RUTHFULLY YOURS

As demonstrated by both Trump and Sanders, a key feature in the 2016 US election has been a populist narrative about how foreign governments and companies, in cahoots with political and institutional insiders, have wrought ruin upon the nation.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has endured two populist insurrections over the past eighteen months, one from the Left and the other from the Right. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have played the populist card, a conviction that ordinary men and women have been rorted by “the system” and that strong decisive action was required on behalf of regular folk to take back control of the nation from a coterie of cronies. The populist’s worldview is invariably a Manichean one of blameless “outsiders”—in alliance with a would-be political saviour—fighting the good fight against the “wicked insiders”. Sanders’s gripe was the state’s failure to safeguard the little person; Trump’s grievance is much the same, albeit for mostly different reasons.

A populist movement is a function of voters going rogue after deciding that the political status quo has lost its legitimacy—in the American case, the customary policies of the Democratic Party and the customary policies of the Republican Party. Populist revolts in America have emerged before at times of stress, from the People’s Party of James B. Weaver in the 1890s to the “Share the Wealth” movement of the Great Depression, the latter cut short by Huey Long’s assassination in 1935. Jack Ross, writing for the American Conservative in March 2016, insisted that Sanders’s politics should be seen as a contemporary version of Huey Long’s proletarian-flavoured radicalism rather than in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt-style liberalism and Henry Wallace’s progressivism or, we might add, Barack Obama’s New Left-style identity politics. Ross rationalises Sanders’s recourse to the middle-class identity politics of Black Lives Matter as the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, then, Senator Sanders differentiated himself from Hillary Clinton in his populist morality tale by implicitly casting her as the establishment candidate, an insider compromised by long and intimate association with “Wall Street speculators”.

Bernie Sanders, fittingly enough, kicked off his primary campaign by refusing to set up a Super PAC (political action committee) as proof that shady plutocrats and their Washington accomplices could not buy off the aspiring people’s hero. He was free to remain an independent operator and, presumably, the champion of outsiders. Central to his populist narrative was that an overclass had subverted democracy in America; decisions were being made that profited powerful oligarchical interests by selling out ordinary American workers, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) being two obvious cases in point.

Sanders’s self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” insurgency also drew on a pervasive bitterness at the wage and wealth inequality in the modern-day US. Accordingly, Sanders’s policy rollout began with a range of government-guaranteed benefits for ordinary workers, from a new minimum wage to longer holidays. Sanders also pledged full remission on student-debt loans and a $70 billion plan to make tertiary education free. It was payback time for the outsiders.

Five weeks before the November 8 election an audiotape (dating back to a March 2016 fundraiser in Virginia) emerged of Hillary Clinton dismissing Bernie Sanders’s supporters as ill-informed Millennials who believed America should have “free college, health care” and that the Obama administration had not “gone far enough” in transforming the United States into “Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means”. However, as Sanders’s campaign was surging at the time, Hillary Clinton entered into a bidding war with her rival. For instance, she promised a $250 billion infrastructure upgrade, only for Bernie Sanders to top this with a $1 trillion undertaking, throwing in high-speed internet access for rural America as a bonus. Why not? Add to that, of course, his plan for universal health care (or so-called Berniecare), a single-payer health plan that Sanders himself acknowledged would increase annual government spending on health from $1 trillion to $2.9 trillion. A Sanders presidency would have likely seen the resentments of the Occupy Wall Street movement to “the greed of corporate America” become the de facto creed of the White House.

Such was the appeal of Bernie Sanders’s leftist version of “the system is rigged” that he garnered almost 39 per cent of Democratic delegates in the primaries, possibly his most surprising victory being the March 8 victory in Michigan. In fact, he collected 46 per cent of delegates if “superdelegates”—party-appointed delegates not elected in primaries or caucuses—are excluded from the count. This was not the only way in which Democratic Party apparatchiks worked in favour of the establishment’s candidate. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, held in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks revealed that the leadership of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had conspired against Sanders from the beginning. For instance, some of the 20,000 leaked e-mails show that the DNC considered making Sanders’s Jewish background a campaign issue in some states. There was also evidence of collusion between the DNC and the Washington Post in the interests of the Clinton campaign. These troubling revelations forced DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign but, tellingly, immediately afterwards she was hired by the Clinton campaign.

Candice E. Jackson, an attorney and advocate for women who have been the victims of other women in positions of power, recently agreed to an interview regarding the Kathy Shelton rape case.

Ms. Shelton, whom Ms. Jackson represents, was 12 years old in 1975 when she was brutally raped by Thomas Taylor.

Mr. Taylor’s defense counsel was Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Below, read this interview of Jackson by John L. Work, a former investigator with the Colorado State Public Defender’s Office and a retired Colorado law enforcement officer.

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Work: Thank you so much for joining me, Candice. You’re an attorney, an author, and an advocate. One of your clients is Kathy Shelton, who as a 12-year-old child was the victim of a brutal rape in 1975.

During the pre-trial proceedings against the man who was eventually arrested and charged with that crime, Thomas Taylor, Ms. Shelton encountered Mr. Taylor’s defense counsel, now known to us as Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Please tell my readers how you came to represent Kathy Shelton as an attorney and advocate.

Jackson: During the process of writing my book Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine back in 2005, I became close friends with women like Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey.

Based on my advocacy on their behalf over the years, when Kathy began being contacted by more and more press this year, she reached out to me feeling the need for an attorney to guide and advise her through this overwhelming process.

I was glad to get to know Kathy and represent her both as a lawyer and spokesperson. My foundation, Their Lives Foundation, fits this case like a glove, as my primary mission is to expose abuse of power (particularly when committed by powerful women) and give a voice to victims of power abuse.

Hillary Clinton’s mistreatment of Kathy Shelton is a stark illustration of women victimizing other women out of motives of ambition and ego, but there are hundreds of similar, lower-profile examples of abuse of power out there needing to be exposed. I also plan to continue to investigate and re-examine Kathy’s rape case from a legal and evidentiary angle so that the historical record is more complete with respect to how one of America’s most powerful female leaders chose to conduct herself in this particular situation, with respect to this particular victim.

This investigation will be important regardless of the results of this presidential election. Because the case is so cold, statutes of limitations likely bar any private action on Kathy’s behalf, even if evidence of wrongdoing crossing the line into civil or criminal misconduct were discovered; however, the court of public opinion and the history books warrant turning over every stone to reveal the facts of Kathy’s rape case.

Work: Central to Ms. Shelton’s grievance against Ms. Clinton is the affidavit in support of a pre-trial mandatory psychiatric evaluation, which Ms. Clinton filed with the Court.

In that affidavit, Ms. Clinton made some allegations which were destructive, to say the least, to your client’s character and reputation. Ms. Clinton’s affidavit attacked your client’s veracity, as well as her mental and emotional competence to testify.

The affidavit was devoid of named sources for the accusations. We have no idea who provided Ms. Clinton the information she used and represented as facts to support her motion for a Court-ordered psychiatric examination, because she didn’t include the names of those persons in her affidavit.

Will you please comment on the specific accusations Ms. Clinton made against your client and the effects they produced on Kathy Shelton, both in the short and long terms?

Jackson: What Ms. Clinton (then Ms. Rodham) said about Kathy Shelton in a court affidavit, under oath, was for the most part made up out of whole cloth.

There’s no reason to believe that Ms. Clinton had any credible source or factual basis for the outrageous, insulting, hurtful claims she made in that affidavit.

For instance, Ms. Clinton wrote that Kathy was emotionally unstable, that Kathy was prone to exaggeration, that Kathy had falsely accused people of touching her in the past, that Kathy came from a “disorganized family” (i.e., raised by a single mother) and therefore was prone to fantasize about older men and romanticize a sexual encounter.

These assertions and insinuations were probably typical blame-the-victim tactics of bygone eras, but in the mid-1970s when feminism had come into its own (particularly the anti-rape culture) and even our behemoth of a legal system was slowly catching up to standards of gender equality (e.g., rape shield laws began to be enacted state by state in 1974), one might expect a politically aware feminist and anti-rape advocate like Hillary Rodham to refuse to engage in blame-the-victim tactics — especially against a child victim.

The overall impact on Kathy as a young girl was to leave her feeling completely deprived of justice for the heinous crime committed against her, and leaving her feeling like it was somehow her fault.

I’d like to add, too, that this court affidavit was not the only place where Ms. Clinton has chosen to outright lie about Kathy and about this case.

Hillary’s two previous explanations of how she took the case are at odds with each other. In her audiotaped interview in the 1980s, she told journalist Roy Reed that the prosecutor (Mahlon Gibson) called her and said he had a defendant accused of rape and the guy “wanted a woman lawyer and would I do it as a favor to him.”

In her book Living History, she states that Mahlon Gibson called to tell her that an indigent prisoner accused of raping a twelve-year-old girl wanted a woman lawyer and that Gibson had recommended that the judge appoint Hillary. She states that she told Gibson she didn’t feel comfortable taking on such a client, but that Gibson “gently reminded me that I couldn’t very well refuse the judge’s request.” More recently, Hillary and her spokespeople have insisted that she was “court appointed,” implying that she was required to accept the case.

Significant questions exist as to all three of Hillary’s explanations. CONTINUE AT SITE

As we approach Election Day, there will be an incredible amount of talk about the polls. Mainstream media pundits will expound on the lead that Hillary Clinton has and how it is something that, in the short time left, can’t be overcome by Donald Trump. But is this “lead” that Hillary Clinton is said to possess and accurate reflection of the electorate?

Emails released by WikiLeaks last week prove that the Clinton team applied an enormous amount of pressure (as if it were needed) on the mainstream media into systematically and deliberately over-sampling Clinton-friendly demographics in their polling. The emails, that originated with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, included a detailed 37-page manual on how to go about most effectively skewing the polling results so as to give the Clinton campaign the numbers they needed to claim a lead.

It was their game plan all along to propagandize huge leads in the polls – through the Clinton-friendly mainstream media – to depress voter turnout for Donald Trump. A simple reading of Podesta’s email and the attached manual prove this beyond any doubt.

This is the inherent danger in a politically corrupt; a politically biased mainstream media. By creating “scientific polls” that, through the use of oversampling, skew the perception of a candidate’s popularity, they are manipulating the masses into thinking there is no reason to show up at the polls. To date, or at least until WikiLeaks exposed the scheme, the Clinton team strategy was working.

This scheme of the Clinton campaign to propagandize the polling data just before Election Day, quite successful until it was exposed, is exactly what Donald Trump and his surrogates are talking about when they make the argument that “the system is rigged.”

What was the Clinton telos? The end point, the aim of all their lying, cheating, criminality, dishonor, and degradation?

Given the latest Wiener scandals coming on top of the latest WikiLeaks scandals, we wonder, what did the Clintons really wish to end up as — and why? Are they Goethe’s Faust or tortured souls crushed by the weight of their money bags in Dante’s Fourth Circle of Hell?

For a few criminals, remorse comes with old age; but for the Clintons, near-70 was to be the capstone, the last chance to trump all their prior shenanigans. They were artists of amorality, and the election of 2016 was to be their magnum opus.

Collate the FBI reopened investigation, WikiLeaks Podesta trove, revelations about the Clinton Foundation, the e-mail–server scandal, the DNC disclosures, and the various off-the-cuff campaign remarks of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and one then ponders what was the point of the Clinton shakedowns, the loss of reputation, the crude lawbreaking, as they neared their seventh decade. To paraphrase Barack Obama, in his progressive sermonizing on making enough money, did the two ever think they had enough money, enough honors, enough power already?

The Hillary/Bill fortune — generated by pay-for-play influence peddling on the proposition that Bill would return to the White House under Hillary’s aegis and reward friends while punishing enemies — hit a reported $150 million some time ago, a fortune built not on farming, mining, insurance, finance, high-tech, or manufacturing, but on skimming off money. The Clintons are simply grifters whose insider access to government gave them the power to make rich people richer.

Long gone was the Scrooge-like need to write off used underwear as charitable tax deductions or to play 4-trillion-to-one odds in rigging a $100,000 cattle-futures profit on a $1,000 “investment,” or Hillary’s decade-and-a-half as a corporate lawyer masquerading as a children’s advocate. How pathetic the minor league Whitewater cons must seem now to the multimillionaire Clintons — such a tawdry ancient example of amateurish shakedowns when compared with the sophistication of real profiteering through the humanitarian-sounding, high-brow, corrupt Clinton Foundation.

The chorus of NeverTrumpers is wailing ever louder as election day and Hillary’s supposed victory approach. After more than a year of complaining about Trump crashing their political soiree, the Republicans attacking Trump still don’t seem to get how their own behavior contributed to the perception that they are out-of-touch elites disdainful of the Republican masses.

A recent example comes from premier NeverTrumper Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal. In his column Stephens bids farewell to a Republican Party stupid enough to nominate Trump, contrasting it with his imagined Golden Age of Republican policy excellence that Trump and his followers have destroyed. One policy in particular, immigration, reveals the distance between the political and pundit elite and the voting masses that helped make Trump the nominee:

At a 1980 Republican primary debate in Houston, candidates George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were asked whether the children of illegal immigrants should be allowed to attend public schools for free. Mr. Bush said they should. “We’re creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law,” he lamented.

Reagan agreed. Instead of “putting up a fence,” he asked, “why don’t we . . . make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then, while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here.” For good measure, Reagan suggested we should “open the border both ways.”

Where, in the populist fervor to build a wall with Mexico and deport millions of human beings, is that Republican Party today?

Take Bush senior’s statement first. It repeats basically the same clichés that the bipartisan Gang of Eight recycled in 2013 during their push for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, another euphemism for amnesty. All those hard-working, family-values illegal immigrants are embryonic conservatives, we were told, who just need legal status and social recognition so they can “come out of the shadows,” as John McCain said, and start voting Republican. The political apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: son Jeb ended his presidential ambitions by calling illegal immigration an “act of love.”

Democrats are in panic mode a week out from Election Day as they try to spin away the FBI’s newly announced discovery of a hoard of two-thirds of a million potentially sensitive emails apparently related to Hillary Clinton’s catastrophic tenure as America’s top diplomat.

Partisan hack James Carville is spewing wild conspiracy theories.

I think it is an outrage and I think the fact that the KGB is involved in this election is an outrage and I think the American people ought to take their democracy back regardless of what the press wants to do and the excuses they want to make for [FBI Director James] Comey. That’s what I think.

He added, “this is in effect an attempt to hijack an election. It ought to be called for what it is.”

Just this past July, Comey was praised by Democrats far and wide for his wisdom in opting not to pursue Clinton. There is evidence federal officials tried to hinder various investigations of Clinton and the endlessly corrupt Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which functions as a bribe processing center for would-be president Hillary Clinton.

But Democrats have suddenly flipped sides, denouncing Comey as an enemy of the republic now that he has opened an investigation into the newly discovered emails.

Carville, long known as the “Ragin’ Cajun,” is apoplectic because he thinks these emails could change the dynamics of the election.

The old Clinton hand may be right.

Investigators found 650,000 emails on a laptop computer they believe was used at home by disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D) and his wife, longtime senior Hillary aide Huma Abedin. The computer is reportedly the same device serial pervert Weiner used to send sexual messages to an underage girl.

“Underlying metadata suggests thousands of those messages could have been sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter,” reports the Wall Street Journal. Some of the information emailed may have been classified.

The WikiLeaks emails prove that Obama knew that Hillary was using a private email system.

As an experienced prosecutor, FBI director Comey knew that Hillary would argue in her defense that Obama knew about her using the private unsecured email system. Obama did not stop her, did not object, and corresponded with Hillary on her system. Given these facts, Hillary would argue she did not have the intent to violate the statutes because her superior, the command in chief, the president, conversed with her on her private email system. Hillary would argue, How can I have the intent to violate the law when the president knows I use the private email system he uses to contact me? Leaving aside that it is Hillary making the argument, it is a reasonable and powerful defense against the charges.

Comey recited the facts sufficient to establish a prima facie case that Hillary violated the law. This should have been enough to recommend indictment because one can infer intent from the facts. The facts were clear enough to warrant an inference that Hillary acted with intent. It is then up to a judge or jury, the trier of facts, to draw the inference. The trier of facts may or may not draw the inference, but the facts are sufficient to warrant an indictment. But Comey must have known that Obama knew about her use, and that Obama did not object or tell Hillary to stop. The FBI review of the emails must have shown emails to and from Obama and aides to Obama. Accordingly, Comey would have concluded that Hillary did not have the criminal intent because she believed that Obama was OK with her use of a private unsecure email server.

A review of Comey’s statement of July 5 shows (emphasis added):

1. “From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.”

Donna Brazile is all over the news right now and the villain of the day on most conservative websites for her role in obtaining presidential debate questions in advance and then providing them to the Clinton campaign ahead of the actual televised event. There is much outrage over her clearly dishonest and unethical behavior, with her laughable denial captured on FOX News, looking full face into the camera and lying as only a Democrat pol can when confronted with the hard evidence. Even the leftist media is seeking a bit of separation from this obvious cheater, as CNN has fired her as an on-air contributor.

But all this outrage is misdirected; Brazile merely provided the heads-up, very detailed for sure, as she not only gave the Clinton campaign the word-for-word question about a very emotional public issue – contaminated drinking water in Flint, Michigan – but also provided a physical description of the female questioner so there could be no mistaking when and where the stolen response needed to be used. Brazile even noted that the questioner had a rash from her public water contamination. As you could expect, armed with all that forbidden information, Clinton managed to be right on top of this emotional public issue during the debate, demonstrating how she’s a thoroughly prepared leader for America, right?

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! What this now exposed situation makes abundantly clear is that this contemptible woman, her loathsome campaign staff, and the despicable Democratic Party leadership, when offered the chance to cheat, even with tens of millions of Americans watching, had no reluctance to do so. Hillary Clinton went out there on that debate stage forearmed with at least one answer that we know of (and who knows how many others?), looked straight into those cameras just like dishonest Donna Brazile, and cheated before the entire world. And this is the person the Democratic Party offers to America to be entrusted with our futures and our nation with all our national wealth?

Crooked Hillary, indeed…and she infects all those around her.