RUTHFULLY YOURS

If not a smoking gun, veteran journalist Edward Klein exposes a smoldering pistol in his new book about Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary cites three of her former State Department colleagues who saw Clinton weave her diplomatic duties with her financial interests in the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. They also report that Clinton let her foreign-policy responsibilities take a back seat to her presidential ambitions. These three sources insisted on anonymity.

“The Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative have very distinct logos. . . . Often, when I went into the secretary of state’s conference room, I saw those logos on papers that were strewn all over the big table,” one of Clinton’s college interns told Klein.

This observer’s low rank gave him surprisingly high-level exposure to Clinton and her confidantes. “It was like I was the invisible man,” he said. “Nobody gave me a second look. They obviously didn’t think it mattered what a young intern saw, so they didn’t make an effort to hide anything from me.”

There’s a tendency in politics to mistake personal animosity for ideological animosity.

Consider Bill Clinton. His staggering dishonesty, tackiness, and scorn for the rule of law aroused a lot of anger from the Right. But he wasn’t really that left-wing.

Oh, he was certainly more liberal in his heart than he let on, but he also worked from the assumption that this was a center-right country, and that limited what he could get away with.

Clinton ran for president the first time by “triangulating” against the base of his own party. He took time off from the campaign to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man so mentally disabled, when he left for the electric chair, he told the guards that he was saving the pecan pie from his last meal “for later.” Clinton signed welfare reform (reluctantly), the Defense of Marriage Act (less reluctantly), helped to balance the budget, and proclaimed that “the era of big government is over.”

And yet, many conservatives insisted he was a no-good hippy left-winger.

There is little doubt this presidential campaign season is unique, at least in one respect: for the first time in a long time, the despicable nature of the mainstream media’s double-standard is as much in focus as the candidates themselves. And perhaps nothing screams double-standard more than the calculated lack of attention on Hillary Clinton’s latest assertion that she never told the families grieving over the loss of their loved ones in Benghazi that an anti-Muslim video was to blame for the attacks.

We begin with where that assertion was made. Clinton floated this latest insult to those families and the American public within the friendly confines of ABC News’ This Week, hosted by pseudo-journalist and former Clinton toady George Stephanopoulos. The would be the same George Stephanopoulos that still passes muster in the corporate suites at ABC, despite having made three separate donations of $25,000 apiece to the Clinton Foundation in 2012, 2013 and 2014 respectively. Those donations remained under the radar, even when Stephanopoulos engaged in a contentious interview with “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer, during which he rose to the Clinton’s defense. After being outed, Stephanopoulos apologized for the oversight, insisting he thought his contributions were “a matter of public record.” “However, in hindsight, I should have taken the extra step of personally disclosing my donations to my employer and to the viewers on air during the recent news stories about the Foundation,” Stephanopoulos confessed.