Let me say how I feel about Hillary Clinton before we get going.
I think Hillary Clinton is a polarizing, calculating, disingenuous, insincere, ambitious, inevitable, entitled, overconfident and secretive candidate. She will do anything to win ??? She represents the past ??? She is way out of touch.
Hillary???s Thugs
Evidently, the thought police in the Hillary Clinton campaign have banned the above paragraph, because they have deemed it ???sexist.??? The Clintons have deployed thought police, in the form of volunteers, to intimidate reporters into not using certain phrases and words they don???t like.
According to the Washington Post, ???Hillary Clinton has been in the public eye for a very long time, which means much has been written about her ??? including quite a few adjectives. But some are now off limits. That???s according to the Clinton ???Super Volunteers,??? who have promised to track the media???s use of words they believe to be sexist code words. The New York Time???s Amy Chozick tweeted a missive she received from the group.??? These tactics sound like the old Chinese Red Guard who would go door to door to confiscate banned books and investigates those who opposed Mao.
One guy, who might get a visit, in the form of a pro-Clinton talking head on cable, is Dan Metcalfe. The Hill reported ???Dan Metcalfe, who previously oversaw the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) at the Department of Justice, has been publicly ripping Clinton for her exclusive use of a private email account during her time as secretary of State.??? At Hilary???s disastrous United Nations press conference, Clinton explained that following the law would have been inconvenient for her, so she decided to ignore it.
Metcalfe argued in Politico ???we now have former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton being revealed as someone who took the unprecedented step of arranging to use her personal email account for all of her official email communications. What???s more, she decided to use her own email server equipment, rather than a commercial Internet service provider, so that the records of her email account would reside solely within her personal control at home.???
Queen Hillary the first shall do her best to not allow the press and her critics to keep her out of the White House.
Rand???s Libertarian Meltdown
Libertarians are absolutely freaking out about Rand Paul these days.
First, they melted down when he wrote a bill declaring war on ISIS. The bill also removed the 2001 Afghanistan and 2002 Iraq Authorizations for the Use of Force (AUMF), prevented the Obama Administration from using old AUMFs to fight new undeclared wars and limited the battlefield to Syria and Iraq. David Weigel of Bloomberg wrote that it limited the President???s war powers. Some libertarians were upset with the declaration of war.
Next, Sen. Paul signed Sen. Tom Cotton???s (R-Arkansas) open letter to the leaders of Iran saying that any treaty or oral agreement that qualifies as a binding agreement between the nations would have to be submitted to the Senate pursuant to the Constitution for ratification. Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com wrote that Paul was ???the Neville Chamberlain of the liberty movement.??? Libertarians were blinded by hate for Sen. Cotton and ignored the fact that the letter???s contents were an accurate description of the constitutional authority of a president.
Finally, Paul filed an amendment to the budget this week to make cuts to programs to pay for new military spending. Some libertarians were ready to pounce and Nick Gillespie of Reason wrote a good analysis of the amendment while other libertarians were throwing him under the bus. The Amendment assumed that if the sequester was eliminated and projected levels of spending on defense were restored, cuts were necessary to pay for the new spending. Paul cut $21 billion in foreign aid, $14 billion from the National Science Foundation, $10 billion from the EPA, $20 billion from the Department of Education and $41 billion from HUD.
On this common sense amendment, Senator Paul only received 4 votes (Sens. Paul, Enzi, McConnell and Vitter). Every Senator, and presidential aspirant, who voted against this amendment, believes that defense spending should not be offset. Ironically, this was the most libertarian amendment offered during the budget debate.
Cruz Missile
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) became the first prominent politician to announce his candidacy for President this past Monday. The man nicknamed ???Cruz Missile??? blasted into the presidential race with an announcement at Liberty University and a roll out video.
The haters came out of the woodwork to make silly claims. One of the most ridiculous was the claim that Cruz was no qualified because he is a first term freshman Senator. This is a comparison to President Barack Obama who was a one-term freshman Senator from Illinois when he steamrolled Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in 2008.
Cruz fired back that Obama ???did not take a leadership role on really any issues of significance. In my time in the Senate, it's been about a little over two years, you can accuse me of a lot of faults but being a back-bencher is not one of them.??? But he could have made a better point.
First term Obama humbled McCain who had over 20 years experience in the Senate. One could argue that Ben Carson is actually the most qualified to be president, because he has not been poisoned by being either a governor or a Senator before jumping into political office.
Only in Washington, would people complain that a candidate had not spent enough time in the Capitol or in a cushy Governors mansion.
Brian Darling is Editor at Large for Human Events
