I wonder how many shoppers got the joke!

Okay.. now this is funny. 🤣 pic.twitter.com/R0ckJMYl5Q

— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) December 5, 2019

Libya, Syria, ISIS, Clinton, Obama

Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton: "Oh, yes, Benghazi is tied to Syria and the rise of ISIS!" Tom reads from a Defense Intelligence Agency document. The DIA was run by General Flynn! "No wonder Obama didn't like him!"

BIG ARMS SCANDAL: Smoking gun docs uncovered by @JudicialWatch show Obama/Clinton were aware arms going to Syria through Benghazi and were warned about rise of ISIS, and they were supporting terrorists in Syria. Obama/Clinton created Syria/Iran mess. https://t.co/2L30dJSmpn … pic.twitter.com/iPQYkX11YP

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) June 21, 2019

Collusion!

Michael Doran writes in National Review about the real collusion story.

...To block Trump, Clinton ’s supporters bent rules and broke laws. They went to surprising lengths to strengthen her while framing him — both in the sense of depicting him in a particular light and of planting evidence against him.

...Well-intentioned but careless, said the commander in chief. Three months later, the FBI finished its investigation, and James Comey arrived at an identical conclusion. “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information,” he said in his July 5 statement, “there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” Well-intentioned but careless — Comey was locked in a Vulcan mind-meld with his boss.

...It is impossible to paste a classified document into an unclassified email accidentally, because the three computer systems (Unclassified, Confidential/Secret, and Top Secret) are physically separate networks, each feeding into an independent hard drive on the user’s desk. If a classified document appears in an unclassified email, then someone downloaded it onto a thumb drive and manually uploaded it to the unclassified network — an intentional act if ever there was one.

...On three separate occasions staffers got sloppy and failed to strip the “nonpapers” of all markings that betrayed their classified origins. The FBI recovered one email, for example, that contained a “C” in parenthesis in the margin — an obvious sign that the corresponding paragraph was classified “Confidential.” When an agent personally interviewed Clinton, on July 2, he showed her the document and asked whether she understood what the “C” meant. For anyone who has ever held a security clearance, “C’s” in the margins are more ubiquitous than “C’s” on water faucets — and no more baffling. But Clinton played the ditzy grandmother. She had simply assumed, she said, that the “C” was marking an item in an alphabetized list.

In the 2,500-year life of the alphabet, this was a first: a list that started with the third letter and contained but a single item. The explanation was laughable, but any sensible answer would have constituted an acknowledgement of malicious intent. Her only out was the “well-intentioned but careless” script that Obama had written for her. In other words, she lied to the FBI — a felony offense.

Before she ever told this howler, however, Comey had already prepared a draft of his statement exonerating her. The FBI let Hillary Clinton skate.

But give Comey his due. If he had followed the letter of the law, the trail of guilt may have led all the way to Obama himself. As Andrew C. McCarthy has demonstrated at National Review Online, Obama used a dummy email account to communicate with Clinton via her private server. Did this make Obama complicit in Clinton’s malfeasance? Anyone in Comey’s position would have thought twice before moving to prosecute her — and not only because the case might have ensnared the president himself. The FBI must enforce the law, but it must also be seen to be enforcing it. As a rule, these two imperatives buttress each other. During the 2016 election, Comey faced extraordinary circumstances. If he had followed the law to the letter, he would have toppled the leading candidate for president and decapitated the Democratic party. Clinton’s supporters, more than 50 percent of the electorate, would have erupted in outrage, screaming that a politicized FBI had thrown the election to Donald Trump.

Guarding the bureau’s reputation for impartiality is a serious concern. But it is nevertheless a thoroughly political concern. Comey would have us believe that it was a unique moment in his career, the singular entry into the political arena of an otherwise apolitical servant of the law. Truth be told, Comey loves being in the thick of it, but not because he is a partisan brawler. He is not. It is the drama that he relishes — the grand stage. His favorite role is that of Joe Friday, the no-nonsense lawman, the guardian of legal processes before the encroachments of dirty politicians.

Joe Friday, however, was a simple detective, a confirmed bachelor, content to live quietly with his mother and his parakeet. And, of course, he was a TV fiction. In real life, humble straight shooters get clobbered with a brick before they ever reach the limelight. In real life, snagging the big part often requires the equivalent of leaving a bloody horsehead in the producer’s bed.

...The right stuff did not require strong Democratic credentials, but they certainly helped. Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, led the team. McCabe was not your FBI gumshoe of old. He spent no time in his younger days chasing bank robbers in Des Moines. He was part of a new breed — the post-9/11 FBI leadership, for whom the career fast track was counterterrorism. He came of age at the intersection of law enforcement with national security, shuttling between D.C. and New York. Along the way, he developed a valuable personal network. His wife, Jill, ran as a Democrat for a Virginia state-senate seat in 2015. The political organization of Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, one of Hillary Clinton’s very closest associates, gave her nearly $500,000.

...Like McCabe, Strzok had pursued a career at the nexus of law enforcement and counterterrorism. But he was less overtly political. A John Kasich sympathizer, he was by nature a middle-of-the-roader, and a Republican-leaning one, at that. Clinton left him cold. But Trump left him even colder — and his active personal life helped concentrate his mind on that antipathy. Strzok was having an affair with Page, who was an FBI lawyer on McCabe’s staff. Both were married. Page’s politics were typical of highly educated people in D.C.: She detested Trump and his supporters. He is “a loathsome human being,” she texted to Strzok, who readily agreed. After Trump captured the nomination, hostility to him quickly became part of their private idiom.

...Deploying secrets for political effect — deciding which to keep, which to tell, and how to tell them — was a task that they approached with alacrity. The ultimate goal, of course, was not propping up Hillary Clinton so much as maximizing the power and autonomy of the FBI. In pursuing this goal, McCabe and the two lovers demonstrated the very essence of the right stuff: a breezy comfort with bending the law to the demands of politics.

...Then there’s the little matter of Steele’s personal bias. According to one well-informed associate, Steele was “passionate about” preventing Trump from winning the election. His financial incentives, of course, oriented him in exactly the same direction. He was a paid piper — and he got paid only for collecting information detrimental to Trump. Isn’t it possible — likely, even — that his shadowy paymasters in the demimonde of the Clinton campaign were calling the tune?

Read more here.

Weiner, Abedin, and Clinton

The Daily Mail is the publication that revealed in September Anthony Weiner's online sexting relatioship with a girl he knew was fifteen-years-old.

He told her he was 'hard'; that he 'would bust that tight p****'; sent her unclothed pictures; and told her he had rape fantasies about her. Wiener knew she was 15 - the girl had told him.

At the time of the sexts, Weiner was still married to Abedin - although he complained about their lack of a sex life to the girl - and caring for their son while she campaigned intensively for Clinton.

New York police and the FBI moved in on Weiner quickly after DailyMail.com's revelations - and it now transpires that when federal authorities investigated, they took the former couple's shared laptop. It is unclear if they also took mobile devices.

In fact Abedin, 40, was already separated from Weiner, 52, by the time the FBI moved in, as she had announced the end of their marriage in August, when he was hit by another sexting scandal.


Sexting: The 15-year-old girl who DailyMail.com revealed had received sexually-charged messages from Weiner, with her father

The former couple are assumed to have started the task of unraveling their life together, but then, in September, came a bombshell which put the past sexting in the shade: DailyMail.com's revelations of sexual messages and pictures to a 15-year-old girl - at a time when he was married to Abedin.

He carried on a months-long online sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl during which,she said, he asked her to dress up in 'school-girl' outfits for him on a video messaging application and pressed her to engage in 'rape fantasies'.

The girl, whose name is still being withheld by DailyMail.com because she is a minor, said the online relationship began last January while she was a high school sophomore.

Weiner was aware that the girl was underage, according to DailyMail.com interviews with the girl and her father, as well as a cache of online messages.

This time Weiner was T-Dog - and an avid user of the sort of instant messaging technology which does not leave a trail. Precisely the sort of technology Clinton had once joked she liked, in the wake of her email scandal emerging.

In Clintonworld, there was no comment, and although Abedin was not on the trail in the immediate aftermath of the story, she was soon back at Clinton's side.

She may have thought that ending the marriage would keep her safe from the fallout from the revelations.
But on Friday she learned that Weiner's fallout is now a danger not just to her - but to Clinton herself.

The FBI had long since said that Clinton - and by extension Abedin - would not be prosecuted for their handling of classified information on the secret email server when an entirely different investigation was launched, this time into the sexting.

What became clear within hours of the dramatic announcement by the FBI Director James Comey on Friday morning that there were new emails relevant to the investigation was where they came from: either Abedin or Weiner's devices.
Both, a New York Times report made clear, had been taken by the FBI in the course of their investigation - and the new material was found.

Read more here.

The echo chamber

David Goldman writes at PJ Media,

"We created an echo chamber. They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say. In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this....The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience is being around political campaigns. That's a sea change. They literally know nothing."

Thus spake a certain Ben Rhodes, literary dabbler and Don DeLillo wannabe, in a stunning interview-essay by David Samuels in the New York Times last May. Rhodes was describing the sale of the Iran nuclear deal to America's body politic, fed by media ignoramuses who dutifully repeated the echoes of the administration's stable of putatively independent experts. But the "echo chamber" principle applies just as well to anything that the Establishment media wants to sell to the public. The trouble with echo chambers, of course, is that positive feedback can blow the roof off. That is what is happening in American politics right now.

... We have had so many iterations of lies, cover-up, cover-up malfunction, new lies, new cover-up and new cover-up malfunction that the experts are in information overload. What is going on in the head of an ordinary voter with a passing interest in politics and ten or fifteen minutes a day to devote to news?

The answer is: Almost anything you might imagine. Sixty-two percent of Americans get at least some of their news via social media according to a Pew Research survey and the proportion is growing fast. Facebook and other social media allow individuals to customize their news consumption on the basis of recommendations and re-posting by friends, and news consumers increasingly depend on their networks rather than the media.

That's how Steve Bannon's Breitbart news organization, with its edgy mix of salacious gossip and right-wing politics, morphed almost overnight into a major media player. That's why the Drudge Report got 1.47 billion page views in July. There is no way of knowing what Americans believe. Only one in nine Americans believes that Hillary Clinton is "honest and trustworthy." They don't trust the media's cover-up of her misdeeds, and the cover-up of the cover-up of the cover-up.

There's no way to tell what people think. It's impossible for most Americans to form a judgment with which they feel comfortable, because they do not have sources of information they can trust. Fox News is in a civil war between the pro- and anti-Trump Republicans. The other networks are with Hillary. The major media outlets have lost credibility. Only 32% of Americans said they had "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of confidence in the news media in a September Gallup poll survey. That's the lowest level in history, and should be no surprise: the major media has to spin a new cover-up every couple of days, before it is finished putting the previous set of lies to bed.

That's why Americans don't simply watch the nightly news and go to bed. They read the rumors on the Internet and circulate them to their friends. They create networks of people they trust in the hope of obtaining an accurate account of what is happening around them.

That's why I'm still calling this election for Donald J. Trump. The polls are meaningless. Perceptions are morphing as rapidly as the new-model Terminator in the molten steel vat at the end of the movie. The election will be won and lost a dozen times between now and Election Day. And when Americans finally go into the voting booth, they will not be able to think of any reasons to vote for Hillary Clinton--only reasons to vote against Donald Trump. There are far more compelling reasons to vote against Clinton. And that's how the election will go.

A skilled manipulator

I watched the debate last night on the couch with my sons. My 16-year-old wrote this in English class today:

September 27 16th
1st Debate Trump vs Clinton
I could hardly watch the debate last night. I agree with people that say that Hillary won. Trump got flustered and started saying all the wrong things. And I think that nobody can argue with the fact that Hillary is possibly the best person in politics in manipulating the truth.

In our society, it is not only common for people to criticize every, single statement that Donald Trump makes, it is EXPECTED. If you don’t, then you are a racist deplorable. You are a redneck that goes to sleep at night and dreams of the defenseless black teens that you can harass; you are immediately a terrible person.

But Hillary's advantage doesn’t stop there. You can watch as Hillary looks into the crowd in the exact way that you would look at an old friend, joking about the weird kid in class. At the end of the debate, Hillary had manipulated it into a group of people that are not listening to the words spoken by the other party, but laughing and watching the pathetic attempt of a 200 pound 6 foot 2 man getting torched by the frail, 4'11" grandmother. But the final conspicuous lead that Hillary had is exactly that. She is a four foot eleven WOMAN. Trump was thrown into a position where he had to pull his punches and act like a gentleman, without confirming the pre-assumed beliefs that the only people that are Trump supporters are rich billionaires and hillbillies that trample over the rights of minorities and women. And Clinton manipulated her advantage in such a way that explains the way that she dodges the repercussions of her self-promoting actions and still come off as the kind, loving grandma. And that is why, if this is going to be the recurring theme of these debates, Trump is destined to crash and burn.

Which candidate will do the least harm?

Ace of Spades links to a USA Today column on the election by Glenn Reynolds, and adds,

Five of the last six popular presidential votes went to Democrats. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 but got in by a hair.

When that stat changes to "six of the last seven" and "seven of the last eight," what do you think the federal bureaucracy will do? They already are almost all liberal government-happy Democrats. Now they'll know that Republicans will barely ever win the Executive, and that the way to guarantee job security is to do... little favors for the Democrats whenever possible.

The #NeverTrumpers -- who are really Hillary supporters; they want Hillary to win, because they think then they can purge the Trumpkins and start winning elections as a party drawing the support of 25% of the country -- seem to think elections are just about intraparty jockeying, palace intrigues, and "principle."

They seem to not notice elections are actually about forming a government and staffing it with actual people, people the president chooses, and then directing (and hopefully restraining) a sprawling bureaucracy that not only can destroy you, but increasingly desires to.

But I guess the important thing is being able to write pungent, emotional opinion pieces for NR.

Reynolds argues,

If you want checks and balances, vote Trump.

The civil service, though supposedly professional and nonpartisan, has become a Democratic Party monoculture.

Trump is a blowhard who seems to have something of a man-crush on Vladimir Putin. His business dealings are as shady as you’d expect a New York real-estate developer’s to be, his campaign has been a madhouse, and even on the positions of his that I like, I don’t have a whole lot of confidence that he’ll actually deliver.

Hillary, on the other hand is, well, a crook. Her period at the State Department was marked by pretty much out-and-out influence peddling, the Clinton Foundation seems to be little more than a money laundry, and when she’s asked to explain herself, she sounds like a Mafia boss’s lawyer, only less believable.

Reynolds notes that

Federal employees overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, donate to Democrats, and, by all appearances, cover for Democrats as a routine part of doing their job.

So if the choice in 2016 is between one bad candidate and another (and it is) the question is, which one will do the least harm. And, judging by the civil service’s behavior, that’s got to be Trump. If Trump tries to target his enemies with the IRS, you can bet that he’ll get a lot of pushback — and the press, instead of explaining it away, will make a huge stink. If Trump engages in influence-peddling, or abuses secrecy laws, you can bet that, even if Trump’s appointees sit atop the DOJ or FBI, the civil service will ensure that things don’t get swept under the rug. And if Trump wants to go to war, he’ll get far more scrutiny than Hillary will get — or, in cases like her disastrous Libya invasion, has gotten.

So the message is clear. If you want good government, vote for Trump — he’s the only one who will make this whole checks-and-balances thing work.

Read more here.

“Lets get together. I’m a big wheel in this town.”

Huma Abedin's husband Anthony Weiner is at it again. The New York Post breaks the story here. Huma says she is separating from him. Huma is the closest person in the world to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

David Burge writes, I hope this doesn't end up embarrassing Hillary and her husband the serial rapisthttps://twitter.com/thehill/status/770255706318573568 …

We only have two choices!

Bookworm writes,

I’m deeply unhappy about the #NeverTrumpers and that’s for a personal reason. I have been for years a very big fan of many of the #NeverTrumpers, especially the writers at National Review. I haven’t always agreed with them (e.g., I wasn’t a Mitt Romney fan, but accepted him once he won the primary), but I deeply admire their intelligence, their thoughtfulness, the breadth and depth of their knowledge, their committed conservativism, their strong principles, and their uniformly excellent writing.

Indeed, admiring them as I did, it troubled me a great deal when a few months ago I realized that I would have to part ways with them. Did I dare to strike out on my own path when such highly regarded people were assuring me it was (and is) the road to perdition?

Bookworm then mentions my three favorite writers at National Review,

Even at National Review, though, people are beginning to accept that Trump is our guy, no matter how much we wish he were not. Dennis Prager wrote a wonderful pro-Trump column which said thoughtfully and elegantly what I’ve been saying in my ragged, scattershot fashion for months now: Trump is better than Hillary and, when there’s a binary election, patriots must choose the least bad option.

Likewise, Victor Davis Hanson, while trying to avoid endorsing Trump cannot help but savage Clinton. He’s too intellectually honest to pretend that throwing the election her way will be anything but a disaster.

Even Andrew McCarthy, once a staunch Trump foe, has come to realize that, when it comes to national security, reasonable people can work with Trump — and he’s better than Hillary.

Lord knows, at my own little bully pulpit, one that reaches only thousands, not tens or even hundreds of thousands, I wrote enough scathing indictments against Trump. During the primaries, he was a political monster when compared to Walker or Cruz or Rubio. But the primaries are over and now Trump is my monster. Instead of being scary, Trump has become endearing and cuddly. This election has been my own personal version of Monsters, Inc., with Trump no longer the killer under the bed but, instead, the hero who saves the day.

Given what both Shirky and Walsh say, it’s time for the #NeverTrumpers to have their own Monsters, Inc. moment. Guys and gals, stop screaming every time you see Trump and learn to appreciate his virtues, laugh at his wacky sense of humor, and line up behind him because, while he’s not a real monster, the monsters are out there and Hillary wants to let them in.

Read more here.

...Like it or not, this election is about degree, relative political agendas, and comparative hazard

Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review,

Certainly, we are in the strangest campaign of the last half-century, in which members of Trump’s own party are among his fiercest critics. In contrast, the ABC/NBC/CBS Sunday-morning liberal pundits feel no need to adopt NeverHillary advocacy. They apparently share little “Not in my name” compunction over “owning” her two decades of serial lying, her violations of basic ethical and legal protocols as secretary of state, her investment in what can be fairly termed a vast Clinton pay-to-play influence-peddling syndicate, and the general corruption of the Democratic primary process.

Amid the anguish over the Trump candidacy, we often forget that the present age of Obama is already more radical than most of what even Trump has blustered about. We live in a country for all practical purposes without an enforceable southern border. Over 300 local and state jurisdictions have declared themselves immune from federal immigration laws — all without much consequence and without worry that a similar principle of nullification was the basis of the American Civil War or that other, more conservative cities could in theory follow their lead and declare themselves exempt from EPA jurisdiction or federal gun-registration laws. Confederate nullification is accepted as the new normal, and, strangely, its antithesis of border enforcement and adherence to settled law is deemed xenophobic, nativist, and racist.

The president of the United States, on matters from immigration to his own health-care act, often has declined to enforce federal laws — sometimes because it was felt that to do so would have been injurious to his 2012 reelection bid. The reputations of agencies such as the IRS and the VA no longer really exist; we concede that they are politicized, corrupt, or hopelessly inept. An attorney general being found in contempt of Congress raises no more of an eyebrow than that same chief law-enforcement officer referring to African Americans as “my people” or writing off Americans in general as a “nation of cowards.”

Quite a while ago, too, we entered the age of postmodern fabulism, in which representatives of the president of the United States casually admitted, in response to criticism, that large segments of Obama’s best-selling autobiography were simply “composites,” a sort of euphemism for making stuff up. From Brian Williams’s pseudo-combat reporting to Hillary Clinton’s dodging bullets in the Balkans, we are now what we say we are — without much consequence any more for flat-out lying. Does any public commentator worry much that Senator Elizabeth Warren’s entire trajectory to Harvard was predicated on her abject and comical lie that she was a rare and sought-after Native American law professor?

I am worried about Trump’s flamboyance and about his sloppy and dangerous references to NATO and U.S. foreign commitments. But from the reaction to his ad hoc and sometimes incoherent musings, one would think that the next president was inheriting a time of peace and stability — not one in which the entire Middle East has imploded, reset with Putin has become a nightmare of Russian expansionism not seen since the Soviet period, “jayvee” and “on-the-run” terrorists are insidiously destroying the calm of the entire international order, and China is creating artificial islands with commensurate “sovereign” air and sea space. If there is one region in the world that is safer and more stable than it was in 2008, would someone please identify it? Iraq? Syria? Ukraine? Libya? North Korea? France? Baton Rouge? For now I am worried about what was and is rather than what might be. Are there any traditional U.S. allies that feel more secure in their partnership with us? Israel? Japan? France?

It is a fair wager that a supposedly isolationist President Trump would be more likely to attend an anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall or the liberation of Auschwitz than would a supposedly internationalist President Obama — or for that matter a European unity rally after horrific terrorist bombings.

We have already seen the shoot-from-the-hip Trump back down on his idiotic idea of denying all Muslims entry into the U.S. (as opposed to those seeking to emigrate from war zones and terrorist-rife nations of the Middle East). So far, we’ve seen no impulse on the part of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to simply employ the terms jihadist, radical Islamist, or Islamic terrorist the next time dozens of Americans are blown up or mowed down by someone shouting Allahu akbar!

...Is Trump’s threatened “isolationism” worse than the present “lead from behind” or the empty step-over lines, deadlines, and red lines of the last seven years? Or than refusing to increase security at Benghazi and creating fables to hide the dereliction?

...We have gone from Democratic opposition to gay marriage in 2008 to a new normal in 2016 of slandering those who oppose the idea of transgender restrooms in primary schools. There is a degree of racial polarization not seen since the 1960s, one in which activists invited to the Oval Office include people, like Al Sharpton and Black Lives Matter leaders, who either have advocated the shooting of police officers or have been affiliated with marches that have chanted such threats.

I agree that Trump is capable of reckless talk and symbolism, but heedlessness is also the new normal when the president of the United States praises the album To Pimp a Butterfly, whose cover features the corpse of an eye-less white judge, his apparently violent demise celebrated by hipsters on the White House lawn.

When the IRS is sicced on political opponents, AP journalists’ communications are tapped by the administration, and an obscure videomaker is jailed on trumped-up parole violations to cement a lying narrative about Benghazi, and all this is greeted by relative somnolence, then the currency of outrage has been drastically cheapened.

The difference between a reckless Trump, Clinton, and Obama is not necessarily one of temperament, sobriety, or judgment, but often one of delivery and assumed establishmentarianism: For some reason Ivy League accents, government résumés, and liberal fides are supposed to repackage outrageousness as a mere slip, an aberration, rather than a window into a dark soul. A much-reviled Trump eliminated his primary opponents through invective and character assassination in open debate; a much-praised sober and judicious Clinton eliminated Bernie Sanders, in part, according to WikiLeaks, through her control of a biased and corrupt Democratic National Committee.

Put “corpse-man” or a cruel joke about the Special Olympics into the mouth of Trump, and we easily would find additional proof of his ignorance and callousness; from the silver tongue of Obama they are either minor gaffes or perhaps proof of the stress he endures on our behalf. There really is a Clinton mirror-image of Trump University; but whereas Trump went through the crude motions of offering real-estate training, it is hard to know how exactly Laureate Universities’ “chancellor” Bill Clinton became the highest annually paid academic official in the history of higher education. And what exactly bothered Bill about Laureate in 2015 to cause him suddenly to surrender his chancellor duties that had not bothered him from 2011 to 2014?

...If a “transformative” and “historic” president with an Ivy League law degree, an enthralled media, and “lower the seas and cool the planet” confidence has left us with a world on fire, the veritable destruction of immigration law, $10 trillion in new debt, a wrecked health-care system, a hollowed-out military, racial conflagration, an ossified economy, and near permanent zero interest rates — to the general approval of half the country — then it is hard to get riled up that a more conservative Trump represents something uniquely dangerous.

...Like it or not, this election is about degree, relative political agendas, and comparative hazard, not about marrying ideological purity and consistency with sobriety and character — a sad fact that did not enter our politics with Donald J. Trump.

Read more here.

Sean Smith's mom lays it out for us

Austin Bay writes at Observer.com,

Consider the speech delivered on the first night of the Republican National Convention by Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith who was slain in the September 11, 2012 assault by Islamist terrorists on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

“I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son. Personally, in an email to her daughter, Hillary Clinton blamed it on—shortly after the attack—terrorism, but when I saw Hillary Clinton, she lied to me and then called me a liar. Since then, I have repeatedly asked Hillary Clinton to ask [for] the real reason why my son is dead. I’m still waiting. Whenever I call the State Department, no one would speak to me because they say I am not a member of the immediate family… Sean was my son. Hillary Clinton is a woman, a mother, a grandmother of two. I am a woman, a mother, and a mother of two. How could she do this to me? How could she do this to any American family? Donald Trump is everything Hillary Clinton is not… He is blunt, direct, and strong. He speaks his mind and his heart. And when it comes to the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorism, he will not hesitate to kill the terrorist who threaten American lives…. He will make America stronger, not weaker… This entire campaign comes down to a single question: If Hillary Clinton can’t give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency?”

Lawless. Incompetent. Greedy. A callous liar. A proven national security risk.

Trump might struggle in a crisis—might. In GetRealLand’s Benghazi bloodletting, Hillary Clinton was a total failure. And then she lied about it, insistently blaming a crackpot video when she knew the attack was the work of an Al Qaeda affiliate. Hillary Clinton waged a Total War On Honesty to protect Obama’s 2012 self-serving and totally false campaign claim that terrorism was waning and the tide of war receding.

Read more here.

Laws are for the little people

Trump's path to victory

Scott Adams writes,

I’ve been saying since last year that Trump’s path to victory is simple. All he needs to do is STOP saying controversial things for the last several months before election day to prove he can control himself.

...Clinton needs to prove she is not crooked, which is now impossible because the head of the FBI has publicly certified her as crooked. At least that’s how it looks to the public. The public heard the FBI say Clinton broke the law, followed by a decision to not prosecute. That taint won’t wash off by November.

...You also have to factor in the Gingrich effect. No matter who gets tapped for Vice President, Gingrich has already created intellectual cover for Trump. Were you worried that Trump is dumb and under-informed? You don’t have that concern about Gingrich, even if you dislike him. Gingrich solves for Trump’s perceived intellect gap with Clinton. Expect Gingrich to have a key role in Trump’s government.

The new Quinnipiac poll shows Trump now leading in 4-out-of-5 battleground states. Most of the polling was done before the FBI announced its email server decision. Do you know what else was happening during that time to influence polls?

Answer: Nothing

In other words, Trump didn’t do anything outrageous for a few weeks. That’s all he needs to do from here on out – more nothing – to win in a landslide. The “Crooked Hillary” harpoon he landed a few months ago is bleeding her out. Trump’s glide path to victory involves picking his cabinet and acting serious for a few months. That’s all it will take. (Expect a few mini-outrages just for fun.)

Read more here.

Turning American citizens against one another

According to blogger Scott Adams, there is a new reason to vote for Hillary: your personal safety!

Some of you watched with amusement as I endorsed Hillary Clinton for my personal safety. What you might not know is that I was completely serious. I was getting a lot of direct and indirect death threats for writing about Trump’s powers of persuasion, and I made all of that go away by endorsing Clinton. People don’t care why I am on their side. They only care that I am.

You might have found it funny that I endorsed Clinton for my personal safety. But it was only funny by coincidence. I did it for personal safety, and apparently it is working. Where I live, in California, it is not safe to be seen as supportive of anything Trump says or does. So I fixed that.

Again, I’m completely serious about the safety issue. Writing about Trump ended my speaking career, and has already reduced my income by about 40%, as far as I can tell. But I’m in less physical danger than I was.

...The backdrop to all of this racial tension is that Trump was winning the persuasion war by making citizens afraid of external threats from illegal immigrants and terrorists. That was a strong formula because people respond to fear.

But Clinton’s team – including social media and the liberal-leaning mainstream media – responded by defining Trump as a literal Hitler. A Hitler-like leader in your own country is even scarier than external threats. Persuasion-wise, it is a winning formula for Team Clinton, even though the case is built on confirmation bias, not fact. (Trump has never mentioned race in a negative way.)

So now we have a situation in which Team Clinton has scared citizens into thinking the threat to their lives is mostly domestic, coming from Trump, Trump supporters, and anyone who looks like them. People who are scared will act. And we see those actions now in terms of violence against police, violence against Trump supporters, and death threats to bloggers such as me. And we already have one attempted Trump assassination.

So far, Trump has showed a willingness to annihilate any professional politician that gets in the way. And he’s annihilated professional reporters and news organizations that got in his way. And he’s tough on non-citizens. But Trump hasn’t tried to turn American citizens against each other. Clinton has, and successfully so.

You can blame Trump for Trump University, and for his uncivil language. You can blame Trump for lots of stuff. But the police shootings and the recent uptick in domestic racial violence are mostly Clinton’s doings to win the election. And it is working. Unless Trump finds a way to counter Clinton’s racial persuasion, he will lose in November.

I expect Trump to go full-attack after the conventions. It would take the world’s greatest persuader to redefine Trump in a way that he can win the election. But as it turns out, Trump is probably the world’s greatest persuader. That’s why I predict he will win in a landslide. Unless someone kills him first.

Read more here.

Clinton played fast and loose with national security and lied about it.

Jonathan Tobin writes at Commentary,

Like his Tuesday announcement, Comey’s testimony provided a number of difficult moments for the Clinton campaign. He reiterated that her use of a private email server was unauthorized and that it exposed U.S. secrets to hostile powers. Most importantly, although he said she didn’t lie in her interview with the FBI, he also made it clear that her repeated denials about transmitting classified information in her emails were untrue.

...The only judges and jury Clinton will ever face are the voters who will go to the polls in November, and it is to them alone that Republicans who are outraged by this scandal should address their concerns. And what was said by Comey this week undermines the case both for Clinton as a competent public servant and a responsible guardian of America’s national security.

...The fact that most of the Republicans who serve on these committees (with a few exceptions such as Rep. Trey Gowdy) have no ability to conduct a cross-examination gives an advantage to the Democrats in their effort to obfuscate the issues and put it all down to partisan bickering.

The GOP problem isn’t that Comey was too able a witness to be pinned down on his faulty judgment or that the Democrats’ defense of Clinton was persuasive. It’s that Clinton’s opponent is too flawed and too obsessed with defending his mistakes and offensive comments to focus on Clinton’s unfitness for office. If the election is a referendum on Hillary Clinton’s untrustworthiness, negligence, paranoia about transparency, and corrupt conflicts of interest with the Clinton Foundation, the Republicans have all they need to win. But since Donald Trump has shown his unfitness in other ways and can’t stay on message enough to make that case, Clinton may get away with it. As long as he is distracting the voters from the truth about Clinton, she will be off the hook.

Read more here.

Trump is inside her head!

ABC's Martha Raddatz reads a Trump tweet, and adds the word "crooked" in front of Hillary Clinton's name.

Time to declare independence?

Kurt Schlicter writes at Town Hall,

The idea of the rule of law today is a lie. There is no law. There is no justice. There are only lies.

Sometimes in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another. It is high time to declare our personal independence from any remnant of obligation to those who have spit upon the rule of law. We owe them nothing - not respect, not loyalty, not obedience.

...Hillary Clinton is manifestly guilty of multiple felonies. Her fans deny it half-heartedly, but mostly out of habit – in the end, it’s fine with them if she’s a felon. They don’t care. It’s just some law. What’s the big deal? It doesn’t matter that anyone else would be in jail right now for doing a fraction of what she did. But the law is not important. Justice is not important.

The attorney general secretly canoodles with the husband of the subject of criminal investigation by her own department and the president, the enforcer of our laws, shrugs. The media, the challenger of the powerful, smirks. They rub our noses in their contempt for the law. And by doing so, demonstrate their contempt for us.

Only power matters, and Hillary stands ready to accumulate more power on their behalf so their oaths, their alleged principles, their duty to the country – all of it goes out the window.

...There is one law for them, and another for us. Sanctuary cities? Obama’s immigration orders? If you conservatives can play by the rules and pass your laws, then we liberals will just not enforce them.

Who is standing against this? Not the judges. The Constitution? Meh. Why should their personal agendas be constrained by some sort of foundational document? Judges find rights that don’t appear in the text and gut ones that do. Just ask a married gay guy in Los Angeles who can’t carry a concealed weapons to protect himself from [OMITTED] radicals.

...Now it seems we actually have a new social contract – do what we say and don’t resist, and in return we’ll abuse you, lie about you, take your money, and look down upon you in contempt. What a bargain!

...We owe them nothing - not respect, not loyalty, not obedience. Nothing.

Read more here.

Spontaneous liar versus premeditated liar

Jonah Goldberg points out in National Review,

By setting up a secret e-mail server in her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., without proper authorization from any legal or security official, Clinton displayed a cavalier disregard for national security and an outrageous desire to hide her doings from Freedom of Information Act requests, government archivists, Congress, the press, and, ultimately, the American people.

...From the earliest days of this scandal — and it is a scandal — Clinton has lied. Unlike Donald Trump’s lies, which he usually vomits up spontaneously like a vesuvian geyser, Clinton’s were carefully prepared, typed up, and repeated for all the world to hear over and over again.

I would think this is an important distinction. Neither of the candidates is worthy of the office in my eyes, but voters might discount many of Trump’s deceits as symptoms of his glandular personality. Much like Vice President Joe Biden, who always gets a pass for launching errant fake-fact missiles from the offline silo that is his mouth, Trump is often seen as entertainingly spontaneous.

Meanwhile, Clinton — who lives many time zones away from the word “entertaining” — is marketing herself as the mature and upstanding grown-up. She does nothing spontaneously. And that means all of her lies are premeditated.

Read more here.

The choice

Jim Geraghty asks in National Review,

Do you choose the certain foe in the corrupt oligarchic progressive pathological liar Hillary Clinton, or the unreliable nominal ally in the incoherent authoritarian populist demagogue with the white nationalist/anti-Semitic fans? (Cue Jeopardy! theme.)

...When Donald Trump says, “I gave $1 million” -- past tense -- to veterans, what he really means is, “I haven’t given $1 million, and I will only get around to actually giving it four months later when the press keeps asking me about it.” He also doesn’t feel that you’re entitled to know which veterans’ groups he gave to and how much.

Will Trump win Sanders supporters, if Hillary is the Democrat nominee?

Is it possible that Bernie Sanders might one day come out to endorse Donald Trump? Ashley Parker and Jonathan Martin write in today's New York Times,

On a range of issues, Mr. Trump seems to be taking a page from the Sanders playbook, expressing a willingness to increase the minimum wage, suggesting that the wealthy may pay higher taxes than under his original proposal, attacking Mrs. Clinton from the left on national security and Wall Street, and making clear that his opposition to free trade will be a centerpiece of his general election campaign.

...Mr. Trump’s approach has scrambled longstanding assumptions about how the two parties can position themselves in a general election fight, and could augur at least a short-term shift in how a Republican presidential nominee campaigns. Until Mr. Trump’s successful campaign, unwavering support for free trade and the business community, a robust American presence in the world, and a commitment to deep tax cuts have been articles of faith for the modern Republican Party.

But Mr. Trump, who has also made attacks on illegal immigrants central to his campaign while vowing to protect Social Security and Medicare, is plainly going to run as more of a Sanders-style populist than as a conservative. And this approach suggests that the 2016 campaign will not be decided in the increasingly diverse states that represent the face of a changing nation — Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Virginia — but in the more heavily white Rust Belt, where blaming trade deals for manufacturing job losses provided resonant themes for Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders during the primaries there.

Mr. Trump recently offered a taste of his coming line of attack on the campaign trail in Oregon, where he praised Mr. Sanders for highlighting Mrs. Clinton’s ties to the country’s largest financial institutions. “She’s totally controlled by Wall Street,” Mr. Trump said, echoing a Sanders rallying cry.

Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump, said he expected the presumptive Republican nominee to grow aggressive on the banks. “Who’s been tougher on bankers than Donald Trump?” asked Mr. Stone, suggesting Mr. Trump could appeal to some of Mr. Sanders’s supporters. “He’s taken them to the cleaners. I think he has a healthy skepticism and deep knowledge of bankers and how they operate. He’s going to be tough on Wall Street.” Mr. Trump has said that “the hedge fund guys are getting away with murder.”

If by abandoning the traditional Republican playbook Mr. Trump were to put Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the Republican column, as some of his aides suggested, he would swing 46 electoral votes from states that have voted for Democratic presidential candidates since the 1980s.

The Times article quotes Arizona Senator Jeff Flake as saying,

“I think he’s more likely to take Michigan than he is to take Arizona,” said Mr. Flake, whose state is home to a fast-growing Latino population.

The unease on the right with Mr. Trump’s ideological positioning spans the party’s factions, alarming national security hawks, fiscal conservatives focused chiefly on promoting free markets, and the Christian right.

And even when he has hit Mrs. Clinton from the left, he has also shown a flexibility that has positioned him on both sides of some issues. He has called for a higher minimum wage, for instance, but has also said the issue should be left to the states rather than have a federal increase. On foreign policy, too, his cautious approach to nation-building and intervention has been juxtaposed by bellicose remarks and a promise to be tougher on Iran and the Islamic State.

Read more here.