"As U.S. armed forces attack ISIS in Libya, WikiLeaks is poised to remind us that ISIS is in Libya -- indeed, that ISIS is ISIS -- thanks to disastrous policies championed by Hillary Clinton as President Obama's secretary of state. Also raised, yet again, is the specter of Mrs. Clinton's lying to Congress and the American people -- this time regarding a matter some of us have been trying for years to get answers about: What mission was so important the United States kept personnel in the jihadist hellhole of Benghazi in 2012?

"Specifically, did that mission involve arming the Syrian 'rebels' -- including al-Qaeda and forces that became ISIS -- just as, at Mrs. Clinton's urging, our government had armed Libyan 'rebels' (again, jihadists) to catastrophic effect?

"It has been less than two weeks since WikiLeaks rocked the Clinton campaign on the eve of the Democratic convention by leaking hacked e-mails illuminating DNC efforts to rig the nomination chase in Clinton's favor. Now the organization's founder, Julian Assange, has announced that WikiLeaks is soon to publish highly sensitive government e-mails that demonstrate Hillary Clinton's key participation in efforts to arm jihadists in Syria. Just as in Libya, where Mrs. Clinton championed the strategy of arming Islamist 'rebels,' the Syrian 'rebels' who ultimately received weapons included the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. ...

"Clearly, we should not take Assange's word for what is to be gleaned from the hacked records, which he says include some 17,000 e-mails 'about Libya alone.' Let'€™s see if he has what he says he has."

"Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton completed no security briefings or courses on the proper handling of classified materials and how to conduct secure communications while at the Department of State, according to new Obama administration legal filings before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

"The surprise admission was released late Friday and could reignite the controversy over Clinton's 'careless' handling of classified materials as asserted by FBI Director James Comey, which has already been a central part of the presidential race.

"The revelation also could renew calls for the Department of State to strip her of her security clearance. The co-founder of at least one retired military officers organization has called for a suspension of her clearance."

"A favorite National Review chengyu is 'tallest building in Wichita,' which is derived from William F. Buckley's response to Gary Wills's claim that Lillian Hellman, the blacklisted Hollywood Communist, was 'America's greatest living female playwright.' That'€™s a lot of modifiers separating 'greatest' and 'playwright.'

"Hillary Rodham Clinton is without a doubt the greatest current female American major-party presidential nominee.

"It is dumb but, for whatever reason (it isn't entirely ununderstandable), we place great significance on those qualifiers, which is why that endless parade of witless cow-eyed hacks participating in and reporting on the Democratic National Convention beamed so dopily about the fact that an American political party had nominated as its presidential candidate a person with a genital configuration common to slightly more than half of the human race 37 years after Margaret Thatcher became the British prime minister, 47 years after Golda Meir became the Israeli prime minister, 50 years after Indira Gandhi became the Indian prime minister, 18 years after Ruth Dreifuss became president of Switzerland, etc."

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"Dressed symbolically all in white (as though she were a bride or a monarch enjoying her privilege du blanc), she delivered a speech that was one part It Takes a Village and eleven parts old State of the Union speeches from Barack Obama and her husband. Her presentation was her usual hectoring -- she is not capable of speaking in another mode -- and one of her themes was the superiority of collective action to atomistic individualism, as though she were running against Ayn Rand rather than Donald Trump. She decried 'mean rhetoric' and then said that people who operate their businesses in ways that displease her are unpatriotic. She suggested that pillaging high-earning individuals and companies with confiscatory taxes could fund an endless goody bag of patronage for her constituents.

"I.e., the usual Hillary."

"After two days of tacking entirely left, Democrats finally tried to reach out Wednesday night to undecided voters -- and had to contend with Bernie Sanders Democrats who booed down former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and sought to interrupt VP candidate Tim Kaine and current VP Joe Biden with chants against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

"Those boos and interruptions were meaningful because their purpose was precisely to warn Hillary Clinton against any pivot to the center -- to threaten her with the possibility that the slightest betrayal of the Sanders agenda might lead a significant number of the 13 million Sanders voters to stay home, or vote for third-party candidates or even Donald Trump."

"If there is anyone who can sell change as steadiness, or steadiness as change, it is Bill Clinton. After his speech Tuesday night, there was some difference of opinion on whether he still has the old magic. But to convince voters that Hillary Clinton, running for what amounts to a third term of the Obama administration, is in fact a change maker will perhaps require more magic than Bill ever had."

"If only we could get to know the real Hillary Clinton.

"Unveiling the Hillary we supposedly don't know has been the perpetual, elusive goal of Clinton's handlers for decades, with the Democratic convention in Philadelphia the latest stab at it. ...

"Over 25 years, the public surely has attained an accurate-enough picture of Hillary Clinton. They may not know all the details of her advocacy work as a young woman, but they have seen her smash-mouth partisanship, her grating insincerity, her gross money-grubbing, her serial dishonesties, her cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof caution, and her grind-out ambition that has lacked a light touch or any poetry.

"Hillary always points out how she is a target for attack, but the two controversies that have dogged her in the past year were entirely of her own doing. No enemy of hers forced her to circumvent the rules to try to keep her official e-mails off the grid, or to take $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for three speeches. She did this to herself -- because she thought she could get away with it."

"Philadelphia -- Could the presidential election be decided by two competing 'October Surprises' based on leaked information?

"One from WikiLeaks could involve the deleted e-mails from Hillary Clinton's private server and could be related to the FBI's ongoing investigation of the Clinton Foundation. Another could involve the leaking of confidential tax-return information regarding Donald Trump, who has steadfastly refused to release his returns even as he demanded to see the returns of people seeking to be his vice-presidential running mate. ...

"No one knows for sure whether October surprises of leaked information are headed our way this fall. But clearly anything is possible in this cut-throat year of political surprises. That's why polls are only of so much use -- they may be dramatically overcome by events on the ground."

"Disruptive. That's a good word to describe Donald Trump's presidential candidacy, and to describe the sometimes ramshackle Republican National Convention his campaign more or less superintended in Cleveland this past week. ...

"Over history America has mostly been built by disruption. ...

"Maybe some disruption from a candidate who says he has 'no tolerance for government incompetence' is in order."

"Although polls show that the race is tight and that Hillary Clinton is widely viewed as dishonest, she enjoys an Electoral College advantage, as well as a personal one. Her proximity to presidential power and decades in top government positions make it easier for many voters to at least imagine her sitting in the Oval Office.

"More than a majority of voters say they simply cannot imagine Trump as president. His challenge, then, is to change millions of minds with the speech of his life.

"He should not try to be all things to all people, but he must reveal a man fully ready to lead the nation for all occasions."