DEMocrats = Destructive Election Manipulators

Democrats are better than Republicans at rigging elections.

As conservative scholar Victor Davis Hanson has written, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election strategy has significantly included “a series of Democratic-planted IEDs about Trump’s foul mouth that exploded at preplanned and opportune moments.”

The anti-Trump tape release, followed by women surfacing to say that the taped comments were true, fits a Democratic Party pattern of unloading extremely negative trash in the campaign’s final weeks.

In 2000, in the campaign’s last five days, A Maine TV reporter acting on a tip unearthed a court record of George W. Bush’s 1976 Maine DUI arrest.  It nearly cost Bush that election.

In 2006, Rahm Emanuel orchestrated a late-campaign release of information about Republican Congressman Mark Foley’s unseemly pursuit of male pages, information that came into his possession a year earlier.  The released information dominated the campaign’s final weeks, and helped turn the House from GOP to Democratic that year.

In 2012, Mitt Romney in May, well before the GOP nomination, told a fundraising event audience:

There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what ... who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims. ... These are people who pay no income tax. ... and so my job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

This was called 2012’s best quote, anywhere. Why not? It probably cost Romney the 2012 election. Had the quote surfaced before the GOP nomination, Republicans could have replaced Romney with a more appealing alternative.

The May quote was secretly filmed by a Democrat sympathizer, but didn’t appear until the progressive Mother Jones published it on September 18, 15 days before the October 3 first presidential debate between Romney and Barack Obama.  Early voting (except in North Carolina, which started even earlier) began September 22, 4 days after the “47%” video hit the media.

In 2016, the Trump/“Access Hollywood” tape surfaced in the Washington Post October 7, two days before the October 9 second Trump-Clinton debate.  The tape, which was eleven years old, was supposed to drop just a few days earlier. 

NBC, however, which controlled the tape (“Access Hollywood” is owned by NBC), was working to edit Billy Bush out of the Trump tape’s content — difficult (also dishonest) because Bush was very much a part of the tape, egging on Trump’s unacceptable comments.  Bush was an NBC personality and co-anchor of “Today” prior to his being fired once the tape came out.

Early voting in 2016 (except in North Carolina, which started even earlier) began September 23.  If the Trump/“Access Hollywood” tape had come out 4 days before early voting began in 2016 — as Romney’s “47%” tape did in 2012 — it would have hit on September 19.

The ideal dates for wreaking the Romney and Trump presidential campaigns appear to have been just before early voting began.  Democrats met that target in 2012, missed by roughly two weeks in 2016, but were still early enough to ruin Trump’s campaign.

Needless to say, had NBC released its 2005 Trump/“Access Hollywood” tape in the Spring instead of October, Trump wouldn’t have been the GOP nominee, and Trump wouldn’t have been here now, easing Clinton’s path to the White House.

DEM = Destructive Election Manipulators.

Vote for Clinton, Vote for “Blatant Corruption”

Quotation without comment.

A Hillary Clinton presidency will be built, from the ground up, on self-dealing, crony favors, and an utter disregard for the law. This isn’t a guess. It is spelled out, in black and white, in the latest bombshell revelation[s] from WikiLeaks.

The Clintons spent their White House years explaining endless sleazy financial deals, and even capping their exit with a scandal over whether Bill was paid to pardon financier Marc Rich. They know the risks. And yet they geared up the foundation and these seedy practices even as Mrs. Clinton was making her first bid for the presidency. They continued them as she sat as secretary of state. They continue them still, as she nears the White House.

This is how the Clintons operate. They don’t change. Any one who pulls the lever for Mrs. Clinton takes responsibility for setting up the nation for all the blatant corruption that will follow.

—Kim Strassel, Wall Street Journal

Hillary: A Crook Running the U.S.A.?

Edited from the words of Mike Goodwin, in the conservative New York Post:

Following Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation over Watergate, President Gerald Ford declared, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” The constitutional system prevailed because both parties confronted the crisis.

Republican Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, Republican William Ruckelshaus, resigned rather than follow Republican Nixon’s order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Nixon himself resigned when fellow Republicans signaled they were prepared to impeach and convict him.

That smooth transfer of power marked a ringing triumph of justice. The fundamental principle that nobody in America is above the law was upheld.

Now imagine another scenario. America wakes up on Nov. 9 to President-elect Hillary Clinton, and to the cold reality that the same principle of equal justice is null and void.

No rational observer could possibly think otherwise.

Here, from a Wall Street Journal editorial:

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend of Hillary and Bill, steered money to the campaign of the wife of a top FBI official. Political organizations under McAuliffe’s control gave more than $675,000 to the 2015 Virginia state Senate campaign of Jill McCabe, the wife of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. Mr. McCabe, director James Comey’s right-hand man, helped oversee the probe into whether Clinton mishandled classified information on her server.

[Are] voters to believe that Mr. McCabe as the No. 3 official at the FBI had nothing to do with the biggest, most sensitive case at that agency[?] This strains credulity. Before he became No. 3 at the FBI Mr. McCabe ran the bureau’s Washington, D.C. field office that provided resources to the Clinton probe. Campaign-finance records show that 98% of the McAuliffe donations to Mrs. McCabe came after the FBI launched its Clinton probe. . . Comey, the self-styled Boy Scout, somehow didn’t think any of this would look suspicious?

And from Daniel J. Flynn, in the conservative American Spectator:

The loss of faith in [FBI Chief James Comey] stems in part from a dishonest rendering of the decision not to indict Mrs. Clinton as unanimous rather than unilateral and in part from the bureau’s decision to destroy evidence in the case and grant blanket immunity to Clinton underlings for no possible prosecutorial purpose.

“There is a consensus among the employees that the director has lost all credibility and that he cannot lead the bureau,” [former U.S. attorney Joseph] diGenova explains. “They are comparing him to L. Patrick Gray, the disgraced former FBI director who threw Watergate papers into the Potomac River.

“When the director said that it was a unanimous decision not to recommend prosecution, that was a lie,” diGenova points out. “In fact, the people involved in the case were outraged at his decision, which he made by himself.”

The Supreme Court's “Equal Justice Under Law?” Right.

Stolen Podesta Wikileaks Emails Reveal People Don’t Matter

Quotation without comment.

From Mark Hemingway, in the conservative Weekly Standard:

America's greatest novelists could not have concocted a tale that so perfectly confirms dark suspicions about how the liberal elites running America really operate. Taken in total, the picture Podesta's emails present is of a man whose tentacles are adroitly moving all the levers of power. In retrospect, Podesta's casual attitude toward Clinton's email problems doesn't look oblivious—it looks prescient. Why should he worry about disgrace for Hillary Clinton when he and his friends in politics, business, and the media dictate what becomes a scandal?

In this respect, Podesta's emails help explain why the FBI ignored basic procedure, destroyed the computers of Clinton aides in "side agreements" to their immunity deals, and then refused to charge Clinton for egregious violations of laws governing classified information.

According to FBI files released in late September, Obama was emailing Clinton using a pseudonym.   .   . Had the Department of Justice charged Hillary Clinton, the nature of the president's correspondence with her might have quickly emerged as an issue. Pretty soon all of America would have been asking: What did Obama know about Clinton's illegal email server and when did he know it?

Clinton’s Clueless National Elite

The trouble with our current national elite is they really, deeply, truly believe they are better. They are the product of high SAT scores and elite universities, trained to rule, a bicoastal meritocracy in control of government, the media, the arts/entertainment, and the global, knowledge-based economy.

The old land-based aristocracy understood they held their exalted status via dumb luck. Our meritocracy is more arrogant, believing brains earn them the right to rule. Therefore, they cannot defer to the country’s vast, inferior majority. But the U.S. inconveniently is a democracy that proclaims all people equal. That’s not meritocracy!

Thus our outnumbered elite know they must by “hook or crook” maintain their status. That means rigged elections (see “Undocumented Democrats”). It means corruption (as in “Clinton Foundation”). It means Hillary’s “public” (false) and “private” (real) positions, as discussed here.

Hillary was raised a white-privileged Goldwater Republican, with no love for the masses. In college, along with many of her fellow late ‘60s anti-Vietnam elitists, she made a smooth transition from reactionary to radical without dropping her detachment from the masses, re-tagged “rednecks”.

Hillary was early to discover Saul Alinsky, even before he wrote Rules for Radicals (1971). Roger Kimball, in the conservative Washington Examiner, tells us that in 1969, Hillary wrote "'There Is Only the Fight ...': An Analysis of the Alinsky Model," a 92-page Wellesley College senior thesis that at the Clintons' request, remained embargoed until after they leave the White House.

We know that Alinsky:

• admiringly cited Lenin's observation that the Bolsheviks "stood for getting power through the ballot, but would reconsider after they got the guns.” 

• practiced deviousness, saying there would be "absolutely nothing here that the police department or the ushers or any other servants of the establishment could do about [trashing]. The law would be completely paralyzed.” 

• preached mouthing various nostrums about the welfare of children, access to healthcare, etc.; one might rail against inequality, sexism, racism, homophobia, etc., but at the end of the day, politics was all about the acquisition of power and life was all about politics. 

• in Rule No. 13 advocated, "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it ... All issues must be polarized if action is to follow.” 

• in Rule No. 4 said, "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules,” adding, "You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian can live up to Christianity.” 

As Alinsky says, it’s all about power — the “private,” real side of defeating the enemy. Or, as Hillary herself described her opponents:

You know, just to be grossly generalist, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. . . Now some of these folks, they are irredeemable. . .

Comment: What’s so very wrong about the Alinsky/Clinton approach to power is that the differences between people are far less important than their similarities. We are all flawed. A century ago, the white world went crazy believing skin color determined who should rule — supposedly based upon the “science” of evolution. Then, it was about superior v. inferior races.

A world war later, have we not learned anything? Brains no more divide us than did skin color. In a democracy, meritocracy is doomed.

Hillary Clinton’s Hidden Campaign: Can’t Make This Up

Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein with Hillary Clinton

Controlling the “unaware and compliant”  

“we’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry.”

— Hillary Clinton supporter Bill Ivey (email to campaign chief John Podesta)  

Putting down Catholics (and Evangelicals)

John Halpin of the Clinton front “Center for American Progress”:

Ken Auletta's latest piece on Murdoch in the New Yorker starts off with the aside that both Murdoch and Robert Thompson, managing editor of the WSJ, are raising their kids Catholic. Friggin' Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus. Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) from the SC [Supreme Court] and think tanks to the media and social groups.

It's an amazing bastardization of the faith. They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.

Clinton Press Secretary Jennifer Palmieri:

I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals.

—Wikileaks via “Independent Journal Review”

From Clinton’s private speeches (in Investors Business Daily):  

Fool the public:

If everybody's watching, you know, all of the backroom discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.

IBD comment: Believe one thing in public, another thing in private: That's a pretty good working definition of hypocrisy.  

Open borders:

My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it.

Asians and Jews up; blacks, Muslims, Gypsies down:

The main reason behind successful immigration should be painfully obvious to even the most dimwitted of observers: Some groups of people are almost always highly successful given only half a chance (Jews, Hindus/Sikhs and Chinese people, for example), while others (Muslims, blacks and Roma, for instance) fare badly almost irrespective of circumstances.

Wikileaks titles for speeches delivered to Goldman Sachs and others:

"Clinton Talks About Holding Wall Street Accountable Only for Political Reasons"

"Clinton Suggests Wall Street Insiders Are What Is Needed to Fix Wall Street"

"Clinton Touts Her Relationship to Wall Street as a Senator”  

Why the hidden hypocrisy?

In our history, first came the shock of realizing the people are sovereign. In the U.S., that began with the election of 1800, when power passed from the Federalists to Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, the pro-French-revolution rabble of farmers and decentralists who won an election where each side deployed its own controlled journals in an all-out dirty war.

The next shock came in the 1828 election, when Andrew Jackson’s popular-based Democratic Party overturned the old order, and at Jackson’s inauguration his common rabble tromped their mud-laden boots all over White House rugs and furniture. Abraham Lincoln’s minority-vote win in 1860 against three opponents, which put the new Republican Party in control of the North and triggered a Civil War, added a third shock to electoral continuity.

After each shock, the country’s moneyed elite adjusted to the new reality, working to insure the newcomers’ leaders and their followers came under the national elite’s control. The Republicans set the tone in post-Civil War America, with business and land-based wealth controlling most elections (14 of 18) from 1860 to the Crash of 1929.

Since 1930-32, Democrats have learned how a meritocracy of the “best and brightest” can hold power by manipulating shifting coalitions of the government-dependent, winning the popular vote in 13 of the last 21 presidential elections and holding the House for all but 4 years from 1930 to 1994.

Of course, a minority needs its “private” exchanges in order to control a “public” majority. The “private” works at fooling “a majority of the people some of the time” — that “some” time being each presidential election. Seeing into Hillary Clinton’s private world helps us understand how the elite fools us.

Ignorant Washington Elite Exposed

I am so pleased about publication of What Washington Gets Wrong: The Unelected Officials Who Actually Run the Government and Their Misconceptions about the American People, by Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins. It shows what we suspected but had not seen in proof — our Washington D.C. elite thinks of itself as our betters (see nearby chart; click to enlarge).

Bachner and Ginsberg polled staffers from the White House and Capitol Hill, career civil servants, and private lobbyists and others who work closely with government. We learn from their work and from Kyle Smith’s accompanying New York Post article that:

• The insiders failed simple multiple-choice quizzes: 65% guessing median household income is lower than $52,000 a year, four out of five underestimating the white share of the population (78%), 64% underestimating the cohort aged 25 and up with a high school diploma (85%), and 80% guessing the homeownership rate is 62% or lower (poll says 67%, but home ownership is now down to 64%). 

• Like President Obama, who tells us terrorists are no more likely to kill you than your bathtub, the Washington elite thinks Islamic extremism is under control. Yet 71% of the public calls terrorism either a huge problem or a moderately big one. 

• When a congressman asked, on behalf of the taxpayers, the chief of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to talk about how much the agency’s new headquarters would cost (an estimated $125 million), director Richard Cordray replied, “Why does that matter to you?” 

• Franklin Township, NJ residents discovered in 2011 that they couldn’t send a tractor over to remove a tree that fell into a creek and caused flooding. They needed federal permission first, because the feds classified the stream as a “Class C-1 creek.” Thus flooding continued for 12 days, damaging many homes before the federal permit finally arrived.

Sunday Townhall: A Civil Debate?

Townhall Principals Cooper, Raddatz, Clinton, Trump

On “Hannity” (10/5/16, @27 minute mark), pollster Frank Luntz offered Trump (unsolicited) advice on how in Sunday’s “Town Hall” Trump can improve his debate performance:

1.  Be specific, say what you will do in your administration's first 24 hours, include a forensic audit because folks think government wastes money. 
2. Ask the audience a question, such as “How many of you feel safer than you did 8 years ago?” 
3. Ask viewers at home “Which one of us is more likely to bring about the change you desire?"

Overall, “take responsibility, show humility, lower the decibel level because you are interacting with real people, not a moderator.”

Good advice. But what about the story the mainstream media and last week’s debate moderator, NBC’s Lester Holt, insist on ignoring? Will Trump be able to get any of this in?

Paul Sperry at the conservative New York Post writes about how upset FBI agents are in the wake of that agency’s failure to mount a real investigation of Hillary Clinton’s crimes. As Sperry reported:

• Comey allowed immunity for witnesses that came with “outrageous” side deals preventing agents from searching for any computer documents written after the Congressional subpoena, especially messages from former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills to Clinton’s server administrator regarding destruction of evidence. 

• Comey accepted FBI destruction of Mills’ laptop, denying Congress the chance to look for destroyed evidence and making the FBI a party to the crime. 

• The witnesses Comey immunized suffered “chronic lapses in memory, made unsubstantiated claims of attorney-client privilege upon tougher questioning and at least two gave demonstrably false statements.” 

• Comey allowed Clinton a “voluntary” witness interview on a major holiday, and let ex-chief of staff Mills sit in on the interview, even though she, too, was supposedly under investigation. 

• Clinton’s interview lasted just 3½ hours, and despite 40 bouts of amnesia, she wasn’t called back. Three days later, Comey cleared her of criminal wrongdoing. 

Said retired FBI agent Dennis V. Hughes, the first chief of the FBI’s computer investigations unit,“The FBI has politicized itself, and its reputation will suffer for a long time. I hold Director Comey responsible.”

Retired FBI agent Michael M. Biasello, calling “cowardly” Comey’s decision not to seek charges against Clinton, commented:

Comey has singlehandedly ruined the reputation of the organization. The accommodations afforded Clinton and her aides are unprecedented, which is another way of saying this outcome was by design. Had myself or my colleagues engaged in behavior of the magnitude of Hillary Clinton, as described by Comey, we would be serving time in Leavenworth.

The latest reporting adds to evidence we provided earlier that Comey in effect abetted Clinton’s obstruction of justice. Will Clinton II really end up as Nixon II?