RUTHFULLY YOURS

“I’m not a crook.”

In 1973 the sitting president, Richard Nixon, used these words at a news conference to deny allegations he had profited off his public service.

In 2016 an aspiring president, Hillary Clinton, as part of her campaign for the White House, is advancing an aggressive variant of the Nixon defense. It runs like this: Anything that isn’t criminal is permissible—and therefore none of it should be disqualifying for the Oval Office.

This has become the go-to argument for Team Clinton these days. Thus Maryland Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings was quick out of the box last week when the State Department’s inspector general released a damning report finding that then-Secretary of State Clinton had defied the department’s rules by setting up her private email server. Mr. Cummings, ABC News said, pointed out that the inspector general’s report “does not accuse Clinton of any crime.” The implication is that it therefore doesn’t matter.

Chalk it up as one legacy of the first Clinton presidency, which has prepared the way for the second. Because by refusing to resign after being caught out in an affair with an intern, President Bill Clinton successfully lowered the bar for would-be President Hillary.

In his fight to remain in office, Mr. Clinton’s argument was that because sex between two consenting adults—even between the president of the United States and a subordinate 27 years his junior—wasn’t a crime, it was nobody’s business but his and his family’s. In this brave new world, even perjury turned out not to be a crime when Bill Clinton did it, because it was about sex.

Today the No Crime/No Foul defense defines the case for Mrs. Clinton. And she and her defenders have been invoking it for years:

“There were no criminal violations involved here.” The speaker was Clinton Budget Director Leon Panetta in July 1993, putting forward the White House party line on the firing of seven people in the travel office, in which some had detected Hillary’s hand. Three years later, an internal memo would surface confirming Mrs. Clinton as the force behind the sackings.

“As far as even a breath of criminal activity by either the president and the first lady, it will turn out to be nothing at all.” This time it was White House counsel Lloyd Cutler in March 1994, dismissing the inquiry into the smelly Whitewater land deal. The remark came at the same time Mrs. Clinton was explaining to the press that she hadn’t been forthcoming about the details because she had been trying to protect her family’s privacy. CONTINUE AT SITE

Oh Puleez! The Clintons take the Olympic gold in chicanery, lying, and fraud…..you don’t have to like or vote for Trump…..but nothing beats Hillary for prevarication and poor judgement with respect to Israel (Max Blumenthal’s e-mails), trying to overthrow democracy in Honduras, resetting the button with Russia, Benghazi, blind spots on North Korea, and mum on global jihad….rsk
The other day I briefly caught sight of—who else?— Donald Trump, on—what else?—“The O’Reilly Factor,” talking about the Middle East. The presumptive Republican nominee was airing his opinion that we “should have never gone into Iraq, but when we got out we should have kept the oil.”

Kept the oil? Like, slipped it in our pocket on the way out?

This wasn’t the first time Mr. Trump has expounded on this theme, and frequent repetition has not made his views any more coherent. Mr. Trump says we ought to steer clear of the Middle East’s imbroglios—but then says we should seize its oil fields. He lambastes our allies as freeloaders and military nincompoops who throw down their arms at the first sign of danger—but then says he would expect these same allies to provide perimeter defense for the oil fields we’ve stolen from them.

Point out these contradictions to the candidate, and he’s likely to rejoin that you’re a loser who’s been wrong about everything and doesn’t understand the art of leadership. Point them out to his admirers and apologists, and they’ll say you’re missing the deeper point, which is that Mr. Trump is reflecting the anger of everyday Americans who want a pragmatist in the White House whose instinct is to put America first and negotiate the details later.

What you won’t get is a satisfactory response to the basic question: How, other than massively garrisoning the Middle East, does Mr. Trump propose to keep the oil?

There was a time when there was a price to be paid in American politics for evading questions. “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Sen. Howard Baker famously asked in 1973 of Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal. The country never got a believable answer from the White House, and Nixon resigned the presidency the following year.CONTINUE AT SITE

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, Bill Kristol doubled down on his betrayal of this country with a pair of tweets:

“Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate — an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance,” Kristol tweeted.

He also said, “Those accused of betraying GOP by opposing Trump can take heart from P. Henry 251 years ago today: ‘If this be treason, make the most of it!’”

This fatuous invocation of an American patriot to justify the betrayal typifies the arrogant disregard for political realities shared by all those involved in a defection that could produce even greater disasters than the Obama era’s 400,000 deaths by jihad and 20 million refugees across the Middle East.

A week earlier, a “Never Trump” diatribe appeared in National Review, written by Charles Murray. To summarize why “Trump is unfit outside the normal parameters” to be president, Murray cited these words by NY Times columnist David Brooks:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa … He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12.

This is a perfect instance of “Trump derangement syndrome,” the underlying animus that motivates Kristol and his destructive cohorts. Dismissing Trump as an ignoramus and a stunted twelve-year-old is the stuff of schoolyard put-downs, not a serious critique of someone with Trump’s considerable achievements. Yet this is typical of Trump’s diehard opponents on the right. Is Trump more unprepared than Barack Obama whose qualification for the presidency was a lifetime career as a left-wing agitator? And how did that work out? Despite the lacunae in his executive resume, Obama is now regarded as “one of the most consequential presidents in American history” by reasonably qualified experts.

Can Trump be reasonably criticized, and is he something of a loose cannon? Of course he can, and yes he is. But criticisms that focus exclusively on the candidate miss the larger reality of this election, which is not merely a contest between two candidates but a clash between two parties and constituencies with radically differing views of what this country is and should be about, and even more importantly about the threats we face and how to deal with them.

When I think about the slow and inexorable––but, of course, inevitable––political demise of Hillary Clinton, I am reminded of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men,” which ends with this haunting refrain:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Hillary’s whimper, it seems clear, will come with an impotently furious last gasp, as the noose that Barack Obama has placed around her neck tightens and tightens and tightens until all we hear is her spasmodic cough, a few hoarse protestations, and a final pitiful bleat––and not the ear-splitting assault of “that voice,” which I described in a previous article.

How could this happen to the woman who former Democrat House Ways and Means Committee Chairman and convicted felon Dan Rostenkowski called “the smartest woman in the world”?

No doubt it started at Wellesley College where Hillary, born to a family of Republicans and an avid supporter herself of the1964 arch-conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, as well as the president of the Wellesley College chapter of College Republicans, was irresistibly attracted to the writings of radical leftist Saul Alinsky, of Rules for Radicals fame, who she wrote her thesis about and also kept in close touch with for years after she graduated.

At her graduation in 1969, Republican Senator Edward Brooke delivered a stirring and enthusiastically received commencement address. Hillary––whose graduation speech followed––exhibited a shocking display of rudeness when she slammed the first black senator to be elected to the U.S. Senate. It would not be the last time she displayed a remarkable aptitude for alienating an audience.

At Yale Law School, she hooked her wagon to the star of fellow student Bill Clinton, and when the roguish good ole boy became governor of Arkansas, Hillary served 12 years as the state’s First Lady, racking up an impressive list of scandals of her very own. The short list includes:

A $100,000 windfall from cattle futures after a $1,000 investment (all the money she had in her account at the time).
The Castle Grande real estate scam.
Her role as attorney for the Rose law firm in what would become the putatively criminal Whitewater affair that would follow her to the White House.
The serial philandering of her husband in which she was either a willing collaborator or, as Donald Trump has said, an “enabler.”

THE SCANDAL QUEEN MOVES UP

Within months of taking up residence in the White House as First Lady of the United States, Hillary put her scandal expertise to work. In May 1993, she was accused of having a central hand in firing several long-time employees of the White House Travel Office in order to give the pricey travel business to her Hollywood pals. A couple of months later, in July 1993, White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster was said to have committed suicide, although the case for this murder has been made persuasively by, among others, Newsmax.com founder Christopher Ruddy, in his 1993 book, “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation.”

“Antisemitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That’s why antisemitism is becoming an issue.”

–Noam Chomsky, 2002.

“Over 99 percent of all new income generated in the economy has gone to the top 1 percent.”

—Bernie Sanders, 2016.

In mid-April of this year the exigencies of an impending primary election in New York, where he lagged far behind Hillary Clinton among likely Jewish Democratic voters, forced Bernie Sanders to suspend his national Jewish “outreach” coordinator—one Simone Zimmerman. It was revealed that her ostensibly warm Jewish heart had a very cold spot reserved for Israel. That he had appointed such a person to such a position in the first place was a true indication of where Sanders’ own sympathies lay. Any uncertainty about this was put to rest in a debate in Brooklyn where he said: “I believe the United States and the rest of the world have got to work together to help the Palestinian people.” He is now practicing what he preached.

No sooner did a desperate Hillary Clinton direct the head of the DNC to bestow upon Sanders five of the fifteen positions on the Democratic Party’s platform committee than he hastened to fill two of them with well-known Israel-haters, or what he calls “helpers” of the Palestinian people, and a third with a politician who is a convert to Islam and once recommended Louis Farrakhan as “a role model for black youth,” and “not an anti-Semite.” Sanders has in the past displayed unseemly envy and sycophantic admiration of foreign countries—the socialism of Sweden, the dictatorship of Nicaragua, the health care of Cuba, the charms of Yaroslavl as honeymoon site and sister city to Burlington, Vermont. But these appointments reveal not only his belief that the key to American foreign policy is the Arab-Israeli conflict, but that Israel’s “intransigence” is the cause of the manifold miseries of the Middle East—a view that even the State Department and its most dogmatic peace-processors have finally, albeit with great sadness, abandoned.

While the State Department’s own internal probe found former Secretary Hillary Clinton violated federal recordkeeping laws, it’s not the first time she and her top aides shielded her e-mail from public disclosure while serving in a government position.

As first lady, Hillary was embroiled in another scheme to bury sensitive White House e-mails, known internally as “Project X.”

In 1999, as investigators looked into Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and other scandals involving the then-first lady, it was discovered that more than 1 million subpoenaed e-mails were mysteriously “lost” due to a “glitch” in a West Wing computer server.

The massive hole in White House archives covered a critical two-year period — 1996 to 1998 — when Republicans and special prosecutor Ken Starr were subpoenaing White House e-mails.

Despite separate congressional investigations and a federal lawsuit over Project X, high-level e-mails dealing with several scandals were never turned over. And the full scope of Bill and Hillary Clintons’ culpability in the parade of scandals was never known.

To those well-versed in Clinton shenanigans, this all sounds distressingly familiar.

A scathing inspector general’s report this week was just the first in what is likely to be a series of official actions related to her private server stemming from the FBI, a federal courthouse and Capitol Hill.

Clinton’s presidential campaign has failed to quiet the furor over the issue, which has dogged her for more than a year.

In the next few weeks — just as the likely Democratic presidential nominee hopes to pivot towards a general election — it will face its toughest scrutiny yet.

“All of that feeds into this overarching problem of public distrust of her,” said Grant Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University.

“To put it in slang terms, she’s got a pretty deeply held street rep at this point. This fits the street rep,” he added.

The State Department’s watchdog report was especially damaging, given the official nature of its source. The report claimed that Clinton never sought approval for her “homebrew” email setup, that her use of the system violated the department’s record-keeping rules and that it would have been rejected had she brought it up to department officials.

Clinton’s allies attempted to paint the office as partisan in the weeks ahead of the report’s release, but the effort failed to leave a lasting impact.

The list of New York’s legendary crime families — the Bonannos, Colombos, Gambinos, Genoveses, and Luccheses — requires this addition: The Clintons.

Hardly a day passes without Hillary, Bill, or one of their gang landing in hot water. The Clintons’ inner circle teems with people embroiled in scandal, under investigation, or heading into or out of jail.

In a report that surfaced Wednesday, the State Department inspector general pulverized Hillary’s claims that her outlaw e-mail server was perfectly legal. The report said that Hillary “did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”

When staffers warned that her private server was vulnerable to hackers, they were ordered “never to speak of the Secretary’s personal e-mail system again.” Indeed, in a January 9, 2011, e-mail, technology aide Bryan Pagliano wrote, “We were attacked again so I shut [the server] down for a few min.” And when then–deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin suggested that Hillary use government e-mail, she chose personal secrecy over national security: “I don’t want the personal being accessible.”

Earlier in this fiasco, Hillary said, “I’m more than ready to talk to anybody, anytime. And I’ve encouraged all of [my staffers] to be very forthcoming.” Those were mere words. In fact, the report states, “Secretary Clinton declined OIG’s request for an interview,” as did Abedin, then–chief of staff Cheryl Mills, former deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, and four others who served Hillary at State.

Meanwhile, as many as 49 FBI agents are exploring the criminality and possible intelligence damage wrought by Clinton’s Chappaqua server and the 2,115 classified e-mails it contained.

According to Forbes, the Clintons went from — as Hillary put it — “dead broke” in early 2001 to earning $230 million through 2014. This happened while she made between $145,100 and $174,000 annually as a U.S. senator from 2001 to 2009 and $186,600 as secretary of state through 2013.

What’s the Clintons’ secret? They seemingly wrap their fingers in fly paper — to grab as many Benjamins as possible.

While Hillary was at State, Bill was a speech-making machine. He charged up to $750,000 per appearance, often paid by Ericsson, TD Bank, the United Arab Emirates, and other entities with business before the State Department.

‘To Clinton’

We need to make “Clintoning” a thing. (I’d argue the same for Trump, but he brilliantly picked a last name that already means something. If I had his last name, every time I got into a whose-business-card-is-better contest — which is actually never — I’d slap mine down and shout, “That’s the Trump card, bitches.”)

The first problem is there are two Clintons. Back when it was really just Bubba out there, the term would be unavoidably sexual. I’m reminded of Michael Kinsley’s response when the Clinton White House was insisting Bill was simply Monica Lewinsky’s mentor. It went something like, “Yeah, right. I’m sure he mentored her senseless.”

I don’t mean to be unduly harsh — just duly harsh — but Hillary makes any of the limerick-quality double entendres unworkable. That’s particularly unfortunate because Rodham, her maiden name, is particularly well-suited for such associations. “Jeffrey Epstein’s plane was like a Caligulan entourage of Rodhamanites.”

Appetite All the Way Down

The amazing thing about Hillary and Bill Clinton is that they are united by no central idea, no governing philosophy that doesn’t — upon close inspection — boil down to the idea that they should be in charge.

Yes, I know. That’s not what they would say. They would argue that with the right experts in charge, the government can do wonderful things to help people. But what the government should do is constantly changing, according to both of them. Bill once declared, “The Era of Big Government is over.” He didn’t mean it. He certainly didn’t want it to be true. He just said it because that’s what he does: He says what he needs to say. I don’t approvingly quote Jesse Jackson all that often (though I do find myself saying, “Keep hope alive,” a lot these days), but I think he had it right when he said Bill had no core beliefs, he was all appetite.

Hillary, in her own way, strikes me as even worse in this regard. Can you name a single substantial policy that she hasn’t flipped on — or wouldn’t change — if it were in her political self-interest? Gay marriage? Free trade? Illegal immigration?

Strip away all of the political posturing and positioning, and their “philosophy” that government run by experts can do wonderful things should really be translated as “government run by us.”

Not too long ago Democrats were America’s pro-Israel party. Harry Truman recognized Israel moments after the Jewish state declared independence in 1948. JFK sold advanced anti-aircraft missiles to Jerusalem, ending a de facto U.S. arms embargo. Bill Clinton was famously close to the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

If that party isn’t dead, it’s close. This week Bernie Sanders named James Zogby of the Arab-American Institute and professor Cornel West to the party’s platform-drafting committee. The pair are expected to push hard for a more “even-handed” position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which in practice means denouncing Israel at every turn.

Mr. West offered a flavor of his even-handedness on Facebook in 2014 during Israel’s last war with Hamas. “Let us not be deceived,” he wrote. “The Israeli massacre of innocent Palestinians, especially the precious children, is a crime against humanity! The rockets of Hamas indeed are morally wrong and politically ineffective—but these crimes pale in the face of the U.S. supported Israeli slaughters of innocent civilians.”

Mr. Zogby has prominently endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, calling it “a legitimate and moral response to Israeli policy.” BDS has gained steam in recent years on college campuses, where Palestinian victimology plays well and students are easily misled about the causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

These views go well beyond the usual bounds of fair criticism of Israel. No other country—including a genuine occupier like China in Tibet—is being singled out for boycotts the way Israel is. The suggestion that Israel deliberately “massacres” innocent Palestinians is false based on everything we know about Israel’s military restraint and war practices. If Palestinians wanted to end Israel’s occupation, they could have taken the deal offered to them at Camp David in 2000 when Bill Clinton was President. CONTINUE AT SITE