RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Meet the Press this morning, Donald Trump insisted that:

he was “100 percent right” when he said he saw thousands of Muslims in Jersey City, New Jersey, cheering the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, even though fact-checkers have debunked his assertion.

In a phone interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said he has heard from “hundreds of people that agree” that there were televised Muslim celebrations of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which he used as evidence to show his remarks were true.

“I saw it. So many people saw it,” said Trump, who, in the race for the November 2016 election, has been among the most vocal of the Republican candidates in expressing skepticism about Muslims in the United States. “So, why would I take it back? I’m not going to take it back.”

When NBC anchor Chuck Todd suggested the people Trump heard from are supporters and might want to agree with him, Trump interrupted to note the “huge Muslim population”

The ISIS Threat Represents a Clash of Civilizations, and Hillary Won’t Admit It

Has Hillary Clinton separated herself from President Obama by taking a tougher and more realistic position on the threat from ISIS? That’s what many in the news media are saying based on some of her recent foreign-policy statements, such as her remarks in a November 19 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations:

ISIS operates across three mutually reinforcing dimensions: a physical enclave in Iraq and Syria; an international terrorist network that includes affiliates across the region and beyond; and an ideological movement of radical jihadism. We have to target and defeat all three, and time is of the essence.

This portrayal of the ISIS threat sounds like an improvement over the awkward rhetoric used by President Obama to discuss what he insists on calling ISIL or Daesh, and his refusal to use words such as “jihad” and “jihadism.” But Hillary’s rhetorical improvements were offset by caveats indicating that she actually has not moved very far from the president and has a worldview that is just as incoherent.

For example, Clinton criticized “the obsession in some quarters [meaning Republicans] with a clash of civilizations.” Clinton also echoed Obama’s frequent claims that the United States is not at war with Islam when she said, “I don’t think we’re at war with all Muslims. I think we’re at war with jihadists.”

Even as Hillary Clinton is upping her anti-Wall Street rhetoric, here comes word that the Clinton Foundation is running a private-equity company down in Colombia.

The private-equity field is where Mitt Romney earned his fortune — and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads from the Obama campaign back in 2008.

The foundation’s Bogota-based firm, Fondo Acceso, was started in 2010 by Bill Clinton, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and mining magnate Frank Giustra, with seed funding of $20 million from the foundation’s Clinton-Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative and the SLIM Foundation, the Washington Free Beacon reports.

Anything to hide here? Well, Fondo Acceso took down its website once the Beacon broke the story. And the venture wasn’t even registered as a private-equity fund in Colombia, thereby skirting government oversight. A good move for an investment firm linked to the US secretary of state.

Ken Boehm, a watchdog with the National Legal and Policy Center, notes, “At the minimum, the Clinton Foundation should disclose every company that received investment funds from them, because the public is entitled to know whether those companies benefited from any State Department foreign-aid programs.”

To hear Hillary Clinton tell it, she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest — even though she was already 6 years old when he made his famous ascent.

On a visit to war-torn Bosnia in 1996, she claimed she and her entourage landed under sniper fire and had to run “with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base” — although videos of her arrival show her waltzing serenely across the tarmac, waving to the crowd.

She blamed the 2012 attack on American diplomatic and intelligence-gathering installations in Benghazi on “a disgusting video” when she knew almost from the first moment that it was a jihadist assault that took the lives of four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya.

No wonder the late William Safire, writing in The New York Times in 1996, at the height of the Whitewater investigation, called her a “congenital liar.” Said Safire: “She is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.”
Photo: Reuters

Baron Munchausen has nothing on Hillary Rodham Clinton.

(Reuters) — U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s support among Republicans has dropped 12 points in less than a week, marking the real estate mogul’s biggest decline since he vaulted to the top of the field in July, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

“It’s clear at this point that Donald Trump acts more like a bully than a ‘traditional’ presidential candidate,” observed New York magazine’s Jesse Singal in September:

The current leader in the GOP polls gleefully flouts all of the usual rules of political and social decorum, constantly launching attacks—many of them rather offensive—against both his political rivals and members of the media he believes have treated him unfairly. . . .

Part of what’s been strange about the trajectory of the campaign so far is that Trump hasn’t been punished, in any real sense, for engaging in the sort of behavior that almost everyone agrees is terrible in any setting. Yes, each gross incident is followed by a wave of denunciations, but they don’t seem to have an impact—if anything, Trump seems to be gaining popularity by bullying.

Singal consulted with a “bullying expert,” a UCLA psychologist, who advised Trump’s Republican rivals to counter his bullying by ganging up against him.

“As of yet,” Singal observed, “that united force hasn’t quite emerged in the GOP primary.” As of now, however, it does seem to have emerged in the media, thanks to a dust-up between Trump and a reporter named Serge Kovaleski.

In 2001, Kovaleski was working for the Washington Post. On Sept. 18 of that year, he shared a byline on a story titled “Northern New Jersey Draws Probers’ Eyes.” The story noted that Jersey City had been the base of operations for Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who directed several terrorist attacks and conspiracies, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. “Law enforcement officials said northeastern New Jersey could be potentially fertile ground” in investigating the 9/11 attacks, the Post reported. The story included this tidbit:

The recent decision by Princeton to repudiate its most famous president, Woodrow Wilson, for his racism – after a century of adoration – is part of a pattern in leftism. Wilson was the first “liberal” or “leftist” or “progressive” president, and he was the most racist president in American history as well. His son-in-law, McAdoo, was supported by the Klan for the 1924 Democrat nomination.

Like virtually all Democrat presidents until Carter, Wilson was a bigot. If this sounds extreme, consider this Democrat presidential legacy. Grover Cleveland appointed Klansmen to the Supreme Court. Wilson purge blacks from federal jobs. FDR appointed a Klansman to be attorney general and another to the Supreme Court. Truman joined the Klan, albeit briefly, and his writings discovered a few years ago showed him as an anti-Semite as well. JFK banned Sammie Davis, Jr. from performing in the White House. LBJ opposed every Civil Rights bill while in the Senate. And so on.

Hillary professes to support women, but she actually supports those who treat women atrociously. Her husband is the worst sexual predator in American political history. This is not the problem Clinton had with his myriad affairs while married to Hillary, although that is what the left professes to be the issue.

The real problem was not whom he had consensual sex with while married – the Monica story was about Clinton’s looking into the camera and lying to America – but the women he forced himself upon. The list of women making this accusation is long, and none of these women were Republicans. The story is depressingly familiar.

Paula Jones was crudely harassed as an Arkansas state employee by Governor Bill Clinton. President Bill Clinton groped a horrified Kathleen Wiley on the very day her husband had committed suicide. Arkansas attorney general Clinton beat and savagely raped Juanita Broaddrick, according to her utterly credible report.

Here is real misogyny, not the invented fantasies of crazy feminists. Here Hillary is either stonily silent or lashing out at these women, who made serious charges against her dishonest husband. How can someone like her be taken seriously when purporting to defend women?

Americans are more cynical than ever about politics, and with ample cause. Witness this week’s denunciations of Pfizer Inc. by politicians for trying to survive competitively under the tax laws these same politicians wrote.

On Monday the New York-based drug giant finally announced its long-mooted merger with Ireland’s Allergan in a roughly $160 billion deal that is the largest tie-up in a record year for corporate deal-making. The merger will, among other things, make it easier for the new Ireland-based Pfizer PLC to bring profits generated overseas back to the U.S. But the same politicians who continue to tilt the playing field against U.S. companies are blasting Pfizer for trying to do right by its shareholders, workers and customers.

“For too long, powerful corporations have exploited loopholes that allow them to hide earnings abroad to lower their taxes,” thundered Hillary Clinton, that epic collector of corporate cash tribute. “Now Pfizer is trying to reduce its tax bill even further.”

Even further? Its effective tax rate of 25% is among the highest in its industry anywhere in the world, hence the need to move the legal address and endure grief from politicians like Mrs. Clinton. Senate Democratic leaders Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer also denounced Pfizer for abiding by the tax laws they’ve done so much to write and preserve.

Ya don’t say…

If the attacks in Paris have dramatically reshaped the national conversation surrounding the presidential race, it may be news to Democratic ad makers.

At least three Republican candidates or their super PACs have gone up on television with hard-hitting ads focused on national security in the days since the ISIL assault on Paris — most recently Marco Rubio, in a 30 second, straight-to-camera spot called “A Civilizational Struggle” — but recent spots from the leading Democratic candidates have remained zeroed-in on domestic policy, highlighting the divergent tracks guiding the two primary races.

What the Republican candidates and their PACs are doing could be dismissed as mere opportunism by cynics, but that isn’t what is going on here.

The GOP candidates, however disparate and/or crazy, are, on their shallowest days, the adults in the 2016 campaign room. None of them believe that incandescent light bulbs are a bigger threat to the planet than ISIS, which is a position from which all of the Democrats are operating. They are responding to what happened in Paris more intensely and openly because America and the world need a strong president to emerge from the next election.