the essential point made in a more colorful way in the most remarkable essay I have read in some time, “The Flight 93 Election,” which appeared a few days back in that indispensable journal, the Claremont Review of Books. I have no idea who “Publius Decius Mus”—the putative author—really is, though I speculate on stylistic and philological grounds that he is not unacquainted with the works of Leo Strauss. The historical Decius Mus was a Roman consul during the first Samnite and Latin wars. In 340BC, he sacrificed himself at the Battle of Vesuvius in order to secure a great victory for the Romans. That story, for those who are interested in such things, is told in Book 8 of Livy’s The History of Rome.

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Last month, I retired from the State Department after 25 years of public service as a Foreign Service officer. As the Deputy Chief of Mission for Libya, I was the last person in Tripoli to speak with Ambassador Chris Stevens before he was murdered in the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on our Benghazi post. On this, the fourth anniversary of the Benghazi tragedy, I would like to offer a different explanation for Benghazi’s relevance to the presidential election than is usually found in the press.

Just as the Constitution makes national security the President’s highest priority, U.S. law mandates the secretary of state to develop and implement policies and programs “to provide for the security … of all United States personnel on official duty abroad.”

This includes not only the State Department employees, but also the CIA officers in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. And the Benghazi record is clear: Secretary Clinton failed to provide adequate security for U.S. government personnel assigned to Benghazi and Tripoli.

The Benghazi Committee’s report graphically illustrates the magnitude of her failure. It states that during August 2012, the State Department reduced the number of U.S. security personnel assigned to the Embassy in Tripoli from 34 (1.5 security officers per diplomat) to 6 (1 security officer per 4.5 diplomats), despite a rapidly deteriorating security situation in both Tripoli and Benghazi. Thus, according to the Report, “there were no surplus security agents” to travel to Benghazi with Amb. Stevens “without leaving the Embassy in Tripoli at severe risk.”

Had Ambassador Stevens’ July 2012 request for 13 additional American security personnel (either military or State Department) been approved rather than rejected by Clinton appointee Under Secretary of State for Management Pat Kennedy, they would have traveled to Benghazi with the ambassador, and the Sept. 11 attack might have been thwarted.