Debate Aftermath

It was the most-watched political event in the history of television, but I didn’t watch the presidential debate last night. I was traveling. But I probably wouldn’t have watched it anyway. I have only a peripheral interest, since the constitutional republic of the United States of America is not what these two candidates wish to preside over. One wants to rule over the United Socialist States of America—a country and concept I do not agree to be ruled by. One wants to rule over the National Dictatorship of America, which will be great, and yuge, believe it—except I don’t believe it.

Trump and Clinton first debate 2016
Image from here

I learned one thing during this past eight years: don’t listen to the speeches. I read, instead of watch or listen.  With Obama, it has had to do with his tone. I hear condescension, and disdain for me and people who believe as I do, because we are a hindrance to him and his anti-constitutional intentions. And there are the grating verbal tics—the ubiquitous ums and uhs, the use of “folks” that never sounds real, the use of a long a when the indefinite article a comes before a consonant, even though none of us talk that way normally, which means it’s an affectation or a teleprompter-reading problem. So even the little things grate. Listening is not only hard on me, it makes me harder on the speaker than I would be without the additional auditory and visual input.

And last night we had two of the most grating voices America could come up with. Hillary sounds like she is always yelling. She sounds stiff, stilted, and annoyed—as if it is beneath her to condescend to do this talking to the public that a campaign requires. The term harpy seems to have been created for such a voice. If she were saying things that were valuable to our constitutional republic, the voice would be something we would just have to be tolerant and forgiving of. But, in her case, the voice comes with lies, deceptions, and power-mongering. I think we’re justified in hating that voice.

Then comes the carnival barker voice of Donald Trump. Like a used car salesman, he hides the details and just says, “Believe me,” when he has provided nothing beyond is over-bloated personal opinion to go on. It is an unseemly voice, often speaking unseemly and anti-constitutional things. Some people find that voice entertaining on a reality TV show; it was unappealing to me even when that is all it was.

So, I did not watch. But I will be looking at transcripts. And I offer that as a better tool for judging how the debate went, if you care.

So that you can experience the debate without the talking over one another, and without the tonal problems, here is the full transcript.

Here is a partial transcript interspersed with an NPR attempt to fact check (so consider the source). 

I am beyond believing any presidential choice this year can get us out of tyranny, back up to northern hemisphere freedom. I am interested in what I can do to make my community, my state, and then my nation a place of freedom, prosperity, and civilization. 

This debate offers me no option for my vote. But if a future debate includes independent candidate Evan McMullin and, possibly, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson (who is not on my list to possibly get my vote, but who should be in on the debate), I might be willing to tune in. 

Unrevising History

I went to a matinee showing of Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary, HIllary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, this past Saturday. There was only one showing that day at the neighborhood theater. And the theater wasn’t one of the larger ones. But it was pretty full. And people clapped at the end.

Here's the 3-minute trailer.

I didn’t take notes in the dark theater, and it’s a couple of days later. So it’s better to refer to the movie or the associated book for facts. But I’ve tried to increase my accuracy with some basic research.

D’Souza’s makes two main points about the Democrat Party:

·         They have been racist since the beginning.

·         They are corrupt through and through.

The Racist History

There’s a lot of history in the movie. He spends some time on Andrew Jackson, a vicious southern slaveowner. I never liked Jackson mainly because of his willingness to ignore the Constitution the way Democrats do. But I had been unaware of the personal cruelty and sexual predation against his slaves.

Abraham Lincoln is essentially the founder of the Republican Party. He and his party were anti-slavery. And it was Lincoln, followed by other Republicans, who guaranteed the elimination of slavery and other deprivations of Constitutional rights based on race. D’Souza showed that the Democrats all along resisted any movement against racism. For example, the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments:

·         13^th Amendment (1865)—outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude: proposed and supported by Republicans with 100% voting in favor, opposed by 77% of Democrats (including northern Democrats)

·         14^th Amendment (1868)—granting full citizenship and protection under the law: 94% of Republicans supported it, 0% of Democrats

·          15^th Amendment (1869)—prohibits states or local governments from denying the right to vote based on race or previous involuntary servitude:  144 Republicans in favor and 3 against in the House and 39 in favor with 5 against in the Senate;  all 39 Democrat votes in the House went against and all 8 in the Senate went against. (Some in both parties did not vote; at least one abstaining Republican was because it didn’t also prohibit poll taxes and literary tests.)

He pointed out that even northern Democrats approved of slavery; it wasn’t a simple case of south vs. north culture. And there’s the fact that there were exactly zero Republican slaveowners.

The Democrats grew the Ku Klux Klan to enforce their racism when the laws didn’t go their way. The Klan was mostly wiped out (at least publicly) by the turn of the century. But President Woodrow Wilson, a racist Democrat (redundant in those days), reignited the KKK as the military arm of the Democrat Party.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was not about choice for women; she was about wiping out blacks, the disabled, and anyone else she disfavored. Forced sterilization was among her favored practices.

If you think that was just the olden days, then maybe you should look at the current stats: 80% of all Planned Parenthood clinics are located in minority neighborhoods; from 1973 on black women's share of abortions has consistently been at least twice their share of live births, at 16% of live births but 32% of abortions.[i]

The Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s was led by Republicans. Martin Luther King, Jr., and many other black Civil Rights leaders were Republicans. A greater percentage of Republicans voted for that legislation than of Democrats. Democrats filibustered the legislation in 1964. It is true that Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson favored the legislation. But for him it was a political strategy. He followed up the Civil Rights legislation with his War on Poverty policies, which keep people weak, dependent, and impoverished. He is quoted as saying,

These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference... I'll have them n-----s voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.[ii]

The claim today is that there was a Great Switch, with racists leaving the Democrat Party for the Republican Party. So D’Souza did the research, looking at the various Democrat officials, leaders, and prominent civilians. Only 1% switched; the other 99% remained Democrats for life.

The lie was told with the help of complicit media and academia—enough times that it was taught as true. But it has never been true. Republicans were for equality for all before the law from the party’s inception. The Democrats have been racist, and now race-card players to this day.

The Corruption

The movie begins with D’Souza’s experience in prison—because he gave more than was allowed to a friend’s political campaign (without telling the friend, so not as an attempt to buy influence). He’s the first and maybe only person imprisoned for this infraction. And it wasn’t a white-collar-criminal-type imprisonment; he was among thieves and murderers. After a couple of months of adjustment (he was out of prison daytimes and returned to prison nightly), he started getting acquainted to learn what he could. What he says he discovered was that corruption in government was pretty much exactly the same pattern as the four-part pattern of The Con.

The Con Pattern

·         The Plan

·         The Pitch

·         The Play (This is two days later. I didn’t take notes, and I don’t remember how it was worded.)

·         The Cover-up: Deny Deny Deny

The segment on Hillary Clinton was at least an hour into the movie. D’Souza covered her history, radicalized by Saul Alinsky—and going beyond him, believing they could get more of their radical ideas realized by infiltrating government at the highest levels.

The Clinton couple, he claims, is a combination of the basic big-talking conman (Bill) and the fixer (Hillary). His flaws, particularly his sexual predatory practices, required clean-up, and that made him dependent on her. That is one explanation of why these two have stayed together. I don’t know if it’s entirely the truth but it fits this narrative.

The players in the Democrat Party do fit the pattern of The Con, as he lays it out. D’Souza has been

Dinesh D'Souza
photo from here

outspoken against Obama first, and now the Clintons, in his movies. Clearly he speaks from a point of view that isn’t likely to see the Democrat Party favorably. But he uses the storytelling of history to make his points. It could be effective—if only the people who have been duped were willing to see it.

Part of his restitution included doing community service, which he portrays as being able to teach ESL classes, and he gladly took that opportunity. He asked the question, “How do you become an American?” At the end of the credits, he answers that question: “You know you’ve become an American when you become a Republican.”

While I was looking up a few details for this post, I came across this review by Chuck Norris, highlighting 10 points made in the movie, which you might enjoy reading. 

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[i] Again, I don’t remember all exact details from the movie, which mentions the data. So I found this data online, which is slightly old, but probably close to current. 

[ii] I didn’t memorize the quote, so I looked it up and found it here. 

Truth Search: Benghazi

I spent some hours over the weekend listening to Thursday’s Benghazi hearing testimony of Hillary Clinton. I’m just a curious American. I’ve been waiting for three years so far to find out what happened in Benghazi, why it happened, and why we got told things that weren’t true about what happened.

I’m not a prosecutor, but I have some confidence in Rep. Trey Gowdy’s abilities to get at the truth. At last. Yes, there have been multiple hearings. As the Democrats on the committee told us multiple times. In fact, in these hearings, the Democrat committee members refrained from asking questions to Hillary Clinton and instead directed attacks at the committee head, Trey Gowdy—reminding us how many previous investigations there have been, and that this one has spent millions of dollars, and so far has found nothing, they claim. Rep. Elijah Cummings, pointed out in his opening comments, before questions had been asked of Ms. Clinton, that the committee hadn’t learned anything. Not helpful.

Rep. Trey Gowdy during committee
hearing Oct. 22, 2015
image from C-SPAN

During the entire questioning, no Democrat asked Hillary Clinton a useful question, with the possible exception of one that allowed her to go through the timeline of what happened in Benghazi that fateful night. Not that the committee needed her testimony for that; she wasn’t there, and the timeline of what happened on the ground was fairly well established—there’s a movie on the subject about to come out. But at least it showed that she was aware of enough details at this point, three years after the fact, to relate them.

There are a few points I noticed, and I’m wondering about. Sometimes I wonder why the media took no notice. Sometimes I wonder what Trey Gowdy knows.

One thing Rep. Gowdy said in an interview afterward, which I didn’t realize, was that he hadn’t subpoenaed Hillary Clinton to testify. She had been asked, and was willing. But that may mean that Trey Gowdy didn’t need her testimony at all, but was willing to use the opportunity as backup to what he knows from other sources. And there's always the chance he can add a perjury charge or two.

He also said that he had given her the option to do the testimony in private or public. Since her testimony wasn’t essential, he could go either way. But he prefers private for several reasons. One is that the testimony can cover classified information safely—in fact, if such questions come up in a public hearing, they must be held and asked later in private. Another is that the person testifying is often more likely to be candid in private, so the committee gets better information. 

In addition, in private hearings, the Democrats do none of the pontificating they do in public; they ask questions. It may be that their questions are designed to allow the testifiers to show themselves in the best light, but at least they’re questioned. They don’t, at all, direct criticism at the committee chair. When they do that in public, therefore, it is merely Democrat theater, and in no way relates to an attempt to find the truth, which is pretty obvious if you’re watching for reasons like mine.

So, if you want to go through this (links below), or any future, public hearing more quickly, simply fast forward through any Democrat questioner; you will miss nothing germane.

I was surprised to see that Hillary Clinton still claims the anti-Muslim video, which was never relevant to Benghazi, a fact known the day of the attack, was a possible cause they were concerned about with good reason. She emailed her daughter, and she told the President of Libya and the Prime Minister of Egypt, indicating clearly within 24 hours that she knew the video had nothing to do with the attack. They knew the attack was planned ahead, by an al-Qaeda-like organization, with names (Ansar al-Sharia) that proved to be involved.

She carefully parsed her words, and made sure the committee understood how carefully she had parsed them, when she said, “Some say…” that the video was the cause. She didn’t say she said so, just that some straw man said so. She and the administration did lead Susan Rice to declare on five TV interviews that the video was the cause, and spokesman Jay Carney to say the video was the cause. And the President said it multiple times, and Clinton herself said it several times—including when she met with families of the deceased and assured them that the makers of the video would be prosecuted, but did not promise that the actual known attackers would be prosecuted. So, using the phrase “some say…” doesn’t exactly explain why this known falsehood kept getting repeated.

After three years, we still don't know
what happened at the Benghazi consulate compound
Map found here

She kept trying to make it sound like that possibility was worth pursuing.[i] The video was claimed to be the cause of a spontaneous demonstration in Egypt—that’s what we were told that day—by the administration in response to that event, prior to the Benghazi attack hours later. In fact, Clinton claimed in her testimony Thursday that the video had been shown on Egyptian television, and that is why they feared it had farther reach and might spread.

But, if I remember correctly, that obscure video wasn’t the cause of the riot in Egypt; that was a preplanned event, weeks ahead, and announced the day before in the Egyptian press, in an attempt to release the Blind Sheikh. That the administration went video shopping was revealed in emails obtained in 2014 through a FOIA request persisted by Judicial Watch.

So the planned riot in Egypt had nothing to do with a video. And therefore it was an absolute known fact that the video had nothing to do with the Benghazi attack. Hillary Clinton knew this without question, and she just lied about it under oath.

One of the questions is why the ambassador was in Benghazi, known to be unsafe, when he had repeatedly requested greater security, since his installation as Libyan ambassador in May 2012. If it wasn’t safe in Tripoli, and was much less safe in Benghazi, what was he doing there? Hillary Clinton claims it was his call, but he was looking into whether a consulate should be opened in Benghazi.

Since within a month after the attack I’ve heard speculation that the administration was involved in gun running, and that was the purpose for the ambassador and the CIA to be in Benghazi, to see to a deal. This was verified in testimony in June, with the speculation Clinton could be subject to treason charges. 

I was surprised when this came up in the hearing. It was a blip. Clinton claimed that of course the administration wanted to see that weapons got into the right hands; all administrations would do so. So, in essence, she admitted that what had until recently been called a bizarre “conspiracy theory” is true, but she said it with an “of course” that led the media to let it go, as if we all knew and accepted this detail all along.

I don’t know what to make of this. I don’t know what Trey Gowdy makes of it either. But gun running is not a normal duty of an ambassador, and is particularly unwise in a country without an established secure government.

Speaking of lack of secure government, she admitted that the security personnel at the consulate were unarmed. She claimed this was normal. It is practice for consulates to trust security of the perimeter to the host country. But why would this would be the practice in a country in which even the citizens wouldn’t trust a weak or non-recognized government to protect them?

She kept saying that it was never recommended that the Libyan embassy be closed. She was sure if Ambassador Stevens had thought it necessary, he would have said so. But she fails to take responsibility for the ignored requests for increased security. 

In an uncomfortable moment, she laughed at the enterprising spirit of the ambassador for “fire sale” shopping—collecting barricades and other safety equipment from nearby closing embassies, since he wasn’t getting anything in response to his requests. (I think there were around 800 requests.) Despite her opening statement that she took responsibility, she said handling security requests was below her pay grade; underlings were tasked with handling security, and they never saw it necessary to bother her about the ambassador’s requests. We do not yet know why these people over security failed to answer the calls. Clinton tried blaming Congress for failing to provide funding, but that seems pretty empty. I'm assuming the committee is following up with the security division she referred to. There's may be among the subpoenaed materials the State Department has yet to provide.

She claims that Ambassador Stevens was a personal friend of hers. But there were zero emails between him and Clinton. She answered that by saying that she didn’t provide him an email address. And she didn’t do much business by email; she didn’t even have a computer in her office. The line of questioning about emails to her from Sidney Blumenthal (which were her emails, only recently revealed, and all related to Benghazi and Libya) showed that he had full and complete access to the Secretary of State, even though he had been refused any official status by the White House. But her “friend,” Chris Stevens, got no access.

She said she used phonecalls and other communications. So she was asked whether she had talked with Chris Stevens by phone after he was made ambassador to Libya. She answered that she was sure she had. On what occasion? When? She couldn’t recall. She was reminded that her phone logs show no calls between her and the ambassador. She shrugged that off as meaningless. He had a direct line to the State Department and could have called at any time. Again, ignoring the 800 or so requests for increased security.

It might be that acquiescing to increased security in Libya would have shown Obama's claim that al-Qaeda was weakened and nearly dissolved to be a lie. That’s an alternative to believing in the gun running scheme. I suppose both could be true simultaneously.

The reason she used a private email server is that private communications (i.e., unrelated to State Department work) are not subject to FOIA requests. She does not choose transparency, even when required by law. But what has been obtained is evidence that she did official work on that server, including classified work.

So she is known to have broken the law concerning making her State Department actions public. And she is known to have allowed multiple examples of classified information outside of a secure government location—a serious law every person with a security clearance understands. She is subject to jail time. 

She didn’t have to testify for this to be known. If there were an explanation that would have exonerated her, she would have provided it. That she did nothing but pretend it was all legitimate may play well in the press, but it will not convince a thorough prosecutor.

We know that many of the emails and resources subpoenaed have yet to be provided. The failure to provide requested information is the main reason the investigation continues. It may also continue because, if she were indicted and convicted in the near future, the president would pardon her, and there would hardly be an inconvenience in her campaign for president. She must be indicted, with rock solid evidence to convict. And it must come before she has any chance of becoming president but close enough to the end of the Obama reign to prevent him from pardoning. Otherwise she gets away scot-free. And the blood of those who lost their lives continues to cry out for justice.

If you want to experience the testimony yourself, C-Span has provided the entire day in four parts:

Part 1: http://www.c-span.org/video/?328699-1/hillary-clinton-testimony-house-select-committee-benghazi-part-1

Part 2: http://www.c-span.org/video/?328699-2/hillary-clinton-testimony-house-select-committee-benghazi-part-2

Part 3: http://www.c-span.org/video/?328699-3/hillary-clinton-testimony-house-select-committee-benghazi-part-3

Part 4: http://www.c-span.org/video/?328699-4/hillary-clinton-testimony-house-select-committee-benghazi-part-4

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[i] Note Hillary Clinton’s testimony at 27:50 minutes in Part 3 of C-Span’s recording.