Hillary’s mystery campaign message, the cardinal calls out fake Catholics & other notable comments

September 16, 2016 | 5:03pm



Liberal journalist asks: Just Why Is Hillary Running?

With Hillary Clinton back on the hustings after a few sick days, David Graham of The Atlantic thinks the Democratic nominee may be “looking to reset not just her health, but her whole campaign.” But that raises a question: “What does she stand for?” At her first rally back, Clinton said the brief hiatus helped her “reconnect with what this whole campaign is about.” Then he cites her communication director’s lament that her campaign needs to “work harder to make sure voters hear” her vision. Graham sees that as “an acknowledgement . . . of a fundamental problem that has plagued her since the start”: It’s always been “a little tough,” he observes, “to tell what the underlying motivation for Clinton’s candidacy was.”

Marine vet’s view: US ships shouldn’t cave to Iran

The young naval officer who surrendered to the Iranians defended his decision in Foreign Policy, but Washington Free Beacon Managing Editor Aaron MacLean, a Marine veteran who served in combat in Afghanistan, finds Lt. David Nartker’s argument “embarrassing — for him.” “Nartker had no legal reason to surrender, as innocent passage of a foreign nation’s territorial waters, even by military vessels, was as permissible in that part of the Persion Gulf as anywhere else.” And Nartker had “no more authority to surrender his command to Iran . . . . than he had to give them New York City.” Worse, Nartker’s public apology only “compounded Iran’s propaganda victory.” Mac-Lean cites the words of the “historical battle standard . . . ‘Don’t Give Up the Ship’ ” — noting that “there is no asterisk.” The buck doesn’t stop there: “The establishments that educated, trained, and deployed Lt. Nartker need to take a long, hard look at themselves.”

Cardinal clarification: Who Speaks for Catholics?

Responding to ads by “Catholics for Choice,” New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan sought to set the record straight: “The use of the name ‘Catholic’ as a platform to promote the taking of innocent human life is offensive not only to Catholics, but to all who expect honesty and forthrightness in public discourse.” In National Right to Life News Today, he accused the group of deceptively seeking taxpayer funding of abortion “in the name of the Catholic faith,” though the group “does not speak for the faithful.” Rather, it’s funded by “powerful private foundations to promote abortion as a method of population control.” Pitting the needs of pregnant women against those of their unborn children “is a false choice.”

Scholarly fact-check: Getting It Wrong on Crime

It’s fashionable, notes George Mason professor Walter Williams at The Daily Signal, for academics and the media to “blame poverty and discrimination” for crime. There’s a problem with that: “No one bothers to ask why crime was falling in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, when blacks faced far greater poverty and discrimination.” In the ’60s, riots weren’t as common in the South, even though “poverty and discrimination were worse” there. And in Detroit, where the deadliest rioting took place, the income of black families “was 95 percent of their white counterparts” and “the black unemployment rate was 3.4 percent.”

Electoral wonk: The Third-Party Toll

With presidential race tightening, support for Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein may be more critical — at Hillary Clinton’s expense. As John Fund notes in National Review, “Almost every national poll shows Hillary doing worse when the two third-party candidates are added to the mix.” Stein is “winning between 3 percent and 5 percent of the vote, with strong appeal to former Bernie Sanders voters and leftists of all stripes.” Johnson’s impact is “more nuanced.” But his “appeal is much broader than the million or so people who usually vote Libertarian in presidential contests.” Especially among the young: A Quinnipiac poll showed Clinton with 31 percent of Millennials, versus 29 percent for Johnson.

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