RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton’s laugh is so often transparently forced and insincere that it is a staple of Kate McKinnon’s impression of her on Saturday Night Live.

At the Democratic debate in Las Vegas, though, the former secretary of state let loose a long peal of amused delight and relief that had about it a strong hint of genuineness. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders had just said we had heard enough about her “damn e-mails.”

The crowd erupted in a standing ovation. Sanders had the signature line of the night, and it was in the cause of buttressing his opponent. He had put away the e-mail issue for the debate, and perhaps for the duration of the primary campaign.

If Joe Biden was sitting at home plotting his electability case against Clinton based on her ethics, the episode had to give him pause. Democrats evidently have about as much interest in delving into Hillary’s e-mail and related controversies as they do in re-litigating Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

Las Vegas was a reminder that it is awfully hard to lose a nomination if no one truly plausible, let alone formidable, is running against you. The structure of the Democratic race from the beginning has been about propping up Hillary Clinton, and it still is. The party is putting on a master class in how to nominate someone under FBI investigation, and is in willful denial about her vulnerabilities.

Yes, Hillary had a good night. She was polished, knowledgeable, shrewd, and hard-hitting — clearly, not someone to be trifled with. But the debate was a false indicator of her strength.

Democrats and their supporters in the media are congratulating themselves for a job well done in the first Democratic debate. Both Martin O’Malley and Hillary Clinton included in their closing remarks canned celebrations of how civil and morally superior the Democratic debate was compared with the earlier GOP donnybrooks.

The New York Times began its Wednesday editorial extolling the value of civility thus: “It was impossible not to feel a sense of relief watching the Democratic debate after months dominated by the Republican circus of haters, ranters, and that very special group of king killers in Congress.”

Longtime Hillary Clinton pet Lanny Davis churned out a column headlined, “The real winner in Las Vegas Tuesday night was the Democratic party — in stark contrast to the GOP.”

Now, it is true that Donald Trump’s presence in the first two prime-time debates lends a superficial credence to claims that the Republican field is more coarse and insulting. Trump, after all, is coarse and insulting. He uses words like “losers” and “dumb” as if they’re punctuation marks.

Anybody remember the hype surrounding something called the “IT”? This device was set to revolutionize transportation in the new millennium. It was going to make the car look like the horse and buggy, conjuring images of the Jetsons while promising worldwide transformation in the mold of the PC. In a clever bit of marketing, it even received what sounded like a secret agent codename — “Ginger.”

We all know the end of that story — the Segway is a novelty item big with mall cops.

After a couple of impressive debate performances, Carly Fiorina is the new Segway candidate. Those looking for a constitutional conservative need to know what she can promise vs. what she could actually deliver.

In many ways, Carly’s business track record forms the linchpin in her viability as a candidate and a leader. Given her current “outsider” status, her thin political track record, and her touting of business successes on the campaign trail, her business history has deservedly received considerable scrutiny. It deserves more.

Let’s start at Lucent, where the record becomes troubling — perhaps even more troubling than her tenure at Hewlett-Packard.

The dumbest woman in the room just got dumber.

Just two old folks jawing…

U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer is urging Vice President Joe Biden to stay out of the Democratic presidential race and instead support Hillary Clinton, Politico reported on Thursday.

After months of deliberating on the issue, Biden is expected to announce this month if he will seek the nomination, as he did in 2008 and 1988, and a political action committee has been urging him to do so.

Boxer, who was a colleague of Biden’s during his long years in the Senate, told Politico on Wednesday that there was no reason for him to run. She was speaking after a televised debate on Tuesday among the Democrats who have announced they are running.

Forget your flu shot. It’s not influenza that infects our society. It’s apologies. We live in a land of near-Bubonic apology fever. Everyone is constantly being asked to apologize for something. (Apologize for eating a Big Mac. Apologize for saying Asians do better in math, etc., etc.)

These apologies range from the sublime to the ridiculous, but are mostly the latter. And the demand for the apologies comes almost exclusively from the left — a morally narcissistic group-think culture that relies on shaming others in order to obscure the truth and gain power.

A great deal of the success of Donald Trump can be ascribed to the fact that he recognizes this nonsense and wants no part of it. With a more intellectual, and often truly educational, style, Ben Carson has been largely the same way, so it was with some dismay I read his article in the Jerusalem Post, “‘Never Again’ means standing with Israel.” In response to accusations of “insensitivity to the Holocaust” on the part of the doctor for a statement he made saying that Jews might have been better off against the Nazis if they had had guns, Carson wrote the following:

In recent days I suggested that things might have unfolded in a very different manner in Europe had the Jewish people been armed and better able to defend themselves. What would have been the impact on Hitler’s war machine if his victims had had more access to guns? It is something that we will never know for sure.