“If liberty of the press … means the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it…” —Benjamin Franklin (1789)

So, Donald Trump claimed that Barack Obama and his trusty secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, were the founders of the Islamic State.

He is, of course, correct. But Trump has no control over how the Democrat’s Leftmedia propaganda machine talkingheads will spin whatever he says — and spin they did!

Now, anyone with a lick of common sense knows that Trump wasn’t being literal about the incorporation of the Islamic State – that he wasn’t asserting that Obama and Clinton went to Iraq and filed documents of incorporation to establish ISIL and the Islamic State. Unfortunately, common sense is not common among the dumbed-down mass media. And, sadly, it’s even more rare among low-information voters whose worldview is shaped by the mass media after consuming their effluent.

Conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt gave Trump the opportunity to clarify his statement, asking him, “You meant that he created the vacuum — he lost the peace?” Trump responded, “No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. … I give him the most valuable player award. I give it [to Hillary] too, by the way. Though Trump outlined how he would defeat ISIL, his communication "style” is a constant source of media fodder.

As for Trump’s indictment of Obama and Clinton for having seeded, sprouted and nourished the Islamic State. How did they do it?

Let’s review the policies that Obama and Clinton established between 2009 and 2012, which indisputably gave rise to the Islamic Caliphate resulting in the Middle East meltdown.

Between 1997 and 2001, despite several opportunities to take out the world’s most dangerous terrorist, Bill Clinton refused to give our special forces operators a green light to kill Osama bin Laden.

On September 11, 2001, under the direction of Osama, al-Qa'ida terrorists attacked New York and Washington, DC.

In response, nine months into the first year of his presidency, George W. Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, which had been a safe haven for al-Qa'ida. In 2003 he launched Operation Iraqi Freedom in order to remove the despotic Saddam Hussein from power and thus eliminate his ability to complete his nuclear WMD program. (Ask the Kurds if Hussein had chemical WMD.) Bush’s objective was also to keep the battle on their turf and off of ours.

Five years later, under Bush’s leadership, al-Qa'ida, the world’s dominant Islamic terror network, was either contained or defeated in its Middle Eastern and global areas of operation.

In 2008, an utterly unqualified freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, won the Democrat Party’s presidential nomination by centering his campaign on “ending the war in Iraq.”

His Republican opponent, John McCain, when asked how long we should stay in Iraq, replied, “One hundred years” — as in whatever length of time it takes to ensure that al-Qa'ida and other terrorist organizations did not re-emerge. McCain insisted we should maintain 25,000 troops in the region, basing his response on the same rationale for maintaining forces in Germany and Japan since WWII — keeping the peace, preventing the rise of another despotic regime, and providing a strategic regional bulwark.

Obama and Clinton skewered McCain for that suggestion, but he was right.

In 2009, Obama, the newly elected foreign policy neophyte, upended Bush’s long-term strategy of establishing a forward military operating capability in Iraq and maintaining stability in a region where we have very critical national interests. Obama thus set a new course for retreat and withdrawal from the Middle East.

In 2011, having let expire the Bush administration’s status of forces agreement (SOFA) that helped secure our hard-won gains in Iraq and the region, Obama declared, “Everything Americans have done in Iraq, all the fighting, all the dying, the bleeding, the building and the training and the partnering, all of it has led to this moment of success. … We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.”

Just look at Iraq today.

In 2012, amid the cascading failure of his domestic economic and social policies, Obama centered his re-election campaign on his faux foreign policy successes and a couple of cynical poll-tested mantras, “Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. I did.” And, “al-Qa'ida is on the run.”

This false campaign narrative was the motive for Clinton’s Benghazi cover-up, which put forth the lie that the attack on Americans there was prompted by an “Internet video” rather than a resurgent al-Qa'ida network of terror.

In the final 2012 presidential debate, Obama chastised his opponent, Mitt Romney: “You say that you’re not interested in duplicating what happened in Iraq, but just a few weeks ago you said you think we should have more troops in Iraq right now. And the challenge we have — I know you haven’t been in a position to actually execute foreign policy, but every time you’ve offered an opinion, you’ve been wrong.”

Despite Obama’s re-election, clearly Romney, as with McCain in 2008, was right.

Predictably, the Obama-Clinton “hope and change” strategy in the region catastrophically failed. The vacuum created by the Obama-Clinton 2011 retreat from Iraq led to Shi'ite factionalism within its government, giving rise to Sunni opposition, and the emergence of ISIL and its codification as the metastasizing Islamic State terror network.

Obama and Clinton effectively created the resurgence of a far more dangerous incarnation of Muslim terrorism than that which Bush had largely defeated by 2008. The Islamic State is now the predominant asymmetric terrorist threat to our domestic, national and global security. That notwithstanding, in 2014 Obama was still insisting, “We’ve contained them.”

And the Obama-Clinton policies in the region have unleashed an epic humanitarian crisis across the Middle East.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are, in fact, the founders of the Islamic State. Given their wanton nuclear empowerment of Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, and the expanding capability of Islamic terror networks now targeting the U.S., the Islamist attack on our nation in 2001 will one day seem minor when compared to the detonation of a fissile weapon in a major urban center.

That notwithstanding, the duplicitous Leftmedia have diverted from Trump’s correct contention about Obama and Clinton, and have spun it into nonsense.

Indeed, Clinton’s free Leftmedia spin is worth billions of dollars in advertising, as they endeavor to create an impenetrable gauntlet to any chance of a Donald Trump election victory in November — opting instead to intentionally back Hillary Clinton and her prolific record of malfeasance.

In 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote of Liberty and the First Amendment, “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”

But the press is only truly “free” if it is free from the incessant bias of partisan political agendas such as those aligned against Trump in favor of Clinton. Sadly, most of the mainstream media are slaves to the ruinous agenda of the Socialist Democrat Party.

Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis