RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump demonstrated true chutzpah in accepting an invitation from Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to meet with him.

On August 31, 2016 Trump met Peña Nieto just hours before addressing an enthusiastic crowd of supporters in Arizona where he laid out his ten-point plan to address the immigration crisis that impacts so many of the challenges and threats that America faces today.

It was politically courageous for Trump to meet with the Mexican President. After nearly eight years of the feckless Obama administration, his demonstration of strength and focus at that meeting was refreshing.

Peña Nieto has compared Trump to Hitler and Mussolini, and Trump has, for the past year, made it clear that he opposed the policies of the Mexican government that have resulted in so many criminals, gangs and narcotics flowing from Mexico into the United States.

The meeting was a gamble but it paid off. As President John F. Kennedy said during his inaugural address,

“So let us begin anew–remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

While President Kennedy was referencing the ongoing tensions with the former Soviet Union and our relationship with Mexico is hardly as adversarial as was our relationship with the USSR, Mexico is separated from the United States by the longest border that divides the First World from the Third World, thus creating huge economic pressures on that border.

Mexico is an important trade partner of the United States. However, a huge component of that trade is illegal and involves illegal aliens, narcotics, weapons and money flowing across the border in violation of our laws.

The Clinton Presidential Center sits near Interstate 30. It is located at 1200 President Clinton Ave in Little Rock, Arkansas. A mere 1,200 miles from the posh digs of the Clintons in Chappaqua, New York.

Little Rock advertises a “Billgrimage” to visit Bill Clinton’s roots in Little Rock, but the Clintons have gotten what they wanted out of Arkansas and Little Rock. And the Clinton Presidential Center.

They’ve moved on to bigger things since.

There isn’t much to do at the Clinton Presidential Center, an awkward glass building shaped like a bus that looks like it’s about to fall into the Arkansas River, but like the equally precarious political fortunes of the Clintons, never quite does.

There are exhibits of Bill’s rise to power. And there’s a gift shop offering a copy of GQ autographed by him for a mere $350, a bronze bust of him for only $29.95 and a t-shirt with the words, “I Miss Bill.”

But how can you miss somebody who never goes away?

They might miss Bill in Little Rock, which he left behind for wealthier places where he can mingle with those who can do far more to advance his career than the locals. Instead they have to make do with Buffalo Blue Cheeseburger at Forty Two, the Clinton Presidential Center’s restaurant, which also offers catering services.

If there’s one thing you can be sure of when it comes to the Clintons, they never miss an angle.

The Clinton Presidential Center website is just a gateway to the network of Clinton Foundation sites. The white banner and menu of the Clinton Foundation is meant to lure visitors in first.

And that’s appropriate, since the Center began as a front for the Foundation.

It’s become a tradition for presidents to have their own libraries. Bill Clinton wanted to raise a modest $200 million for his glass shoebox on President Clinton Avenue. But he had to settle for $165 million.

A lot of the money came from abroad. The Saudis ponied up millions. Clinton’s former FBI director described him begging for a donation to his library from Prince Abdullah during a meeting asking the Saudis to give the FBI access to suspects in a terror attack which had killed 19 Americans.

“Bill Clinton raised the subject only to tell the crown prince that he understood the Saudi’s reluctance to cooperate, and then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library,” he wrote.

The Clintons always have their priorities.

The election of Hillary Clinton would mean final defeat for American conservativism — for at least a generation and almost certainly for much longer than that. The demographic changes certain to flow from eight more years of open borders, general amnesty, and distribution of the newly arrived statist voters to electorally vulnerable states would make the Left’s presidential victory this fall, for all practical purposes, permanent.

And that’s without considering the effect on the electorate of the increasingly intolerant and repressive educational and political environment, an environment that for eight more years would continue driving substantial segments of the populace, especially the vulnerable young, into the ever more mandatory belief systems of the Left.

But don’t worry: After Clinton’s election the elegant and witty columns of George Will, William Kristol and Jonah Goldberg, aided by the surpassing political skills of the Bush and Romney families, will save us all from both these calamities, and from all the other unnamed ones that Hillary and the Left will bring.

Uh, maybe not.

If Clinton prevails there will be no conservative (or Republican) president during the lifetime of any adult member of the feckless Republican royal families, or of Mr. Goldberg or the children of George Will or William Kristol. Their prediction that the presidency will be recovered in short order is a pipe dream. Over the medium term, twenty to twenty-five years, that recovery would approach demographic impossibility.

Despite the inarguable magnitude of the coming Clinton/Left disaster, Republican/conservative turncoats, led by these and other members of what Peggy Noonan aptly terms the “protected classes,” are working for Clinton’s election.

In unalloyed self-destructive irrationality, the support of Hillary Clinton by Never Trump commentators and Republican politicians is sui generis.

Never before in American history have intellectual and political leaders of a major party deliberately attempted to open the gates of enduring power to an enemy sworn to their eradication.

Are they moved by general snobbery, confusion caused by overwork, East Coast social pressure? I’ve stopped trying to figure it out and stopped caring.

But on a different level, on the level of their own personal careers and perceived short-term well-being, I’m absolutely certain what they think:

“We’ll do fine under Clinton and the Left. Under Obama we’ve experienced all of what Clinton will bring and we’ve flourished. Under Clinton we’ll do it again. We’ll continue speaking out, politely and carefully of course, and they won’t touch us; we won’t lose our jobs, our children won’t be expelled, there’ll be no unpleasant changes in our expensive neighborhoods or our children’s toney private schools, we’ll drink with the same refined people in our clubs and cocktail parties. Through it all, we’ll continue making an excellent living as the articulate opposition to the wretchedness the Left will be imposing on the American working and middle classes. The little people, the unprotected people, will endure the downside — low wages, high taxes, unsafe and decaying neighborhoods, destroyed public schools, and violent racial animosity. We’ll be the Left’s safe and well paid critics.”

What an appalling betrayal of the vast majority of Main Street voters who elected two Bush Presidents and made conservative intellectuals ‘cushy lives possible!

This is clear: Trump’s defeat, if it occurs, will be the work of the NeverTrumps.

A criminal organization masquerading as a political party, as the saying goes, Bubba Division. How would you like to make $18 million for a do-nothing job?

The guest list for a private State Department dinner on higher-education policy was taking shape when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a suggestion.

In addition to recommending invitations for leaders from a community college and a church-funded institution, Clinton wanted a representative from a for-profit college company called Laureate International Universities, which, she explained in an email to her chief of staff that was released last year, was “the fastest growing college network in the world.”

There was another reason Clinton favored setting a seat aside for Laureate at the August 2009 event: The company was started by a businessman, Doug Becker, “who Bill likes a lot,” the secretary wrote, referring to her husband, the former president.

Nine months later, Laureate signed Bill Clinton to a lucrative deal as a consultant and “honorary chancellor,” paying him $17.6 million over five years until the contract ended in 2015 as Hillary Clinton launched her campaign for president.

I know, I know: there’s “no evidence” of a quid pro quo (as if there naturally would be) and we can’t prove there is. So let the Washington Post hastily assure you of same:

There is no evidence that Laureate received special favors from the State Department in direct exchange for hiring Bill Clinton, but the Baltimore-based company had much to gain from an association with a globally connected ex-president and, indirectly, the United States’ chief diplomat. Being included at the 2009 dinner, shoulder to shoulder with leaders from internationally renowned universities for a discussion about the role of higher education in global diplomacy, provided an added level of credibility for the business as it pursued an aggressive expansion strategy overseas, occasionally tangling with foreign regulators.

“A lot of these private-education guys, they’re looking to get into events like this one,” said Sam Pitroda, a higher-education expert who was representing a policy commission from India at the State Department dinner. “The discussion itself is irrelevant. . . . It gets you very high-level contacts, and it gets you to the right people.”

HAMPTON, Ill.–Democrat Hillary Clinton strongly suggested Monday that the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin are using cyberattacks to try to tilt the race for her opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Mrs. Clinton cited what she described as official assessments that Russian intelligence services are behind the recent hack of computers at the Democratic National Committee. Thousands of stolen emails were released publicly this summer on the eve of the Democratic Party convention, in some cases embarrassing Democratic officials. The Democratic nominee compared the hacks to an electronic version of Watergate, when Republican operatives sent burglars to break into the DNC offices in the early 1970s.

Mrs. Clinton also pointed to Mr. Trump’s comments in late July urging the Russians to find emails that her office deleted, remarks his campaign later said were misconstrued. And she cited his warm words for Mr. Putin, and noted places where his positions that line up with Russian interests, such as pulling back the U.S. commitment to NATO members.

“We’ve never had a foreign adversarial power be already involved in our electoral process with the DNC hacks,” she said. “We’ve never had the nominee of one of our major parties urging the Russians to hack more. So I am grateful that this is being taken seriously and I want everyone—Democrat, Republican, independent—to understand the real threat that this represents.”

Representatives for the Trump campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mrs. Clinton’s comments came during a 25-minute question-and-answer session aboard her new campaign plane, which for the first time this year accommodates both the candidate and her traveling press corps.

It has been months since Mrs. Clinton gave a full-fledged news conference, so there was considerable pressure on her to engage an extended back-and-forth like she did on the plane. She last took questions from reporters on July 31, but that was a more brief exchange that covered fewer serious topics. CONTINUE AT SITE

Thousands of pages of Hillary Clinton’s official records are set to be released in coming weeks, testing the Democratic presidential candidate as she looks to maintain her advantage in the final two months of the campaign.

On the heels of recently released Federal Bureau of Investigation documents on Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email account at the State Department, the coming disclosures are likely to provide fodder for Republican Donald Trump. While Mrs. Clinton has held a durable if narrower lead over her rival in polls, there are signs that recent records releases have raised issues of trust with voters.

Dozens of lawsuits, mostly brought by conservative groups and Republican operatives against the State Department, are being heard in federal courts. Many of the documents still to come are expected to involve correspondence between Mrs. Clinton, her aides and employees at her family’s charitable foundation.

Similar releases over the summer generated days of news coverage about the relationship between Mrs. Clinton and the foundation’s corporate, foreign and individual donors. In September alone, government agencies are expected to hand over thousands of pages of records from Mrs. Clinton’s time in office.

The two candidates, meanwhile, spent Labor Day hopscotching around the battleground of Ohio, as did both of their vice-presidential picks. Mrs. Clinton, speaking to reporters on her new campaign plane, strongly suggested that the Russian government was trying to tilt the race for Mr. Trump.

What makes us any different from Venezuela now?

It’s a matter or record. Americans now populate the largest, wealthiest and most powerful banana republic in the world. The differences between Obama’s America and Maduro’s Venezuela are defined only by degree.

The defining characteristics of banana republics are a matter of history. First, the law is not enforced against a chosen class in a banana republic, usually the allies of the autocrat in charge. Second, foreign policy is always performed in the autocrat’s interests and often in disregard of the nation’s actual interests. This describes how America functions in the era of President Obama.

The newly-released FBI documents on the investigation of Hillary Clinton make it clear beyond argument that the fix was in and that the FBI never had any intention of recommending that she should be prosecuted for her crimes.

That is very hard to write. I have had very good friends among the agents of the FBI, men of unshakeable dedication to the fair enforcement of the law. But that is no longer the FBI’s goal, as just a few references to the documents published last week reveal.

First, you had to notice that the FBI agreed that there would be no videotape of its interview of Clinton. Not only would there not be a videotape, but no court reporter would be present to record a transcript. That itself is highly unusual, but there is far more, and far worse.

Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, had to have participated in sending classified material to Clinton on her private and unsecured “clintonemail.com” email system. Yet when the FBI questioned Clinton, Mills was permitted to attend as one of Clinton’s lawyers. That is not only unethical under the Bar’s unenforced ethics standards, but obviously a huge violation of the most elementary of FBI procedures that requires witnesses — and possible suspects — to be questioned separately in isolation from one another.

Clinton told the FBI that she relied on others’ judgment in sending her sensitive information on the unsecured email system. She also claimed that as a result of a head injury she didn’t recall key events such as being trained by the State Department on handing classified information or retaining records in accordance with federal law.