RUTHFULLY YOURS

“If Jeb Bush’s campaign is struggling to stay afloat, he didn’t show it on Saturday,” CNN reports from Daniel Island, S.C. “A day after slashing salaries and cutting campaign staff, the former Florida governor got an enthusiastic reception and delivered one of his strongest campaign performances to date.”

Well, that’s one way of looking at it, but we have another. Consider the most widely discussed passage from his Daniel Island remarks:

Bush got one of his biggest responses from the crowd when he lamented the state of politics in Washington and argued that [Donald] Trump is not the kind of leader that could break through the gridlock.

“If this election is about how we’re going to fight to get nothing done, then . . . I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation,” he said.

“I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that,” Bush added.

Thanks to Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony on Thursday, we now understand why the former secretary of state never wanted anyone to see her emails and why the State Department sat on documents. Turns out those emails and papers show that the Obama administration deliberately misled the nation about the deadly events in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.

Don’t forget how we came to this point. Mrs. Clinton complained in her testimony on Capitol Hill that past Congresses had never made the overseas deaths of U.S. officials a “partisan” issue. That’s because those past deaths had never inspired an administration to concoct a wild excuse for their occurrence, in an apparent attempt to avoid blame for a terror attack in a presidential re-election year.

The early hints that this is exactly what happened after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans cast doubt on every White House-issued “fact” about the fiasco and led to the establishment of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s select committee.

Let down by her overconfidence that the homebrew server would remain secret.

No wonder Hillary Clinton feels aggrieved by her congressional grilling on Benghazi. She had the hard luck to be secretary of state in the Internet era, when digital secrets escape despite the best efforts to keep them hidden. Unintended transparency is better than none.

In an earlier era, the American public would never have learned Mrs. Clinton knew during the attack that it was a planned operation by terrorists and not a spontaneous protest as the administration insisted.

Mrs. Clinton kept her more than 60,000 emails off the State Department’s server. They came to light only because the House Select Committee on Benghazi discovered her secret email system. Those emails—not Mrs. Clinton—were the star witness at last week’s hearing, disclosing with precision who knew what when.

Publicly, Mrs. Clinton issued a statement at 10:32 p.m. Sept. 11, 2012, the evening of the attack, blaming the YouTube video. But the committee disclosed that at 11:12 p.m., she told her daughter, Chelsea, by email: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Qaeda-like group.” At 11:49 p.m., according to a State Department email, she told the president of Libya: “There is a gun battle ongoing, which I understand Ansar [al] Sharia”—the local al Qaeda affiliate—“is claiming responsibility for.”

In 2016, there are 14 Republican presidential candidates for whom Ronald Reagan is both the benchmark for conservative values and the lodestar of conservative ideas. There’s also one who wrote, in the second to last year of Reagan’s presidency, that he had been “so smooth, so effective a performer” that “only now, seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.”

The gadfly was Donald Trump, writing in his book The Art of the Deal. But it wasn’t just a glancing blow; to promote the book, Trump launched a political campaign that tore into Reagan’s record, including his willingness to stand up to the Soviet Union. Advised by the notorious Roger Stone, a Nixon-era GOP trickster, in 1987 Trump took out full-page ads in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and theWashington Post blasting Reagan and his team.

In the text, which was addressed “To the American people,” Trump declared, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” The problem was America’s leading role in defending democracy, which had been fulfilled by Republicans and Democrats all the way back to FDR. Foreshadowing his 2015 argument that would have Mexico pay for an American-built border wall, Trump then said that the United States should present its allies with a bill for defense services rendered.

There are two kinds of evil: the passive, and the active.

“Clearly, it seems to me that Hillary Clinton is: a) a liar and an amoral scoundrel who ought to be serving jail time; or b) an upstanding woman of the highest character and virtue and a paragon of honesty.”

I’ve seen that one-step-forward-two-steps-back syntax too many times in written and verbal statements. If something seems to be to a person, then it isn’t clear at all to him, regardless of the subject matter He is confessing that he isn’t quite sure what it is he is pronouncing judgment on. We can thank a long line of philosophers – for example, Rene Descartes – for making that contradiction of certainty-cum-doubt ubiquitous as a bad thinking habit, and as a repeated element in common language. We can also cite David Hume and John Dewey, among others.

It’s a far more grievous error than speakers and writers, in making comparisons, saying different than and not different from. Different than means absolutely nothing. As a conjunction, than is not synonymous with the preposition from.

It seems to me is also symptomatic of a lack of courage and resolve to be forthright in one’s statements. It’s a woozy approximation that is supposed to stand in for rock-solid certainty. It’s cowardly. It’s a half-full/half-empty glass of nothing. It’s like Michael Moore substituting for Cary Grant, or Rosie O’Donnell for Audrey Hepburn.

US Senator Ted Cruz, the conservative Republican firebrand from Texas, is running for president. Up until a few weeks ago, his candidacy was met with indifference as the media and political operatives all dismissed its viability. But that is beginning to change. The voices arguing that Cruz, the favorite of Tea Party fiscal conservatives and Evangelical Christians may have what it takes to win the Republican nomination have multiplied.

Since arriving in Washington four years ago, Cruz has arguably been Israel’s most avid defender in the Senate. During Operation Protective Edge in July 2014, Cruz used his authority as a member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee to force the Obama administration to end the Federal Aviation Commission’s ban on US flights to Ben-Gurion Airport. Cruz announced at the time that he would put a hold on all State Department appointments until the administration justified the flight ban.

Rather than defend its position, the administration restored flights to Israel after 36 hours.

Last summer Cruz led the national opposition to US President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. He brought thousands of activists to the Capitol to participate in a rally he organized calling for Congress to vote down the deal. Rather than use the rally as a means to promote himself, Cruz invited Republican front-runner real estate developer Donald Trump to join him at the rally. Trump’s participation ensured that the event received wide coverage from the national media.

Hillary Clinton, by wearing the Hijab, is advertising that she is the property of a man

Hillary’s latest campaign video tries to build up her non-existent foreign policy experience. That means making as much as possible out of her feminist speech in China… which avoided criticizing a Communist regime that forces women to have abortion. (Or as her Planned Parenthood pals call it, health care outreach.) And showing her travel photo slideshow.

It’s basically like those travel videos friends force you to watch… except this is a really expensive commercial and no one can force you to watch it.

But in odd contrast to touting Hillary’s feminism and strength, is this shot of her wearing a Hijab; an Islamic garment of submission.

Not only has the Hijab consistently been a source of Muslim violence against women, both in punishing women who don’t wear it and punishing women who take it off, but its origins lie in an Islamic commandment distinguishing Muslim women, who couldn’t be raped, from non-Muslim slave women captured by Mohammed’s rampaging gang.

It’s really quite explicit.

Hillary Clinton has only one accomplishment; the Libyan War. Bombing Libya in support of a Muslim Brotherhood takeover was Hillary’s pet project.

Obama unenthusiastically signed off on a war that he had told members of Congress “is all Secretary Clinton’s matter.”

The Pentagon fought Hillary’s illegal war every step of the way. Both the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs opposed Hillary’s plan to bomb Libya. One of the Chairman’s top aides said that he did not trust the reports coming out of the State Department and the CIA, then controlled by Clinton loyalist Leon Panetta. When it was clear that the Clintonites had gotten their war on, an irritated Secretary of Defense Gates resigned after failing to stop Hillary’s war and was replaced by Panetta.

As the State Department set the military agenda, the Pentagon retaliated by taking over the diplomatic agenda attempting to arrange a ceasefire with the Gaddafi regime over Hillary’s objections.

Hillary was using the State Department to start a war while the military was trying to use diplomacy to stop a war. The Pentagon lost the power struggle and one of her minions took over the military to make sure that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Jihadists would be able to overrun another country.

Huma Abedin had beaten the Secretary of Defense.

Donald Trump has recovered from a post-debate dip to post his highest national average, 27.2 percent, since the month between the first and second GOP debates. This includes his single highest national poll result, 32 percent in the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, since his 33 percent in the early September edition of that same poll.

Trump’s demographic-support trends remain steady. He does better among non-college graduates than among college grads; among men than among women; among moderates and liberals than among conservatives; and among independents than among Republicans. His support remains unusually similar across all factions, however, making him the least factional of any GOP front runner in the modern era.

Trump’s state average support also remains high, although the smaller number of state-level polls means this week’s average is not directly comparable to the averages from weeks two and three. Seven state-level polls, including three of New Hampshire, have been released since last week. Including the average from the three New Hampshire polls, Trump’s state average is now 34.1 percent. The states polled, however, include only 54 of the nation’s 435 congressional districts, down from the over 130 CDs included in the state averages from prior weeks.

Hillary Clinton has done Trey Gowdy an enormous favor. In anticipation of her testimony on Thursday before the Benghazi select committee he chairs, and with a lot of Republican help, she has framed the committee as a partisan political witch-hunt obsessed with dashing her presidential ambitions.

To regain credibility, all Gowdy needs to do is demonstrate that it is not. Meaning: all Gowdy needs to do is focus on why the United States had its officials stationed in Benghazi, one of the world’s most dangerous places for Americans.

What mission was so essential that it was necessary to keep Americans on-site when the jihadist threat had become so intense that other nations and organizations were pulling their people out?

These questions implicate disastrous policy that was, very much, bipartisan policy: (a) withdrawing American support for the Qaddafi regime that our government was funding and allied with against jihadist terror; (b) switching sides to aid and arm the jihadist-rife “rebels” who opposed Qaddafi; (c) waging a war under false pretenses – i.e., working for Qaddafi’s ouster, without congressional authorization, under the guise of a U.N. mandate that only permitted the protection of civilians; and (d) transitioning from support of Libyan jihadists to support for Syrian jihadists – i.e., transitioning from the policy that has left Libya a failed state with a growing ISIS and al Qaeda foot print, to a policy that contributed to the ascendancy of ISIS – by among other things, abetting the shipment of weapons from Libya to Syria.