[guest post by Dana]

Tomorrow’s cover of the New York Post via the twitters:

She built this, she owns this. Let’s let a grown woman assume the responsibility that belongs to her. Let’s not infantilize, patronize and condescend to this breaker of glass ceilings by trying to relieve her of full ownership of this debacle. After all, it’s not like the little woman was at home quietly baking cookies all these years. Instead, she was expertly baking America with a skillful deceit:

But in all of the arguments and counter-arguments about whether Comey is right or wrong, principled or cynical, something important is lost in the conversation: This is all Hillary Clinton’s fault. She did this. She and her husband have spent 30 years bending and breaking the rules and letting others pay the price for it. The Clintons force everyone off the highroad and then, when convenient, condemn them for deviating from it. Clinton put Comey in a terrible situation. We can condemn him — or praise him — for the decisions he made once he ended up there. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is all Hillary Clinton’s doing in the first place. She decided to use the home-brew server. She decided to lie about it. She did this. And if she ends up losing this election (which I still very much doubt) it will be her fault — and her fault alone.

Women fought long and hard for the right to choose. Hillary chose. This is her baby. And hers alone.

–Dana

I am of two minds about this.

On the one hand, people like this cretin have been emboldened by Trump’s campaign. And this man obviously feels he is in a Safe Space, as he loudly chants “JEW-S-A!!!” at the press . . . and explains that he is doing so because, hey, the press is “run by the Jews.”

On the other hand, the people around him are ignoring him, and Trump is not openly inciting this sort of thing — at least, at the moment the guy is chanting it.

I’ll try to take some comfort from the latter thought.

P.S. If the embed does not work on your device, just click the link in the tweet and you can watch the video.

Guy chants "Jew-S-A" in front of press pen pic.twitter.com/2yqgA6dD4k

— Nick Corasaniti (@NYTnickc) October 29, 2016

[Cross-posted at RedState.]

UPDATE: Evidence the guy may have been a plant or at least a phony, as many here have contended, here. Note the identical tattoos. I’ll wait until real media has sorted this out, as pro-Trumper Web sites and Twitter accounts are notorious for making up evidence. But if this evidence is not made up, it seems pretty convincing.

Hillary Clinton addressed the re-opened (yes, re-opened, lefties!) FBI investigation relating to her emails at a rally in Daytona Beach today, calling Director Comey’s announcement of the re-opening of the investigation “unprecedented” and “deeply troubling.” Video is below.

This is the quickly coalescing narrative among leftists and Big Media (but I repeat myself). Stories are already touting the fact that partisan hack Loretta Lynch advised against Director Comey sending his letter to Congress. Lost in all this partisan analysis is that Democrats nominated someone who was under federal investigation for most of her campaign. They can’t really be shocked when the FBI becomes involved again shortly before the election.

Above: Hillary Clinton thinks it’s all very funny

As Donald Trump properly notes (did I just say that?), Hillary has “nobody to blame but herself.”

I have selected the relevant 90 seconds for you, which will play when you hit the play button.

Now, I’m sure that some of you may have heard about a letter that the FBI director sent out yesterday. [BOOS] Well, if you’re like me, you probably have a few questions about it. It is pretty strange — it’s pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information right before an election. In fact, in fact, it’s not just strange, it’s unprecedented and it is deeply troubling because voters deserve to get full and complete facts. And so, we’ve called on Director Comey to explain everything right away, put it all out on the table. Right?

Now, of course, Donald Trump is already making up lies about this. He is doing his best to confuse, mislead, and discourage the American people. Ah think it’s time for Donald Trump to stop fearmongering, to stop disgracing himself, to stop attacking our democracy. We can’t let him get away with this, can we?

How it is “attacking our democracy” to point out that a major party candidate for the presidency is under federal investigation with 10 days to go in the election?

[Cross-posted at RedState.]

Perhaps no reporter has done so much to hold Donald Trump’s feet to the fire regarding his con-artist promises than David Farenthold of the Washington Post. Remember when Trump ran crying like a baby from the Iowa debate with Megyn Kelly in the primaries, and used as his excuse a hastily slapped together fundraiser for veterans? Trump claimed he had given $1 million of his own money to the veterans — and months later, Farenthold showed Trump had lied, forcing Trump to actually donate the money Trump had falsely claimed to have given.

Today, Farenthold has a new comprehensive article that represents months of research on the topic of Trump’s alleged philanthropy. By now, if you have been paying attention, you won’t be surprised to learn that Farenthold’s report shows that Trump a) is cheap and ungenerous; b) consistently tries to portray himself as generous when he is not; and c) tends to make sure that what little charitable giving he does make, benefits him personally.

For as long as he has been rich and famous, Donald Trump has also wanted people to believe he is generous. He spent years constructing an image as a philanthropist by appearing at charity events and by making very public — even nationally televised — promises to give his own money away.

It was, in large part, a facade. A months-long investigation by The Washington Post has not been able to verify many of Trump’s boasts about his philanthropy.

Instead, throughout his life in the spotlight, whether as a businessman, television star or presidential candidate, The Post found that Trump had sought credit for charity he had not given — or claimed other people’s giving as his own.

I’m sure the Trumpers will react to this article by saying Hillary’s self-dealing is on a grander scale. You know what? Some of Trump’s B.S. is on a large scale, such as his attempt to get out of paying the $1 million to the vets, or to get out of donating millions from “The Apprentice” or “Art of the Deal” to charities as he promised to. But some of it is pathetic and laughably small — and I don’t think it’s to his credit that he grifts on a small level as well as on a grand scale. It just shows his grifting is so habitual that he’ll grift $100 here or even $7 there (oh yes! $7! you’ll see!), just because that’s what he does.

I could tell story after story from this article, but the self-dealing from the Trump Foundation amuses me the most, because it is so penny-ante and makes him look like such a small man. Trump promised to donate his money from the “Art of the Deal” “to the homeless, to Vietnam veterans, for AIDS, multiple sclerosis” — you know, anything that sounded good.

But, of course, he reneged — as he always does:

So in 1987, Trump signed the forms to incorporate the Donald J. Trump Foundation. The paperwork warned that he could not use the charity’s money to help political candidates. Nor could he use it for the benefit of “any member, trustee, director or officer” of the charity.

That first year, Trump made himself president.

He put in $144,050.

Then he used $100 of the foundation’s money to buy a two-person membership to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Oh, it gets pettier than that, too! Trump used the Trump Foundation as a piggy bank to pay his son’s $7 Boy Scout registration:

New findings, for instance, show that the Trump Foundation’s largest-ever gift — $264,631 — was used to renovate a fountain outside the windows of Trump’s Plaza Hotel.

Its smallest-ever gift, for $7, was paid to the Boy Scouts in 1989, at a time when it cost $7 to register a new Scout. Trump’s oldest son was 11 at the time. Trump did not respond to a question about whether the money paid to register him.

See? It was force of habit. If there was anything he could possibly justify calling charity, he would write a check for it from the Trump Foundation.

Trump’s characteristic streak of cruelty is also evident at points in the article, such as in this anecdote:

In 1997, for instance, he was “principal for a day” at a public school in an impoverished area of the Bronx. The chess team was holding a bake sale, Hot & Crusty danishes and croissants. They were $5,000 short of what they needed to travel to a tournament.

Trump had brought something to wow them.

“He handed them a fake million-dollar bill,” said David MacEnulty, a teacher and the chess team’s coach.

The team’s parent volunteers were thrilled.

Then disappointment.

Trump then gave them $200 in real money and drove away in a limousine.

Why just $200?

“I have no idea,” MacEnulty said. “He was about the most clueless person I’ve ever seen in that regard.”

The happy ending, he said, was that a woman read about Trump’s gift in the New York Times, called the school and donated the $5,000. “I am ashamed to be the same species as this man,” MacEnulty recalled her saying.

That’s about how I feel, too. What a comically awful person.

If your reflex is to say oh yeah well what about Hillary Clinton?!?! then fine . . . but you’re missing my point. I’m not writing a brief for Hillary Clinton here. I’m making the case that we, as Americans, need to figure out how we got ourselves into a situation where we have two choices this wretched. No matter for whom you cast your single and (sorry, it’s true) almost certainly inconsequential personal vote on November 8, we have to be clear-eyed about the system that brought us two such morally defective candidates. In considering this question, it is critical that we not impatiently brush aside the problems of our preferred candidate.

You want to vote for Donald Trump because you think Hillary Clinton is worse? That’s fine with me.

But Donald Trump is human filth. Let’s not pretend otherwise for purely partisan reasons.

Kudos to David Farenthold for doing such a great job revealing it.

[Cross-posted at RedState.]

Absolutely classic Joe Biden. Here he is being interviewed on CNN by Michael Smerconish — and you can watch the precise moment when Biden learns, on live TV, that the new emails being reviewed by the FBI are related to the investigation of Anthony Weiner:

BIDEN: It’s unfortunate.

SMERCONISH: I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that if she had released all the emails from the get-go, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

BIDEN: Well, that’s true. But I don’t know where this email, where those emails came from, what —

SMERCONISH: Apparently Anthony Weiner.

BIDEN: Well, oh God. Anthony Weiner. I should not comment on Anthony Weiner. I’m not a big fan. And I wasn’t before he got in trouble, so, I shouldn’t comment on Anthony Weiner.

Hilarious.

[Cross-posted at RedState.]

In honor of Hillary Clinton: “The Devil Is In Her Eyes” by the Jayhawks.

FBI Director James Comey wrote two letters yesterday about the Hillary Clinton email investigation. You’ve heard about the first one, which he sent to Republican and Democrat lawmakers on Capitol Hill (and which Hillary Clinton falsely claimed he had sent only to Republicans). Now, read his other letter, where he explains his decision to re-open (yes, lefty pundits: “re-open” . . . see rant below) the email investigation:

To all:

This morning I sent a letter to Congress in connection with the Secretary Clinton email investigation. Yesterday, the investigative team briefed me on their recommendation with respect to seeking access to emails that have recently been found in an unrelated case. Because those emails appear to be pertinent to our investigation, I agreed that we should take appropriate steps to obtain and review them.

Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. At the same time, however, given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression. In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season, there is significant risk of being misunderstood, but I wanted you to hear directly from me about it.

Jim Comey

Comey here acknowledges that he is aware of the influence his decision could have on the election, and expresses concern that his letter to Congress will be misunderstood. Those who criticize him for the timing should imagine the contrary situation where he says nothing — and then it comes out after the election that he knew something and stayed mum. Especially if the new (if they are new) emails turned out to something significant, the firestorm would be never-ending. Comey is in a tough spot, and obviously felt that he had no choice but to speak up.

Contrast his actions with those of the vile John Koskinen, who repeatedly testified that the IRS would be producing all Lois Lerner’s emails — while taking four months to inform Congress that the IRS had “lost” many of them. Unlike Koskinen, Comey is doing his best here to be forthright with Congress, as he should.

BONUS MINI-RANT ON THE “IT’S NOT RE-OPENED!” CONTROVERSY: And by the way, lefty pundits, what he’s being honest about is that the FBI is re-opening the investigation. Comey’s letter to lawmakers yesterday said that the FBI — and I quote — “had completed its investigation.” Now, they are going to investigate further. If that’s not “re-opening” the investigation, then what the hell is it?

[Cross-posted at RedState.]