RUTHFULLY YOURS

The third debate was a rerun of the other two. Even moderator Chris Wallace scolded both candidates for repeating stale talking points and talking over each other like squabbling fishwives. Neither Trump nor Clinton said anything that will change this race one way or the other, although the media will shriek over Trump’s refusal to say he wouldn’t contest the results. There still may be an October surprise, but Trump’s persona is pretty much fixed, and any further scandals about taxes or women are already baked in. Hillary is more vulnerable to the unexpected, given her numerous scandals filled with potential bombshells, but it would have to be spectacularly damaging to overcome the media’s studied indifference to anything that might hurt their candidate. Now it’s time for the voters to decide.

So what have we learned from this election campaign? This race, the candidates, and the three debates have been analyzed and commented on ad nauseam. But the analyses with some exceptions have not been even-handed, or based on clear principles objectively applied. Both candidates are obviously flawed, and these deficiencies are plain to everyone, as both candidates’ high disapproval ratings show. Indeed, their flaws are glaring to an extent unprecedented in modern presidential candidates. Trump’s in-your-face, braggadocios, hyper-egoistic character, lack of preparation, addiction to superlative adjectives, and his crude, sometimes vulgar rhetoric, have been a year-long obsession of the pundits and media. Not so much with Clinton’s 25-year-long catalogue of scandal––from cattle futures, the Rose Law firm, Whitewater, and brutally managing Bill’s bimbo eruptions; to server-gate, email-gate, pay-for-play Clinton family foundation, auctioning off the State Department, collusion with the FBI, and giving perjurious testimony to Congress.

This brings us to one very obvious take-away from this campaign: the mainstream media are utterly enslaved to progressive ideology. Their cheerleading for Obama should have made it clear that their protestations of objectivity, “speaking truth to power,” “comforting the afflicted afflicting the comfortable,” and being the “watchdogs” of the public weal are gross lies.

The mainstream media are the “power” in our image-besotted, celebrity-obsessed superficial age. They are the “comfortable,” with the same elite credentials and zip codes as the political elite of both parties. They are not “watchdogs,” but spaniels, perched on the laps of the progressive commissars and eating from their hands. They occasionally snarl and nip, but never risk their privilege and influence by investigating and reporting the truth. You know the media are shameless hacks when Trump’s decades-old vulgar sexual banter and unproven charges of sexual groping get 23 minutes of television news coverage for every one minute on Hillary’s emails and their revelation of her corruption of the State Department, her debauchment of the FBI, her endangerment of national security, and her campaign flunkies’ dirty tricks against her opponent.

The peculiar self-contradiction of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was on abundant display Wednesday night during her third and last presidential debate with Donald Trump: running as the anointed heir of a two-term president in whose administration she served, she has to maintain both that everything is going great and that the nation in general is in drastic need of repair. Above all, amid all the bluster and platitudes, she and Trump took up opposing sides on virtually all the major fault lines of contemporary America, emphasizing yet again that this election is for all the marbles: either the U.S. will continue on the road to socialist internationalism, or recover a sense of itself. This may be the last time that question is at stake in a presidential election.

“What kind of country are we going to be?,” Hillary Clinton asked near the beginning of the debate, and that indeed was the question. The Supreme Court, she told us, needs to stand on the side of the American people, not on side of the wealthy. What would a Supreme Court that stood on the side of the people, rather than the plutocrats, look like? Why, of course it would be one that said no to Citizen’s United, and yes to Marriage Equality and Roe vs. Wade: as far as Hillary Clinton is concerned, anyone who stands for traditional values is simply not of the people, or any people she has any interest in representing. Nor, presumably, among Hillary Clinton’s people are those who respect and want to uphold the Second Amendment – in which she firmly believes, she assured us Wednesday night, as long as it is gutted of any actual substance.

Trump, on the other hand, affirmed that he would appoint justices who would interpret the Constitution as written, repeal Roe v. Wade and return the abortion question to the states, and protect gun rights. Chicago, he pointed out, has some of the nation’s toughest gun laws, yet also has more gun violence than any other city. This was a telling point; in response, Clinton promised she would give us both the Second Amendment and “reform,” but did not explain how this sleight-of-hand would be performed.

The situation was the same when the topic turned to immigration. Trump spoke of the need for strong borders, pointing to the drugs pouring into the country over the Mexican border as the reason why a border wall was needed, and declaring: “We have no country if we have no border.” In response, Clinton spoke about not wanting to send illegal immigrant parents away from their children who are citizens – an answer that may have tugged at Leftist heartstrings, but left the drug problem unaddressed.

Clinton danced all night. When moderator Chris Wallace quoted her earlier statement saying she wanted open borders, Clinton turned the question into one about Wikileaks, and pressed Trump over whether he would condemn Russia, which she insisted was behind the leaks, for meddling in an American election. “That was a great pivot,” Trump noted drily, “from her wanting open borders.”

In Spanish. my mother tongue, we call an idiot a “pendejo”

In an interview on the Spanish-language show “Noticias Telemundo,” Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, the Democrat nominee for vice president, said that Spanish was the language of America before English. Kaine has often given speeches in Spanish, and on Sunday he gave a sermon entirely in Spanish at Pneuma Church in Miami, Fla.

“Latino culture is one of the most important things in our country right now because we have had Hispanic roots since the beginning. … Spanish was the language of our country before English,” Kaine told Telemundo host José Díaz-Balart on Monday, according to a translated transcript.

“It’s important to remember that, and celebrate it,” Kaine argued. “And also, the issues important to Latinos are the same: education, economic development and, especially, respect. In this campaign the question of respect is very important, because the two sides of the campaign have very different opinions about the Latino community.”

Kaine was hinting at Donald Trump’s many disparaging comments about immigrants from Mexico, which have been attacked as racist. Trump’s complaints mostly focus on illegal immigrants, as opposed to people of a particular race. The Republican nominee has not specifically disparaged Latinos, but many feel insulted and attacked by his comments, especially as many media outlets have reported them as racist.

Clinton has gone overboard in her attempts to appeal to Latinos, and even the Huffington Post has acknowledged her efforts veer into “Hispandering.” She has launched Spanish-language ads specifically targeting Latinos, especially in Florida. Nevertheless, some Puerto Ricans in that state are still on the fence about her. Nevertheless, the outreach seems to be working.

Trump won’t accept defeat, should that be his lot on November 8, unless he is satisfied the game wasn’t rigged, which it is always is. As for Mrs Clinton, she will maintain the habit of a lifetime and surround the Oval Office with a bodyguard of lies.
The issue of issues in the third debate was Trump’s refusal to commit himself to accepting the results of the election as tallied on the day. He has, in effect, stated that an election result would not be acceptable if there is serious evidence of voter and electoral fraud. I wish he hadn’t said it since it will diminish his outstanding performance on the rest.

But what do I know about politics at that levels, since what it will do is put the spotlight on the way in which the deceased vote early and often, how voting machines are hacked and the multiple-voting that is rife across the American system.For all my misgivings, he is the one that has taken the Trump train to the edge of the White House, so we shall just have to see what happens now.

I have often thought about this issue, in particular in relation to the 2012 election: In 59 Philadelphia voting divisions, Mitt Romney got zero votes. Not one person voted for Romney, not even by accident, not even by pulling the wrong lever, not even my mis-reading the ballot paper! Not one? To quote from the above link:

The unanimous support for Obama in these Philadelphia neighborhoods – clustered in almost exclusively black sections of West and North Philadelphia – fertilizes fears of fraud, despite little hard evidence.

Upon hearing the numbers, Steve Miskin, a spokesman for Republicans in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, brought up his party’s voter-identification initiative – which was held off for this election – and said, “We believe we need to continue ensuring the integrity of the ballot.”

The absence of a voter-ID law, however, would not stop anyone from voting for a Republican candidate.

Which is exactly the point. The polls showed a super-majority voting for Obama, but the polls also showed the score at 94-6. Six percent is not zero percent. And then there’s this:

The video was put up just the other day, on October 18, and comes with this caption:

In the second video of James O’Keefe’s new explosive series on the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign, Democratic party operatives tell us how to successfully commit voter fraud on a massive scale. Scott Foval, who has since been fired, admits that the Democrats have been rigging elections for fifty years.

This is an issue of immense importance in a democracy. Legitimacy is bestowed only if the system is fair and perceived to be fair. Trump is in the middle of a battle he thinks, and I think, is for the future of America and the West. What he said is that he is not going to give the outcome his prior approval before he has actually seen what has happened on the day.

And I do have to say that I was surprised that he didn’t bring up Al Gore and the disputed election in 2012. It would no doubt have crossed his mind, so you have to think Trump had sifted this on the spot and didn’t wish to change the focus to sixteen years ago. He wants this election, this year, run clean. And since this is his greatest vulnerability – an election stolen by those with a proven track record of electoral theft – he wants to keep the pressure on as best he can.

Politics is ultimately what works. Does it cost him votes to focus on voter fraud in this way? No doubt. But will it also gain him votes if he can contain the fraud? Yes again. The question really comes down to how it will play out.

That the Clinton Foundation’s operations are nothing but a cash cow scam is seen in a brilliant analysis and exposé of its operations in Colombia, a country beset by internal strife and an ongoing battle with drug cartels. The truth, as reported by Ken Silverman and the American Media Institute in Fusion, a joint venture of ABC and Univision, hardly Trump surrogates, explains in part how the Clintons amassed a small fortune without holding any job or running any business:

Colombia should be the Clinton Foundation’s best case study. Ground zero for the drug wars of the 1980s and 90s, racked by uneven development and low-intensity conflict for half a century, Colombia has received more foundation money and attention than any other nation outside the United States. Bill and Hillary Clinton have visited the country often and enjoy close relationships with members of Colombia’s ruling party. Colombia has also been home to the vast oil and natural gas holdings of the man who is reportedly the Clinton Foundation’s largest individual donor, Canadian financier Frank Giustra….

Many of the Colombian “success stories” touted on the foundation’s website — the ones specific enough for us to track down — were critical about the foundation’s effect on their lives. Labor leaders and progressive activists say foundation programs caused environmental harm, displaced indigenous people, and that it concentrated a larger share of Colombia’s oil and natural gas reserves in the hands of Giustra…

We interviewed young women in the foundation’s job-training programs; female business owners who sought help from its programs; workers who toiled for the foundation’s biggest individual donor’s firms; indigenous fisherman who were promised jobs and aid; and union leaders, social-justice activists, and progressive lawmakers. Some say they lost money. Others said they were used as props. Still others simply thought that the foundation had wasted a lot of their time. “They are doing nothing for workers,” one Colombian union official told us, with disgust. “I don’t even know what they are doing in this country other than exploiting poverty and extracting money.”