‘In my concession speech, I said, “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” I hoped that my fears for our future were overblown…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Hillary Clinton is at it again.
Seemingly unaware of the fact that her bold-faced and brazen deceptiveness cost her the election, Clinton—who has spent the better part of the last two years coming up with new reasons why she lost the election—resumed her equivocating in full-on candidate mode with a commentary in The Atlantic on Sunday that would give fact-checkers plenty to unpack if they weren’t so focused on cherrypicking Republican underdog candidates.
‘The Chance to Lead’
It takes Clinton a mere two sentences before the lying commences. After observing that “It’s been nearly two years since Donald Trump won enough Electoral College votes to become president of the United States” (true), Clinton issues her first falsehood by implying that she graciously conceded the election.
“On the day after, in my concession speech, I said, ‘We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.’ I hoped that my fears for our future were overblown.”
Yet, despite Trump having never gotten his due—on account of the constant sniping in the media (perpetuated through smears from former Clinton operative Jake Sullivan and former Obama operative Ben Rhodes); the holdover ‘resistance’ that claims to be sabotaging Trump from within; and the distractions of a baseless investigation into Russia collusion resulting from fraudulent opposition research by Hillary’s campaign that has exposed deep levels of conspiracy within our own intelligence apparatus but nothing implicating Trump—the president has nonetheless succeeded in leading the country to new milestones both domestically and abroad.
Border Separation
Clinton’s next false statement pertains to the detention of illegal immigrant children at the border. Citing a statistic from the ever-reliable New York Times, she says, “the administration continues to detain 12,800 children right now, despite all the outcry and court orders.” However, the Times story, while itself misleading in the way the information is presented, buries the fact that “most of the children crossed the border alone, without their parents,” thus connecting it directly with Obama’s unconstitutional decision to encourage tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors to cross the border, with some estimates of around 130,000 children and teens.
While the more dishonest “fact-checking” sites attempt to muddle the issue by suggesting that Obama’s welcoming of unaccompanied minors was different from Trump separating families while attempting to suspend the ineffective “catch and release” practice permitted by the Flores settlement, the reality is that Obama’s policies led to what some considered ‘mistreatment’ in detention centers. Moreover, only around 2,000 kids were detained separately from parents during the brief window in April and May when Trump permitted family separations. As of September, only about 500 of those separated from their families remain in custody while authorities work to verify the relationships.
As the Times article noted, “The big difference [under Trump …] is that red tape and fear brought on by stricter immigration enforcement have discouraged relatives and family friends from coming forward to sponsor children.” However, The Daily Caller reported that under the previous unaccompanied minor policy, roughly 80 percent were placed in the care of other illegal immigrants with the potential of being released into the hands of MS-13 gang members and human traffickers.
Hurricane Relief
Without so much as a paragraph break, Clinton jumps into her third untruth, attempting to implicate Trump in the deaths of 3,000 Puerto Ricans after last year’s Hurricane Maria. As conservative Never-Trumper Ben Shapiro noted, this is not an actual number, but an estimate of “excess deaths” beyond the normal death rate. He cites Lynn Goldman, the dean of George Washington University’s Milken Institute of Public Health, which released the estimated toll, as saying that “among all the deaths that occurred, which of them were related to Maria, which of them would not have occurred if it hadn’t been for the storm? We’re not able to say that now.”
Russian Collusion
As if worried that the truth might catch up, Clinton then, in the same paragraph, makes a passing reference to the Russian collusion investigation, attempting to falsely implicate Trump by once again conflating two separate questions: 1) Did the Russians meddle?; and 2) Was he involved in it?
Trump has acknowledged the former, and he recently signed an order that would punish foreign meddling, though some media reports, unsurprisingly, attempted to spin it against him. By contrast, even as Obama claimed to be aware of Russian meddling, he did nothing to prevent it under the presumption that it would benefit Clinton.
Of course, Hillary’s claim is particularly disingenuous in light of the many documented instances of largely Chinese election meddling and campaign funding violations that occurred under Bill Clinton. Furthermore, whatever Trump did or did not do, there has been little attention paid to the fact that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, likely was engaging inappropriately with a number of foreign entities who then contributed to a campaign slush fund via the Clinton Foundation, including her dealings with Russia via the Uranium One company.
All in all, Clinton’s nearly 2,600 word diatribe/stump speech is packed so full of fabrications and a lack of self awareness that adding the proper context to every whopper would take up more server space than her 30,000 missing emails.
“Trump and his cronies do so many despicable things that it can be hard to keep track,” she ironically claims.
Fortunately, those who may feel a tinge of buyer’s remorse need only consider the alternative.