RUTHFULLY YOURS

A week ago Hillary Clinton’s allies accused the State Department Inspector General’s office of belonging to the vast right-wing conspiracy. So you have to admire her chutzpah this week in trying to spin a memo from that same office to exonerate her use of a renegade private email server. All the more so because the new memo strengthens the case that she mishandled national secrets.

In Thursday’s Democratic debate, Mrs. Clinton hailed a new document from State IG Steve Linick that summarizes his view of the email practices of five prior Secretaries of State. The memo says he found a few instances of “sensitive material” sent to the private email accounts of Republicans Colin Powell and staffers to Condoleezza Rice.

“Now you have these people in the government who are doing the same thing [to Powell and Rice’s aides] they’ve been doing to me,” claimed Mrs. Clinton—that is, “retroactively classifying” documents. “I agree with Secretary Powell, who said today this is an absurdity.”
Ah, yes, the old everybody-does-it defense. Mrs. Clinton wants Americans to believe it was common practice for top diplomats to use private email, and that they are all now subject to overzealous interagency squabbling over classification. By Friday Democrats were spinning that Mrs. Clinton is a political victim for having been singled out. Her media phalanx is buying this line, though the Powell and Rice details prove the opposite—and how reckless Mrs. Clinton was by comparison.

Laconia, N.H.

Lake Winnipesaukee has a monsoon season, apparently, but sheets of rain did not prevent voters from packing the former mill where Marco Rubio spoke Wednesday. The fire marshals closed the doors, as they did the night before in Exeter and would later that evening in Dover. Fresh off his surge in Iowa to a stronger-than-anticipated third, the senator is drawing crowds beyond the merely curious that feature some ineffable, heightened quality—something approaching genuine enthusiasm.

Mr. Rubio’s message is the same as it always was, with a well-rehearsed rap that matches Ted Cruz’s. But his political bet is that some New Hampshire voters want their anger tempered by optimism and a cheerful note or two.

The Florida senator’s combination of optimism and despair can nonetheless be contradictory. America is the greatest nation in the history of the world, he says, but it’s at risk of decline amid extraordinary challenges, and by the way if the present is terrible, look forward to the glorious “new American century” of the future.

Mr. Rubio can be as acid as Mr. Cruz or Donald Trump about the failures of President Obama and the diminished potential of American life, and he says the election is no less than “a referendum on our identity as a nation and a people” (as he says at every stop).

Having been blindsided from the left for the second time in as many presidential campaigns, inevitable Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is trying to mount a defense. Here’s the thrust and parry with immoderate moderator Rachel Maddow, from last night’s Clinton-Sanders squirmish on MSNBC:

Maddow: Secretary Clinton, Sen. Sanders is campaigning against you now, at this point in the campaign, basically arguing that you are not progressive enough to be the Democratic nominee. He has said that if you voted for the Iraq war, if you are in favor of the death penalty, if you wobbled on things like the Keystone Pipeline or TPP [the Trans-Pacific Partnership], if you said single-payer health care could never happen, then you’re too far to the right of the Democratic Party to be the party’s standard-bearer.

Given those policy positions, why should liberal Democrats support you and not Sen. Sanders?

Mrs. Clinton: Well because I am a progressive who gets things done.

Before elaborating, she went off on three separate tangents. First, she informed viewers that “the root of that word, progressive, is progress.” (The word duh, by contrast, is sui generis.)

Second, she listed a bunch of Democrats, past and future, who supposedly wouldn’t be pure enough to meet Sanders’s definition of a progressive: President Obama; Vice President Biden; Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the state in whose primary next week Sanders is expected to trounce Mrs. Clinton; and “even the late, great Senator Paul Wellstone.”

So according to Mrs. Clinton, even Paul Wellstone wasn’t as progressive as Sanders. If that’s meant to be an appeal to the left, it seems like one on Sanders’s behalf, not Mrs. Clinton’s.

Third, she went on about gun control, the only issue on which she is undeniably to the left of Sanders, hailing as he does from a constitutional-carry state. “I don’t think it was progressive to vote to give gun makers and sellers immunity,” Mrs. Clinton said. She said something about immigration, then finally circled back to the “progressive who gets things done” theme:

So we could go back and forth like this, but the fact is most people watching tonight want to know what we’ve done and what we will do. That’s why I am laying out a specific agenda that will make more progress, get more jobs with rising incomes, get us to universal health-care coverage, get us to universal pre-K, paid family leave and the other elements of what I think will build a strong economy, that will ensure Americans keep making progress. That’s what I’m offering and that’s what I will do as president.

Meanwhile … Bernie Sanders could possibly become the Democrat nominee for president.

A reader wrote in:

My wife and I have been looking forward to a Trump/Bernie general election precisely because we could witness a national MMA fight between capitalism and communism, and finish this thing once and for all.

He called my attention to a recent Sanders column by smear artist Ronald Radosh.

First, Paul Sperry wrote a column in the New York Post arguing that “self-described socialist” Bernie Sanders was also a “communist.” Small-c.

Radosh replied with a dissent posted at PJ Media arguing that Sanders was not a “Communist.” Large-C.

Typo? A large-C communist is a party member — a claim Sperry does not make. With Radosh, of course, errors are part of the MO. As redundantly demonstrated in The Rebuttal, Radosh makes errors (lies, smears); therefore he is. What I see more clearly than before is that the errors Radosh makes — and perhaps encourages disciples to make? — are a “bodyguard of lies” for his own line of propaganda.

Take his line against Sperry — Sanders Is Not a “Communist” (which, as noted, is not what Sperry wrote). Regardless of what motivates Radosh to try to knock down such a “charge,” he makes an argument based in error. Following the disinformation campaign against American Betrayal, many have pondered the degree to which such errors reflect sloppiness (as in incompetence) and/or conscious deceit. The point I wish to consider is the degree to which the facts, to Radosh, do not matter, period. His own party-line is the thing.

For the novice who might not understand how I have arrived a such a hypothesis, I will paste in a single page from The Rebuttal to Radosh’s dumbfounding campaign of lies against American Betrayal.

Dr. Ben Carson calls it “dirty tricks,” “blatant lying” and wants someone fired. Donald Trump calls it fraud, a stolen victory, and wants a redo. Ted Cruz calls it a “mistake” and clearly hopes to move on, as they say, after apologizing to Carson.

What is “it”? The false rumor that Carson was suspending his presidential campaign which Cruz campaign people used to urge Carson supporters to support Cruz on caucus night in Iowa.

Evidence includes the email (image above) that CNN, Huffington Post, the Daily Mail and other media outlets have reported that the Cruz campaign sent to Iowa precinct captains.

As super op Karl Rove explained it, there are 1500 precincts in Iowa. If only 4 Carson voters per precinct decide to vote for Cruz, Cruz wins.

Where did the rumor come from in the first place?

Cruz supporters say it came from CNN. It seems more accurate to say the Cruz campaign took CNN reporting about Carson’s immediate, post-Iowa itinerary and, in effect, turned it into a political weapon to use during the whole night of caucusing — despite numerous real-time corrections from a CNN correspondent, plus protests from the Carson campaign on Twitter (reproduced below).