BloggeRhythms

David Martosko, US Political Editor for Dailymail.com, today provided a preview of what a potential presidential campaign between Trump and Bill Clinton’s wife would look like.

Mr. Martosko writes: “The Democratic Party's front-runner delivered a blistering speech earlier in the day that was billed as a foreign policy address but ended up as a lengthy indictment of Trump as an uncontrollable risk to national security.  

“Donald Trump's ideas are not just different, they are dangerously incoherent,' she said 

“They're not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.” 

In response, Trump “spoke for an hour in San Jose, California, alternating between clobbering Clinton as a morally compromised candidate and berating her for being too boring to watch. 

“I watched Hillary's thing today, which was hard,' he said. 'It was like taking Sominex. To watch her is like Sominex. 

“Did you ever hear of Sominex? Sleep all night. Bing!' he said, assuming a sleeping posture with his hands next to his head. 

'It's hard to stay awake when you're – you know, I'm not a great sleeper. I think she could make more money if she made speeches and sold them for people that can't sleep.” 

He later added: “'After what she said about me today in her phony speech – that was a phony speech, that was a Donald Trump hit job – I will say this: Hillary Clinton has to go to jail, okay?' 

“She has to go to jail. Has to go to jail,' he said again as cheers erupted in sternum-shaking chaos. 

“That was a phony hit job. She's guilty as hell."

Thus, the nation may wind up with a total incompetent as POTUS if either one ever gets to the White House. But, in the meantime, while the campaigning itself will be at the lowest, most childish level the nation has ever seen, it should be really funny to watch.

As far as actual campaign points are concerned, despite Bill’s wife’s claiming that Trump's national security ideas are “not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies,” the voting public may still desire that he follow up and actually build his border wall. 

Stephen Dinan @washingtontimes.com, headed this morning’s column: “Smuggling network guided illegals from Middle East terror hotbeds to U.S. border” 

According to the text: “A smuggling network has managed to sneak illegal immigrants from Middle Eastern terrorism hotbeds straight to the doorstep of the U.S., including helping one Afghan who authorities say was part of an attack plot in North America. 

“Immigration officials have identified at least a dozen Middle Eastern men smuggled into the Western Hemisphere by a Brazilian-based network that connected them with Mexicans who guided them to the U.S. border, according to internal government documents reviewed by The Washington Times. 

"Those smuggled included Palestinians, Pakistanis and the Afghan man who Homeland Security officials said had family ties to the Taliban and was “involved in a plot to conduct an attack in the U.S. and/or Canada.” He is in custody, but The Times is withholding his name at the request of law enforcement to protect investigations. 

“Some of the men handled by the smuggling network were nabbed before they reached the U.S., but others made it into the country. The Afghan man was part of a group of six from “special-interest countries.”

While networks capable of smuggling potential terrorists have long been a concern, the administration tamped down those worries, arguing that the southwest border wasn’t a likely route for operatives.

Nonetheless, "evidence has mounted over the past couple of years, including a smuggling ring that sneaked four Turkish men with ties to a U.S.-designated terrorist group into the U.S. in 2014. They paid $8,000 apiece to be smuggled from Istanbul through Paris to Mexico City, where they were stashed in safe houses before being smuggled to the border.

“Lev Kubiak, assistant director at ICE Homeland Security Investigations’ international operations branch, testified to Congress this year that Operation Citadel resulted in 210 criminal arrests in 2015. One part of the effort, known as Operation Lucero, dismantled 14 human smuggling routes, including some operations designed to move people from the Eastern Hemisphere to Latin America and then into the U.S., he said.”

Therefore, if Bill’s wife is perceived as a continuation of her predecessor regarding immigration policy and procedure, a loss to Trump is almost a virtual guarantee.   

At the same time, another problem looms for her at voting booths, because the economy is currently taking a significant turn for the worse as far as unemployment’s concerned. 

Three days ago the POTUS told the people of Elkhart, Indiana: “By almost every economic measure, America is better off than when I came here at the beginning of my presidency. We cut unemployment in half, years before a lot of economists thought we would." 

The only problem with that statement however, is that the actual numbers say something else completely. 

Harriet Torry @wsj.com, writes: “May’s weak job growth and the revisions bring the average monthly job gains in the past three months to 116,000, a sharp slowdown from the average 219,000 growth over the prior 12 months.” 

Curt Long, chief economist at the National Association of Federal Credit Unions, noted: “This was an unqualified dud of a jobs report, the unemployment rate fell, but for the wrong reason as labor force participation declined for the second consecutive month.” The share of Americans participating in the labor force fell to 62.6% in May, down 0.2 percentage point from April. 

In that regard, Republicans across the nation were boosted by additional information provided by Susan Jones @cnsnews.com. that a record 94,708,000 Americans were not in the labor force in May -- 664,000 more than in April. That was near its 38-year low, according to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics report today.

“When President Obama took office in January 2009, 80,529,000 Americans were not participating in the labor force; since then, 14,179,000 Americans have left the workforce -- some of them retiring and some just quitting because they can't find work.”

Lucia Mutikani @ca.news.yahoo.com, underscored the report's  weakness by disclosing that “employers hired 59,000 fewer workers in March and April than previously reported.” Which is another typical negative adjustment after the fact that’s been rampant under this administration.  

And then, Ms Mutikani gets to another major flaw in the POTUS’s claim that: “We cut unemployment in half, years before a lot of economists thought we would."

In fact, however, the lower number of reported unemployed isn’t due at all to hiring growth. The reduction appears because a completely different formula’s now used in the calculation. “In May, 7.4 million workers who wanted a job couldn’t find one. And a broad measure of unemployment that includes Americans stuck in part-time jobs or too discouraged to look for work held steady at 9.7%, unchanged from April.” Therefore, if the same formulation was used as every president before him had, the POTUS’s actual number of unemployed would be double what’s reported now. 

As far as the job gains specifically in May were concerned, they were “broadly weak, with the private sector adding only 25,000 jobs, the smallest since February 2010. Manufacturing employment fell by 10,000 jobs and construction payrolls dropped 15,000.”

All adding up to a miserable performance by anyone’s formulation. 

Bringing us to today’s update on Bill Clinton's wife, which is significantly important because of the source, K.T." McFarland, Fox News National Security Analyst and host of FoxNews.com's "DefCon 3,” who served in national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations

Ms McFarland writes: “Hillary Clinton has begun the policy wars with Donald Trump. She gave it her best shot Thursday with what was billed as a major foreign policy speech. I’ll save you the effort to read the transcript. She said in essence, nothing. 

“Most of her time was spent trash-talking Trump saying he’s neither smart enough nor stable enough to be president. 

“The rest of the time was telling us about all her many self-proclaimed successes and ending with how she and President Obama were responsible for killing Usama bin Laden. I give her full credit for that, as well as Obama. But that’s not the only issue in American foreign policy over the last two terms.” 

In making her point, MS McFarland lists Bill’s wife’s “own very questionable judgment on a number of issues:

"- Compromising national security with her cavalier treatment of our most classified information.
- Failing to protect or rescue Americans in Benghazi and then lying about it afterwards.
- Clamoring for the Libya war and supporting the premature Iraq withdrawal which enabled the spread of radical Islam far and wide.
- Failing to reset relations with Russia"

Then Ms McFarland adds: “The establishment decimated the U.S. military and abandoned our veterans. They’ve allowed America to be pushed around all over the world -- by China, by Iran, by Russia, and even the pipsqueak in North Korea. 

“They’ve also failed to get a handle on cyber-threats.” 

Next, Trump is specifically addressed, as follows: 

“Secretary Clinton slams Trump for not appreciating, or even comprehending, the accepted conventional wisdom of both political parties. In so doing, she misses the point. 

“Trump hasn’t accepted the conventional wisdom because it hasn’t succeeded, at least not for the last decade or so."

Then, Ms McFarland delivers a well-aimed shot right across Bill’s wife and the POTUS’s bow, by decimating the completely ineffective foreign policy decision-making they’ve consistently followed.

“Trump is forcing us to rethink our failed policies of the past, by relying on good, old-fashioned common sense.” 

And finally, Ms McFarland slams the lid on the subject by writing: “You know who else did that? Reagan. In 1980 he challenged and beat the GOP establishment candidate George H.W. Bush in the primaries and went on to beat the incumbent Democrat President Jimmy Carter in the general election.” 

Thus, all in all, Ms McFarland gave Trump a quite strong endorsement, burying Democrat thinking in the process.

A Facebook friend put it this way:



Leading to the ongoing question again: Joe Biden, Mayor Bloomberg, Jerry Brown, and Starbuck’s chairman and CEO, Howard Schultz, are you guys reading this?    

 

That’s it for today folks.    

 

Adios