THE MUSLIM WAR ON WOMEN COMES TO GERMANY

The only way for European women to have a future is to fight Muslim migration.

Daniel Greenfield

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

January 7, 2016

Foto: HansPaulEnterprise

The city of Cologne’s website tells tourists that spending New Year’s there is “something to write home about.” It certainly is after the German city took in 10,000 mostly Muslim refugees last year.  There are 120,000 Muslims already in the city making them more than 10% of the population. It has been estimated that Cologne will become a majority Muslim city by the last New Year’s Eve of the century.

When the anti-Islamist group Pegida came out to protest last year, the Cologne cathedral turned out its lights to condemn them while pro-migrant activists smugly held up signs reading, “Refugees welcome”.

But for this New Year’s Eve, the crowd outside the Cologne Cathedral was dominated by young Muslim men who threw fireworks at police and sexually assaulted women and girls trapped in the crowd.

In a crowd of 1,000 men, hundreds of Muslim refugees prowled, assaulting and robbing any woman they could find. A police officer described seeing crying women stumble toward him after midnight. He managed to rescue one woman whose clothes had been torn off her body from a group of her attackers, but could not save her friends because the mob had begun hurling fireworks at him.

The eight men he arrested carried asylum papers. They were among the mob of refugees welcomed by the people of Cologne.

Mayor Henriette Reker, the refugee activist whose victory had been greeted with cheerful headlines from the pro-refugee press and shouts of Allahu Akbar by the locals, was forced to declare it a crisis.

Desperate efforts were made to suppress the crimes that had been committed, but too many women had been assaulted. More than 90 complaints had been filed. There was no telling how many more women had been too ashamed to go to the police. Or how many thought that there was no point because the authorities would not be on their side, but on the side of the Muslim refugee rapists.

A man spoke of being unable to protect his wife or teenage daughter from the mob. A British tourist fought against being forced into a car. A 17-year-old girl described being brutally violated and seeing other girls in the police station in the same condition. A 22-year-old woman recalled, “When I called for help, they laughed.” Even a volunteer policewoman had been molested.

Katia remembered walking through a “tunnel” made up only of “foreign men” who assaulted her on all sides. “Although we shouted and hit them, the men didn’t stop.” Instead they insulted and taunted her.

The provost of the Cologne Cathedral had warned anti-Islamist protesters, “You're supporting people you really don't want to support.” But it was the provost and pro-refugee activists who had supported people they really didn’t want to support. There is no way to know whether any of the smiling young people holding, “I Love Immigration” banners had fallen victim to those refugees they loved so much.

The over 1 million migrants brought to Germany by Merkel had already inflicted trauma on many women and girls while the offenders received little more than a slap on the wrist from the authorities.

Even pro-refugee activists working in camps in Germany had warned of a “culture of rape and violence” where unaccompanied women are viewed as “fair game” and rapes and sexual assaults are routine. A 16-year-old girl wasraped on September 11 near a migrant shelter. Two Iraqis refugees had raped an 18-year-old girl behind a schoolyard. Another Iraqi raped a 17-year-old girl at a festival. A 7-year-old girl was raped in a park not far from where her mother was sitting.

Some of these cases were covered up. Others were dismissed as isolated incidents.

But the mass attack on nearly 100 women and girls by hundreds of men right in the center of the New Year’s Eve celebrations was too big to suppress. And when it broke, the outrage was tremendous.

Yet the rationalizations remain the same.

The authorities claim not to know who was responsible, but are somehow able to assure the media that none of them were refugees. Feminist groups protest broadly against sexual harassment, but insist that there “should be no racism under the guise of women's rights.” When a handful of the perpetrators are finally brought to trial, their lawyers will claim that like so many Muslim sex offenders before them they were unfamiliar with European “culture” and were “overwhelmed” by all the non-burqaed women.

And those will be lies. The horrifying scene in Cologne is commonplace in the Muslim world.

While many remember the horrifying sexual assaults of the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square, including the attack on Lara Logan, such incidents are actually commonplace in Egypt, especially around Eid Al-Fitr. It doesn’t matter how the women are dressed. A 2006 story describes mass attacks on “any and every girl in sight, whether a Niqabi, a Hijabi or uncovered. Whether Egyptian or foreigner. Even pregnant ones.” 99% of Egyptian women report being sexually harassed. This behavior has is common in Muslim lands.

In Iraq, it’s eight out of ten women. In Afghanistan, rape and honor killings are routine. And this is the population that Germany’s mostly Muslim migrants are drawn from.

What happened is inevitable and it will go on happening. More surveillance cameras and patrols won’t stop it. Instead, as in the UK, it will go underground. Muslim men will groom and abuse troubled girls. The authorities will turn a blind eye until a decade later the story gets too big to be covered up. And by then thousands of lives will be ruined. The only way to stop it is to keep it out of Europe and America.

Islam was a declaration of war against women and non-Muslims by Mohammed and his followers. From the mob outside the Cologne cathedral to the rape rooms of the Islamic State, Mohammed’s followers continue fighting the dead warlord’s brutal and ugly war against women.

Mohammed had told his men that the majority of those condemned to hell are women (Bukhari 2:24:541), that they could rape non-Muslim women (Koran 4:24) and that women who weren’t wearing Hijabs or Burkas were fair game (Koran 33:59). This isn’t an aberration. This is Islam.

Due to Germany’s asylum laws, it’s unlikely that any of the foreign attackers will be deported for their crimes. Sexual assault isn’t “serious enough” for that. And as refugees, they probably couldn’t be deported anyway because they would face “persecution” in their homeland. The hundreds of Muslim men who assaulted women know that they have nothing to fear because nothing will happen to them.

Merkel made this mess. And the only way to undo it is to undo Germany’s asylum policies and likely its membership in the European Union. The migrant wave has fundamentally altered Germany’s demographics in a way that makes the country hostile to women. The only way for women in Europe to have a future is to fight the migration mob. Otherwise what happened outside the Cologne cathedral, what happens to the 99% of women in Egypt and what happens in the Islamic State will be their future.

 Tags: Activism, germany, Muslim immigration, Muslim rape gangs

Stranger than Fiction: Hollywood Gets Benghazi Right

By STEPHEN F. HAYES
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
From January 18, 2016 Issue

"This is a true story." Those words appear onscreen to open 13 Hours, the major motion picture about Benghazi, in theaters on January 15. And with them, director Michael Bay announced that he is taking sides in the long-running debate over the attacks there on September 11, 2012.

For three years, the White House and its defenders in the media have characterized the Libya raids as a tragedy, a series of unfortunate events that were utterly unpreventable and for which no one is much to blame. Many of those who were on the ground in Libya, CIA contractors and diplomats alike, see them as something quite different. To them, Benghazi represents bureaucratic indifference and incompetence before the attacks, deadly governmental indecision and fecklessness during the attacks, and official deception and dishonesty after the attacks.

This is their story. And the fact that it's a story familiar to readers of The Weekly Standard indicates that Bay, the man behind the blockbuster "Transformers" movies, has taken sides in a way that one might not expect from a successful Hollywood director.

The movie is based on the book of the same name, written by Boston University journalism professor Mitchell Zuckoff with five CIA contractors who participated in the many battles in Benghazi that night. The authors announced in the book's introduction that they had sought to avoid the politics of Benghazi in favor of a fact-based account of what happened during the 13 hours of fighting there. And while the film tracks the book's narrative closely, Bay's depiction of the sense of abandonment felt by those men, as they wait for help that never arrives, heightens the outrage.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, as the film is titled in full, begins as CIA contractor Jack Silva leaves his family for Libya. Upon landing in Benghazi, Silva and a fellow contractor embark on what ought to be a routine trip to the CIA's secret annex. But as they make their way through the cluttered streets of Libya's second-largest city, a hostile gang of locals forces their vehicle to a stop at gunpoint, leading to a tense and chaotic exchange of lethal threats. They are allowed to pass, rattled but unharmed. It's a temporary reprieve.

The story is told largely through the eyes of Silva, played brilliantly by a bearded and newly bemuscled John Krasinski, best known for his role as the affable and sarcastic Jim Halpert on The Office, and four other CIA contractors—Mark "Oz" Geist, John "Tig" Tiegen, Kris "Tanto" Paronto, and "Boon." (Geist, Tiegen, and Paronto have spoken previously with TWS about their experiences and served as consultants on the movie.)

The film documents the contractors' concerns about security before the assault on September 11, 2012, making clear that the attack was not an isolated incident but the culmination of a long series of hostilities directed at Western targets. Even before the events of that day, viewers are led to understand the difficulty of distinguishing friend from foe. The February 17th Martyrs Brigade, a Libyan militia the State Department engaged and ostensibly the good guys, is filled with shady characters, some of whom seem to know well in advance the plans of the jihadists who attack the diplomatic compound and the CIA annex. Hours before the attack begins, members of the local police force are observed conducting surveillance on the compound. Throughout the hours of fighting at both sites, when the Americans trying to repel the attacks see large groups of dark-skinned, heavily armed men show up to the battle, they cannot determine whether the new arrivals are there to help them or kill them.

This inability to distinguish friend from foe is disorienting in an extraordinarily powerful way. The vulnerability the disorder evokes is almost overwhelming, even as you sit safe in a theater eating your buttered popcorn and drinking your oversized Coke.

As the battle intensifies, the sense of helplessness produced by this confusion about the enemy is replaced by a growing outrage over the indecisiveness and willful impotence of the U.S. government. As the CIA contractors at the annex stand by their loaded vehicles and listen in real time to the desperate pleas for help from Americans under siege at the diplomatic compound, the CIA station chief repeatedly tells them they cannot go. Each time they call to Washington for help, even just to request a flyover, they're given excuses, not assistance. When a small team of security officials arrives from Tripoli, they're told to hold at the airport rather than rush to join the fighting. Pleas for military reinforcements from the Pentagon are rejected—again and again.

In one of the most affecting scenes of the film, Bay cuts briefly from the bedlam of the fighting and the desperation of the CIA contractors to a shot of U.S. fighter jets spinning their engines on an airstrip in Aviano, Italy. American power, idle.

The film never mentions Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But in subtle ways, it makes clear their weakness and dishonesty. The YouTube video that they would blame for the attacks is mentioned only in passing in a news report about Cairo airing in the background at the CIA annex. In between exchanges of gunfire and mortar, one U.S. official reports to others that the State Department has assigned blame for the attacks to the al Qaeda-linked fighters of Ansar al Sharia. Another official expresses bewilderment at claims from Washington that there had been a demonstration before the attack began. And the entire film renders absurd the notion that the attacks were not planned.

So what is the likely political impact of the movie, if any? For months, there has been speculation the film could damage the presidential prospects of Hillary Clinton. That's possible. It's certainly an effective critique of the Obama administration's misadventures in Libya and culpability in the Benghazi disaster

But if the film has any political impact, it seems far more likely to be on the Republican primary. It's not hard to imagine that there could be considerable overlap between the people who choose to see 13 Hours in its opening weeks and those who vote in the Republican primaries over the next several months. And that would likely lead to a boost for Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

Two dominant themes emerge from the film: 1) In the chaos of post-Qaddafi Libya it was impossible to distinguish between good guys and bad guys. And, for that reason and others, 2) the U.S. government isn't very effective in its efforts to create order out of the inevitable instability that results from removing dictators.

These are arguments that have been central to the foreign policy case made by both of the GOP frontrunners, albeit with vastly different levels of sophistication. Trump's call for a temporary ban on all Muslim immigration is a crude and offensive amplification of that first theme: It's impossible to identify good Muslims and weed out the bad ones, so ban them all. And Cruz has repeatedly warned about the dangers that can result from changing bad regimes in the greater Middle East.

Marco Rubio, who supported the removal of Muammar Qaddafi, consistently criticized how the Obama administration handled the intervention in Libya. He was right to do so and argues that the resulting chaos validated his objections. But his are nuanced arguments, and they come at a time when nuance doesn't seem to be working.

Whatever its impact, 13 Hours is a powerful film that is well worth seeing. From beginning to end, it forcefully rejects the sanitized, no-fault version of Benghazi. In scene after powerful scene, it assigns blame: to policymakers in Washington who naïvely overestimated our ability to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys in post-Qaddafi Libya; to Washington bureaucrats who paid little attention to repeated warnings about the security of U.S. facilities in Benghazi; to CIA officials more concerned with career advancement and positive performance reviews than saving lives.

But perhaps the strongest indictment made by 13 Hours is an unspoken one. The film itself is an implicit but devastating critique of the American media that refused to report this story in this way, an establishment media that left to Hollywood the responsibility of telling these important truths.

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

BENGHAZI, MOVIE REVIEW, 13 HOURS

Today's Tune: Florence + the Machine - All This and Heaven Too (Live Jonathan Ross Show)

Obama’s Gun-Control Order Is Dictatorial, and It Won’t Work

By John Lott — January 5, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

HOTOGRAPH BY PETE MAROVICH / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY

Today, upset that Congress has refused, in his words, to do “something, anything” to stop gun violence, President Obama released executive actions that bring the country closer to his oft-stated goal of “universal” background checks that cover the private transfer of firearms.

The current law is very clear. Only federally licensed gun dealers are required to conduct background checks, and only sellers whose “principal objective of livelihood and profit [is] the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms” are required to obtain a federal license. Anyone “who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms” is specifically exempted from the licensing requirement.

But that doesn’t matter to Obama, whose actions today will require many sellers to get a license if they sell even a single gun. White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett told reporters that licenses would now be required based on such things as, “whether you sell firearms shortly after they’re acquired or whether you buy or sell in the original packaging.”

In an era when private individuals can set up their cell phones to accept credit cards, accepting credit-card payment for one gun will now make selling firearms your “principal objective of livelihood.”

Yet Obama doesn’t have to unilaterally rewrite the law to achieve meaningful reform. He could easily pass universal background checks through Congress, just by including three simple and reasonable changes:

1) Don’t charge gun buyers. All background checks currently on the books make gun buyers and sellers pay for the cost of transferring or selling a gun. Some states require a processing fee as well as compensation to the licensed dealer who oversees the private transfer.

Yet, if it’s really true that background checks reduce crime, everyone benefits, not just gun buyers. Why not pay for the background checks out of general revenue?

Background checks on private transfers add about $80 to the cost of transferring a gun in New York, up to $60 in Washington State, and $125 in DC. These fees can put guns out of the reach of those who are the most likely victims of violent crimes: poor people living in high-crime, urban areas. If gun-control advocates care more about passing universal background checks than about who pays for them, this should be an easy and fair fix.

2) Fix the system so it stops falsely flagging law-abiding people. The current federal background-check system is a mess. Virtually everyone who fails a check is legally eligible to buy a gun.

During a recent Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton claimed that, “Since [the Brady Act] was passed, more than 2 million prohibited purchases have been prevented.” In reality, there were over 2 million “initial denials” — almost all of which turned out to be mistakes.

In 2010, the Department of Justice’s annual report on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) showed that 94 percent of “initial denials” were dropped after the first internal fact check. A 2004 review by Congress found that another two percent were dropped when the cases were sent out to BATFE field offices. Many more cases were dropped during the three remaining stages of review.

If a private company’s criminal-background checks on employees failed at anything close to the same rate, they’d be sued out of business in a heartbeat. There’s no doubt that for many of the 2.4 million people mistakenly given an initial denial, it was a mere inconvenience. But some people really do need quick access to a gun for protection. 

The solution? Hold the government to the same standards as private companies.

3) Stop using background checks as de facto registration. As laws concerning handguns and “assault” weapons have evolved, such places as California, New York, and Chicago have all used registration lists to identify who owns guns that are no longer legal.

Since 2004, Congress has required the FBI to destroy NICS records of gun sales and transfers within 24 hours. But federally licensed dealers are required to keep records of background checks. Congress currently forbids federal collection of this information into a central database, but there’s no guarantee that this won’t change. The government could potentially figure out who legally owns a gun.

Gun-control proponents assure us that they aren’t setting up a registration program. Yet in the same breath, they defend gun registration as a crime-fighting tool. The logic is that police could find a gun at a crime scene and then be able to trace it to the registered owner.

In fact, guns are very rarely left at crime scenes, and those left are virtually always unregistered.

Police can’t seem to point to a single instance in which gun registration has helped them solve a crime. During a recent deposition, D.C. police chief Cathy Lanier said she couldn’t “recall any specific instance where registration records were used to determine who committed a crime.” Police in Hawaii, Canada, and other places have made similar admissions.

Instead of requiring federally licensed dealers to hold background-check information for as long as they are in business, we should place limits on how long they can hold the information that they obtain.

These proposals have been around for years, and gun-control advocates have always shot them down. They feel particularly strongly about making gun owners pay the fees for firearms transfers. During Colorado’s 2013 debate on universal background checks, Republicans offered an amendment waiving the state fee for people below the poverty level, but Democrats voted almost unanimously against it. Maryland Democrats stopped a similar move.

If Democrats really believe that universal background checks are so important, making these simple, fair changes will eliminate opposition to the policy from gun-rights proponents. If they won’t make the changes, it will only prove that their real aim is to reduce gun ownership, not to stop crime. 

— John R. Lott Jr. is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author of More Guns, Less Crime.

RELATED: President Obama Has Let His Emotion Get the Better of His Judgment

RELATED: Why the War on Guns Has Failed

RELATED: Mass Shootings and Gun Control

RELATED: The Left’s Cynical Gun-Control Reflex

OBAMA GOES IT ALONE ON GUN CONTROL

The Radical-in-Chief ignores the Constitution and the Jihadist threat.

Joseph Klein

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

January 6, 2016

U.S. President Barack Obama wipes tears while delivering a statement on steps the administration is taking to reduce gun violence in the East Room of the White House in Washington January 5, 2016 © Carlos Barria / Reuters

Wiping away tears that eluded him when he spoke about the jihadist massacres in Paris and San Bernardino, President Obama condemned congressional inaction in the face of gun violence during remarks he delivered from the East Room of the White House on Tuesday morning.  The president vowed to fill in the void through executive action. The most egregious of these measures is a wholesale re-writing of the definition of what constitutes a “seller” in order to extend the reach of federal government control over all gun owners. Obama listed this as his top priority action, ahead of what he described as “smart and effective enforcement of gun safety laws that are already on the books.”

Enforcing the laws already on the books is the responsibility of the executive branch. Making new laws or changing existing laws is the responsibility of the legislative branch.

Apparently, President Obama has learned nothing from the Supreme Court’s reversal of his unconstitutional recess appointments and the judicial stay issued against his unconstitutional immigration amnesty executive orders. Obama gave little comfort to skeptics when he claimed in his White House remarks that “I believe in the Second Amendment.  It’s there written on the paper.”

The problem is that Obama believes the Constitution is only just a piece of paper, which he can erase and then use the blank page to write his own rules of governance. After all, this is the same man who complained years ago that the Constitution says “what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”

As president, Obama has gone even further, railing against the separation of powers. If Congress does not act the way he thinks it should, he will just proceed all by himself. In his mind, he is doing something he must on behalf of the American people right now, while the “gun lobby” is holding Congress “hostage.” 

As usual, President Obama raised strawman arguments to justify his latest power grab.

For example, Obama claimed in his East Room remarks announcing his gun control executive actions that “we are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency.  It doesn't happen in other advanced countries.  It’s not even close.”

Obama’s claim is misleading.

First of all, we do not have complete data from countries such as China and Russia to draw any meaningful conclusions. Secondly, raw total numbers of mass shootings tell less in terms of real comparisons than normalizing the numbers utilizing some constant unit of population.  According to a study conducted by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which compared annual death rates per million people from mass public shootings between the United States and European countries from 2009 to mid-2015, the United States ranks 9th.  The United States has the same ranking when comparing the frequency of mass public shootings during the same time period. This data, by the way, was compiled before the deadly jihadist mass shootings in Paris that claimed 130 lives last November.

Moreover, deaths in general that have occurred as a result of gun violence have declined sharply during the last twenty years. According to a Pew Research Center analysis of death certificate data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “The nation’s overall gun death rate has declined 31% since 1993.” President Obama is deliberately distorting the scope of the problem to convince Americans that we are facing an urgent crisis which he must address immediately to resolve.

Obama also tried to debunk the argument that other forms of weapons such as knives, which are not so heavily regulated, are also effective lethal instruments that can be as deadly as guns. Israeli civilians, facing the constant threat of Palestinian knife attacks which have taken multiple lives, would beg to differ. Conveniently ignoring what is going on in Israel today, Obama chose to use a knife attack in China to buttress his point that guns are far more deadly:

“Some of you may recall, at the same time that Sandy Hook happened, a disturbed person in China took a knife and tried to kill -- with a knife -- a bunch of children in China.  But most of them survived because he didn’t have access to a powerful weapon.”

Again, Obama is guilty of cherry-picking his facts, or perhaps he was just misinformed. Last September, knife-wielding jihadists stabbed at least 50 people to death at a coalmine in China’s violence-ridden Xinjiang province. Last June, a group of knife-wielding jihadists killed 33 people and injured 130 others. In September 2014, a deranged man stabbed three children and a teacher to death and wounded several others at a Chinese primary school that had refused to enroll his daughter. These are just a few examples of deadly stabbing incidents in China.

Guns are very strictly controlled in China, but not knives. People who are determined to engage in mass killings, whatever their motives may be, will find the weapon to carry out their evil deeds.

Obama tried to debunk the argument that comprehensive background checks might not have stopped at least some previous mass killings. “I reject that thinking,” he said. Obama cited Connecticut as an example of a state where background checks make a difference. “After Connecticut passed a law requiring background checks and gun safety courses, gun deaths decreased by 40 percent -- 40 percent,” he proclaimed to applause. Obama omitted to mention that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Connecticut happened seventeen years after the passage of that law. According to the final Report of the State’s Attorney for the Judicial District of Danbury, “All of the firearms were legally purchased by the shooter’s mother.”

Moreover, the president undercut his own argument regarding the need for more gun control measures when he casually mentioned that gun violence claiming the lives of kids “happens on the streets of Chicago every day.” Chicago has amongst the strictest gun control laws in the country.

Some proponents of Obama’s executive actions claim they are modest improvements to tighten loopholes in existing laws, ramp up enforcement resources, improve dealers’ reporting of lost or stolen guns, address mental health issues including better information sharing and boost gun safety technology. However, Obama’s past performance on a host of issues indicates that if you give him an inch he will take a mile. His first priority – to require anyone the Obama administration deems to be “in the business of selling firearms” to “get a license and conduct background checks”- is an invitation to further abuse of power. According to a report in the New York Times, White House officials have said that someone selling even one or two guns could be considered in the business of selling firearms and subject to the new requirements. How would a barter arrangement instead of a cash transaction be treated?

President Obama should save his tears for the victims of global jihad, including those Americans killed in such places as Fort Hood, Boston, Seattle, Chattanooga and San Bernardino. If he wants his final year in office to show any accomplishments, he should go after ISIS, al Qaeda and other jihadist groups who mean to do us harm with the “fierce urgency of now” that he reserving for his gun control agenda. The president’s drive to release more and more jihadists from Guantanamo, some of whom have returned to battle against us, demonstrates his “fierce urgency” in the opposite direction.

 Tags: executive order, Gun Control, Obama

Bill Is Back

What ‘buy one, get one free’ really means with the Clintons

By John Fund — January 3, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Bill and Hillary Clinton, center, greet people as they exit the funeral for Mario Cuomo at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2015

Bill Clinton, perhaps the best natural campaigner of his generation, will stump for his wife’s presidential campaign in New Hampshire on Monday. He will inject an energy into her sometimes lackluster campaign, but bringing Bill back comes with a price.

Bill Clinton made a famous 1992 campaign promise that if people voted for him, it would be a package deal that included Hillary: “Buy one, get one free.” Now Hillary is in danger of reminding voters that in voting for her, they also get Bill Clinton and what he brings with him — from the dubious dealings of the Clinton Foundation to his “woman problem” and his renowned talent for evasion (“It all depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”). Democratic primary voters aren’t likely to care much, but polls show many independent voters in a general election would be leery of the baggage the couple drags with them. In a new Quinnipiac national poll, only 23 percent of independent voters view Hillary Clinton as “honest and trustworthy.”

Donna Brazile, a CNN commentator who was Al Gore’s 2000 campaign manager, has bluntly said that “one of the most important things [Bill Clinton] can do in this election cycle is basically stay out of the way. Let Hillary Clinton make the case for herself.”

But Hillary is prone to tactical stumbles. Last month she accused Donald Trump of “sexism,” prompting the real-estate mogul to fire back. Saying that Hillary’s attack left him “no choice” but to bring up Bill’s colorful past with women, he went on the attack — over and over again. He not only brought up Bill’s 1997 affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old White House intern, but he referenced three women who had accused Clinton of sexual harassment or worse. “I hope Bill Clinton starts talking about women’s issues so that voters can see what a hypocrite he is and how Hillary abused those women!,” he tweeted Saturday.

What Donald Trump was referring to is one of the least attractive elements of Hillary Clinton’s personality — a take-no-prisoners approach to destroying anyone who gets in the way. Her close ally Sidney Blumenthal smeared Lewinsky as a “stalker” in conversations with reporters. Hillary herself described the young woman as “a narcissistic loony toon,” according to the personal papers of Diane Blair, a close Hillary friend from Arkansas.

When Paula Jones, an Arkansas state worker, and Kathleen Willey, a Democratic volunteer at the White House, accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment, minions of the Clintons systematically set out to discredit them. Ditto with Juanita Broaddrick, the owner of an Arkansas nursing home, who said Bill Clinton raped her when he was Arkansas attorney general in 1978. Indeed, Errol Louis of the New York Daily News stunned a CNN interviewer last week by noting that 14 women have accused Bill Clinton of some form of sexual abuse. That’s not up to the numbers of women accusing comedian Bill Cosby of abuse, but Bill Clinton does get his own Wikipedia page listing his accusers.

Even some liberals who opposed Bill Clinton’s impeachment on charges that he committed perjury and obstructed justice during the Lewinsky scandal acknowledge that he has a problem. Ruth Marcus, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, wrote last week: “Clinton has preyed on [women], and in a workplace setting where he was by far the superior. That is uncomfortable for Clinton supporters but it is unavoidably true.”

In political terms, I agree that Bill Clinton’s sexual history in and of itself is unlikely to gain that much traction. As Paul Mirengoff of the Powerline blog notes: “There are dozens of lines of attack against Hillary Clinton, nearly all of which will resonate with folks who already dislike her. The trick for the GOP nominee will be to select the handful that are likely to resonate with other voters.”

But to the extent that Hillary Clinton accuses Republicans of waging a “war on women,” the history of her husband’s record with women will blunt the effectiveness of her attack. Voters may have extended sympathy to Hillary as a wronged spouse back in the 1990s, but the one-third of voters who don’t remember the impeachment of Bill Clinton well may be surprised to learn just how big Hillary’s role in discrediting Bill Clinton’s accusers has been.

As the Wall Street Journal editorial page has observed:

This September Mrs. Clinton declared that “every survivor of sexual assault” has “the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed.” But when her own access to political power was at stake, she dismissed the women and defended her husband.

Both Hillary and Bill Clinton are skillful spinners of their record, but as the campaign grinds on to the November election, some voters may weary of the potential for history to repeat itself with them. When you vote for a Clinton, you do indeed “buy one and get one free.” And both of then have shown through their past misbehavior that they carry with them a substantial danger that they will bring the exact opposite of dignity and honor to the Oval Office.

— John Fund is National Review’s national-affairs correspondent.

RELATED: Hillary, Not Trump, Forced Us to Revisit Bill Clinton’s Scandals

RELATED: The Dirty Business of the Billary Machine, Again

‘Downton Abbey’: Saying Farewell to All That

By Roslyn Sulcas
December 30, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/arts/television/downton-abbey-saying-farewell-to-all-that.html?_r=0


Cast members and producers of “Downton Abbey”: Michelle Dockery, foreground, with from left, Kevin Doyle, Susanne Simpson, Rebecca Eaton, Gareth Neame, Julian Fellowes, Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Jim Carter, Phyllis Logan and Allen Leech. CreditJesse Dittmar for The New York Times

NEWBURY, ENGLAND — “I just want to get over it,” Lady Mary said. “I mean, over him. I mean, over with. What do I mean?” She burst out laughing and turned back into the actress Michelle Dockery, who plays Lady Mary on “Downton Abbey.” Allen Leech, who plays her brother-in-law, Tom Branson, stepped in to help, “She wants to get it over with.”

It was May at Highclere Castle, the Georgian mansion that serves as set for the titular building, and the cast was halfway through the six-month shoot for the show’s final season. When Season 6, which has already aired in Britain, begins Sunday on “Masterpiece” on PBS, it will be over for Lord and Lady Grantham (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern), their daughters, relations, servants and the love affairs, intrigues, criminal trials, deaths, marriages, withering asides and maintenance of etiquette that have defined “Downton Abbey” since it was first broadcast on ITV in Britain in September 2010.

“I love the way it’s all unraveling,” Ms. Dockery said. “There is a feeling of people moving on with their lives and the sense of the aristocracy as a kind of endangered species. But Mary is trying to keep it going; she doesn’t really like change.”

Who does? Probably not PBS, which saw audiences, and its profile, increase to more than 10 million for Season 5 from five million viewers for Season 1. That number often dwarfed shows across commercial networks.

“‘Downton’ was the rising tide which lifted all boats in every way, shape and form,” said Rebecca Eaton, the “Masterpiece” executive producer. “To have a hit of this magnitude put us back in the international conversation about drama.” Everyone involved, she added, “is feeling quite sad.”

From its opening, with the news (via ironed newspapers) of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, to this final season, set in 1925, when women are working and great houses like Downton are foundering, the series has been catnip to audiences fascinated by a bygone era, the ways of the aristocracy and a social hierarchy in which everyone’s place, however high or low, is rigidly defined.

“‘Downton Abbey’ reconfigures conflicts between the lords and ladies upstairs that are mirrored by tensions among the servants below,” Alessandra Stanley, a former television critic for The New York Times,wrote in 2013 of Season 3. “Fortunes lost can be regained, some class lines can be breached, and love triumphs again and again, and then one more time.” The series, she added, “is a fantasy that gets sillier in prolongation.”

The erosion of those clear lines — which began early in the series when the chauffeur Tom Branson married Lady Sybil and slowly made his way into the heart of the family — is a persistent theme in Season 6, with talk of downsizing the staff, some of the servants branching out into other jobs, and Lady Edith (played by Laura Carmichael) and Lady Mary both working women. Even Lady Grantham, the wife of Earl of Grantham, secures an occupation.

“I think that the history that we are tracing makes this a good point to stop,” said Gareth Neame, an executive producer of the series. “There could have been a seventh or eighth season, but I think the six seasons are beautifully formed. Everything is changing, but the heart of the show is about a group of people living under one roof, and in 1925 that is still the case.”

On a sunny but chilly spring day, no one seemed particularly miserable about the end. “It’s a funny thing, it’s a bit of relief in a way,” said Jim Carter, who plays Mr. Carson, the estate’s butler and embodiment of all aristocratic household standards. “We’ll all miss it, it has dictated the rhythm of our lives for the last six years, and it was more successful than anything any of us will probably ever do again. But it’s right that it comes to an end.”

His words were echoed through the halls. “I’m quite glad actually; I don’t think it’s in an actor’s DNA to play parts for very long,” said Kevin Doyle, who plays Molesley, a footman. (Some months later, when the actors’ lack of sentimentality about the ending of the series was recounted to Maggie Smith — the Dowager Countess — she laughed. “I heard Big Jim was crying!” she said.)

Mr. Carter, who seemed less imposing and beetle-browed than on screen, was sitting on a dainty chair in a small room filled with chunky film equipment and props. Nearby, the crew was setting the dining room table for a scene in which Mary, Edith, Tom, Lady Cora and Bertie Pelham (Edith’s new love interest, played by Harry Hadden-Paton) discuss the practicalities of opening Downton to the public for a day to benefit the local hospital. (“Why should anyone pay to see a perfectly ordinary house?” the Dowager Countess asks incredulously in a prior scene.) The actors, some with bathrobes over their costumes — palatial homes are hard to heat — were tapping their cellphones or reading the newspaper.

All said in interviews that they were amazed by the way “Downton” took off after the first season. So was Julian Fellowes, the show’s sole writer, who originally envisaged “Downton” as a single season, inspired by the upstairs-downstairs world he had already created as the writer of the film “Gosford Park,” for which he won an Academy Award.

“During a memorably bad dinner, Gareth asked me if I would ever think of going into ‘Gosford’ territory for television,” Mr. Fellowes recounted in December.

“You have to remember — it seems strange now — but at that time, the received truth was that there was no audience for that kind of drama,” he said. “So I had to shape it in a way that was a self-contained unit. I chose 1912 as a starting point, because I wanted it to be at the beginning of the modern world, moving into trains and cars and telegrams, and ending with the announcement of war. Then, I thought, if we get a second or third series, they could be very contrasted; during the war, then after. We never thought it could be more than three.”

Asked if he hadn’t been tempted to keep the show going, Mr. Fellowes said he had felt strongly it was time to end. “You want to go at a high point,” he said. “You don’t want to go when everyone is relieved to see the back of you. It’s like a woman with a successful frock. There is a moment when you’ve worn it enough.”

The show’s popular success has been huge, with audience numbers in Britain close to 12 million for several seasons, dropping only slightly for Seasons 5 and 6; that’s almost 20 percent of the population. But “Downton Abbey” came in for frequent critical drubbings from British reviewers, who noted with disappointment a shift into soap opera melodrama. Reviewing the opening of the final season, which begins with a fox hunt, in The Telegraph, Ceri Radford wrote: “I felt nostalgia of a different kind at play, too, in the longing for another distant era: namely 2010, when the first and best series of ‘Downton’ aired. No installment has quite measured up since.” And yet, she noted, “these characters still manage to catch and compel, even if you know that rationally, the whole dramatic edifice is less stone abbey, more house of cards.” (The series finished with a two-hour special on Christmas Day in Britain.)

Mr. Neame said that Downton’s “soapiness” was a key ingredient in a successful formula. “Like lots of British producers, I’ve worked on a lot of things with aristocrats and servants,” he said. “But Julian can write this world in a way no one else can, and in ‘Downton’ he has reinvented the genre, and made it a costume drama with the pace and rapidity of storytelling of a modern series.”

That reinvention has had a considerable influence on television, from “Mr. Selfridge” for ITV and Steve McQueen (whose 2013 film “12 Years a Slave” won the Oscar for best picture) with “Codes of Conduct” for HBO, to Mr. Fellowes’s new projects: “The Gilded Age,” set in 19th-century New York high society, for NBC, and the Victorian-era “Doctor Thorne,” based on a Trollope novel, for ITV.

Whether the actors, made internationally famous by “Downton,” will continue to have substantial careers is unsure. Dan Stevens, who played the unexpected heir to Downton and romantic interest to Ms. Dockery’s character, left the show after three seasons to pursue other roles but hasn’t been particularly visible since. Mr. Fellowes put it succinctly. “The young ones, they are stars now — but are they?”

Although the series has abounded in historical references — from the trenches of the First World War to the arrival of refrigerators and the Teapot Dome Scandal in the United States — Season 6 contains few concrete reminders of events in the outside world. (Although Neville Chamberlain, then the minister of health, does come to visit.) Instead, the series seems to show the characters taking in the social realities that have been consistently alluded to in previous episodes.

Well, sort of. Constant talk of social change doesn’t seem to have impaired the gorgeous clothes, the impeccable manners, the elaborate dinners, the ritualized service and the sense of community that have made the series irresistible to audiences across cultures.

“I think Americans in particular love the show because of the way character is defined in relation to social position and the way a stratified culture offers you possibilities or constrains you,” said the American-born Michael Engler, who directed Episodes 5 and 6 as well as the Christmas special in the final season. “What’s interesting for us is that the dignity of anybody below stairs is as integrally related to the well-being of the house and family as above stairs. In the end, they are a kind of family; they are all equally invested.”

He gestured at the magnificent proportions of Highclere’s drawing room, familiar to viewers. “And then you have all this; you couldn’t build these sets,” he said. “Nobody does this kind of period drama better than the British. You always have the feeling it rings true; this is how it would have happened.”

Bearing out his words, the show’s historical adviser, Alastair Bruce, checked the dinner table for accuracy before the actors began to rehearse their scene.

“Even if no one would know if the wrong fork was there, it’s the subconscious elements that help make ‘Downton Abbey’ succeed,” he said. “The series charts the diminution of aristocratic life from its heyday to a period that we’re still living through really, and you’ve got to get every stage of that right.” He paused. “What I love about the ‘Downton Abbey’ story is that we all know it’s going to end — and they don’t.”

Ms. Carmichael, who plays Lady Edith, looked up. “Yes, we do,” she said. “We’re all going to cry.”