Author: Papa Giorgio
Is “Servergate” Just a Fox News Promoted Waste of Time?
Via NewBusters:
In a discussion about Hillary’s emails, a 2nd Amendment loving ex-conservative (read here, committed [not in an asylum] lefty) said this:
[icon name=”thumb-tack” class=””] Its another “Bengazi-styled”, mountain out of a mole hill, Fox news promoted, waste of time, partisan, Hillary witch hunt.
This really is not the case. In other words, Fox is joined by a chorus of media this time. Remember, when this was found out, Democrats were pissed: “5 House Democrats call for release of first batch of Hillary Clinton emails.” Hillary herself in 2007 was against secret emails before she was for them.
“We know our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps, the secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts.” ~ 2007 (RPT)
The AP (not Fox News) is suing Hillary. And NPR points out 3-reasons Dems are worried (what the Washington Post says are leading Democrats):
1. Democrats feel like they’ve just stepped into the wayback machine and not in a good way.
2. It won’t go away any time soon.
3. There’s no Plan B.
Bubba even said he never emailed her, then, “surprise, surprise,” the emails are already showing this to be a lie.
She also printed out 50,000 pages of emails… as to make me ask on my Twitter how many indigenous people had to die and trees be destroyed for this eco-terror to happen :lol:
She has said she deleted many. S h e – h a s – s a i d… not Fox News.
So this scandal is soo bad that Fox is not the leader in real news for once. Nor are Republicans taking legal action against the Clinton’s~ the Democrats are as well as the AP.
The AP Does a Fact Check on Hildabeast’s Servergate Press Conferance
Via Breitbart:
CLINTON: “Others had done it.”
The Associated Press on Wednesday sued the State Department to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
The legal action follows repeated requests filed under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act that have gone unfulfilled. They include one request the AP made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013.
The suit in U.S. District Court comes a day after Clinton broke her silence about her use of a private email account while she was America’s top diplomat.
The FOIA requests and the suit seek materials related to her public and private calendars; correspondence involving aides likely to play important roles in her expected campaign for president; and Clinton-related emails about the Osama bin Laden raid and National Security Agency surveillance practices.
“After careful deliberation and exhausting our other options, The Associated Press is taking the necessary legal steps to gain access to these important documents, which will shed light on actions by the State Department and former Secretary Clinton, a presumptive 2016 presidential candidate, during some of the most significant issues of our time,” said Karen Kaiser, AP’s general counsel.
Said AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll: “The Freedom of Information Act exists to give citizens a clear view of what government officials are doing on their behalf. When that view is denied, the next resort is the courts.”…
(Yahoo)
THE FACTS: Although email practices varied among her predecessors, Clinton is the only secretary of state known to have conducted all official unclassified government business on a private email address. Years earlier, when emailing was not the ubiquitous practice it is now among high officials, Colin Powell used both a government and a private account. It’s a striking departure from the norm for top officials to rely exclusively on private email for official business.
CLINTON: “I fully complied with every rule I was governed by.”
THE FACTS: At the very least, Clinton appears to have violated what the White House has called “very specific guidance” that officials should use government email to conduct business.
Clinton provided no details about whether she had initially consulted with the department or other government officials before using the private email system. She did not answer several questions about whether she sought any clearances before she began relying exclusively on private emails for government business.
Federal officials are allowed to communicate on private email and are generally allowed to conduct government business in those exchanges, but that ability is constrained, both by federal regulations and by their supervisors.
Federal law during Clinton’s tenure called for the archiving of such private email records when used for government work, but did not set out clear rules or punishments for violations until rules were tightened in November. In 2011, when Clinton was secretary, a cable from her office sent to all employees advised them to avoid conducting any official business on their private email accounts because of targeting by unspecified “online adversaries.”
CLINTON: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.”
THE FACTS: The assertion fits with the facts as known but skirts the issue of exchanging information in a private account that, while falling below the level of classified, is still sensitive.
The State Department and other national security agencies have specified rules for the handling of such sensitive material, which could affect national security, diplomatic and privacy concerns, and may include material such as personnel, medical and law enforcement data. In reviewing the 30,000 emails she turned over to the State Department, officials are looking for any security lapses concerning sensitive but unclassified material that may have been disclosed.
CLINTON: “It had numerous safeguards. It was on property guarded by the Secret Service. And there were no security breaches.”
THE FACTS: While Clinton’s server was physically guarded by the Secret Service, she provided no evidence it hadn’t been compromised by hackers or foreign adversaries. She also didn’t detail who administered the email system, if it received appropriate software security updates, or if it was monitored routinely for unauthorized access.
Clinton also didn’t answer whether the homebrew computer system on her property had the same level of safeguards provided at professional data facilities, such as regulated temperatures, offsite backups, generators in case of power outages and fire-suppression systems. It was unclear what, if any, encryption software Clinton’s server may have used to communicate with U.S. government email accounts.
Recent high-profile breaches, including at Sony Pictures Entertainment, have raised scrutiny on how well corporations and private individuals protect their computer networks from attack.
CLINTON: “When I got to work as secretary of state, I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two. Looking back, it would’ve been better if I’d simply used a second email account and carried a second phone, but at the time, this didn’t seem like an issue.”
THE FACTS: If multiple devices were an inconvenience in the past, they may be something of an obsession now. Clinton told an event in California’s Silicon Valley last month that she has an iPad, a mini-iPad, an iPhone and a BlackBerry. “I’m like two steps short of a hoarder,” she said. She suggested she started out in Washington with a BlackBerry but her devices grew in number.
Smartphones were capable of multiple emails when she became secretary; it’s not clear whether the particular phone she used then was permitted to do so under State Department rules.
Concepts: Are We Insane? Nope, Just You Van Huizum (Updated)
Yet another unfounded swipe at the Iraq War. John Van Huizum lives in a bubble where if he has come to a conclusion years ago… that’s it! History forever stays right where John wants it to stay. Here is an excerpt of John’s (click to enlarge it) article shows a complete lack of history. 
I doubt he think any differently about Vietnam based on his 1970’s conclusions. It wouldn’t matter that after 1990 — the fall of the Wall — 100,000 of thousands of Soviet era documents were now being translated and reviewed by military historians and good books based on MORE historical documents. Because these new documents support the traditional (and not the Left’s reasoning) for entering and fighting this proxy war of WWIII (the Cold War), this new information is rejected from the matrix of the left’s consciousness. But that is neither here-nor-there.
So, let’s deal with some of the contentions in John’s excerpted article. Firstly he notes that there were insufficient reasons for going to war.
May I remind him there were many U.N. Resolutions against Iraq that were almost all not met:
- UNSCR 678 – November 29, 1990
- UNSCR 686 – March 2, 1991
- UNSCR 687 – April 3, 1991
- UNSCR 688 – April 5, 1991
- UNSCR 707 – August 15, 1991
- UNSCR 715 – October 11, 1991
- UNSCR 949 – October 15, 1994
- UNSCR 1051 – March 27, 1996
- UNSCR 1060 – June 12, 1996
- UNSCR 1115 – June 21, 1997
- UNSCR 1134 – October 23, 1997
- UNSCR 1137 – November 12, 1997
- UNSCR 1154 – March 2, 1998
- UNSCR 1194 – September 9, 1998 (“Condemns the decision by Iraq of 5 August 1998 to suspend cooperation with” UN and IAEA inspectors, which constitutes “a totally unacceptable contravention” of its obligations under UNSCR 687, 707, 715, 1060, 1115, and 1154.)
- UNSCR 1205 – November 5, 1998
- UNSCR 1284 – December 17, 1999
Official U.N. resolutions aside, Bush went to Congress and made his case with these and many other points. One point being that Iraq was firing almost everyday on our fighter pilots in the no-fly zone. In the cease fire of the First Gulf War, this was enough — under international law — to RESUME aggression.
But I also argue very forcefully that WMDs (and AMDs) were found in Iraq. And I made a case for it via a debate with a professor of history from the University of Michigan. The ever growing case for it can be found here on my WMD PAGE. Another site that is more in-depth than my own is this one. On it we find an even more in-depth quoting of Democrats — in other words, not Cheney — making Bush’s case:
- “One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line.”
~ President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998.
- “Together we must also confront the new hazards of chemical and biological weapons, and the outlaw states, terrorists and organized criminals seeking to acquire them. Saddam Hussein has spent the better part of this decade, and much of his nation’s wealth, not on providing for the Iraqi people, but on developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them.”
~ President Clinton, Jan. 27, 1998.
- “Fateful decisions will be made in the days and weeks ahead. At issue is nothing less than the fundamental question of whether or not we can keep the most lethal weapons known to mankind out of the hands of an unreconstructed tyrant and aggressor who is in the same league as the most brutal dictators of this century.”
~ Sen. Joe Biden (D, DE), Feb. 12, 1998
- “It is essential that a dictator like Saddam not be allowed to evade international strictures and wield frightening weapons of mass destruction. As long as UNSCOM is prevented from carrying out its mission, the effort to monitor Iraqi compliance with Resolution 687 becomes a dangerous shell game. Neither the United States nor the global community can afford to allow Saddam Hussein to continue on this path.”
~ Sen. Tom Daschle (D, SD), Feb. 12, 1998
- “Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.”
~ Madeleine Albright, Feb. 18, 1998.
- “He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.”
~ Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb. 18, 1998.
- “We urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.”
~ Letter to President Clinton, signed by Sens. Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, and others Oct. 9, 1998.
- “As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am keenly aware that the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is an issue of grave importance to all nations. Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.”
~ Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998.
- “Hussein has … chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies.”
~ Madeleine Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999.
- “This December will mark three years since United Nations inspectors last visited Iraq. There is no doubt that since that time, Saddam Hussein has reinvigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf War status. In addition, Saddam continues to refine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.”
~ Letter to President Bush, Signed by Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL) and others, Dec, 5, 2001.
- “We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.”
~ Sen. Carl Levin (D, MI), Sept. 19, 2002.
- “We know that he has stored away secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.”
~ Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002.
- “Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.”
~ Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002.
- “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.”
~ Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002.
- “The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons…”
~ Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002.
- “My position is very clear: The time has come for decisive action to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. I’m a co-sponsor of the bipartisan resolution that’s presently under consideration in the Senate. Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave threat to America and our allies…”
~ John Edwards (D, NC), Oct. 7, 2002
- “I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force — if necessary — to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.”
~ Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002.
- “There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years …. We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.”
~ Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002.
- “He has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years, every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity. This he has refused to do.”
~ Rep. Henry Waxman (D, CA), Oct. 10, 2002.
- “In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members…. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.”
~ Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct. 10, 2002.
- “We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.
~ Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL), Dec. 8, 2002.
- “Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime …. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation … And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction …. So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real ….”
~ Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003.
Nope, no one named Dick Cheney there.
Now, on to my second grievance with John’s ignorance of history. And it has to do with God’s existence and war. While I will grant him that Islam has inherent to it properties that make them go to war… constantly, their whole history.
John Quincy Adams is worth reading at greater length on the topic, as he provides some insight into what has been going on in Iraq now that Obama has prematurely removed our troops:
▼ In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad], the Egyptian, […..] Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST. – TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE…. Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant … While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.
Winston Churchill deserves a longer hearing too:
▼ “How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.
Islam has not changed over the centuries. All that has changed is that never before have we been ruled by people who take Islam’s side against us.
(Click to enlarge)
Other religions do not. But the Left typically will think religion is the main catalyst for war throughout history. This is not the case. Let me repeat that, this is NOT the case.
A recent comprehensive compilation of the history of human warfare, Encyclopedia of Wars by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod documents 1763 wars, of which 123 have been classified to involve a religious conflict. So, what atheists have considered to be ‘most’ really amounts to less than 7% of all wars. It is interesting to note that 66 of these wars (more than 50%) involved Islam, which did not even exist as a religion for the first 3,000 years of recorded human warfare. Even the Seven Years’ War, widely recognized to be “religious” in motivation, noting that the warring factions were not necessarily split along confessional lines as much as along secular interests.
- Alan Axelrod & Charles Phillips, Encyclopedia of Wars, Facts on File, November 2004
- John Entick, The General History of the Later War, Volume 3, 1763, p. 110.
So I would argue the further you get from the Judeo-Christian ethic/God, the more violent a culture gets. As we become more secularized, we (Judeo-Christian adherents) meet snorts and ridicule: 
“No culture is perfect – far from it. But all healthy cultures reward virtue and punish vice, encourage what is noble and beautiful and discourage what is base and tawdry, promote liberty, and restrain license. [Every young man] must now dwell in a perverse anti-culture in which his attempt to practice the demanding virtue of purity meets less than approval. It meets snorts of disdain and ridicule.”
Anthony Esolen, Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity (Charlotte, NC: Saint Benedict Press, 2014), 54.
We know that our Constitution was founded for a particular people, which is what the left want a “living/breathing” constitution which is based in a different worldview than those who wrote it: “Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and practice” ~ Woodrow Wilson.
“…we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
- John Adams, first (1789–1797) Vice President of the United States, and the second (1797–1801) President of the United States. Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798, in Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull (New York, 1848), pp 265-6.
All this is lost on John however… it is like teaching a new trick to a very old dog. But people are entitled to their opinions… just not their own facts.
“Victicrat” ~ Defined
What Are the Least Free Places in America? Universities
Video Description:
Question: Which American institution—one that prides itself on being open, democratic, and diverse—punishes its members severely for offering unpopular opinions, while it offers them a very narrow, limited worldview? Answer: Universities. Once the vanguard of open debate and free speech, colleges have become a place where alternative thinking goes to die. Students who speak out on behalf of traditional American ideals, unfortunately, are often silenced by college administrators. Learn how the college campus, a place that should be an intellectual melting pot, has turned into anything but, violating the rights of those who have alternate opinions.
Lecturer: Greg Lukianoff, President at The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. His book, “Unlearning Liberty,” is available on Amazon
Video Description:
Should offensive speech be banned? Where should we, as a society, draw the line where permitted speech is on one side, and forbidden speech is on the other? Should we even have that line? And should free speech be limited by things like trigger warnings and punishments for microaggressions? Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, answers these questions and more.
One of my favorite clips from IndoctrinateU, is this one by a liberal professor that echoes the above video by pointing out the intellectual laziness created by “labeling” people who “offend” them:
Video Description:
A liberal professor interviewed in Indoctrinate U explains that protecting and teaching from one ideological viewpoint insulates students who are liberal to properly defend and coherently explain their views in the real world — outside the classroom. This excerpt is taken from two parts, Part One is here, and Part Two is here. (Posted by: Religio-Political Talk)
This segways into an introduction to F.I.R.E.’s co-founder, Harvey Silverglate, and exemplifies the importance of keeping free speech alive and well… especially on university campuses. Harvey touches on his Alma mater, Harvard (the ENTIRE video can be found HERE):
Here is one of my favorite examples of what F.I.R.E. does:
Larry Elder Excoriates Leftism after Eric Holder’s Ferguson Report
Audio Description:
A magic 50-minutes with Larry Elder. He weaves the reality that the Left can only weave — and that is this:
▼ the bankruptcy of and the consequences of the “state” [statist ideology] that came to fruition in Ferguson in the micro via the MACRO application of failed leftist policies! (e.g., the welfare state, subsidizing fatherless-ness, and the funding of programs and pensions via unions and it’s city/state employes.
Larry elder is not on 790 any-longer. To get his shows one MUST currently go here: http://www.larryelder.com/ One can sign up as an Elderado and get his podcasts on iTunes.
➳ (A tip for Elderodoes): My Larry Elder podcasts stopped downloading recently in iTunes. So the first thing I did was I copied my past episodes into a seperate file (the copying and relocating took a while). Then I went into iTunes and deleted the Larry Elder podcast[s]. I then went to larryelder.com, got into my account, and refreshed the whole show podcasts for iTunes. I am now getting the new episodes.
Don’t forget about Larry’s blog: http://www.elderstatement.com/
A young man called into the show that same day. Larry Elder kept him on for a long time, but I truncated the call to reflect the main [muddled] thinking of the caller’s reasoning:
“Servergate” ~ Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Death Knell
Hillary said,
“We know our Constitution is being shredded. We know about the secret wiretaps, the secret military tribunals, the secret White House email accounts.” ~ 2007
Megyn Kelly noted the hypocrisy in the Hillary “mailgate” issue:
…“That’s not how it’s supposed to work,” she continued. “The federal agencies are supposed to have all these documents. They’ll screen them. They’ll take out the personal ones. Someone could be held accountable. Right now it’s just Hillary’s people whose word upon which we apparently must rely.”
She added, “It’s not just the — you can have private email, it’s what you do with the email thereafter is what’s the problem. Federal law makes it a crime punishable by up to three years in prison if someone has records and “willfully and unlawfully conceals or destroys such records.” Did she conceal those records for years when those seven committees were demanding to see her personal correspondence?”
After running a clip of Hillary Clinton criticizing the Bush Administration over secret emails, Kelly continued, “What a hypocrite. It’s obvious.”
Kelly ended the segment, which featured Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry, Judge Andrew Napolitano and “The Five” co-host Dana Perino, by speaking directly to a State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf….
When I noted all the new Benghazi emails being uncovered that were previously requested, I got this link to a story about Issa “glossing over” Bush emails (Crooks & Liars: “Issa Blamed IBM Software For Loss Of 22 Million Bush Emails“). I wish to note the difference here.
1) The new law that ex-CIA director David Petraeus is pleading guilty to and all incoming Cabinet members were filled in on, and Hillary helped pass the rules for when in the Senate ~ was made law in 2009. I will repeat, 2009. The separation of Bush emails was in trying to comply with the Hatch Amendments. Hillary has broken the law on this newer regulation which she was aware of… and as she emailed many people in the administration, they knew she was violating as well. Even Mother Jones gets it:
Since 2009, NARA’s regulations have stated that “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.”
This rule is clear: If Clinton used personal email to conduct official business—which apparently did not violate any federal rules at the time—all of those emails had to be collected and preserved within the State Department’s recordkeeping system. That makes sense: The whole point of preserving official records of government business is to have this material controlled by the government, not by the individual official or employee.
So Issa had no legal course of action to say the same thing.
2) All those “lost emails” of Bush were found. The charge was that these lost emails showed collusion by the Bush administration against Valerie Plame. They have had all these emails since early 2009… don’t you think we would have been inundated with story-after-story about these emails showing this left-wing conspiracy narrative to be true?
3) Bush did not use his own server in his home.
Ben Shapiro notes the history of Hillary thwarting documents being handed over:
Hillary’s “Thwarted Record Requests.” On Wednesday, the Times reported that Clinton used her private email address to avoid turning over documents to Congressional committees investigating the Benghazi, Libya terror attack of September 11, 2012. According to the Times, “It was one of several instances in which records requests sent to the State Department, which had no access to Mrs. Clinton’s emails, came up empty.” The State Department did the same routine with regard to a Freedom of Information Act request asking for correspondence between Hillary and former political hit man Sidney Blumenthal; in 2010, the AP said its FOIA requests had gone unanswered by the State Department on the same grounds; the same holds true with regard to FOIA requests from conservative group Citizens United.
Hillary’s First Emailgate. According to Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, Hillary’s top woman, Cheryl Mills – you remember her from Benghazi – “helped orchestrate the cover-up of a major scandal, often referred to as ‘Email-gate.’” Over the course of years, the Clinton Administration allegedly withheld some 1.8 million email communications from Judicial Watch’s attorneys, as well as federal investigators and Congress. Judicial Watchsays that when a White House computer contractor attempted to reveal the emails, White House officials “instructed her to keep her mouth shut about the hidden e-mail or face dismissal and jail time.”
Hillary’s Missing Whitewater Documents. In 1996, a special Senate Whitewater committee released a report from the FBI demonstrating that documents sought in the Whitewater investigation had been found in the personal Clinton quarters of the White House. The First Lady’s fingerprints were on them. The documents had gone mysteriously missing for two years. Mark Fabiani, special White House counsel, immediately stated that there was no problem, according to the Times: “He added that she had testified under oath that she had nothing to do with the documents during the two years they were missing and did not know how they ended up in the family quarters.” Hillary remains the only First Lady in American history to be fingerprinted by the FBI. Those weren’t the only missing Whitewater documents later found in the Clinton White House. Rose Law billing records were found years after being sought “in the storage area in the third-floor private residence at the White House where unsolicited gifts to the President and First Lady are stored before being sorted and catalogued.”
Hillary’s Missing Travelgate Documents. In 1996, just before the Whitewater documents emerged – literally the day before – a two-year-old memo emerged, according to The New York Times, showing that Hillary “had played a far greater role in the dismissal of employees of the White House travel office than the Administration has acknowledged.” Oops.
Hillary’s “Unethical Practices” During Watergate. According to Democrat Jerry Zeifman, Hillary “engaged in a variety of self-serving unethical practices in violation of House rules” designed to keep Nixon in office long enough to guarantee a Democratic presidential victory in 1976. Zeifman said that Clinton – then Hillary Rodham — had worked with Teddy Kennedy’s political strategist. More specifically, Zeifman accused Rodham of writing a fraudulent legal brief and grabbing public documents. Zeifman fired her, and later claimed that he wished he had reported her to the Bar.
Hillary has a long history of this behavior. But that won’t stop her from moving forward. The media are less interested in governmental transparency than in picking the next president – and making sure the next president represents the hard, corrupt left….
Lierre Keith, Author of “The Vegetarian Myth” Talks About Veganism
A Conservative Giant Passes ~ RIP M. Stanton Evans
Mr. Evans will be missed. His impact and legacy will live on however. Here are two tributes worth reading:
✪ The Washington Times
✪ Powerline
He was known as well for his humor:
“We have two parties here, and only two — one is the evil party, and the other is the stupid party,” he said. “I’m very proud to be a member of the stupid party. Occasionally, the two parties get together to do something that’s both evil and stupid. That’s called bipartisanship.”
You can hear his humorous side work it’s way out in the lecture at the bottom of this tribute.
One of my favorite books by Stanton is, “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies.” My first book I read by him was “The Theme is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Traditions.” Very impactful. And really makes you aware of the many streams of thought and history that converged in the settler life to form such wonderful Founding documents. Here is a taste of his writing style:
Even so, constitutional government as we conceive it was not attained in England. On the contrary, the principal lesson English Whigs derived from struggling with the Stuarts was that Parliament should wield the supreme, unchecked authority that had been wrested from the crown. While constitutional-ism and the rule of law continued to be talked of, the British concluded, in so many words, that Parliament could do whatever it wished, up to and including making changes in the constitution. The king accordingly was “under the law,” but Parliament wasn’t—since law was whatever Parliament decided.
As we have seen, this idea was never accepted by the Americans, and it became the focus of bitter conflict with the English. In the American theory, all political power was subject to a higher law, and this included legislatures as well as monarchs. In constitutional terms, the War of Independence was fought about this issue, and the political arrangements arrived at in the aftermath of fighting reflected the identical thesis. “In all free states,” Sam Adams put it, “the constitution is fixed.” Hence the method of establishing and tightly controlling power through conventions, the written Constitution, federalism, the doctrine of “enumerated powers,” and other techniques for limiting all authority whatsoever.
Why the Americans arrived at these particular notions, as opposed to the purely common law approach, is an intriguing question, though one omitted in the usual treatment. Part of it no doubt is the “freezing” effect of colonial living, which tends to keep political (and other) thought close to the baseline at the era of departure. Also important was the reliance of the settlers on written documents: colonial charters, the New England compacts, the constitutions and bills of rights adopted in the revolutionary era. While certainly not immune to change, as we well know, a document defining government powers is less susceptible to slippage than an evolving scheme of precedents and customs.
Undergirding this reliance on written agreements, also, was the habit of consulting Scripture. And while this too is open to variant readings, the Scriptural-theological element was a major prop of “fixity” in colonial doctrine. By keeping the original sources of the tradition to the forefront, this axiomatic stress restrained the drift inherent in a purely common law approach, which goes wherever precedent leads it. “Fixity” thus became the distinguishing feature of our founding epoch, and in limited-government terms was as much an advance beyond the British system as that was beyond the absolutism of the French. Rather than affirming the “rule of law” as a sentiment or theory, the Americans made it a definite principle of statecraft, enforced and strengthened by as many devices as they could muster.
Viewed this way, American constitutional doctrine is the product of an immensely long development, unfolding over two millennia of Western thought and practice. It starts with the religious insight that there is a higher law above the state; finds backing for this stricture in the church, and thereafter in the feudal order; deduces from these a system of contractual statecraft, representative bodies, and written guarantees of freedom—all translated to our shores and undergirded by the methods we have examined. Taken as a whole, this history tracks a series of ever-narrowing and more definite limits on, the reach of secular power—of which the American Constitution is (or was) the ultimate expression.
So construed, the measures adopted at our founding were an extension of the medieval outlook—though modified by religious changes, the colonial setting, and years of struggle with the British. Self-professed traditionalists that they were, the framers were more conservative than they knew. They were in a sense the last survivors of the feudal-medieval order, insisting that all earthly power must be subject to some limit. And, like their medieval forebears, they backed this up with pluralist, decentralized arrangements that gave practical content to the doctrine.
If this reading be accepted, a number of important conclusions are in order. One is that the chief political tradition of our culture is, above all else, a tradition of limited government, in the interest of protecting personal freedom. Those who profess this view today accordingly defend a legacy passed down to us, at considerable hazard, through many generations. The oft-stated conflict between traditional values and libertarian practice in our politics is therefore an illusion—a misreading of the record, or an artifact of special pleading. In the Anglo-American context, “big government conservatism” is the oxymoron—whatever its vogue among paternalists in Europe.
Also, it is worth repeating that this tradition is rooted in religious faith, not secular abstraction. The very concepts of the limited state and personal liberty, and the institutions that gave these practical force, grew from the religious vision of the West. Likewise, the specific ideas and political methods of our republic were products of this background—as seen in the theology of the early settlers, the arrangements they derived from this, and the religious customs of the founding era. All this is irrespective of whether Americans have always lived up to their faith, whether religious people have resorted to oppression, and other charges brought (sometimes correctly) in the conventional treatment. The point is rather that the conceptual building blocks and main political features of the free society were derived from these religious sources.
Stanton Evans, The Theme is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Traditions (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1994), 310-313.
If you have the time and can stomach silver ware hitting plates as people eat, this Alger Hiss lecture is a fun watch:
Wisconsin Sheriff David Clarke Talks Civil Rights and Conservatism
More at the Daily Caller, the Sheriff’s Twitter, and his blog:
“[N]one of these individuals deserves to have been killed, but the fact is they were co-conspirators in their own demise,” Clarke said. “They engaged in some behavior that took them to a very dark place. Things weren’t going to turn out for them and didn’t. However, how can the civil rights movement in 2014 cloak themselves around criminal behavior, people who engage in criminal behavior and say this is the face of the civil rights movement? I’ve heard people say, ‘This is a new civil rights movement.’ No it’s not. That is an embarrassment.”
“That is a desecration of the legacy of people like Rosa Parks, people like Dr. Martin Luther King,” he continued. “You know again, Condi Rice’s story – two parents, education. That’s the key. That’s the traditional vehicle for upward mobility in the United States for everybody. You got to embrace it. You got to grind it out. We’re not offering the best schools for blacks in some of these urban centers, which is a very big issue for me.”
Michael Beasley Reviews Hitchens Book, “God Is Not Great”
Michael John Beasley speaks on atheist Christopher Hitchens’ completely shallow views of God and Christianity from his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
I want to deal a bit with Hitchens worldview that is the drive for such a book that uses bad-thinking to get an emotional response (e.g., propaganda). Here Hitchens hat-tips Karl Marx by saying that this [Marx’s Manifesto] was “…OUR first attempt at philosophy, just as it was OUR first attempt at healthcare, cosmology… astronomy, and so on….”
Here is a wonderful documentary (15-parts, they will load automatically) about the Marxist/Leninist philosophy. Before watching the documentary, consider this by a former leader in the 60’s communist movement here in the states:
…To transform society, you need the power of the state; it is the only way their future can be achieved. That is why they are willing to follow the marching orders of a party that can control the state, and that is why they want to advance its fortunes. The Democrats’ perennial campaign message — Republicans are conducting a war on minorities, women, working Americans, and the poor — rests on the central idea that unites progressives behind the party: We are for equality, they are against it.
The reasoning behind such behavior was revealed by Leon Trotsky when he explained why he would not leave the Bolshevik party even after Stalin — who would eventually murder him — became its absolute leader: “We can only be right with and by the Party,” Trotsky said, “for history has provided no other way of being in the right.” “If the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.”
Non-Bolsheviks may not share Trotsky’s metaphysical certitude, but they will recognize the principle. If the cause is about changing the world and there is only one party that can acquire the means to do it, then even though it may be wrong on this or that matter, its fortunes must be advanced and its power defended. This commitment is magnified when the opposition party is viewed as the enemy of the noble cause. If Republicans are seen as the party of privilege at war with minorities, women, and the poor, then their ideas are not only wrong but evil. As President Obama’s political mentor, Saul Alinsky, put it in Rules for Radicals: “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all of the angels are on one side and the devils are on the other.”
Here is another statement from Rules for Radicals: “We are always moral and our enemies always immoral.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the immorality of the opposition, of conservatives and Republicans. If they are perceived as immoral and indecent, their policies and arguments can be dismissed, and even those constituencies that are non-political or “low-information” can be mobilized to do battle against an evil party. In 1996 Senator Bob Dole — a moderate Republican and deal-maker — ran for president against the incumbent, Bill Clinton. At the time, Dick Morris was Clinton’s political adviser. As they were heading into the election campaign, Clinton — a centrist Democrat — told Morris, “You have to understand, Dick, Bob Dole is evil.” That is how even centrist Democrats view the political battle.
Because Democrats and progressives regard politics as a battle of good versus evil, their focus is not on policies that work and ideas that make sense, but on what will make their party win. Demonizing the opposition is one answer; unity is another. If we are divided, we will fail, and that means evil will triumph…
Enjoy this tour of worldviews: