LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: VIDEO: TEEN MOUNTS A FLAMETHROWER ON A DRONE.

UPDATE: Link fixed!

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PROF. NICHOLAS JOHNSON TALKS TO JOHN STOSSEL ABOUT The African-American tradition of arms in America.

HILLARY CLINTON: WHY ARE THE RELATIVES OF THE BENGHAZI VICTIMS ALL LYING ABOUT ME?

At the now-infamous Andrews Air Force base ceremony on September 14, 2012, Hillary Clinton told grieving family members that their loved ones had been murdered by a bloodthirsty mob incited by an online anti-Islam video.  Four different relatives of three separate victims have publicly shared that recollection, including one who jotted down notes shortly after the meeting:

“I gave Hillary a hug and shook her hand. And she said ‘we are going to have the film maker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son,'” recalls Tyrone Woods’ father, reading directly from his written record from that day. Sean Smith’s mother and uncle remember the same thing, as does Glen Doherty’s sister.  Now watch Hillary’s performance from this past Sunday.  Note how anchor George Stephanopoulos, to his credit, asks a very specific question, preceded by clips of statements from several of the aforementioned family members:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Did you tell them it was about the film? And what’s your response?

CLINTON: No. You know, look I understand the continuing grief at the loss that parents experienced with the loss of these four brave Americans. And I did testify, as you know, for 11 hours. And I answered all of these questions. Now, I can’t — I can’t help it the people think there has to be something else there. I said very clearly there had been a terrorist group, uh, that had taken responsibility on Facebook, um, between the time that, uh, I – you know, when I talked to my daughter, that was the latest information; we were, uh, giving it credibility. And then we learned the next day it wasn’t true. In fact, they retracted it. This was a fast-moving series of events in the fog of war and I think most Americans understand that.

Did you tell the families that the attack was about the film?  Answer: No.  Justin has addressed her subsequent “fog of war” dissembling, which is belied by the fact that she consistently managed to get it right in private discussions, while peddling a very different tale in public.  But let’s ignore that part of her answer for the moment.  She was asked a direct question: Did she, or did she not, tell those family members that the Internet film was responsible for their loved ones’ deaths?  She says she did not.  This is a direct contradiction of very explicit memories shared on the record by multiple people who have far less incentive to lie than, say, a truth-challenged politician seeking power.  This should be a serious problem for Hillary Clinton.

But it won’t be, because the MSM are essentially Hillary’s Democratic operatives with bylines, and because Trump is sucking all the oxygen out of the room. Or as CBS chief Les Moonves exclaimed on Monday, “We love having all 16 Republican candidates throwing crap at each other. The more they spend, the better it is for us,” adding “Go Donald! This is fun, watching this.”

CENSORSHIP: Facebook Declares BBC Article About French Political Polls ‘Unsafe.’

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: FBI investigates if terror group arranged California killers’ marriage.

AND YET PEOPLE STILL SEE IT AS RUN BY IDIOTS: Federal Government Spent $4.34 Billion On Outside PR In Last Seven Years.

WE NEED NEW ONES: How Old Is Too Old For A Nuclear Reactor?

NAT HENTOFF: ACLU Silence Enables Campus Anti-Free Speech Movement.

And they’re not exactly covering themselves with glory protecting America from its current president’s excesses, either. But then, as Glenn wrote yesterday, the ACLU’s current motto is, “We only protect constitutional rights we like from people we don’t like. And we don’t like guns, and we do like Obama, so suck it, gun nuts.”

Related: ACLU: Hey, sure, let’s strip constitutional rights without due process!

(Via Iowahawk.)

TAKE $15 OFF AMAZON FIRE TV.

CHARLES C.W. COOKE IN THE WAPO: The right to bear arms isn’t up for debate:

When debating the wisdom of the Constitution’s Second Amendment, the media tends to start from the presumption that the question is purely scientific, and that the answers can — and should — be derived from statistical analyses and relentless experimentation. This approach is mistaken. The right of the people to keep and bear arms is not the product of the latest research fads or exquisitely tortured “data journalism,” but a natural extension of the Lockean principles on which this country was founded. It must be protected as such. . . .

At the time of the American founding, it was widely understood that there was a real danger in a government’s attempting to deprive the people of what Alexander Hamilton called their “original right of self-defense.” This is why, when it came to writing the Constitution, the anti-Federalists, who feared the government’s potential to become corrupt, refused to sign on to a more powerful national government until they had been promised certain explicit protections. Then, as now, their logic was clear: It makes no sense to allow the representatives of a free people to disarm their masters.

Reacting to this argument, we often hear advocates of gun control propose that the Founders’ observations are irrelevant because they could “not have imagined the modern world.” I agree with the latter assertion: They couldn’t have. As well-read in world history as they were, there is no way that they could have foreseen just how prescient they were in insisting on harsh limitations of government power. In their time, “tyranny” was comparatively soft — their complaints focused on under-representation and the capricious restriction of ancient rights. In the past century, by contrast, tyranny involved the systematic execution of entire groups and the enslavement of whole countries. The notion that if James Madison had foreseen the 20th century he would have concluded that the Bill of Rights was too generous is laughable.

True.

SPYING: FBI admits it uses stingrays, zero-day exploits: The “queen of domestic surveillance” inches closer to hot-button topics.

HISTORY’S GREATEST MONSTER! Jimmy Carter Banned Iranians from Coming to US During Hostage Crisis:

Trump is a monster, a madman and a vile racist. He’s just like Hitler. Or Jimmy Carter.

During the Iranian hostage crisis, Carter issued a number of orders to put pressure on Iran. Among these, Iranians were banned from entering the United States unless they oppose the Shiite Islamist regime or had a medical emergency.

Here’s Jimmy “Hitler” Carter saying it back in 1980.

Fourth, the Secretary of Treasury [State] and the Attorney General will invalidate all visas issued to Iranian citizens for future entry into the United States, effective today. We will not reissue visas, nor will we issue new visas, except for compelling and proven humanitarian reasons or where the national interest of our own country requires. This directive will be interpreted very strictly.

Apparently barring people from a terrorist country is not against “our values” after all. It may even be “who we are”. Either that or Carter was a racist monster just like Trump.

And note that FrontPage goes there with the Photoshop as well.

(Headline via the residents of Springfield, presumably now finding strange new respect from the MSM…)

RAND SIMBERG WAS SELLING THESE YEARS AGO: You Can Buy a Ride in a MiG-29 Fighter Jet: Fly to the edge of space for just $18,000. Although I think he was selling rides in Mig-25s, not -29s.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Choose The Form Of Your Destructor.

READER BOOK PLUG: John J. Miller: The Polygamist King: A True Story of Murder, Lust, and Exotic Faith in America.

LEADING FROM BEHIND:

Starring President Empty Chair, and his would-be successor, his former Secretary of State who couldn’t be bothered to answer her own 3:00 am phone call.

(Via PJM alumnus Jennifer Rubin.)

NOW THAT POLITICS IS SELF-SATIRIZING: Christopher Buckley has switched from Washington satire to historical fiction in his new novel, The Relic Master. I think it’s his best book yet, a page-turner about a 16th-century dealer in religious relics who joins the painter Albrecht Durer in the ultimate heist — an attempt to make off with the relic known today as the Shroud of Turin. (Full disclosure: I’m a friend and previous co-author.) It opens in 1517, one of those hinges in history. The Catholic elite’s passion for collecting saints’ bones (and using them to market the lucrative sale of indulgences) has become a bubble market that’s about to be burst by the Reformation. Martin Luther makes an appearance along with the the corrupt Pope Leo X and other relic buffs like Frederick the Wise. The novel combines the Buckley wit with a rich historical tableau: Flashman meets The Name of the Rose.

For holiday shoppers, I should note that it’s still possible to buy a relic, as in this assortment of saintly remains on eBay. But The Relic Master seems like a safer gift – and it’s definitely cheaper. Sure, a reliquary with St. Francis of Assisi’s hair would be a good conversation piece, but $680?

COOL — MAYBE THEY CAN BE A SPONSOR AT BULLETS & BOURBON NEXT YEAR: NYT Freaks Out: Meet the New GunTV Channel.

NOT THE ONION: Transgender AND Transager: 52 Year-Old Father Lives as a 6 Year-Old Girl.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 944. Brian Leiter is, as happens so often, both insulting and wrong. When I linked, the number was 35%.

TO BE FAIR, “FASCIST” JUST MEANS SOMEBODY THE LEFT DOESN’T LIKE, NOWADAYS: Megan McArdle: Trump Is Scary, But Not ‘Fascist’ Scary.

Should we hunker down for America’s version of Mussolini/Hitler-style fascism, a la “It Can’t Happen Here”? Not quite. Douthat wrote a second column, pointing out the ways in which Trump is different from typical fascist leaders. Classical fascism is obsessed with tradition and secret knowledge, which feels backward in our modernist, diverse country.

The more important distinction, to my mind, is that Trump doesn’t have an organization so much as a mood.

Actual fascists, let us remember, were born out of a brutal world war that resulted in territorial losses, and left a lot of demobilized soldiers running around with dim economic prospects. Whatever your opinions on the war on terror, it is not the same scale as World War I, and it has certainly not left the U.S. in the kind of parlous condition in which Hitler and Mussolini were able to grow smaller radical groups into national mass movements. Trump himself doesn’t have that kind of dedication to his cause; just try to imagine him leading a coup, landing in jail, angrily penning “The Art of the Struggle.”

Implausible. Trump has far too much to lose, and too little to gain, to embrace truly revolutionary fervor.

Nor is he operating in a weak state with a short and spotty democratic history. The U.S. government has ticked along for going on 250 years, through multiple crises and an armed insurrection. Americans are pretty emotionally attached to its institutions, for all the complaints about them, and precisely because we are ethnically diverse, we tend to rest our national identity heavily upon our political institutions: not the expansionist “Drang nach Osten,” but the Constitution … the huddled masses yearning to breathe free … life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have failed many times to live up to our ideals, but we have never stopped professing them.

All this matters. The main problem with fascists, after all, is not that they have creepy cartelist economic notions and uncharitable immigration policies; the problem with fascists is that they had a tendency to go on killing sprees against neighbors, internal minorities and their political enemies. I don’t like Trump’s economic pseudo-policies, or anti-immigrant sentiment. But they are so far from Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy as to be differences in kind as well as degree. And America has neither the weak institutions nor the revolutionary organizations necessary for a Trump Reich to fester.

To be fair, Obama has done a lot to weaken our institutions, which were no prize already. But don’t worry about Trump. Take Trump as a warning sign of what may come down the road later, if the people who have been running our institutions continue to behave so fecklessly.

KEN WHITE: Talking Productively About Guns.

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