RUTHFULLY YOURS

In Hillary Clinton’s CNN interview on Tuesday (which I discussed with Megyn Kelly that evening), Mrs. Clinton rolled out a string of misrepresentations in defense of her improper e-mail practices. She flatly misrepresented that there was no law to govern her conduct. As we have discussed repeatedly in these pages since March, however, federal criminal statutes, federal record regulations, State Department handbooks, and Mrs. Clinton’s own directions to State Department personnel all plainly governed and prohibited her egregious conduct.

A brief recap of how some of those rules apply here lays her “no law” claim to waste:

Mrs. Clinton’s maintenance and exclusive use of a private e-mail address to conduct official business violated State Department regulations (in place since at least 2005), which required that such business be conducted whenever possible over official servers in order to protect the security of sensitive State business. (See 12 Foreign Affairs Manual 544.3(a): “It is the Department’s general policy that normal day-to-day operations be conducted on an authorized AIS, which has the proper level of security control to provide nonrepudiation, authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the resident information.”) For what it’s worth, the White House also claims that Mrs. Clinton violated the Obama administration’s e-mail policy prohibiting private e-mail accounts. Mrs. Clinton herself reportedly cabled State Department employees stationed overseas in 2011 to direct them not to use private e-mails to conduct official business. And she removed at least one ambassador from his post, in part, because of his use of commercial e-mail systems to conduct State business.

Hillary Clinton lies.

This is a widely acknowledged fact among people who pay attention and aren’t on her payroll. Nearly 20 years ago, New York Times columnist William Safire wrote, “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our first lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation – is a congenital liar.”
Younger folks probably have little to no memory of the lies Safire had in mind, though some might have heard about Hillary Clinton’s infamously implausible explanation for how she managed to make a 10,000 percent profit in cattle futures simply by reading the Wall Street Journal.

Suffice it to say that she’s been honing her craft for decades. And that’s turning into a problem for her, perhaps her biggest problem.

After ducking the press for months, Clinton sat down for an interview with CNN’s Brianna Keilar. It was a savvy choice. Keilar covers the Clinton campaign and has every incentive not to offend her famously vindictive sources 16 months before the election.

Obama the triple-loser…

Obama is delusional. He told a group from the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative that he is proudest of three accomplishments: 1) the economic recovery, 2) Obamacare, and 3) his foreign policy.

Narcissism is narcissism. It’s egotism that loves the reflection of its own ego. But when it spills over into the president’s warped perception of reality and the reality of the world depends on his clarity, then he, our president, has endangered the world.

Boasting about accomplishments that he has not achieved is mild psychosis with possible deleterious results. Taking credit for three disasters is a failure to perceive the results of his actions.

We owe so much to the Hellenic culture of the ancients, not least the simple moral lessons of their fables and epics. Somehow, modern Greeks opted to ignore the advice their forebears bequeathed to all humanity. If only they had stopped their ears against the siren song of the spendthrift left.

Greece is an amazing country with history to match. The rest of the world owes Greeks big-time for their bequest of immortal literature, theatre, art, democracy, science, medicine, philosophy, travel, the alphabet. At the risk of sounding like the heroine’s father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the fact is that a great many things in our modern lives have been borrowed or adapted from the Greeks. Hellenic culture is regarded as one of the three foundation stones of Western civilisation, the trifecta being Jewish monotheism, Roman law and Greek democracy. That legacy highlights Greek culture’s contribution to the way we live, think and behave. Another gift is the lessons we ought to draw from Greece’s default on the country’s debt.

In 1970, Israel’s power projection forced a rollback of the Soviet-backed Syrian invasion of pro-US Jordan. The Syrian invasion aimed at toppling the Hashemite regime, and then surging into Saudi Arabia, which would have given the USSR a dramatic triumph, while devastating US economic and military interests.

In the 1967 War, Israel obliterated the Egyptian military, aborting an attempt by the pro-Soviet Egypt to topple the pro-US Arab oil-producing regimes.

In 2015, Israel is the only stable, reliable, predictable, capable, democratic and unconditional ally of the US.

The new leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula surfaced in an audio message today to call on Muslims to conduct global jihad, with a specific order to “direct and gather your arrows and swords against” the United States.

AQAP’s commander of military operations, Qasim al-Rimi, seamlessly moved into the top spot after an airstrike killed Nasir al-Wuhayshi in a June airstrike.

Rimi eulogized Wuhayshi in the recording from AQAP’s al-Malahem Media Foundation and renewed his allegiance to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

It’s day one here at Freedom Fest and one of the most interesting speakers at the event is Whole Foods CEO John Mackey.

Mackey, if you don’t know, is a libertarian and the author of the book Conscious Capitalism. He is a passionate believer in the free market, telling the audience “economic freedom has lifted humanity out of the dirt.”

I think most people just assume he is a granola-type hippy.

Critical Studies’ end products will be tribes of dependent, interchangeable, obedient, compliant manqués, ever-ready to do the State’s bidding.

As you leave your Critical Literary Studies class to trudge wearily down the hall to your Critical Legal Studies class, your head may be spinning with a kaleidoscope of disconnected images, feelings, huge swathes of “text,” and memory of the agony of trying to second-guess your instructor about what anything means.

You were particularly confused about why the instructor claimed that there was no question that Nick Carraway’s obsession with Jay Gatsby was actually a disguised and coded homosexual fascination with the millionaire in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Carraway’s affair with Jordan Baker, the female golfer character, was merely a substitute proxy relationship. The air-headed Daisy Buchanan served as a convenient transition point and a “false focal nexus,” as did Myrtle Wilson, the local garage owner’s cuckolding wife. All the signifiers and signifieds in the “text” say so. Your homework assignment is to pinpoint and discuss seven of them in a paper due by the end of the week.

Former President Jimmy Carter has tipped his hat toward Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as the liberal standard-bearer seeking the Democratic nomination — but concedes that “stupid” campaign finance laws will hand victory to Hillary Clinton.

Carter told PBS that “more inherently” Sanders and Elizabeth Warren speak better on the issue of income inequality.

“The senator was in the forefront of saying equality and doing away with discrimination economically, constraining Wall Street, and doing away with the domination that the rich people now have over the political system,” Carter said of the Massachusetts Democrat.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said he was the only Republican that liked Lisa Jackson, President Obama’s first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, because she “could not tell a lie.”

“You don’t fit in this administration unless you can lie,” Inhofe, chairman of the Committee on the Environment and Public Works, said at the Heritage Foundation.

Inhofe recalled Jackson saying “no” when he asked if the EPA pursuing cap and trade through regulations would lower CO2 emissions worldwide. “Climategate” occurred after their conversation, which stalled widespread federal action on carbon at the time.