RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Carnegie Council on the East Side’s posh E. 64th Street, off Third Avenue, boasts modestly to attendees that it is the “18th most important think tank”. In the city? Country? Universe? On ne sais pas.

The Carnegie handout describes themselves thus:

Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1914, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs is an educational, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that produces lectures, publications and multimedia materials on the ethical challenges of living in a globalized world.

Their programs include a roster of impressive events. This season, for instance, they have a lineup that includes:

The rise of the new far right in Europe and implications for EU parliament elections (panel discussion);
Attacks on the press: journalism on the front lines (Joel Simon; Jacob Weisberg);
Moral imagination (David Bromwich);
Age of ambition: Chasing fortune, truth and faith in the New China (Evan Osnos).

In the main, top shelf. Topics the knowledgeable and committed care about. We go into these details to demonstrate that the captures are worthy, and the scope of discussants as wide as one could hope in this astral work-in-progress called New York City.

We also come to the reason for this report. The latest presentation at Carnegie Council was titled “Ethics matter: A conversation with Ezekiel Emanuel”. He is the elder of the celebrated and occasionally reviled Rahm Emanuel, ex- of the White House under the current 44th president, and currently serving as mayor of the nation’s highest citadel of civilian crime, shootings, drive-by killings, and other mayhemia made fresh by the resuscitation of the tightest gun-control laws in the nation (excepting only Phoenix, perhaps; but that fair Arizona dry-heat destination is title-winner mainly for abductions and kidnappings).

For those on a yoga retreat for the past five years, Zeke, one of three Emanuel brothers, high-achieving sons (the third brother is the model for Ariel “Ari” Gold, the super-caffeinated agent made amazingly eclatant by Jeremy Piven in Entourage) of Israeli physician parents, Holocaust survivors, was a prime architect of the Affordable Care Act. For those partial to nicknames, the ACA is of course what we have come to lovably bristle at as ObamaCare.

If one sets out to destroy the core pillars of a society, to incrementally break down the values of a country, and to dishearten its inhabitants, then Barack Hussein Obama has been a sterling success.

He is no amateur; he is not a feckless individual who doesn’t know what he is doing. His actions are deliberate, and his goals are in direct opposition to the vast majority of the American people. His so-called misdirections are calculated, and his leadership traits are not intended to support America. He knows exactly what he is doing, and far too many people still don’t comprehend or want to believe the machinations of this man and his underlying political arc.

Even some conservative commentators appear to be amazed at the constant replays of actions designed to hurt America. Why should they be? Obama is doing what Obama said he would do. He is transforming this country into the mold he wants – a weakened America, a demoralized American people, and a vast playground that he can ultimately demolish should he become head of the United Nations.

And he is succeeding.

What gives Obama an almost teflon-shield protection is that he is neither a bombastic leader like Hitler nor quite a sociopath like Stalin. He has mastered the art of being cool. He gives no one any conversational satisfaction, because he simply disappears from the scene. His passive resistance is a clever way of disarming the other side, who is not expecting such a response.

He has been tutored well; he is an excellent student, who has far surpassed his mentors. They would be proud.

But we do not have to be so naive. It is mandatory that we play the same game as Obama and company, but our net result is to save the country, not destroy it. We need to tweet one-liners that expose his true intentions; that speak the jargon that will resonate with people.

Is Hillary Clinton a charlatan or just the crappiest lawyer in Washington? As the Obama Left likes to say, that’s a false choice. There’s no reason she can’t be both.

The question arises thanks to yet another excellent report on the Obama administration’s Benghazi fraud by the Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes. The Benghazi fraud is a prominent subject of my new book, Faithless Execution, which traces the debacle from the president’s unauthorized, unprovoked, and ultimately disastrous instigation of a war against the Qaddafi regime; through his (and Secretary Clinton’s) recklessly irresponsible failure to provide security for the American officials they mysteriously stationed in Benghazi (a jihadist hotbed that is one of the world’s most dangerous places for Americans); through the president’s shocking failure to attempt to rescue Americans under siege on the night of September 11, 2012; and finally through Mr. Obama’s carefully orchestrated deception, in which the administration tried to hoodwink the country into blaming the murders of our ambassador and three other Americans on a video rather than on his calamitous policy of empowering Islamic supremacists.

Steve’s latest report homes in on Mrs. Clinton’s infamous “What difference, at this point, does it make” caterwaul, emitted during tense questioning by Senator Ron Johnson (R., WI) during a hearing on Benghazi.

Apparently, the former secretary of state struggles to rationalize this appalling testimony in her forthcoming memoir, Hard Choices. As notorious for taking no responsibility as for committing blunders over which accountability becomes an issue, Mrs. Clinton complains that her “What difference” yowl has been distorted. It was not, she insists, an exhibition of callous indifference; it was, in Steve’s description, “an attempt to redirect the questioning from its focus on the hours before the attacks to preventing similar attacks in the future.” Or, as Mrs. Clinton reportedly writes:

My point was simple: If someone breaks into your home and takes your family hostage, how much time are you going to spend focused on how the intruder spent his day as opposed to how best to rescue your loved ones and then prevent it from happening again?

As Steve quite rightly observes, this is nonsense. By the time of Mrs. Clinton’s testimony, the Benghazi Massacre—and, indeed, even the Obama administration’s fraudulent “The Video Did It” cover-up of the cause of the Benghazi Massacre—was several months old. We were long, long past the intruder-in-the-home phase. We were in the accountability phase—the phase of: let’s now establish what actually happened and why, so we can then figure out how to prevent a recurrence.

Any competent lawyer knows that during the investigative and trial stages that follow a public debacle—to say nothing of an act of war in which American officials were derelict in responding to a murderous terrorist attack—the obligation of the witnesses is not to redirect the questions. It is to answer the questions. Any competent trial judge would have sustained an objection to the secretary of state’s evasive answer, striking it from the record as non-responsive.

Mrs. Clinton is a crappy lawyer if she does not get that, since a first-year law student would. And she is a charlatan because the transparent two-step objective of her performance was, first, to dodge questions about her conduct and, then, to wail that the questions must cease because she has already answered them.