RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 brand: Tough. Capable. Experienced. Ready. A fighter.

Who freaks out when a man stands behind her for a few seconds.

That last detail about Hillary’s personality didn’t emerge until the world was treated to excerpts from her forthcoming memoir What Happened, in which Clinton makes yet another effort to cast herself as the victim of structural sexism. She writes that when Donald Trump wandered up behind her during the second debate, in St. Louis, she thought, “This is not OK. . . . Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces.”

You can almost hear the theme from Halloween as Clinton continues with her unnerving tale: “It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled. It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, well, what would you do? Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘Back up you creep, get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.’”

Wait — months later, that’s her big comeback, her esprit d’escalier? More like colère d’escalier.

Picking up this anecdote — treating a sliver of a wisp of a crumb as though it’s a boulder with which to crush feminism’s enemies — diehard Clinton defender Jill Filipovic wonders, ludicrously, in the New York Times whether the incident was the game-changer of 2016. She speculates that a “different split-second choice could have changed the course of world history,” suggesting that if either Clinton or the debate’s moderators had made a big fuss about Trump’s violation of her personal space, Hillary would have won the election.

That Clinton didn’t react simply neutralized the moment, though. If anything, it hurt Trump a bit by making him look a little weird. If Clinton had responded angrily, she would have looked unhinged and everything else about the evening would have been forgotten. On her better days, Mrs. Clinton has a Nurse Ratched streak, and she would hardly have done herself any favors by coming across as touchy and dyspeptic. As for the moderators, Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz, they declined to intervene on Clinton’s behalf not because they are secretly knights of the International Brotherhood of Sexism but because they thought moderators should remain neutral. Or because, less charitably, they didn’t want to make it too obvious that they were on Clinton’s side.

Clinton and Filipovic make a mistake familiar to anyone who tries to slog through feminist thinking. Both see no options except for a) lashing out angrily and b) cursing their feminine fate while suffering in silence. As political analysts, they have remarkably short memories: Neither seems to recall that the same issue arose in the very same building as the Trump–Clinton clash — the Field House at Washington University in St. Louis — in another presidential debate, on October 17, 2000.

https://bluedogcaucus-costa.house.gov/members

The Blue Dog Coalition is an official caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives comprised of 18 fiscally-responsible Democrats, who are leading the way to find commonsense solutions. They represent the center of the political spectrum, appealing to the mainstream values of the American public. The Blue Dogs are dedicated to pursuing fiscally-responsible policies, ensuring a strong national defense for our country, and transcending party lines to get things done for the American people.
Rep. Adam Schiff California District 28th left the coalition which recommends it immediately….rsk

As House and Senate Democrats press forward with their quest to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency by any means necessary, they are simultaneously focused on finding someone in their ranks who could be an effective presidential candidate for their own party in 2020. Fifty-three-year-old Kamala Harris, who served as the Attorney General of California from 2011-16 and then filled the vacant U.S. Senate seat that had been occupied for a quarter-century by Barbara Boxer, is someone whom they will undoubtedly look at very closely. To be sure, Harris possesses all the qualifications necessary to be a Democratic leader, insofar as she is a far leftist in the mold of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — but without the baggage of Obama’s extensive ties to domestic terrorists, anti-Semites, and America-hating Marxists, or of Hillary’s status as a money-grubbing thief who feloniously violated the Espionage Act more times than anyone can count.

Consider, for instance, Harris’s stance on immigration. In December 2012, during her tenure as California’s Attorney General, she issued a memo informing all the executives of law-enforcement agencies statewide that they could “make their own decisions about whether to fulfill” Immigration & Customs Enforcement detainers, which are temporary holds that federal immigration authorities place on municipal prisoners who are suspected of being eligible for deportation.

After an illegal alien named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez — a convicted felon who had been deported from the United States on five separate occasions — was released from prison in April 2015 and subsequently murdered a 32-year-old San Francisco woman named Kathryn Steinle, Harris backed up the city sheriff’s decision to release Lopez-Sanchez without first calling immigration authorities.

During Harris’s Senate run in 2016, her campaign website stated that “everyone should have access to public education, public health, and public safety regardless of their immigration status”; that Harris, if elected, would “fight for comprehensive immigration reform that creates a fair pathway to citizenship” for America’s “11 million undocumented immigrants”; that she would “protect President Obama’s immigration executive actions,” which shielded several million illegals from deportation; and that the U.S. had a duty to “responsibly resettle refugees” from Syria and other war-torn, terrorism-infested nations around the world.

But then again, America’s national security has never been high on Kamala Harris’s list of priorities. In September 2015, for instance, she spoke out in support of the nuclear deal that the Obama administration had negotiated with the government of Iran — an agreement that allowed the Islamist regime in Tehran to enrich uranium, build advanced centrifuges, purchase ballistic missiles, fund terrorism, and be guaranteed of having a near-zero breakout time to the development of a nuclear bomb approximately a decade down the road. But by Harris’s reckoning, the accord represented “the best available option for blocking Iran from developing nuclear weapons capability and to avoid potentially disastrous military conflict in the Middle East.”

In 2015 as well, Harris launched an investigation of journalist/anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, who had recently made headlines by releasing undercover videos demonstrating that Planned Parenthood routinely violated federal law by collecting and selling fetal tissue and body parts. As National Review reports: “The basis for investigating Daleiden was his appearing to have used a fake California driver’s license to hide his identity from Planned Parenthood, and the suspicion that he violated Planned Parenthood’s privacy. Those trivial allegations were enough for Harris to have eleven police officers raid Daleiden’s house, confiscate his computers and hard drives, some private documents, and all the yet-unreleased Planned Parenthood footage Daleiden had shot over two years. When Daleiden called his lawyer, Harris’s raiders tried to confiscate his phone too.”

Chuck Schumer has been much remarked upon, even praised in many quarters, for stating the obvious — that Hillary Clinton should stop blaming the sun, moon, and stars, and, of course, Russia for her demise and look to herself for her failure to win the presidency. She was a wretched candidate with no obvious reason for running. Indeed, the WikiLeaks from her campaign operatives are rife with emails searching for some justification for her candidacy other than gender.

The New York senator is clearly correct in his criticism but he has a larger unacknowledged problem that is ultimately far more serious: Hillary’s loss didn’t occur entirely due to her own ineptitude. She is not alone. Her party has no useful programs anymore. As Gertrude said of Oakland, there’s no there there. All they have is Trump bashing and, with the help of their media pals, that’s all they do — and the country knows it.

Yes, as we also all know, the Republicans have their issues, to put it mildly. For a party controlling practically everything, they are remarkably inept and self-destructive, but at least, beneath it all, they have the potential to come together and move forward. (Who knows if they will?) For the Democrats it is another matter. They are hamstrung on all sides.

On the left, they have the Bernie Sanders contingent. At first glance, these people are stuck in 1968, but in truth, they are stuck in (roughly) 1932 or is it 1867? (The publication of Das Kapital.) Bernie’s ideas are ye olde and moribund. He doesn’t even seem to understand (or admit) that the Europeans — whose version of socialism he continually touts — have been deserting that system right and left for years, going more free market than the USA currently is, particularly in the area of corporate taxes.

Bernie is Margaret Thatcher’s admonition about socialism eventually running out of other people’s money writ large. Sure, some young people are seduced by his seemingly idealistic palaver (actually it’s the reverse) but if he — or a younger clone — does run in 2020, one word will spell disaster for them: Venezuela. All socialist roads sooner or later point that way or to something even worse — the Soviet Union, China, etc. It doesn’t take a genius to point that out, nor to demonstrate the catastrophic deficits his proposals engender. (Hillary, scared of alienating his supporters, was terrible at this.) And the young people who vote — those concerned about jobs, not the sad Social Justice Warriors who have, unwittingly, already given up on life — will react accordingly.

It would be fun to watch her get demolished by Trump in 2020.

Finding a pol as (or more) obnoxious than Barbara Boxer is no easy feat, but Golden State voters managed to perform it by selecting Kamala Harris as her replacement. Harris is a left-wing dingbat of singular rudeness. A deluded Boxer thought of herself as kittenish and charming; Harris conceives of herself as more of a clawing feline — the relentless prosecutor who is going to bring the conservative dogs of Washington to heel. Except she is too vapid and dim to pull the role off.

My favorite moment from her absurd harangue of General Kelly earlier this year came when she demanded to know why he was subjecting immigration officers and local officials to a “Hobbesian choice.” She meant Hobson’s choice. Kelly was too nice to point out her sub-literate gibbering, but he did object to her lack of basic manners. She interrupted him repeatedly and finally he told her to knock it off (as have even John McCain and Richard Burr). That, of course, has occasioned feminist whining from Harris about a culture of mansplaining and double standards.

Barack Obama once got on the wrong side of her feminist fan club after he noted her striking good looks. He duly apologized for the infraction. The press, hinting at this secret to her success, calls her a “fresh face” in prospective presidential politics, by which it means a pretty one. It is hard to imagine reporters listening with bated breath to her pronouncements about this or that “Hobbesian choice” if she possessed the looks of, say, Barbara Mikulski.

Were it not for her fanatical support for abortion and all things culturally degenerate, NOW and NARAL would see Harris as an annoying and unworthy rival to Elizabeth Warren. A nubile Harris, after all, slept her way to the middle of California politics after she had an affair with a pol thirty-some years her senior, Willie Brown. An open crook with a Cosbyesque marriage to a long-suffering wife, Brown had no problem arranging lucrative state jobs for Harris after they trysted. The legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen called Kamala Harris Brown’s “steady.”

These days Harris furrows her brows over Trump’s “public corruption.” But Willie Brown, to paraphrase Oscar Levant, knew her before she was a virgin. She got at least two public jobs after serving as his mistress, according to the California press. It is safe to say that MSNBC-style fretting over “emoluments” didn’t figure into their pillow talk.

The growing chatter among Dems about her as a potential 2020 candidate is yet another illustration of the party’s lack of seriousness. At a time when it should be downplaying its image as an out-of-touch bi-coastal party, it deepens that image by pushing one more San Francisco radical forward. Who knows, maybe Harris can run with Pelosi.

According to press reports, Harris wowed supporters of Hillary’s at a recent fundraiser in the Hamptons. What a compelling look for a defeated party — a San Francisco kook feted by routed East Coast plutocrats impressed by her stern questioning of General Mattis over the plight of transgender soldiers. That should work well in the Rust Belt and the South.

Even Mark Penn, Hillary’s former strategist, is wincing at the party’s direction. He recently wrote that the party can’t recover if it stays on this far-left course. He proposes that the party adopt a more measured, less intolerant liberalism. But his plea is falling on deaf ears. The party is in no mood for any Sister Souljah moments. It remains the party of MoveOn.org, evident in the gushing over Harris for having raised money for it off her classless antics against Sessions and company.

In 1984, Reagan crushed the “San Francisco Democrats,” as his foreign policy advisor Jeane Kirkpatrick called them. Trump, in his re-election bid, would do the same, should Harris somehow rise to the top in the primaries. He would probably find that even more fun than beating “Pocahontas.”

Former President Obama’s army of community organizing thugs shows no signs of slowing down efforts to protect Obama’s policy legacy and undermine the Trump administration.

Obama directs Organizing for Action, a huge, well-funded 501(c)(4) nonprofit with more than 30,000 volunteers nationwide that doesn’t have to disclose its donors and that is at the head of Obama’s network of left-wing nonprofit groups. OfA, which grew out of Obama’s electoral campaigns, has upwards of 250 offices across America. His other nonprofit, the Barack Obama Foundation, is building Obama’s $675 million presidential library in Chicago. The library is slated to be a hub of left-wing activism.

Obama now owns and lives in a $8.1 million, 8,200-square-foot, walled mansion in Washington’s Embassy Row that he is using to command his community organizing cadres in the war against President Trump. Obama’s alter ego, Valerie Jarrett, has moved into the house to help out. Jarrett also resided in the White House when Obama was president.

No ex-president has ever stuck around the nation’s capital to vex and undermine his successor. Of course, Obama is unlike any president the United States has ever had. Even failed, self-righteous presidents like Jimmy Carter, who has occasionally taken shots at his successors, didn’t stay behind in the nation’s capital to obstruct the policy-making of the new administration.

OfA, which functions as a kind of shadow government, has been on the front lines attacking President Trump in order to defend the Obama administration’s awful legacy. Both OfA and George Soros-funded MoveOn.org have been leading the way in packing town hall meetings with unruly protesters. Many protests OfA has been involved in have turned into riots.

In 2013, Michelle Obama appeared in a video introducing the group to the public. She said OfA was “the next phase of our movement for change,” and that it would help Obama supporters “finish what we started and truly make that change we believe in.” She congratulated supporters for having “already begun to change our politics,” and declared that “the mission of Organizing for Action” is to “change our country” in accordance with her husband’s vision of how to “bridge [the] divide” between “the world as it is and the world as it should be.”

In the early days of the Trump administration, Organizing for Action activists organized protests across the country. After President Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning visitors from seven terrorism-plagued Muslim countries, OfA organized “spontaneous” demonstrations at airports.

Take down the name Shiva Ayyadurai. You’re going to want to keep your eye on him. This successful entrepreneur would like to throw his hat in the ring in 2018 and defeat Sen. Elizabeth Warren. During his appearance on Varney & Co. on Fox Business, Ayyadurai might have come up with the best campaign slogan of all time.

“I think only a real Indian can defeat a fake Indian,” Ayyadurai told Stuart Varney. “You know, I sent her a DNA test kit for her birthday and I was very sad that she returned it.”

He then got serious:

“Because the issue of real Indian and fake Indian; there’s a truth there, because here’s a woman who actually checked off the box saying she was a Native American. I mean, this foretells a person who’s basically a self-serving elitist; is willing to cut in line as she needs; is willing to promote policies, for example, illegal immigration, so others can cut in line. I came in as a legal immigrant… So, there’s essentially a disrespect for the laws and a disrespect for the country.”

Ayyadurai was born in Mumbai but moved to the U.S. when he was seven. He said his dad came first and they had to wait a year. Ayyadurai holds four degrees from MIT and has a Ph.D. in biological engineering.

“I love Donald Trump,” Ayyadurai said. “I think he’s doing a great job. He’s my hero and I’m very fortunate, again, to be a part of this moment in history.”

“I’m looking forward to going against Warren,” he said. “I know how these elites work. I know I can defeat her.”