Every Presidential Nominee Should Be Subject To A Rorschach Test! Brett Responds. Go Schlicter!

Comey's Destructive Double Standard Decision.
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Hey Richard,

We know liberals love their policies like they love their bumper stickers: good slogan, zero substance.

So this election season, let’s really give them something to honk at:

Get a HillNo! bumper sticker by pledging just $3 to the one organization solely dedicated to stopping Hillary Clinton becoming our next President. +++

Obama continues to press the case for Iran's economic improvement in the misguided hope/conviction it will change their behavior as if Obama ever changes his own behaviour. (See 1 below.)
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Last night my friend and fellow memo reader, Bret Stephens, was interviewed about the Comey matter and he made some interesting observations.  He reviewed cases in which Comey had made previous decisions pertaining to high profile people and Brett concluded Comey often lacked the courage to rule based on the law. Brett also stated he was 95% certain the Hillary decision was dictated.

Comey's previous prosecution of Scooter Libby was a travesty of justice and I said so at the time.

One of the first responses I received after Comey's decision was from a prominent Savannah business man who took me to task for ever thinking Hillary was as I have characterized her.

Perhaps, at the time, he had responded based on the headline and not listened to Comey's recitation.

In any event, I feel vindicated for calling Hillary a liar. I have always thought her to be totally untrustworthy and this is why I believe every candidate for president should be subject to a Rorschach Test!  That way voters would be better informed about potential loose screws.

Obama, campaigning in North Carolina, called Hillary " the most qualified candidate ever."  Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.  Obama was totally unqualified and has proven he remains so. (See 2 below.)

I listened to the Comey Testimony until I had to leave for a lunch meeting  so I have not heard the entire proceedings.  I did draw these conclusions based on what I did hear:

The Democrats sought to turn the investigation into a "Republican witch hunt" and a waste of spending tax payer money for political reasons.

The Republicans asked probing questions that tried to understand the distinction between negligent behaviour and careless and how her avowed and acknowledged carelessness did not justify the conclusion of negligence and a pattern of behviour that should have allowed the FBI to proceed with a recommendation of prosecution would have been in order so the perception of a double standard would not hang over our nation now and beyond as a result of Comey's decision.

Comey was forthright and answered every question but I conclude that much of the ground that was the basis of his decision was cut out from under him by probing questions from the Republican side.

The Petraeus case was cut and dry.  The Clinton case was more difficult because Hillary did not state she was knowingly violating the law but any reasonable person, particularly at her level, should have known.  She even signed a State Department Document regarding how she should have handled herself.
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Kurt Schlicter thinks as I do.  (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)

A Bad Iran Investment By Lawrence J. Haas

Stretching appeasement to the breaking point, Washington is working overtime to convince global institutions, nations, banks and companies to dismiss their well-founded concerns and do business with the America-hating, terror-sponsoring, nuclear weapons-pursuing regime in Tehran. Washington's efforts - which are coming despite no discernable change in Iranian behavior - extend a familiar script of recent years, in which the Obama administration kowtows to the regime, ignores the concerns of America's regional allies and breaks its promises to monitor Iranian activities closely and act accordingly. It's an embarrassing spectacle that diminishes U.S. leadership and credibility in the region and beyond. Nevertheless, the U.S. effort is having an impact. The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, which sets global standards for fighting money laundering and terror financing, responded to U.S. pressure by deciding last week to suspend for a year its measures to combat Iranian terror sponsorship because Iran has adopted a plan to address the problem - even though Tehran hasn't actually implemented it. And the plan is meaningless to begin with because it excludes from "terrorism" any group that Iran says is "attempting to end foreign occupation, colonialism, and racism," as Iran surely would say of its terrorist proxies Hezbollah and Hamas. The Financial Action Task Force has long labeled Iran and North Korea "high-risk or uncooperative jurisdictions" and urged other countries to take "counter-measures" to protect their financial systems. As recently as February, it said it was "particularly and exceptionally concerned about Iran's failure to address the risk of terrorist financing and the serious threat this poses to the integrity of the international financial system." Whether the group's change of heart will generate much new business for Iran, however, remains unclear. "Practically speaking," the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, D.C. think tank, has noted, "there is no change since, given the continued concerns over Iran's illicit conduct, financial institutions will continue to voluntarily implement strict countermeasures ... Businesses considering ties to Iran will have to conduct enhanced due diligence that will prove a nightmare for them." That's because Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp controls nearly a third of Iran's economy, many of Iran's companies hide their ties to the guard, the country ranked 130 out of 168 countries on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, and it continues to bolster Bashar Assad, Syria's brutal dictator, and to support Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist groups. "Most large banks that care about long-term protection of their assets," the Foundation for Defense of Democracies wrote, "are not rushing back into Iran because they understand it has a long way to go before it's safe to do business there. Ultimately they are looking to avoid the massive sanctions, money-laundering, and corruption risk Iran poses to their stakeholders." On the other hand, Boeing recently announced that it will sell 100 jets to Iran Air in a $25 billion deal that the State Department said it "welcomes," adding that Boeing was in "close contact" with the department on the deal. To facilitate it, the administration dropped the sanctions that it had slapped on Iran Air in 2011 for using its passenger and cargo planes to send rockets and missiles to Syria, disguising those shipments as medicine or spare parts, and enabling the Revolutionary Guard to control some of the flights. Whether pressuring the Financial Action Task Force, facilitating Boeing or promoting Iran as a place to do business, the administration admits that it's going well beyond its obligations under the U.S.-led global nuclear deal with Iran. "I have personally gone beyond the absolute requirements of the lifting of sanctions," Secretary of State John Kerry said recently, "to personally engage with banks and businesses and others who have a natural reluctance after several years of sanctions to move without fully understanding what they are allowed to do and what they are not allowed to do." Administration officials say they're driven by two motives. First, President Barack Obama is doubling down on his hopes that - whether through the $100 billion-plus in sanctions relief provided under the nuclear deal, or because of U.S. promotion of Iran as a place for business - Iran's economic progress will convince the regime to abandon its militancy and become a responsible global actor. Second, by expanding U.S. ties to and investment in Iran, Obama hopes to make it harder for his successor to undo his nuclear deal, which he considers among his top achievements. To achieve this goal, in his remaining months in office, he's reportedly pushing for such additional steps as Iranian entry into the World Trade Organization and facilitating Iranian access to the dollar. But U.S. efforts to nourish Iran's economy have prompted no change in Iranian behavior. Unless they eventually do, a more prosperous Tehran will pose greater risks for the United States on the world stage. A president focused on his legacy, however, doesn't seem to worry. Lawrence J. Haas, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, is the author of the new book Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

2)

The Trumpen Proletariat

Barack Obama’s presidency of moral condescension has produced an electoral backlash.

Wonder Land Columnist Dan Henninger on what motivates the presumptive Republican nominee’s supporters. Photo credit: Associated Press.

By

DANIEL HENNINGER

Karl Marx, in a particularly dyspeptic moment, offered this description of what he dismissed as the lumpen proletariat:

“Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.”

Even Donald Trump’s critics would not go so far as to suggest that his voter base consists of vagabonds, pickpockets or even, ugh, “literati.” But for the longest time, the American media saw the Trump base as an “indefinite, disintegrated mass” of mostly angry, lower-middle-class white males. The early Trump adopters often looked like bikers, with or without jobs. The Trumpen proletariat.

This was the original Trump bedrock, the proles who could look past him saying thatJohn McCain, though tortured for years by the Vietnamese, wasn’t a hero. Even now they’ll blink right by Mr. Trump’s remark this week that Saddam Hussein was “good” at killing terrorists (“they didn’t read them their rights”), despite the unhappy fact that Saddam was a psychopathic, blood-soaked torturer responsible for the deaths of perhaps a half million non-terrorist Iraqi citizens.

(Still, one may ask: When the day after her Comey pardon, Hillary Clinton proposes “free” tuition at public colleges for families earning up to $85,000 a year, and $125,000 by 2021, how come her campaign isn’t universally laughed and mocked off the map?)

The media originally looked upon the emerging Trump base with suspicion and distrust, regarding it as a volatile and possibly dangerous political faction but one that would slip back to the shadows as the Trump candidacy faded.

We are 10 days from the party conventions, and Mr. Trump sits, uneasily as always, close to the polling margin of error against the former Secretary of State, former U.S. senator and former first lady Hillary Clinton. The Trumpen proletariat turns out to be bigger than imagined.

In the nonstop conversation about the 2016 election, the question at the center of everything is whether one is a “Trump supporter.” But if it is true that in this election all the rules have been broken, couldn’t it also be true that Donald Trump has himself become a bystander to the forces set in motion this year?

And yet he stands. This election must be about something else.Mr. Trump has raised very little money, is still pouring the foundation for a campaign organization and faces a determined, billion-dollar Democratic Party machine. Once a month, he slanders reality with backhanded admiration for mass murderers such as Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Un.

It is a reckoning, a final settling of accounts and grievances going way back. This isn’t about Republicans versus Democrats. It’s the gunfight at the OK Corral, between the Earps and the Clantons. It’s a street fight about what have become irreconcilable views of America.

Undeniably, economic anxiety over flatlined incomes and the sense of economic loss, blamed variously on globalization or immigrants, explains a lot in this election. But not all of it. A Trump doesn’t rise without stronger forces in play.

That force has been described, including by me, as the revolt of the politically incorrect. PC, though, is just the symptom of a more virulent social disease.

The U.S. has been through culture wars before, as with the religious right in the 1980s and ’90s. Or the smart set in the 1920s. The country, ever resilient, eventually adjusts and moves on.

Political correctness added something new to the cultural divide: moral condescension.

What has really “angered” so many more millions who now feel drawn into the Trump camp isn’t just PC itself but that its proponents show such relentless moral contempt and superiority toward everyone else. People in America can take a lot, but not that. Marx would have a field day with how progressivism’s cultural elites have reordered social classes between the right-minded and everyone else.

Despite years of winning Supreme Court assent to their views, the left insists that the other side must remain on the moral hook. On race, sex or the environment the moralistic left seems to think it can keep the population incarcerated forever on vague, unproven charges of cultural guilt. For what?

In nearly eight years of presidential speeches, Barack Obama, by explicit choice, has come to embody the holier-than-thou idea of showing secular moral contempt for those who disagree with him.

As his inheritor, Hillary Clinton will bear the brunt of an energized Trumpen proletariat that suddenly finds moral demotion as something they no longer have to bear. That the mercurial Donald Trump has occupied both sides of this conflict and then some is, after all these years, beside the point.

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3) You Need To Suck It Up And Vote For Trump

By Kurt Schlicter

Donald Trump is a vulgar clown posing as a conservative, unmoored to any coherent ideology. He has generated unprecedented opposition and the contempt of people across the political spectrum. He is unbound to any principle other than his own appetite for adulation. And those very factors that make him so appalling also make him America’s only hope.

Now we need to suck it up and pull the lever for this jerk. I don’t need to hear why Trump sucks again. I know why he’s terrible. I’ve written about it at length.

But the Hillary Clinton charade of July 5th – a date that shall live in infamy – and the subsequent rubbing of normal Americans’ noses in the heap of droppings progressives have piled upon the rule of law make plain that there is something much more important at stake here than fussy distaste over Trump’s aesthetic failings and his myriad misjudgments.

The short-sighted liberal elite, aided and abetted by its media catamites, are using our Constitution as toilet paper. One thing matters. One thing only. That is restoring the rule of law, because without it the coastal femboys and hectoring harridans of the left will keep pushing and prodding and provoking until they, to their shock, find normal Americans pushing back. They are worse than stupid – they are unwise, thinking they are simply playing fun games oppressing and abusing those they see as lessers when, in reality, they are playing with fire.

One thing matters. One thing only. That is restoring the rule of law, and only a Trump presidency can do that.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and their cabal have demonstrated that there is no one they cannot corrupt, or at least whose integrity they can’t twist and deform. John Roberts, James Comey – all we heard about was their lofty integrity right up until the moment they shoved their shivs in our collective kidney. We can’t rely on the honor of individuals. We need to return to a paradigm where the interests of factions work to check and balance each other.

If elected, how will Hillary Clinton ever be held accountable? Can you conceive of a scenario where the Democrats, or their media, judicial and bureaucratic allies ever stand up in opposition to anything she does, no matter how venal, how corrupt, how fascist? Name the Democrat who stood up in the wake of Comey’s honor flush and said, “This is wrong!”

There will be no check or balance on Hillary Clinton. Not the Congress (D or R), not the courts, not the media, not the bureaucrats. None. This Alinksyite corruptocrat, her second-rate mind twisted with hatred toward normal Americans, will reign unchallenged. She has already sought the power to jail those who criticize her; reversing Citizens United would only be the first step in an unopposed quest to eliminate all legitimate means of dissent, to bar all legitimate means of opposition. Which, of course, would leave only illegitimate means – something she is too dense and ignorant of normal Americans to imagine is possible.

Which leaves Donald Trump as the only alternative, not merely because he is less awful than Hillary Clinton – leprosy is less awful than Hillary Clinton – but because the election of a tacky jerk like Donald Trump is the only thing that could ever motivate the elite to rediscover checks and balances upon executive power.

Think of it. A Congress that finally finds a spine in the face of the president. And that’s not just Democrats – even the posing goofs on the Republican side of the aisle would be falling over themselves to take a whack at the orange executive. What court would shrug and defer to El Presidente Little Digits? Even the mainstream media would rediscover the curiosity about West Wing wrongdoing that disappeared back in January 2009. Imagine their delight to once again be able to preen and strut while babbling about how they speak truth to power instead of groveling and bussing the rear of their White House master.

America will have never seen checking and balancing like President Trump would experience. And that is exactly, precisely what America must have right now.

Hillary Clinton will roll into office unhindered and unaccountable. We know what Clintons do when there is oversight; any sane person should shudder at the thought of them not merely unaccountable, but actively abetted by the entire elite. If you want to tear this country apart – not figuratively, not metaphorically, but with the real violence and bloodshed she will blunder into provoking – then hand that aspiring pants-suited Chavez wannabe the keys to the Oval Office.

That’s the choice. There’s no white knight riding in to snag the nomination away from the guy who won it fair and square. It’s Trump or Hillary. Sorry, that’s your choice, and making no choice is a choice for her.

I get that you detest Trump. So do I. But you can stop sending me tweets about the latest faux outrage. “Trump loves Saddam Hussein and has insulted all our vets and blah blah blah!” Get some damn perspective.

I know you’ve invested a lot of your personal credibility in refusing to support him, and you will absolutely have to endure a lot of graceless gloating by his jerkier acolytes if you walk it back. I endure plenty from Trump haters. Apparently I’m a fake conservative and hate America and blah blah blah. But walk it back you must.

This isn’t about how awful Trump is; it’s about how awful Hillary will be without any constraints whatsoever.

Only one thing matters. One thing only. That is restoring the rule of law. And only a Trump presidency has any hope of doing that.

Sorry.

Suck it up and vote for the rule of law.

And, astonishingly, that means you must vote for Donald Trump.

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