… high minded skulduggery and narrow minded illusion.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton considered a secret plan created by her then-advisers to foment unrest among Palestinian citizens and spark protests in order to push the Israeli government back to the negotiating table, according to emails released as part of the investigation into the Democratic presidential frontrunner’s private email server.

In a Dec, 18, 2011, email, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Thomas Pickering suggested that Clinton consider a plan to restart then-stalled peace negotiations by kickstarting Palestinian demonstrations against Israel.

Pickering described the effort as a potential “game changer in the region”, recommending that the United States undertake a clandestine campaign to generate unrest. …

“What will change the situation is a major effort to use non-violent protests and demonstrations to put peace back in the center of people’s aspirations as well as their thoughts, and use that to influence the political leadership,” Pickering wrote.

“This is far from a sure thing, but far, in my humble view, from hopeless,” he continued. “Women can and ought to be at the center of these demonstrations. Many men and others will denigrate the idea. I don’t and I don’t think that was your message.”

Palestinian women, he noted, are less likely than men to resort to violence.

“It must be all and only women. Why? On the Palestinian side the male culture is to use force,” Pickering wrote, comparing the effort to the protests in Egypt that deposed former leader Hosni Mubarak. “Palestinian men will not for long patiently demonstrate — they will be inclined over time and much too soon to be frustrated and use force. Their male culture comes close to requiring it.”

So Palestinian men, in the “humble” view of this presumptuous man, cannot be expected to demonstrate non-violently because “much too soon” they will use force. Indeed, “their male culture comes close to requiring it”.

And yet he thinks it perfectly possible to put “peace back in the center” of their “aspirations”?

They have shown no sign of wanting peace for 68 years, but if the women can be stirred up to protest against something-or-other, suddenly peace will pop into their minds?

Pickering noted that the administration must keep its role in the demonstration a secret, so as not to aggravate ties with Israel.

And he thought Mossad would never find out that the Obama administration was once again up to its dirty tricks in the land (like its efforts to influence elections, which were not kept secret for long)?

“Most of all the United States, in my view, cannot be seen to have stimulated, encouraged or be the power behind it for reasons you will understand better than anyone,” he wrote, suggesting that the government enlist liberal non-profit groups in Israel. “I believe third parties and a number of NGOs [non-government organizations] on both sides would help.”

Cannot be seen to be doing it, but do it without compunction. Because – you see, Hillary, who will understand this better than anyone – it is for the great good of reviving a non-existent “peace process”, and such high-minded goodness can be allowed to resort to low-down duplicity and subterfuge.

To the Left, the ends always justify the means, though the ends may be unrealistic, and the means predictably foul.

As relations with Israel remained tense, another Clinton confidant, Anne Marie Slaughter, sent a staff-wide email to Clinton staffers recommending that they undertake a “Pledge for Palestine” campaign aimed at convincing US millionaires and billionaires to donate significant portions of their wealth to the Palestinian cause.

The effort, Slaughter wrote in the September 2010 email, could help shame Israel.

“Shame Israel”. There’s a high minded plan.

“Such a campaign among billionaires/multi-millionaires around the world would reflect a strong vote of confidence in the building of a Palestinian state and could offset the ending of the moratorium for Palestinians,” Slaughter wrote. “There would also be a certain shaming effect re Israelis, who would be building settlements in the face of a pledge for peace.”

A pledge, that is, on the part of “millionaires and billionaires” around the world, not the Palestinians.

Slaughter, who described the effort as a “crazy idea”, suggested tapping the “Clinton fundraising network” in order to raise the money needed.

“With even 30 calls to the right people in the Clinton fundraising network it should be possible to generate a substantial enough amount quickly enough to capture the public imagination,” she wrote in the email, which was sent to top Clinton staffers, including Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin.

Note the assumption that “the public imagination” is readily stirred for the Palestinians. These plotters round Hillary Clinton, like the whole of the Obama administration, seem to have been marvelously insulated from public opinion.

We have to assume that either these plots were not put into effect, or they were tried and failed. And we can see why Hillary, having such advisers and given such advice on top of being the ideologically twisted being that she is, failed totally as Secretary of State to achieve anything good for her country, but did a great deal of continuing harm.

We carried over this precious chalice full of nonsense from its incredulous discoverer, Steven Hayward of PowerLine, with respectful awe.

These are the words of Sidonie A. Smith, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities at the University of Michigan, author of a book titled Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times.

Writing this book, I came to see the new scholar subject as a performative of passionate singularity, hybrid materiality and networked relationality. This is one sense in which the humanities scholar that is becoming is possibly posthuman, and a posthumanist scholar. The locus of thinking, for the prosthetically extendable scholar joined along the currents of networked relationality, is an ensemble affair. It involves the scholar, the device, the algorithm, the code. It involves the design architecture of platform and tool, the experiential architecture of networks, and the economy of energy. It involves the cloud, the crowd and the “rooms”, bricks and mortar and virtual, in which scholarly thinking moves forward. Ultimately, thinking is a collaborative affair of multiple actors, human and nonhuman, virtual and material, elegantly orderly and unruly.

A professor of philosophy named David Benatar published, some eight or nine years ago, a book titled: Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. 

He makes the case that to live is to suffer and so it is best not to live. Just coming into existence is “a serious harm”. People should not have children. All babies should be killed in the womb. Humanity should become extinct.

He argues that the pain living beings endure is always much greater than the pleasure they enjoy. So they should not live. To avoid pain is a good thing; to miss pleasure is merely not a bad thing. The harm must always outweigh the joy.

It would not matter – he contends – if the human race ceased to exist: human existence has no value. 

His argument is derived from the experience of each sentient being; that he [she, it] feels pain. Feels pain more acutely and more often than pleasure.

It is on subjective experience that Benatar builds his case.

But subjective experience and the judgment of it is confined to each subject, each individual. Pleasure and pain are entirely subjective. I can feel only my own pain and pleasure. Only I can know if it is worth it to me to endure the pain. Only I can determine what is pleasurable to me, and how intense the pleasure is, and how much it is worth to me.

Benatar even goes so far as to claim that all people overestimate the pleasure they have, or can possibly have.

How can he know? He can’t. He cannot know the subjective experience of any other single person, let alone of all people.

On the face of it, the claim that all people suffer more than they enjoy or hope to enjoy, is nonsensical. If it were true, suicide would be the rule. The population of the world would have been very small, probably entirely youthful, and would long ago have dwindled away. But it didn’t.  And that’s probably why he had to deduce that people don’t realize how much they suffer – the chumps!

All that is hardly worth debating. Though the Oxford University Press takes his contention seriously enough to put it in print. (And there must be at least some people who are willing to fork out a whopping $21 for the kindle edition!)

Why take notice of it now?

Because, when he comes to his declaration that human life has no value, one hears the voice of the Zeitgeist. A cold hand clutches one’s heart, and one must protest.

Value to whom? As measured by what? Relative to what?

How can the value of human life be objectively assessed? Value is a human idea. Take away all human beings, take away the human mind, and there are no ideas, no values. No goodness. No truth. No beauty. No joy. No jokes.

No world. No universe. As the only begetter of ideas, the human consciousness is the creator of “the universe”.

Mathematics, physics, computers, the Ninth Symphony, Hamlet and The Tempest, the palace of Versailles, the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, Americans walking on the moon … all are valued as long and only as long as human beings exist. Then, eventually (and it could be billions of years from now), our revels will be ended. “The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,/ The solemn temples, the great globe itself,/ Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve/And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,/Leave not a rack behind.” And after that, nothing will matter. There will be no one for anything to matter to.

The statement “human life has no value” is meaningless.

Yet it is stated. Not just by one (deeply unhappy?) philosopher. Who lives, incidentally, in the loveliest part of the world, the magnificent Cape of South Africa, with its clement climate and breathtaking natural beauty of mountains, valleys, oceans, beaches, vineyards, forests, and more wild flowers than anywhere else on earth. But what is beauty and plenty and a professor’s generous salary when metaphysical angst, toothache, and the prospect of death ineluctably confront a man?

As I said, it is the Zeitgeist speaking. It is common now among the intellectual elite of the Western world, habituated to a sociological way of thinking – which is to say, seeing human beings as a swarm, like insects – to affirm that this species is a bad thing. They say we are bad for the planet. They say we should be fewer in number. Humanity should give up its cities, its industries, its farming, its civilization, its arts, its investigation of nature. We should live as our most primitive ancestors did. (Only with cell phones.)

The most radical of such thinkers – among them some who live in the greatest luxury like Professor Benatar – say the entire human species must go. Whether slowly over a few generations by not breeding, or quickly within a few years by abortion, murder and suicide, go it must.

How are they different from those cranks who used to patrol the main streets of cities with billboards proclaiming, “The End is Nigh“?

They are different in this: while the old cranks considered it a frightening prophecy, the Benatars of our time think it is a good plan.

Do we not see that it is good?

Well no, Professor. I do not.

Jillian Becker    January 10, 2016

Ted Cruz answers a questioner who, after introducing himself as an atheist, asks the presidential candidate why he should vote for him.

Today we have posted under Pages (see the top of our margin), an Appendix to the series of essays by Jillian Becker, titled The Darkness of This World.

It is a short account of the ancient Greek cults of Dionysos and Orpheus.

It is provided in particular to explain why a contemporary “Action” artist of Austria, Hermann Nitsch – the subject of one of the essays – declared his rituals to be “Dionysian”. In general it amplifies the analogies drawn throughout the series between the rebellious pursuit of evil in post-Enlightenment European cultures and ancient Gnostic cults.

*

Dionysos and Orpheus

The worship of the Greek god Dionysos was a primitive mystery religion. He was the god of wine. He had many names, one of them Bacchus – the name the Romans used for him. Because the celebrants at Dionysian festivals performed passionate choral “dithyrambic” hymns out of which Greek drama developed, he became also the god of drama, music, and poetry.

“Dionysos” means twice born. In a Thracian and Theban myth, he is first born when Zeus begets him upon a mortal maiden named Semele. In a Cretan myth, Zeus, in the form of a snake, impregnates his own daughter Persephone – born to him by Demeter, the goddess of agriculture – and Persephone begets Dionysus-Zagreus, who has the horns of a bull. In both, he is abducted soon after his birth by the Titans, the sons of Earth. (In the Semele myth, they are prompted to do so by Hera, Zeus’s consort, the Queen of Heaven, because she is jealous of Semele.) They tear the babe limb from limb, and eat him. But the goddess Athene retrieves his heart in the nick of time and brings it to Zeus, who swallows it whole. Then Dionysos is born again from his father’s thigh. Zeus punished the Titans by burning them up in a flash of lightning. From their ashes, humankind arose.

In the rituals of the worship of Dionysos, bulls and goats were sacrificed, both beasts being held sacred to him. Celebrants became intensely inebriated and danced wildly to the loud music of pipes, drums and cymbals, until the “god entered into them”, a mystic condition for which the Greek word was Enthusiasm. With the god inside them, they were freed from all restrictions of law and reason and, transcending even the supposed limits set by nature, would tear an animal or human being apart with their bare hands and feast on the raw flesh. Bands of drunken men and woman (but in The Bacchae by Euripides, only bands of women called the Maenads), ran and danced, naked or partially clad in the skins of fawns, and smeared with the blood of the animal or human prey, night-long, in wild places, leaping over earth and grass and stone, and indulging every erotic desire.

The story clearly signals that the Dionysian Mysteries involved human sacrifice.

To be initiated into the Mysteries, a man would perform a “re-enactment” of the god’s birth, death and re-birth in order to “become one with the god”. The rite included a simulated Descent into the Underworld (the Katabasis) – the initiate probably going into deep dark caves – to seek the God; or perhaps to find Persephone who spent six months of the year down there; and symbolically bring him or her back up from Hades to the light. The initiate would then be let into the secret of the Liknon, or Arc – that it contained a goat’s penis, or (most likely when the ceremony was performed in temples rather than in the wild), a wooden phallus. He would then be invested with an oak or ash wand, the Thyrsus, and bear it in procession to a celebration with his fellow initiates, all of them communing with the god by imbibing lavish quantities of his good wine.

A woman too could be inducted into the religion. She would be called “an Ariadne”. Adorned as a bride of Dionysos, she would first undergo ceremonial flagellation, and be hanged on a tree, possibly to the point of near asphyxiation. She would then “descend into the Underworld to meet the god”, and on her return the Liknon would be opened, and she would publicly consummate her union with Dionysos by using the sacred phallus as his representative. She would then join the god’s love-fest with the drinking of wine.

The Dionysos cult was already somewhat tamed by the time – no one knows when, but certainly not later than the early 6^th century BCE – when Orpheus came along and reformed it. He may have been a living man, a priest of Thrace (modern European Turkey), or a Cretan. But then again, he could be entirely mythical. Man or myth, legends surround his name. He was the musician who (Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII) “with his lute made trees/ And the mountain tops that freeze/ Bow themselves when he did sing”; and who, by his musical charms, gained passage into the underworld of the dead to fetch back his wife, Eurydice – a mission which tragically failed when he looked back at her before they regained the land of the living.

Whether he was man or myth, to him is attributed a development that did happen – the transformation of the savage cult of Dionysos into a moral religion. (By no means the first – both Zoroastrianism and Judaism preceded it – but the first among the Greeks.)

The Orphics taught that human beings had a double nature, of earth and of heaven, mundane and divine, as did Dionysos, child of the King of Heaven and a mortal woman. Thus man was mortal, but had an immortal soul. He could liberate his soul from his base earthly nature through moral practices, so that when he died, it would rise to its real home in heaven where it would live eternally. A good soul would rise immediately upon the death of the body. A bad soul would be punished by being confined in another body, again and again until it learnt to be good.

For men and women to purify their souls (the Orphic religion held that women were equal to men in the eyes of the gods), they had first to be ritually cleansed in the blood of beasts. After that ceremony, he or she wore only white garments and abstained from drinking wine or eating meat, except as a sacrament. Many pleasures of the flesh were renounced. Right living was commanded, and the continual observance of the Orphic religious rules. The ideal way of everyday life for the Orphic was ascetic. Only by following this path would they find spiritual redemption, and their souls, rescued from all earthly strife and pain, be united eternally with the divine.

Did the Orphics perform the sacrament of Enthusiasm as the Dionysian celebrants had done? That is to say, did they gather in crowds for the drinking of wine, for blood-sacrifice, and the devouring of freshly killed raw meat; did they run naked through the countryside and dance wildly and have violent sexual intercourse? Were willing “victims” flagellated, and hung on a tree until they were near death, then “reborn” in imitation of the god? In a word, did the Orphics indulge in a Dionysian “orgion” – an orgy?  The word was the name of this sacrament. But it has come to mean a wild party of many intoxicated people abandoning themselves promiscuously to the pleasures of the flesh.

Or was the Orphic orgion less savage than the older Dionysian rite? One might expect so, but we do not know. Legend has it that their ideal was, yes, to become enthused and steadily augment the divine element in them as the Dionysians had done, only not with wine, but by striving for a profound understanding of esoteric Orphic teaching – which could hardly have been done in the course of one wild night. They drank wine only as a sacrament (as later the Christians did in the ceremony of the Eucharist).

One might suppose that the Orphics, with their morality and respect for all life, would balk at the sacrifice of human beings. But it’s not known if they did. And the legend of Orpheus’s death suggests that human sacrifice retained a place in their mythology if not also in their rites. For in the story Orpheus himself, the good priest, the beautiful enchanting musician, was torn to pieces and devoured by orthodox worshipers of Dionysos.

His innovations, however, survived him. The Orphic bloodwashing ritual was carried over into the Roman cult of Mithras, the majority religion of the Roman army. The initiate would stand naked under a grid, upon which a bull was slain, so that its blood poured over him. More significantly, Orphism introduced the idea of an immortal soul into Greek religion and philosophy. For the Greeks, that idea had its beginnings in the Enthusiasm of the Dionysian Mysteries. (In the Hebrew scriptures, the belief that the individual soul rises to God after the body dies may be far older. In the book of Ecclesiastes, attributed to King Solomon who died in 931 BCE, “the Preacher” writes: “The earth shall return to the earth as it was, and the spirit unto God who gave it.” And even older, by perhaps as much as five centuries, are the Zoroastrian tales of the individual soul’s adventures immediately after escaping from its dead body.)

Pythagoras (born 571 BCE) embraced Orphism, and his school of thought held that the individual soul, though it migrated from body to body, had knowledge of the god. Plato (5^th into 4^th century BCE) believed that the soul, or spirit, was immortal. Plotinus (204-270 CE), and his followers the Neoplatonists, believed that the soul was eternal and indestructible, not born with any particular person it may inhabit, and not ending with him either, only moving on forever into bodies new.

Christianity, which may have initially derived the idea of the individual soul or spirit either from Judaism or Orphic-influenced Greek philosophy (or possibly both), teaches several contradictory doctrines about the individual soul: that it bears the record of the person’s life, is responsible for what that person did, and will be judged by God according to its record; but also that regardless of what the soul made the body do in life, whatever good and whatever evil, it was predestined for heaven or hell before it was born in a body. And whether the saving or condemning to its eternal fate will occur immediately after the death of the body or at the end of time, when all souls will convene before the divine Judgement Seat, remains unsettled. Parts of Christian mysticism and some of its ritual could plausibly be traced to the Orphics (though for most of them other sources cannot be ruled out). Obvious examples are: the idea of the immortal soul; the infant god being the son of a divine father and a mortal woman; the infant god being hunted by men who would kill him; a dying and resurrecting god; the god’s descent into an underworld and his return from it; his performance of miracles (notably the turning of water into wine which was also told of Dionysos); the ideal of spiritual purity, to attain which morally clean living is commanded; the rite of baptism (though in water not blood); the sacrament of the Eucharist.

The religions most evidently descended from the Orphics were the Gnostic cults. Their theogonies and rituals – but not morality – were closely similar. All the Gnostic sects that arose and proliferated from the 1^st to the 13^th century CE, taught that the inner self, or soul, had what one might call “godness” – a spark from the true godhead. Those who were gifted with the gnosis – ie. with intuitive knowledge of the divine spark within and of the deity who bestowed it – would rise in the spirit to become one with that deity, who dwelt in the highest heaven, far above the Creator god who made this base world of filthy matter.

Although the Orphics did not regard this world as entirely evil, their idea that the soul should be purified so as to rise to the absolutely clean spiritual sphere could easily be understood to imply that this world is filthy and bad. And the Orphics taught that the earthly body is the tomb of the heavenly soul. This was also a Gnostic doctrine, almost certainly derived from the Orphic Mysteries.

But there was a difference between Orphic and Gnostic doctrines about the destiny of the soul. In Orphic doctrine, death does not often release a soul to start its ascension to heaven immediately, but more often traps it in body after body that lives and suffers and dies on this earth, unless and until its redemption is won (an idea probably drawn from far eastern religions, such as Buddhism). In most Gnostic teachings, those who know they have divinity within them, rise in the divine spirit from the dead base filthy body immediately after death, and soar upward to the highest height. They know the passwords to speak to the powers and principalities that guard the way to the godhead, so they might be allowed to proceed on their upward way, until they reach the Pleroma, there to dwell eternally with the mystic godhead, the source of all existence.

Finally – and most infamously in the judgment of the Catholic Church Fathers – the Gnostics kept the Orphic sacrament, the orgion. They kept it in the Dionysian tradition: drugged, drunk, naked and lewd. But not as a summoning of the God to enter their bodies, take over their will, and force them to indulge their appetites and lusts. The Gnostic orgy was a rite of deliberate sinning. Because they believed that this world was entirely bad, anything that was done in opposition to it was good. Because Christian and Jewish morality forbade adulterous sex, homosexuality, sodomy, pederasty and bestiality, those were the very acts that it was incumbent on the Gnostics to perform – for what they held to be the immeasurably Higher Good.

Our fervent hope that the deeply corrupt Hillary Clinton will not only fail to gain the presidency, or even the Democratic Party’s nomination, but actually go to prison, has found much encouragement of late. Our breath quickens, our pulses beat faster.

Judge Andrew Napolitano writes at the Washington Times:

The self-inflicted wounds of Hillary Clinton just keep manifesting themselves. She has two serious issues that have arisen in the past week; one is political and the other is legal. Both have deception at their root.

Her political problem is one of credibility. We know from her emails that she informed her daughter Chelsea and the then-prime minister of Egypt within 12 hours of the murder of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, that he had been killed in Benghazi by al Qaeda. We know from the public record that the Obama administration’s narrative blamed the killings of the ambassador and his guards on an anonymous crowd’s spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muhammad video.

Over this past weekend we learned that her own embassy staff in Tripoli told her senior staff in Washington the day after the killings that the video was not an issue, and very few Libyans had seen it. We also know from her emails that the CIA informed her within 24 hours of the ambassador’s murder that it had been planned by al Qaeda 12 days before the actual killings.

Nevertheless, she persisted in blaming the video. When she received the bodies of Ambassador Stevens and his three bodyguards at Andrews Air Force Base three days after their murders, she told the media and the families of the deceased assembled there that the four Americans had been killed by a spontaneous mob reacting to a cheap 15-minute anti-Muhammad video.

Mrs. Clinton’s sordid behavior throughout this unhappy affair reveals a cavalier attitude about the truth and a ready willingness to deceive the public for short-term political gain. This might not harm her political aspirations with her base in the Democratic Party, but it will be a serious political problem for her with independent voters, without whose support she simply cannot be elected.

Yet, her name might not appear on any ballot in 2016.

That’s because each time she addresses these issues — her involvement in Benghazi and her emails — her legal problems get worse. We already know that the FBI has been investigating her for espionage (the failure to secure state secrets), destruction of government property and obstruction of justice (wiping her computer server clean of governmental emails that were and are the property of the federal government), and perjury (lying to a federal judge about whether she returned all governmental emails to the State Department).

Now, she has added new potential perjury and misleading Congress issues because of her deceptive testimony to the House Benghazi committee. In 2011, when President Obama persuaded NATO to enact and enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, he sent American intelligence agents on the ground. Since they were not military and were not shooting at Libyan government forces, he could plausibly argue that he had not put “boots” on the ground. Mrs. Clinton, however, decided that she could accelerate the departure of the Libyan strongman, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, by arming some of the Libyan rebel groups that were attempting to oppose him, and thus help them to shoot at government forces.

In violation of federal law and the U.N. arms embargo on Libya she authorized the shipment of American arms to Qatar, knowing they’d be passed off to Libyan rebels, some of whom were al Qaeda, a few of whom killed Ambassador Stevens using American-made weapons. When asked about this, she said she knew nothing of it. The emails underlying this are in the public domain. Mrs. Clinton not only knew of the arms-to-Libyan-rebels deal, she authored and authorized it. She lied about this under oath.

After surveying the damage done to his regime and his family by NATO bombings, Gadhafi made known his wish to negotiate a peaceful departure from Libya. When his wish was presented to Mrs. Clinton, a source in the room with her has revealed that she silently made the “off with his head” hand motion by moving her hand quickly across her neck. She could do that because she knew the rebels were well equipped with American arms with which to kill him. She didn’t care that many of the rebels were al Qaeda or that arming them was a felony. She lied about this under oath.

My Fox News colleagues Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne have scrutinized Mrs. Clinton’s testimony with respect to her friend and adviser Sidney Blumenthal. Recall that Mr. Obama vetoed Mrs. Clinton’s wish to hire him as her State Department senior adviser. So she had the Clinton Foundation pay him a greater salary than the State Department would have, and he became her silent de facto adviser.

They emailed each other hundreds of times during her tenure. He provided intelligence to her, which he obtained from a security company on the ground in Libya in which he had a financial interest. He advised her on how to present herself to the media. He even advocated the parameters of the Libyan no-fly zone and she acted upon his recommendations. Yet she told the committee he was “just a friend”.  She was highly deceptive and criminally misleading about this under oath.

It is difficult to believe that the federal prosecutors and FBI agents investigating Mrs. Clinton will not recommend that she be indicted. Inexplicably, she seems to have forgotten that they were monitoring what she said under oath to the Benghazi committee. By lying under oath and by misleading Congress, she gave that team additional areas to investigate and on which to recommend indictments.

When those recommendations are made known, no ballot will bear her name.

And Sarah Westwood writes at the Washington Examiner:

A former U.S. attorney thinks Hillary Clinton could face a criminal indictment from the FBI within the next 60 days.

Joe DiGenova, a Republican U.S. attorney appointed by President Reagan, said Clinton’s “biggest problem right now” is the open FBI investigation into the contents of her private emails.

“They have reached a critical mass in their investigation of the secretary and all of her senior staff,” DiGenova said  … “And, it’s going to come to a head, I would suggest, in the next 60 days.” …

“It’s going to be a very complex matter for the Department of Justice, but they’re not going to be able to walk away from it,” DiGenova said. “They are now at over 1,200 classified emails. And, that’s just for the ones we know about from the State Department. That does not include the ones that the FBI is, in fact, recovering from her hard drives.”

The former U.S. attorney noted Clinton has yet to be interviewed by the FBI, a step he said will likely occur before agents make their findings public.

But DiGenova warned the decision to charge Clinton personally with a crime lies with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, putting the Obama administration in a difficult political position.

“I believe that the evidence that the FBI is compiling will be so compelling that, unless [Lynch] agrees to the charges, there will be a massive revolt inside the FBI, which she will not be able to survive as an attorney general. It will be like Watergate. It will be unbelievable,” DiGenova said. “The evidence against the Clinton staff and the secretary is so overwhelming at this point that if, in fact, she chooses not to charge Hillary, they will never be able to charge another federal employee with the negligent handling of classified information. … The intelligence community will not stand for that. They will fight for indictment and they are already in the process of gearing themselves to basically revolt if she refuses to bring charges.”

And then there is this too, from the pro-Hillary Washington Post, about Bill’s angry women and Hillary’s enabling; inescapably revived in the public memory, much as the left-biased media (most of them) would like it to be forgotten:

The ghosts of the 1990s have returned to confront Hillary Clinton, released from the vault by Donald Trump …

The fresher [sic] case being made is that Hillary Clinton has been, at a minimum, hypocritical about her husband’s treatment of women, and possibly even complicit in discrediting his accusers.

And it is being pressed at a time when there is a new sensitivity toward victims of unwanted sexual contact, and when one of the biggest news stories is the prosecution of once-beloved comedian Bill Cosby on charges that he drugged and assaulted a woman 12 years ago — one of dozens who have accused him of similar behavior.

In November, Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.” She has made women’s issues a central focus of her campaign and is counting on a swell of support for the historic prospect of the first female president. …

Trump started hammering on Bill Clinton’s behavior in retaliation for Hillary Clinton’s assertion … that Trump has demonstrated a “penchant for sexism”.

“Hillary Clinton has announced that she is letting her husband out to campaign but HE’S DEMONSTRATED A PENCHANT FOR SEXISM, so inappropriate!” Trump tweeted on Dec. 26. …

[And] Trump amped up his rhetoric, calling Bill Clinton “one of the great women abusers of all time” and saying Hillary Clinton was his “enabler”. …

Last month, a woman in the audience at a Clinton campaign event in New Hampshire asked her: “You say that all rape victims should be believed. But would you say that about Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and/or Paula Jones?”

Clinton responded: “Well, I would say that everyone should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence.” …

There was, of course, plenty of evidence that Bill Clinton was guilty of sexually assaulting the women who accused him. Though he lied and lied, there was DNA evidence that he had had sexual relations with an intern. He paid damages to one of his victims. He was disbarred in Arkansas. He was impeached.

But Hillary put it all down to “a vast right-wing conspiracy”.

There is also this from Fox News Insider, talking about a film that will remind everyone of the horrors of Benghazi for which Hillary is largely responsible, and which she has consistently lied about.

Ahead of the release of the film 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, Megyn Kelly spoke to three of the heroes who fought on the night of the terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead.

In a powerful Kelly File exclusive, Mark “Oz” Geist, Kris “Tanto” Paronto and John “Tig” Tiegen reflected on the 2012 attack and reacted to Michael Bay’s much-anticipated film. …

Tiegen told Megyn that he was surprised during the attack that they were given a “stand-down” order and offered no help, even after Amb. Chris Stevens had been missing for hours.

“13 hours. Nobody comes. That’s the big deal,” Tanto added.

Megyn noted that Hillary Clinton and the White House have relied on Congressional investigations that concluded there was no “stand-down” order given at the annex.

Paronto said it’s “just silly” and Tiegen pointed out that investigators believed everything else the men testified about.

“It’s kind of funny. Everything we testified to, they agreed with us 100 percent. Pretty much from us eating a candy bar to shooting all our ammo, but for some reason they don’t want to believe that we were told to stand down,” said Tiegen. …

Paronto concluded that the film is important because it helps honor the sacrifice and service of those who lost their lives at Benghazi and those who selflessly risked their lives to save others.

The three men finally disobeyed the order to stand down, and went to see what they could do to save the people at the mission. They were too late to save the Ambassador – who suffered an atrocious death and whose body was hideously defiled – but they did save some thirty others. They are heroes, treated by the Obama administration as villains.

The film itself should go far towards destroying the last defenses the Democrats and Hillary Clinton herself are desperately trying to shore up.

In addition to all that, there are questions about Hillary’s health.  What the long discussion of her affliction amounts to is that this (morally rotten) woman is (also) physically sick and frail. She is not strong enough to do the gruelling job of the presidency – even to do it badly. A long rest in prison might do her good.

So give it up, Hillary!

Democrats, your party’s Plan A may very well be scuttled.

What’s your Plan B? That old Socialist, Bernie Sanders? Hmmm.

From Canada Free Press, by Katy Grimes:

Successfully amassing support in 21 California counties, proponents of the State of Jefferson movement took their petitions to the Secretary of State and the State Legislature Wednesday. …

California’s northern most counties are suffering from a lack of representation in the state Legislature. Twenty Northern California counties have 6 state level representatives, while the southern 38 counties have 114 state representatives.

The State of Jefferson [SOJ] … plans to remedy this lack of representation by seeking reforms, such as one senator per county, or by creating a new state—the 51st state.

State of Jefferson is a proposed U.S. state that would span the contiguous and mostly rural area of Southern Oregon and Northern California. Supporters of the State of Jefferson movement are interested in forming an independent state whose fundamental framework revolves around maintaining the integrity of individual liberties, and Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

There are 11 counties in the north state with one state senator, while Los Angeles County alone has 11 senators. And Northern California has three out of 80 seats in the California Assembly.

If Jefferson becomes a state, it would hold a population of 1.7 million people and consist of California’s 21 northernmost counties [and a piece of Oregon] ….

State of Jefferson wants:

• To elect its own 2 U.S. Senators and Congressional representatives;
• To elect its own Governor, State Senate and Assembly, based on Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution;
• Make Jefferson a business friendly state with common sense tax laws and no state corporate income taxes;
• Property Taxes to stay in State of Jefferson and more specifically its counties;
• Laws to hold elected representatives accountable to its people;
• Reduce the 570 state agencies and bureaucracies currently in California;
• Constitutionally based laws;
• Utilization of its natural resources – timber, water, farming, mining, hunting and fishing;
• A revamping of Social Services.

Seems reasonable to us.

California is a declining state, misgoverned by Social Justice Warriors.

We’d like to know what our readers think of the break-away movement and the founding of a 51st. state of the Union.

We are not alone in blaming Bill Clinton for letting the North Koreans become a nuclear-armed power. (See our post immediately below.)

Presidential candidate Ted Cruz says the same. And he too draws the analogy between Clinton’s deal with North Korea and Obama’s with Iran.

This is from the Washington Post:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) reacted to news of the alleged hydrogen bomb test by North Korea with an indictment of two decades of Democratic foreign policy, warning that any president who didn’t “tear up” the nuclear agreement with Iran would risk attacks on American and Israeli cities.

“This underscores the gravity of the threats we are facing right now, and also the sheer folly of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy,” Cruz told reporters … “When we look at North Korea, it’s like looking at a crystal ball. This is where Iran ends up, if we continue on this same misguided path. It’s worth remembering, we’re here because of the Clinton administration. The Clinton administration led the world in relaxing sanctions against North Korea. They used the billions of dollars that flowed into North Korea to develop nuclear weapons. Now we’re facing a megalomaniacal manic who may potentially have a hydrogen bomb.”

Cruz also derided the Obama administration for giving a job in the State Department and a role in the Iran negotiations to North Korea negotiations veteran Wendy Sherman– “the one person on Earth who has already messed this up. And sadly, they negotiated essentially the same deal.”

Asked how a Cruz presidency would respond to North Korea, the candidate said he would pressure China to “cut off their client state”, and “to continue to isolate North Korea, to continue to cut off North Korea, to raise the costs of their belligerence.” But he warned that “every bad actor would get worse” until Obama was replaced.

“For the remainder of President Obama’s term, we’re essentially in a Hobbesian state of nature, like ‘Lord of the Flies’,” he said. … “We saw last night the consequences of this deal if it is allowed to go forward. Iran’s nuclear test may not be underground, measured by an earthquake. It may be above the skies of Tel Aviv, or New York, or Los Angeles.”

Wendy Sherman is a trained social worker. Busied herself with child welfare. So President Clinton thought her admirably qualified to negotiate with North Korea, to keep that vicious Communist dictatorship from getting nukes. And after that triumph, President Obama judged her to be the ideal person to negotiate with Iran to the same end …

Oh no, wait! Obama saw her usefulness in failing to stop an enemy of the US acquiring nukes …

North Korea claims to have successfully tested a hydrogen bomb – a nuclear fusion bomb many times more destructive than a nuclear fission bomb. What’s more, the North Koreans claim to have miniaturized the weapon so it can be dispatched as the warhead of a missile.

President Clinton did a deal with North Korea in 1994 which, like the deal Obama believes he has done with Iran, was purported to save the world from the threat of a dangerous nuclear-armed enemy.

Here is a video of Bill Clinton speaking on 21 October, 1994, on the “good deal” he has made with North Korea. Listen to him saying that the deal will make it “much harder for them to produce nuclear weapons”.

Why do any Americans who are not totally insane, or longing for the destruction of their country and Western civilization, ever put responsibility for their survival in the hands of Democrats?

Glorious satire:

The UN must be destroyed.