RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump probably is not helping his cause much with his conspiracy-mongering about a “rigged” election but Democrats should be thankful for small favors.

Mr. Trump lacks message discipline. Instead of scattershot claims that the race is being manipulated, wild conspiracy theories about ballot box-stuffing, which both parties and Americans of decency and goodwill strongly refute, he might be focusing laser-like on the “rigged” argument that nobody can confidently refute.

That’s the argument that Hillary Clinton is her party’s nominee and on her way to the White House only because the Obama administration decided to waive the law on handling classified material—and the FBI went along—in order to assure that its designated heiress would succeed to the presidency.

Google says the question “is Trump trying to lose?” has skyrocketed in popularity in the last few days. Mr. Trump is perhaps willing to be president but hasn’t been willing to do what was necessary to win. He never seriously tried to expand beyond his core support. He never wanted to spend the money, especially on TV advertising, that would be needed to do so.

If, in a deeper realism, he suspected that something like the Billy Bush tape was always going to stand in his way, he was rational to limit his financial risk—though he did the country no favor by accepting the nomination. In any case, Mr. Trump is now behaving as we knew he would. The appeal of “rigged” is obvious. It’s an argument that can continue to be prosecuted on-air after Election Day. Mr. Trump need not, as losing candidates do, concede defeat and disappear. His son-in-law, we’re told by the Financial Times this week, has already reached out to an investment banker about starting a Trump TV network after the election.

America, you’ve been played.

If today’s Democratic campaign were being fought against a generic Republican without Mr. Trump’s distinct qualities and history, here’s what would dominate the news:

Mrs. Clinton was verbally convicted by the FBI chief for mishandling classified information yet somehow not formally charged.

Her aides were allowed to cut curious deals with FBI investigators that effectively swept under the rug any possible charges against them for obstruction or evidence tampering.

Those same aides have been revealed, through email leaks, to have freely mixed public and private interests, including their own and Clinton private interests, in the performance of jobs that, in some cases, saw them receiving salaries from the Clinton Foundation or the Clinton family even as they also worked for the taxpayer at the State Department. CONTINUE AT SITE

Imagine you are thinking of defecting from a dictatorship. Pehaps you have important information about a plan by your country’s “supreme leader” to assassinate unfriendly American politicians. With this information you are sure the CIA will hide you and subsidize a new life in America.

Then you get second thoughts.

Your cold feet come from hearing of the following news item:

When Bill Clinton was president, his wife Hillary ordered that John Huang be brought into the Commerce Department. Huang had worked at a bank controlled by James Riady.

According to Barbara Olson’s Hell to Pay, Riady had close ties with the Communist government of China. This is bad news for your plans to defect, because in the Commerce Department,

John Huang could dip into the flow of U.S. cable traffic at will. He had access to hundreds of CIA documents… He had access to information that, if revealed to a foreign power, would have exposed informants to torture or execution.

But then you think to yourself — Hillary is out of power, and Barack Obama, from what you have heard, is incorruptible and competent. So maybe you will defect after all.

Then you read that:

In June 2015, perhaps 21 million personnel records of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) were stolen. (Before hiring applicants for sensitive positions OPM asks the neighbors of applicants what they know that could be used to blackmail him or her.)

The OPM had been warned multiple times of security vulnerabilities and failings. A March 2015 OPM Office of the Inspector General semi-annual report to Congress warned of “persistent deficiencies in OPM’s information system security program,” including “incomplete security authorization packages, weaknesses in testing of information security controls, and inaccurate Plans of Action and Milestones.

So who was in charge of the OPM? The director was Katherine Archuleta, former National Political Director for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Daniel Henninger, deputy editorial page director of the Wall Street Journal, speaking on Fox News’ Journal Editorial Report, criticized the appointment of Archuleta to be “in charge of one of the most sensitive agencies” in the U.S. government, saying: “What is her experience to run something like that? She was the national political director of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. She’s also the head of something called the Latina Initiative. She’s a politico, right? … That is the kind of person they have put in…”

You start thinking the U.S. government is corrupt, even if it involves national security. And if they don’t care about national security, why would they care about your security? So maybe you should not defect.

You spend a sleepless night. But then your idealism kicks in. For the sake of liberty, you must defect!

Until you read about:

Bradley Manning, the soldier who disclosed to WikiLeaks nearly three-quarters of a million classified or unclassified but sensitive military and diplomatic documents.

“Amazing,” you think to yourself. Any soldier can obtain all this classified information! This country is just not serious.

ON FACT CHECKING AND MODERATORS:

‘‘​Fact-checking’

Few any longer believe in fact-checking, largely because it was exposed as an arm of progressive campaigns.

The embarrassing recent statements of Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, were a frightening synopsis of rank bias defined up as disinterested audit. So were the obsequious check-ins by toady journalists with the Clinton campaign to remind Podesta, Inc. of their own lack of ethics.

Fact-checkers inordinately go after conservatives. Or they make up rules about what constitute “facts” as they go along, providing context and supposed noble intent to water down progressive inaccuracies. Or they use adverbs like “mostly” to suggest that false liberal assertions are “mostly” true and other accurate statements of non-liberals are “mostly” false. Fact-checking is postmodern truth that depends on who says something and for what purpose.

When Hillary Clinton in the second debate directed the audience to her own website to “fact-check” Trump, we came full circle from naiveté to farce.

Fact-checking might have been a neutral concept, not inherently better or worse than the original “facts” themselves — given that it is entirely predicated on the character and ability of those who fact-check (who, as we see from WikiLeaks, can be just as sanctimonious and deceitful as the politicians they audit). Fact-checking in the age of the Internet arena will go the way of America Online or Myspace.

Debate Moderators

There are no such persons any longer as “debate moderators.” The enterprise has devolved into artifice, in which the moderator is supposed to argue with the conservative candidate, “fact-check” him or her in mediis rebus, while being deferential to the like-minded progressive candidate.

Debate moderators follow assumed premises: an Anderson Cooper, Candy Crawley, Lester Holt, or Martha Raddatz envision themselves as crusaders hammering away at selfish and dangerous conservatives, in behalf of an ignorant audience that needs their enlightened help to avoid being duped. In a few of the worst cases, a scheduled debate question is leaked to the liberal candidate to ensure she is not embarrassed.

If a conservative candidate seems to have tied his opponent, the liberal moderator — witness a Matt Lauer — is considered a sell-out, soon to be shunned by the right people. Most are thus deterred from moderating “incorrectly.”

After 2016, we should either let the candidates go at it, or, better yet, let robot time keepers run things.” The entire column can be read below.

Our Neutron Bomb Election The shells of our institutions maybe survive the 2016 campaign, but they will be mere husks. By Victor Davis Hanson http://www.nationalreview.com/node/441158/print

The frequent outbursts of violence at Republican candidate Donald Trump’s campaign rallies have been orchestrated and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, a stunning new undercover video suggests.

Why isn’t the mainstream media apart from Fox News covering this new scandal? Perhaps because reporters overwhelmingly support Hillary Clinton in the election. In terms of dollars donated to the Clinton and Trump campaigns, journalists favor Clinton by a factor of 27 to 1. They’ve given more than $382,000 to Clinton’s campaign compared to just $14,000 to Trump’s campaign, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

This newly revealed Reichstag fire of a plot by Democrats at the highest levels is “a direct assault on democracy and the rule of law,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) told Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel last night. “This is a hundred times bigger than Watergate.”

Gingrich may be on to something. Thanks to the video provided by Project Veritas Action, Americans will now be able to see that the Left has been running a clandestine operation against Trump for some time now.

The idea was to concoct evidence that Trump supporters were crazy, knuckle-dragging thugs in order to discredit the billionaire businessman’s campaign for president. Many left-wingers already call Trump a fascist or a Nazi so creating the appearance at Trump rallies that the candidate’s supporters are violent put some meat on the bone, so to speak. It’s the Big Lie American-style, a huge false-flag operation generated by a real-life vast left-wing conspiracy.

This, of course, is what the Left does. Its agenda-setters dislike stories that deviate from their preferred narrative. They will lie and distort in order to shoehorn events to support their worldview. This is why Americans were told over and over again that the Tea Party movement was violent and dangerous, while Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street are gentle and benign. This is why we are told Republicans are greedy, heartless, and racist, while Democrats are selfless, compassionate, and color-blind.

In the video, Americans United for Change (AUfC) operative Scott Foval is shown on camera saying, “One of the things we do is we stage very authentic grassroots protests right in their faces at their own events. Like, we infiltrate.”

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, she will seek to move the country in the same hard-left direction as Barack Obama. This article focuses on seven Clinton policy priorities that will have the most devastating impact on the American people.

1. Importing 65,000 Syrian “Refugees”

In order to address “the worst refugee crisis since the end of World War II,” Mrs. Clinton has explicitly called for bringing some 65,000 refugees from Syria into the United States as quickly as possible. This represents a 550% increase over Barack Obama’s 2016 goal of 10,000 Syrian refugees, which Clinton describes as merely a “good start.”

Clinton is committed to this reckless policy even though ISIS has vowed to infiltrate the flow of Syrian refugees with its own bloodthirsty operatives; even though more than 30,000 illegal immigrants from “countries of terrorist concern” entered the United States through America’s Southwestern border with Mexico in 2015 alone; and even though high-ranking officials like FBI Director James Comey, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, CIA Director John Brennan, and FBI Deputy Assistant Director Michael Steinbach have all made it clear that it is impossible to reliably screen out terrorists who could be posing as refugees.

2. Amnesty & Open Borders

Mrs. Clinton vows to “introduce comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to full and equal citizenship” within her first 100 days in office, and pledges to “go even further” than the two unconstitutional executive orders (DACA and DAPA) by which President Obama has already protected millions of illegal aliens from deportation. It is all part of the Democrats’ long-term master plan to transform the American electorate into a permanent Democrat voting bloc by importing massive numbers of people who can be counted upon to support the political party that offers them the largest number of welfare-state benefits. Clinton also supports what she terms “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” And she smears those people who wish to enforce immigration law as “obstructionists” whose “backward-looking” mindset is “fundamentally un-American.”

3. Sanctuary Cities

Clinton unequivocally supports the “sanctuary” policies that bar police officers and other public-sector employees in some 340 U.S. cities from notifying the federal government about the presence of illegal aliens residing in their communities. Though sanctuary policies have turned hundreds of U.S. cities into very dangerous places, Clinton explains that without such arrangements, “people from the immigrant community … may not talk” to police who are trying to solve crimes there because “they think you’re also going to be enforcing the immigration laws.” As Xochitl Hinojosa, a Clinton presidential campaign director, puts it: “Hillary Clinton believes that sanctuary cities can help further public safety, and she has defended those policies going back years.”