RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton ruffled Republican feathers Thursday after she compared terrorists’ and Republicans’ views on women during a campaign rally in Ohio.

Clinton made the remarks while condemning GOP efforts to defund Planned Parenthood during a rally at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “Extreme views about women — we expect that from some of the terrorist groups. We expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world,” she said.

Of all the Republican candidates, Florida Senator Marco Rubio has been most forceful in pushing back against the cynical attack.

“It’s par for the course with her,” Rubio said on the Hugh Hewitt Show. “She’s a failing candidate, has no credibility, being exposed for being deceitful on the whole issue of her server, compromised the national security of the United States. And, quite frankly, she’s going to be chasing Bernie Sanders and others in her party to the extreme left.”

“So obviously she’s going to go around saying outrageous things, and I expect more of in the months to come,” Rubio said.

On Fox and Friends Friday morning, Rubio pointed out what he finds most offensive about it: “They won’t call terrorists terrorists, going all the way back to Benghazi and before that, but they call political opponents terrorists.”

The Florida senator again predicted that we’ll be seeing a lot more of this behavior in the weeks to come because Clinton is “desperate” and “panicked.”

“They’re in a lot of trouble — it’s been well documented,” said Rubio, adding that “maybe even criminal charges [are] around the corner.”

Marc Thiessen on The Kelly File yesterday speculated that Hillary was impersonating Donald Trump with her outrageous rhetoric.

“Seems to me like she’s saying to herself, ‘my campaign’s in trouble…outrageous statements seem to be working for Donald Trump, maybe they’ll work for me!’ This is her effort to maybe copy Donald Trump,” Thiessen surmised.

Another explanation is she’s employing an Obama administration tactic that CBS reporter Major Garrett  exposed in 2012:

This is the White House theory of “Stray Voltage.” It is the brainchild of former White House Senior Adviser David Plouffe, whose methods loom large long after his departure. The theory goes like this: Controversy sparks attention, attention provokes conversation, and conversation embeds previously unknown or marginalized ideas in the public consciousness. This happens, Plouffe theorizes, even when—and sometimes especially when—the White House appears defensive, besieged, or off-guard. I first discovered and wrote about this in July of 2012.

I would argue that it happens most often when the White House is “defensive, besieged, or off-guard.”

Senator Rubio hit upon it when he noted that the Clinton campaign is “in a lot of trouble” so “she’s going around saying outrageous things.”

Via Ace of Spades HQ:

Whenever the White House is in trouble — which is almost always, because they’re socialist and hence incompetent — they drop a rhetorical stinkbomb on the nation, a statement calculated to be trollish, controversial, enraging, and false.

They deliberately said false things about the women’s pay gap, for example.

Why? Specifically to draw attention to the statement itself, which, while it may be a negative (in as much as Obama is lying as usual), is a sort of manageable, normal, routine-business sort of negative. Politicians argue about their claims all the time; they also frequently lie. Thus, to be in that particular fight was no big deal for Obama, because he’s used to that, and while there may be a downside, it’s just normal wear-and-tear downside, not major damage.

This has been done to take the spotlight off of  major scandals that threaten his agenda — like Fast and Furious, the IRS scandal, Benghazi, the VA, ObamaCrash, his incompetence on ISIS, etc.