RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bernie Sanders has been asserting more forthrightly than any of his Democratic rivals that pretty much every domestic problem—from aging infrastructure to student debt to teenage acne—could be solved by raising taxes high enough on the super rich. Rarely do interviewers perform the public service of challenging his math, which is why the Vermont senator’s exchange Sunday with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News is noteworthy.

Mr. Sanders said that he is open to raising the current 39.6% top marginal income-tax rate to as high as 90%. The self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” also explained how he would increase the death tax “so that [Donald] Trump and his billionaire friends and their families will end up paying more.” Mr. Stephanopoulos replied that the numbers still don’t compute. “To pay for all of your programs, you’re going to have to do more than tax the top 1%,” he said. “How far below the top 1% are you going to go with tax hikes?”

Hillary Clinton may not see the point, but her Thursday testimony may tell us much about her ability to lead.

Only in Perry Mason stories does the real culprit break down in open court. After Hillary Clinton’s now-immortal Capitol Hill outburst about investigations into the deadly 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya—“What difference, at this point, does it make?”—the former secretary of state and Democratic candidate for president is unlikely to offer any such spontaneity when she testifies Thursday before the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Nonetheless, the committee’s work is utterly serious, its preparations extensive (and extensively stonewalled by Mrs. Clinton’s team) and its mission vital to our fight against still-metastasizing Islamist terrorism. Much is at stake. The hearing’s focus must be on the key policy and leadership implications of the mistakes made before, during and after the murders of Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11 three years ago.
Before the attack, there was ample warning that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi wasn’t secure, with terrorist threats in the area multiplying. Even the International Red Cross had pulled out of Benghazi. After a string of requests from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli for more security, in mid-August came a joint Embassy-CIA recommendation to move the State Department’s people into the CIA’s Benghazi compound. The State Department in Washington was invariably unresponsive, even though, as Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey later testified, the rising terrorist threat in Libya was well known.

The media court-encomiasts of the Democrat Party were gushing last week over Hillary Clinton’s supposed “victory” in the first primary debate. “Crushed” was the cliché de jour used to describe Clinton’s besting of the cranks, has-beens, and nobodies running against her. Such praise is akin to calling her the tallest building in Wichita Kansas, to paraphrase William F. Buckley.

Yet when it comes to substance, there was little or nothing specific or fresh or even rational in the various nostrums the candidates shouted out like the expletives and epithets involuntarily vocalized by victims of Tourette’s Syndrome. Except for a brief tussle over who hated the NRA the most, and the occasional good sense from Jim Webb, the debate was a dreary list of reflexive progressive talking points utterly disconnected from the real world.

When gun control came up, for example, candidates immediately started twitching and barking out “assault rifles!” and “gun shows!” The facts suggest otherwise. As BusinessWeek pointed out, fewer than 3% of the 12,000 murders in 2014 involved rifles of any sort, let alone semi-automatic assault rifles––a percentage less than knives (13%) and feet and hands (6%). As for gun shows, sellers are subject to the same federal licensing laws as sellers in retail stores, and in any case guns purchased at gun shows account for no more than 2% of the guns used in crimes.

The little legacy that couldn’t.

For the first time, former Florida governor Jeb Bush has fallen into single digits in a home-state Republican primary poll that shows Donald Trump still in front, trailed by Ben Carson and Sen. Marco Rubio.

Jeb Bush’s 9-percent, fourth-place showing in the University of North Florida poll is his worst showing in any survey of likely Florida Republican voters.

Sure, it is only one poll but it’s Florida. One of his only selling points to those of us who wouldn’t otherwise be inclined to vote for him is that he’s supposed to be able to deliver Florida.

Money is still not really a problem for Bush, although he has been forced to adjust his trust fund boy spending habits. Still, this isn’t anything like the coronation he was hoping for. One wonders how long he will hang around in pursuit of a job it doesn’t seem that he really wants anyway. If he does want it, he’s doing a marvelous job of hiding it.

Donald Trump and Ben Carson continue to broaden their appeal among Republican primary voters and have widened their lead over former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and many other more-experienced candidates, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

Mr. Bush, once considered the GOP’s likely nominee, is also lagging behind his onetime protege, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who is emerging as a leading contender to rally the party’s establishment wing against the rise of insurgent outsiders such as Messrs. Trump and Carson.

The new poll, conducted Oct. 15-18, underscores the durability—even the gathering strength—of anti-Washington candidates who had long been viewed as likely to be flash-in-the-pan political phenomena.

The poll also tested opinion on another aspect of the Republican Party’s internal struggles, the question of who will succeed Rep. John Boehner (R., Ohio) as House speaker. GOP primary voters in the survey said it was more important to find a successor who would stand up for principles rather than seek compromise, even if that meant less work would get done, by a 56% to 40% split.

Donald Trump is running for the Republican presidential nomination, but sometimes it’s hard to tell. On national security the businessman often sounds closer to Bernie Sanders than he does to the GOP policy of active global leadership that has prevailed since the 1950s.

Mr. Trump’s latest walk on the wild left side is his attempt to rewrite the history of 9/11. In his campaign against Jeb Bush, the New Yorker is blaming George W. Bush because the hijackers struck during his Presidency. “The World Trade Center came down during his reign,” Mr. Trump said Friday, adding a day later that, “Do I blame George Bush? I only say he was the President at the time, and you know, you could say the buck stops here.”

Recall that during the last debate Jeb Bush received the biggest applause line of his campaign when he defended his brother’s antiterror record by saying “he kept us safe.” Mr. Trump is now trying to blunt that rebuke by distorting the truth about the hijackers and the Osama bin Laden era.

The UK Daily Mail is making big headlines (at the top of the Drudge Report page as I write) with its exclusive story purporting to prove that former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was committed to war with Iraq at a time he was telling the British public that he was seeking a diplomatic solution. The email it cites came from “a batch of secret emails held on the private server of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton which U.S. courts have forced her to reveal.”

I think the Daily Mail has buried the lead. For one thing, the secret memo to President Bush authored by then US secretary of State Colin Powell, rather than proving Blair was committed to war clearly states, “On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary.” That is a contingency. If diplomacy had succeeded, then Blair would not be committed to war.

But much more important to me than this UK-centric story is what we learn about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Take a look at the memo itself, the top line in the left had column.

In the Perils of Pauline–like cliffhanger serial that is Hillary Clinton’s career, she has once again escaped and is declaring herself safe.

A strong debate performance — aided by chief rival Bernie Sanders’s dismissal of her e-mail scandal — has Clinton backers claiming the scandal is a dead issue in the Democratic primaries. Clinton’s pollster, Joel Berenson, notes that some 75 percent of Democrats approve of her, even though 31 percent of them also think she is lying about the e-mail scandal. Her questioners on the House Benghazi Committee, this line of thinking goes, have revealed their partisanship, and she ought to have no trouble besting them in her appearance before the committee this Thursday.

Not so fast. An intelligence source told Fox News the FBI is focusing on evidence that Clinton may have engaged in “gross negligence” in her mishandling of government documents, a violation of the Espionage Act. FBI agents are also looking at obstruction-of-justice allegations. More than 400 e-mails containing classified information flowed through Hillary’s homebrew server, but she continues to insist that she handled no classified material on it. But the mishandling-of-government-documents charge doesn’t even require that any of them be classified.

As for Hillary’s new political peril, Vice President Biden leaked his interest in running for president to columnist Maureen Dowd in early August, knowing that the e-mail revelations would spool out over months. As new revelations are pried out of the State Department, the scandal has taken on new dimension. All appearances to the contrary, its resolution is still beyond Clinton’s control: It lies with the FBI and the national-security establishment, as it always has. Biden might not enter the primaries now, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t fully aware new twists in the story could have party leaders begging him to jump in and replace a badly crippled front-runner at some point in the near future.

For Progressives, It’s Personnel over Policy

As he approaches the end of his career in elected office, Barack Obama is in a truly precarious position: He is going to exit the White House having accomplished almost nothing substantive on the policy front — his health-care program is not going to survive, Gitmo is not going to be closed, we are not leaving Afghanistan, and he is sending troops into Iraq — and outside of his perch at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, his party is in ruins: In Congress and the states, the Democrats are in their weakest position in modern political history. If the Democrats do not win the presidency in 2016, there are going to be some very uncomfortable questions about what exactly Obama & Co. accomplished, and at what price.

What to do? Throw Herself to the wolves, of course.

Barack Obama isn’t a policy guy; he’s a personnel guy. An underappreciated aspect of Barack Obama’s politics is that he has been trying to convert the Democratic party from a party that lives in Congress to a party that lives in the White House.

“I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry, ” President-elect Obama said in early 2009. “They’re trying to pry it out of my hands.” The National Security Agency was so anxious about foreign intelligence agents gaining access to classified information that it assigned dozens of technologists to work for months before the inauguration to modify a BlackBerry Mr. Obama could use. The new president was told his device could safely communicate with fewer than a dozen other people, after their devices were loaded with special encryption.

His secretary of state took a different approach.

Hillary Clinton set up her own private email server. By avoiding use of government servers, she succeeded in keeping emails off-limits to information requests from congressional overseers and journalists—but American counterintelligence agents must now assume that Chinese, Russian and possibly other agents had full access. A Pentagon counterintelligence official told the Daily Beast that if he were in charge of a foreign intelligence agency, “I’d fire my staff if they weren’t getting all this.”