RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton wants you to know that she’s just regular folk. That’s right, she’s like any other adult who, while representing her state and her country on government business, during a taxpayer-funded trip, engages in an alcoholic binge-drinking competition. Who hasn’t?

I’m not unearthing dirt to smear the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who hopes to command the world’s most powerful military, tickle the nuclear trigger, and become the global face of these United States of America.

I’m merely passing along Hillary Clinton’s latest campaign video [see below], in which an off-camera woman asks if Madame Secretary has “ever won a drinking competition.”

She laughs, with that endearing husky tone so familiar to hard-drinking chain-smokers, as she brags of her vodka-shots showdown with fellow Sen. John McCain. Furthermore, Mrs. Clinton assures an American public concerned about a stagnant economy and the threat of terrorism that the McCain-Rodham throwdown was not the only time she chugged copious quantities of non-prescription ethanol depressants to see who could knock back the most before blacking out or puking.

It is, however, in her words, the “most famous” episode.

It’s odd the things that catch the eye of the Internet. My comparison of Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton was a throwaway aside on yesterday’s Rush Limbaugh Show. I spent less time on it than on the question of whether President Clinton raped Juanita Broaddrick (NBC’s Lisa Myers to Mrs Broaddrick: “The good news is you’re credible. The bad news is you’re very credible”) or on the fact that more recently Clinton was a frequent guest of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who flew the former President on “Lolita One” at least 11 times to the island resort where he kept “slaves”, and that a procurer of underage girls was among the guests Bill invited to Chelsea’s wedding.

Nevertheless, it’s the Cosby/Clinton comparison that tickled the fancy of Breitbart News, and now of Brian Lilley at Truth Revolt, Don Surber, and Elizabeth Preza for Mediaite and Fox News:

Mark Steyn: Why Is Bill Cosby Finished While Bill Clinton Is Beloved?

Nobody needed criminal convictions to drop Cosby – just multiple accusations of sexual assault and some out-of-court payouts. But multiple accusations of sexual assault, out-of-court payouts and the loss of his law license are apparently not enough to bar Bill Clinton from another eight years in the White House.

Abigail Abrams turns up this interesting tidbit from the dawn of Hillary’s post-White House political career:

When Hillary Clinton was running for the United States Senate in 2000, Cosby endorsed the former first lady, using his power as America’s most beloved TV dad to drive support for her…

When Hillary Clinton appeared with Cosby on election day in 2000, he was one of several celebrities giving her their support. Sen. Chuck Schumer was also in attendance, along with Doug Flutie, the Buffalo Bills quarterback who had a line of cereal at the time.

The batch of Hillary Clinton e-mails released Thursday afternoon is the smallest in months. But there’s a higher rate of classified documents in the latest production than in any since the first of her e-mails were released, and one is labeled “Secret” — the first new document found with that highly sensitive classification in four months.

The State Department missed a court-imposed deadline on Thursday, producing less than two-thirds of the e-mails promised to a federal judge and making today’s production the smallest since July. Still, just under 9 percent of the 3,100 e-mails were marked classified by State Department reviewers. That’s up dramatically from last month’s 6.5 percent, the previous high.

Most of the classified e-mails were marked “Confidential,” a middling level of classification used by the federal government. But one e-mail was marked “Secret,” the second-highest classification level, just below “Top Secret.” The last time the department produced a document marked “Secret” was in September.

The e-mail was sent to Clinton by Jeffrey Feltman, the assistant secretary for the Middle East. Both subject line and body of the e-mail were entirely redacted by State Department reviewers. The document was marked “SBU” in multiple places, an abbreviation meaning “Sensitive but Unclassified.”

Clinton is under investigation by the FBI for her use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state. Much of that investigation centers on whether she sent or received classified government material through an unsecured server. Clinton and her campaign have maintained that she never knowingly sent or received classified material, and the State Department has said that all the e-mails it has released have been classified retroactively. The CIA and other intelligence-community reviewers dispute that claim, saying that at least four e-mails – including two labeled “Top Secret” — were classified at the time they were sent.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton sat down with the editorial board of New Hampshire’s Conway Daily Sun on Tuesday — and thanks to conservative columnist Tom McLaughlin, it did not go as smoothly as she would have liked. A question Clinton struggled to answer when it was put to her by George Stephanopoulos on December 6 came back to haunt her on Tuesday when McLaughlin asked her about private statements she had made blaming the Benghazi terrorist attack on “an al-Qaeda-like group” while publicly blaming a YouTube video.

She tried to swat away the issue by blaming the “fog of war” and likened the situation to a “40-alarm fire.” She also insinuated that the CIA was behind the video narrative even though the acting CIA director claims his CIA intelligence analysts never said the video was a factor.

Sun Columnist Tom McLaughlin said she told an Egyptian diplomat the Benghazi attack was planned and not a protest but that she told family members of the deceased that the attack was the result of a demonstration. He said she then told George Stephanopoulos that she didn’t tell the families the attack was a demonstration about a film.

“Somebody is lying,” said McLaughlin.”Who is it?

Clinton replied, “Not me, that’s all I can tell you.”

At the time, Clinton said, everyone was emotionally distraught. She said some families didn’t know their sons were working for the CIA or were in Benghazi. Clinton said the information she had about the attack was from the intelligence community.

Since Hillary announced that her husband would be joining her on the campaign trail, people have been debating whether or not it’s fair for the GOP to attack Bill’s sexual misdeeds in order to indirectly attack her.

This makes sense. After all, we’re talking about a guy who has been accused of the sexual assault of more than ten women. Think about it: How is her appointing him really any different than if she’d appointed Bill Cosby?

But here’s the thing: The real issue isn’t whether or not to attack Bill to indirectly attack Hillary — it’s about directly attacking Hillary for how she herself treated the women involved.

Hillary Clinton claims to be pro-women, yet has actively worked to ruin lives of so many of them. She’s running on a “feminist platform” — she’s even dared to say that sexual-assault survivors have a “right to be believed” — despite the fact that what she did to the women who accused Bill went far beyond not believing them.

She attacked them.

When allegations of sexual misconduct emerged during Bill’s 1992 presidential run, she’s reported to have said “Who is going to find out? These women are trash. Nobody’s going to believe them.” Multiple people also report that she called the women “sluts” and “whores” — you know, for daring to be raped. A private investigator named Ivan Duda claims that, after Bill lost his second governor’s race, Hillary told him: “I want you to get rid of all these b****** he’s seeing . . . I want you to give me the names and addresses and phone numbers, and we can get them under control.”

Speaking Fees Meet Politics for Clintons By James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus
At Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing for secretary of state, she promised she would take “extraordinary steps…to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

Later, more than two dozen companies and groups and one foreign government paid former President Bill Clinton a total of more than $8 million to give speeches around the time they also had matters before Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

Fifteen of them also donated a total of between $5 million and $15 million to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the family’s charity, according to foundation disclosures.

In several instances, State Department actions benefited those that paid Mr. Clinton. The Journal found no evidence that speaking fees were paid to the former president in exchange for any action by Mrs. Clinton, now the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Mrs. Clinton has come under fire from Republicans and some Democrats for potential conflicts of interest between her family’s work at the foundation and her duties as secretary of state between 2009 and February 2013. Her husband’s high-profile activities pose a unique challenge for Mrs. Clinton as she runs for president and he prepares to step up his role in her campaign.

If current trends continue, Republican primary voters will give themselves a warm “stick it to the man” feeling by defying Mitch McConnell, the Bush family, and the greater GOP establishment and nominating Donald Trump for president. They have endured years of policy disappointments and ideological betrayals by Washington Republicans; it’s hard to blame them.

There’s just one problem: Once this fight-the-power euphoria has ebbed, Trump would face the Democratic nominee, most likely Hillary Clinton. Fairly or unfairly, she will pound the Manhattan real-estate mogul as a mean, insensitive, sexist, and possibly racist multi-billionaire “who doesn’t care about people like you.” Clinton, the Democrats, and their butlers and maids in the old-guard media will tar Trump as Mitt Romney with more money and less warmth.

Indeed, Clinton would smash Trump 50 percent to 40, according to a December 14 NBC/Wall Street Journal survey of 1,000 adults (margin of error: +/- 3.4 percent). A December 16–17 Fox News survey of 1,013 registered voters finds Clinton thumping Trump by 11 points – 49 percent to 38 (MOE: +/- 3.0 percent). A December 22 Quinnipiac University poll found that 50 percent of 1,140 registered voters surveyed would be “embarrassed to have Donald Trump as President.” Only 35 percent said this of Hillary Clinton. (MOE: +/- 2.9 percent).

With his coattails drenched in Crisco, Trump most likely would see Republican senators, congressmen, state-level candidates, and even local contenders slip down the general-election ticket and slide to defeat.

Memo to GOP primary voters: Breathe deep the gathering doom.

Rather than engineer a Hillary Clinton landslide, Republican voters should nominate a stalwart, quick-witted conservative whose immigrant roots and modest means make him a far more elusive target for Clinton’s slings and arrows.

It is now axiomatic that Marco Rubio is the “establishment” favorite in the 2016 Republican primaries, due for a collision with a conservative alternative such as Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or Ben Carson.

But if Rubio really represents the new GOP “establishment,” then the fight is over and the conservatives won. Despite infuriating many grassroots conservatives by pushing the failed Gang of Eight immigration-reform bill and advocating a path to legalization, Rubio has an indisputably conservative record as a senator.

This is a man who has a lifetime ACU rating of 98 out of 100. A man who has a perfect rating from the NRA in the U.S. Senate. A man who earned scores of 100 in 2014, 100 in 2013, 71 in 2012, and 100 in 2011 from the Family Research Council. A “Taxpayer Super Hero” with a lifetime rating of 95 from Citizens Against Government Waste. A man Club for Growth president David McIntosh called “a complete pro-growth, free-market, limited-government conservative.”

Across the board, Rubio’s stances, policy proposals, and rhetoric fall squarely within the bounds of traditional conservatism.

Populism is typically born in places like Nebraska, Louisiana, Kansas, and the other places given short shrift in that famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cartoon showing the view of the world from Ninth Avenue.

It’s not supposed to hail from Brooklyn or Queens, never mind Burlington, Vermont, or midtown Manhattan. But that’s where the two reigning populists of the 2016 cycle call home.

You could say that Donald Trump, the son of a rich real-estate developer in Queens, was always a populist at heart. All his life he wanted to break into the fancy-pants world of Manhattan real estate. Despite his wealth, he still has that bridge-and-tunnel chip on his shoulder. And that chip explains the garishness of his publicity-seeking lifestyle, as well as his politics.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants. He followed a somewhat familiar path to politics. As Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina quipped in one of the recent Republican debates, Sanders went to the Soviet Union on his honeymoon and never came back. In reality, he ended up in Burlington and became the socialist mayor of one of the very first latte towns.

Looked at through a historical lens, a billionaire Manhattanite from Queens and a Jewish socialist from Brooklyn should be standing at the pointy end of the pitchforks, not leading the mobs holding them. Nearly all of the famous populists hated the East Coast, the super-rich, and the big cities. A good number — but not all — of them disliked Jews.

And yet, what you might call “blue state populism” is here.