Watergate II: Collusiongate
Unlike Watergate, the current crisis in government/spying/politics doesn’t have a memorable name. But for those of us who lived through Watergate it has a certain resonance with that event as well as major differences, imparting a strange sense of familiarity, dislocation, and increasing alarm.
This isn’t some burglary to get some dirt on the opposing party, and it isn’t a threat (unfulfilled) of using government entities to “get” the opposition. This is the marshaling of those government entities by one administration in order to “get” the next, and nearly succeeding.
And—as Roger L. Simon points out:
One of the more notable differences between Watergate and the metastasizing scandals involving the FBI, our intelligence agencies, and the Obama administration — subjects of the soon-to-be-released inspector general’s report — is that the media exposed Watergate. They aided and abetted the current transgressions.
By providing a willing and virtually unquestioned repository for every anonymous leaker (as long as he or she was on the “right” side) in Washington and beyond, the press has evolved from being part of the solution to being a major part of the problem.
However, it depends what side you were and are rooting for. For example, if you believe that Donald Trump and his associates colluded with Russia to try to defeat Hillary Clinton, then you believe that the media has been exposing Collusiongate, just as they did with Watergate.
And if you believe that FBI second-in-command Mark Felt, who turns out to have been the Woodward and Bernstein informant known at the time as Deep Throat, was right to leak to them, then you might believe that all of today’s leakers are also right to leak to MSM outlets like the Times in order to spread the word of Trump and Co.’s perfidy.
Now, I happen to think the evidence is powerful that Trump is innocent and that he was not only wrongly investigated but that he was most likely set up by the opposition—almost entrapped, although so far it seems the Trump people didn’t take the bait except for some go-nowhere incidents like the Trump Tower meeting between the Russian lawyer and Trump Junior. But those who read and admire the NY Times these days would beg to differ with me, and that group includes most of my friends and family.
As always, Andrew C. McCarthy has some especially cogent things to say on the subject of Collusiongate:
The fons et origo of the counterintelligence investigation was the suspicion ”” which our intelligence agencies assure us is a fact ”” that the Democratic National Committee’s server was hacked by covert Russian operatives. Without this cyber-espionage attack, there would be no investigation. But how do we know it really happened? The Obama Justice Department never took custody of the server ”” no subpoena, no search warrant. The server was thus never subjected to analysis by the FBI’s renowned forensics lab, and its evidentiary integrity was never preserved for courtroom presentation to a jury.
How come? Well, you see, there was an ongoing election campaign, so the Obama Justice Department figured it would be a terrible imposition to pry into the Democrats’ communications. So, yes, the entire “Russia hacked the election” narrative the nation has endured for nearly two years hinges on the say-so of CrowdStrike, a private DNC contractor with significant financial ties to the Clinton campaign…
Despite the absence of any evidence that the Trump campaign conspired in Russia’s espionage, the Obama Justice Department ”” led by then”“acting attorney general Sally Yates ”” relied on the Logan Act to conduct a criminal investigation of General Michael Flynn, a 30-year decorated combat veteran. A key Trump campaign adviser who played a central role in the Trump transition and was designated as the incoming national-security adviser, it was Flynn’s job to communicate with such foreign counterparts as Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, a Washington fixture whose dance card has never been short on Democrats. Flynn was also an intense Obama critic, and the outgoing administration understood that he was preparing to reverse Obama policies.
The Obama Justice Department and FBI investigated Flynn ”” including an ambush interview ”” on the theory that his discussions with Kislyak and other diplomats violated the Logan Act. Currently codified as Section 953 of the federal penal code, this statute purports to criminalize “any correspondence or intercourse” with agents of a foreign sovereign conducted “without authority of the United States” ”” an impossibly vague term that probably means permission from the executive branch. The Logan Act is patently unconstitutional, but no court has had the opportunity to invalidate it because, to borrow a phrase, no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. As our Dan McLaughlin has explained, the Act dates to 1799, a dark time for free-speech rights during the John Adams administration. Never in its 219-year history has it resulted in a single conviction; indeed, there have been only two indictments, the last one in 1852.
I can’t summarize the article; just read the whole thing. Anyone who reads even a portion of it should come away outraged at what the government has done to Trump and his associates—and the outraged should include people who oppose Trump and everything he stands for. However, that’s not the way things work in this day and age; outrage is very very selective.
One of the many differences between now and Watergate is that back then there was actual evidence on which the investigation, and Nixon’s ultimate resignation, was based. There was a break-in. There were audiotapes of what Nixon said about it. You may disagree about whether the country came out ahead because he resigned, but the facts were and are the facts.
Felt of the FBI leaked to the press, but he did not frame Nixon—nor, as far as I know, did he lie in his leaks. Collusiongate is based on almost no evidence except for the partisan manufactured kind, and is loaded with lies and blatant misbehavior and favoritism on the part of the government and its law enforcement agencies. I conclude that it is far far worse than Watergate, both in what actually happened and what it reveals about our government agencies.
[NOTE: In addition, the FBI appears to be intent on exposing its own supposedly secret source. Why? Nobody seems to know.]
Even assuming Nixon knew about or encouraged the Watergate attempted bugging, there is an important difference. Nixon did not use the organs of the government such as the FBI or the CIA to do his dirty work here. In fact, anyone could have hired people to do exactly what the Watergate people did (or attempted to do). To my eyes, this makes what Nixon (hypothetically) did criminal, but not corrupt.
Nixon’s attempt to use the IRS to target opponents was certainly corrupt, but unsuccessful. Obama’s men’s use of the IRS to target his political opponents was very successful, but there is no smoking gun linking this to Obama.
LTEC:
No smoking gun as yet. Of course, Obama was probably very careful not to leave one.
I agree about Nixon. That’s why I wrote “unfulfilled” in this sentence: “[Collusiongate] isn’t a threat (unfulfilled) of using government entities to ‘get’ the opposition.” I added that Collusiongate makes good on that threat, unlike Watergate, “[Collusingate] is the marshaling of those government entities by one administration in order to ‘get’ the next, and nearly succeeding.”
It’s like the Hamas attack deaths being “explained” as the Israeli massacre of innocent protesters.
I get tribalism and partisanship but not to the point one confuses black with white.
But that’s where Democrats are these days. I don’t see how they can climb down.
Furthermore, it seems the DOJ/FBI/Clinton/Obama people know there are many terribly damaging secrets to be protected lest all sorts of top-tier people face losing their jobs or being indicted, in addition to humiliation.
I was so ridiculed during the election for my attitude that it was indeed a “Flight 93” election on which the future of the republic depended.
Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind now that if Hillary had won, Obama’s corrupting of every agency of government would have been just a mild precursor of much more egregious corruption by her administration?
Could the republic have survived two such corrupt administrations back to back? I seriously doubt it.
“But those who read and admire the NY Times these days would beg to differ with me, and that group includes most of my friends and family.”
Absolutely. But… it doesn’t matter what anyone on the left ‘thinks’ or believes. What matters is what can be proven in a court of law. Let liberals and leftists outraged by lawful consequence go and pound sand.
There must be accountability and consequence for wrongdoing. If not, then the only means of redress will be “politics by ‘other’ means”…
Irv,
Many here held the same POV regarding the predictable consequences that would follow with the election of Hillary Clinton. We dodged a bullet. Though the fight is far from over.
I was so ridiculed during the election for my attitude that it was indeed a “Flight 93” election on which the future of the republic depended.
Irv: That’s not how I remember it. I recall you being quite overbearing towards those who presumed to disagree with your advocacy.
For myself, I was not trying to persuade Trump people to my side, much less ridiculing them, but trying to carve out a place for myself not to vote Trump.
And I have no regrets about that.
Could the republic have survived a disastrously corrupt and incompetent Trump presidency, which seemed more likely than not based on Trump’s record, then put another Democrat president with Congressional super-majorities in place?
I seriously doubt it.
“Protocols of the Elders of Spydom”:
https://garygindler.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/protocols-of-the-elders-of-spydom/
When this scandal can be summed up briefly in a sentence that anyone can understand, and especially when it has a catchy name that calls to mind for people that brief summary, it will be exponentially harder for the ancien regime to maintain the smokescreen. If only there was someone with the knack for creating pithy labels in 140 characters of less.
I agree that this scandal is of a different kind than Watergate. This is repression and manipulation using the power of the government that is what you would expect in places with one-party rule, which is exactly what the Democrat crime boss oligarchs think it should be.
Perhaps Trump can leverage the feeling of being defrauded and cheated that the non-Hillary supporting Democrats and lefties feel as a result of the Obama-Clinton machinations against any Democrat who was not Hillary into an acceptance of the truth by some portion of the left. After all, they tried to steal the election from Trump (the American people really), but they were successful in stealing the primary election from Bernie Sanders.
The current explanation from FBI sources, published in NYT and WAPO is a “modified limited hang out” as Nixon would put it. Stay tuned as Spygate gets a whole lot more damaging to the previous administration and journalists.
Felt of the FBI leaked to the press, but he did not frame Nixon–nor, as far as I know, did he lie in his leaks.
Felt was the one that ordered the illegal break in and searches of Weatherunderground safe houses. Which means he was the one that let Bernadine Dohr and Ayers free and clear.
It just so happens that the former FBI and CIA operates working for Nixon, breaks into some place, and Felt knew about it.
How much of a coincidence that is, people are going to have to learn to figure out by reading the actual history and not the media told narrative of the past.
Felt was leaking an investigation of the FBI, by the FBI, on former FBI, and on DC internal politics, that was caused by the FBI and former FBI tactics. That’s not so much leaking stuff as setting it up. Spying on people is necessary work in DC. If you don’t have spies to record what Nixon said, then there’s no ability to get dirt.
Nixon didn’t need a break in as the FBI and CIA had very efficient methods to obtain information via eavesdropping technology. In fact, the FBi was known to break into people in order to get evidence, but at the same time it would also prevent the prosecution unless they had bought the judge.
Felt had to keep his identity a secret, not due to Nixon since Nixon became a private person after losing political power, but to keep the public, you all, from looking up his background.
We know about the corruption of the FBI and NSA toward Trump because Trump won in 2016.
Do you think this was the first time? What was done in 2012 to Romney and his people?
Paul Ryan should FOIA all records on himself.
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If you always distrust politicians and bureaucrats, you will never be disappointed.
As to why they are revealing this Halper guy: maybe they are trying to fireproof their other guys, to keep their other guys hidden. “Yup, you got us now, it was Halper, for sure!”
Meanwhile their other three Donnie Brascos get some breathing room. Because everybody keeps saying “informant in the campaign,” but Halper was over in England. He wasn’t in anything, my opinion.
Despite Deep Plunger’s expose of the Obama/Clinton/DNC axis collusion with foreign intelligence, the “deep state”, and journolists in the press, we are still knee deep in Water Closet.
This post was linked on PowerLine tonight.
Now, on to the discussion.
Holly Taringsworth Says:
May 19th, 2018 at 6:51 pm
We know about the corruption of the FBI and NSA toward Trump because Trump won in 2016.
Do you think this was the first time? What was done in 2012 to Romney and his people?
* * *
Whatever was done only turned up a dog on the roof, a HS haircut prank, and binders of women.
X Contra Says:
May 19th, 2018 at 8:49 pm
As to why they are revealing this Halper guy: maybe they are trying to fireproof their other guys, to keep their other guys hidden. “Yup, you got us now, it was Halper, for sure!”
* * *
And we all know that Mr. Mueller is not averse to letting criminals escape prosecution if he can jail innocent people instead, so Mr. Halper had best lawyer up now.
You were not alone. I wrote here often during the presidential campaign words to the effect that Hillary is a criminal and we would be in grave danger if we did not elect Trump instead of her. And, I often signed off, “Hillary delende est.”
The “Third man” is finally named here, citing the story by Chuck Ross in The Daily Caller.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/05/jazzing-up-the-fbi-spying-on-trump-scandal.php
“The FBI and its friends in the mainstream media want to make the Bureau’s spying on the Trump campaign seem as dry, innocuous, and non-cloak-and-dagger as possible under the circumstances. An elderly professor contacted three Trump advisers – Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis.
He met with Page at least several times and maintained an email correspondence with him. He met with Clovis once for coffee. He met several times for dinner with Papadopoulos. He was looking for indications of Russian influence in the campaign. Apparently, he found none.”
** *
Who the heck is Sam Clovis???
Only the Wikipedia knows.
Samuel H. Clovis Jr. (born September 18, 1949)[1] is a former United States Air Force officer, talk radio host, and political figure. Clovis is currently the senior White House adviser to the United States Department of Agriculture.
…(moved up for narrative clarity) …
After retiring from the Air Force, Clovis worked for BETAC (1996—97) and Northrop Grumman (1997—2000).[1] In 2000, he moved to Iowa and worked at William Penn University in Oskaloosa, until 2003.[4] In 2003 he worked for Booz Allen Hamilton for a year; from 2004 to 2010 he worked for the Homeland Security Institute,[1] now the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute.[4] In 2005 he began working at Morningside College[1] in Sioux City, Iowa, as a professor,[8][2] teaching classes on business, management and public policy.[9]
…
Clovis unsuccessfully ran for Iowa state treasurer in the 2014 elections. He was national co-chair of Donald Trump’s campaign in the 2016 presidential election. In January 2017, Trump made Clovis a senior White House adviser to the USDA. In July 2017, Trump nominated Clovis as Under Secretary of Agriculture for Research, Education, and Economics in the United States Department of Agriculture.[2] On November 2, 2017, Clovis withdrew from consideration for the appointment following news of his involvement in the 2017 Special Counsel investigation.[3]
..
In October 2017, former Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about his contacts with the Russia government during the campaign. Papadopoulos was charged by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.[15][16] According to court records, Papadopoulos had been recruited to join Trump’s foreign policy advisor team in early March 2016 by a “campaign supervisor” later identified as Clovis. In a meeting on March 6, Clovis reportedly told Papadopoulos that “a principal foreign policy focus of the campaign was an improved U.S. relationship with Russia,” but Clovis denies having said that.[17] Over the next few months, Papadopoulos made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to arrange meetings or contacts between Russian officials and Trump or his campaign representatives. Clovis was identified as a campaign supervisor who encouraged Papadopoulos to travel to Russia and meet Russian officials to build relations with the Kremlin.[15][16] It was reported that Clovis has spoken to investigators with the special prosecutor’s office and has testified before the federal grand jury looking into the matter.[18] He has since withdrawn from the nomination due to the ongoing investigation and questions about his role.
* * *
Want to know why an Iowa aggie academic has to be destroyed? Read the rest of the section for his political views.
Hint:
He was not a radical lefty.
This was an interesting part of Ross’s story that I haven’t seen dissected yet:
“What exactly prompted the surveillance campaign is also a mystery. Page had been on the FBI’s radar since 2013 when he cooperated with the FBI for its investigation of a Russian spy ring in New York City. One of the Russian operatives met with Page. Page shared some of his academic research with the operative, and said nothing of substance was exchanged.
Page and Papadopoulos joined the campaign together on March 21, 2016. Weeks later, top officials at the FBI and Justice Department considered whether to warn the Trump campaign about Page because of the Russian spy ring case as well as about Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who is now indicted over his lobbying work for a Ukrainian political party.
Then-FBI Director James Comey and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch decided against briefing the Trump team, according to a recent report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. U.S. officials did not want to offer the warnings for fear of alerting any Russian agents that were circling around the Trump associates, according to various reports.
The government appears instead to have opted for old-fashioned human-on-human spying.”
* * *
Because if they warned Trump, the Russian agents (which they set to circling?) would not be able to deliver any incriminating evidence of collusion.
PLB addresses the matter briefly here, and a couple of commenters wondered why the Obama administration actually did nothing to “protect” Mr. Trump.
Rhetorical question, of course.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/05/were-from-the-fbi-and-were-here-to-help-you-mr-trump.php
“Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent, argues that the FBI didn’t spy on the Trump campaign (or use an informant, as she delicately puts it) to go after Donald Trump. Rather, it did so to protect him. ”
>>”IF the Trump campaign had been infiltrated by Russians and IF the FBI was there to protect Trump, wouldn’t they have informed Trump in an attempt to secure his cooperation in finding and exposing the infiltrators? After all, isn’t it standard practice to get the victim to assist in finding the perpetrator? The fact that they didn’t tells us that they didn’t view Trump as a victim of infiltration, so they were not there to protect him but rather to get information to use against him.”
Another trenchant observation from J. E. Dyer:
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/05/18/crossfire-hurricane-its-all-right-now-fbi-was-just-spying-on-the-trump-campaign-is-all/
“But I would suggest stepping back even further than Strassel does, and recognizing a bigger picture. If the FBI really thought Trump’s future national security adviser, his campaign chairman, his adviser with Russian contacts, and his adviser who might be a Russian agent, were so gravely suspect that they needed to be spied on, improperly, on an emergency basis, with all the tools of federal surveillance — what in the world was the Obama administration doing keeping that under wraps for months on end?
If they genuinely thought they were watching a national security train wreck developing, it was a colossal error of judgment to dither around about it, doing nothing more than spying on the suspicious wretches and worrying about whether acting more publicly would have an undue impact on the campaign.
And by colossal, I mean titanic. This is the kind of error in judgment that rightly gets senior people dismissed from their jobs for gross dereliction of duty, and banished to where they will never be heard from again.
…
If, that is — if, the FBI really had reason to harbor such suspicions about Trump.
Note, of course, that the buck stopped much higher up. It’s at the NSC and Oval Office level that I have questioned this before: this implication of the Russiagate narrative that the Obama administration did nothing wrong in sneaking around spying on Trump, and throwing shade on him, instead of confronting the potential of Russian interference head-on.
The FBI happens to be the agency the NYT article focuses on. But the answer on this — the answer to why the Obama administration didn’t just do the right thing, if it truly thought it had a candidate for president colluding with the Russians — can only be properly answered by Obama himself.
The thought must intrude that the Obama administration did not truly think Trump was colluding with the Russians. Instead, it saw an opportunity to exploit the appearance that that was possible.
Remember, the Obama agencies, by the middle of 2016, had pulled vast amounts of NSA surveillance data on most or perhaps all of the Trump team. If the agencies had found anything indicating collusion with the Russians, we would already know about it. That cannot be stressed enough. Virtually all the information the agencies were ever going to have from that set of surveillance sources, and from that block of time — months or years before mid-2016 — they already had in mid-2016. They thus had, significantly, their most important tool for identifying contacts and shaping lines of inquiry — including the questioning of suspects and informants — already in-hand.”
The data transfer rate was too high for the internet connection they had to be a hack. But it matches the data transfer rate of being downloaded to a USB port. Which means someone physically next the hard drive, a leak not a hack.
It really is amazing how this scandal is turning out to be at least as bad as feared, likely much worse. Hard to keep up with all of the people who were involved and all that was happening to get us here.
Sharyl Attkisson made an interesting point a few days ago that reminded me of the Hilary email scandal. While the email server/classified doc mishandling was bad enough, you know that the whole point of it was to facilitate other, worse crimes about which we still only have a partial idea (“Clinton Cash” is a good start. Here’s what Attkisson tweeted:
I think there’s a major fallacy in focusing on the 2016 election without understanding the bigger part of the picture: *why* bad actors in intel community were so desperate to not have Trump elected. It’s about what could be discovered about the past 10-20 years. Not just 2016.
When you consider activities such as the Uranium One pay-to-play and the mind-boggling Iran deal with its huge cash payout to the mullahs, this may get far uglier.
Fen – FWIW, Kim Dotcom has confirmed that Seth Rich was the one who downloaded the DNC emails and provided them to Assange/WikiLeaks. Dotcom says he was the intermediary. He offered to testify in exchange only for safe passage to/from the US (and not in exchange for dropped charges against him). However, does not seem Mueller or anyone else is interested.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4563700/Kim-Dotcom-wants-deal-DOJ-Seth-Rich-testimony.html
“No smoking gun as yet. Of course, Obama was probably very careful not to leave one.”
Neo, Obama DIDN’T HAVE TO LEAVE ONE. He was Henry the Second on steroids. “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?”
“I hope my political opponents are straight with the IRS (ha ha ha)!” Next thing you know, every conservative 501c group is having their applications denied and slow walked by the Democrats at IRS.
Gibson Guitars didn’t donate. All of a sudden there’s contraband rosewood that donor Martin Guitars could use from the same shipping lot no problemo.
True The Vote raises questions about how he got elected; the founder has a dozen federal agencies crawling all over her.
Example after example after example of our corrupt bureaucracy knowing exactly what their masters wanted, and acting without any instructions being necessary. Our civil service is more corrupt than at any time in our history.
Conspiracies don’t need to meet together to conspire in some smoke filled room. That’s what we have the internet and civil service bureaucratic hierarchy for.
Lizzy Says:
May 20th, 2018 at 8:26 am
* *
As someone once said, “It’s not the crime it’s the cover-up” that gets you into trouble.
Trying to oust President Trump has only uncovered their corruption to an even greater extent than was already known.
If Hillary and Co. had just left things alone, Trump might not have delved too deeply, and the Deep State would have had plenty of time to destroy more evidence.
I need to look up the fable that has as its moral “best to let sleeping dogs lie.”
(or lying dogs sleep, as the case may be)
SDN Says:
May 20th, 2018 at 8:37 am
Our civil service is more corrupt than at any time in our history.
* * *
That we know of.
Lizzy Says:
May 20th, 2018 at 8:35 am
Fen — FWIW, Kim Dotcom has confirmed that Seth Rich was the one who downloaded the DNC emails and provided them to Assange/WikiLeaks. Dotcom says he was the intermediary. He offered to testify in exchange only for safe passage to/from the US (and not in exchange for dropped charges against him).
* * *
IF he is telling the truth, he will cut the best deal he can.
However, IF he trusts the current US DOJ to honor any deal for safe passage, he is a fool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aeI428Lvdk
The US has been purging itself far longer than when Hussein came on the scene.
To understand Russia, America’s lies about its own history must first be purged and unveiled. Diana West covers the FDR administration.
Why are Americans surprised that there are traitors in DC. They didn’t purge them back during FDR, did they expect that the Soviet Union separating apart was going to save them. People get more angry at hearing the truth than they get from hearing their pleasant delusions spoken from the seats of District of Columbia.
The mind control is strong within the USA goyim nation. Just look at Horo, it is not merely an ideological or political divide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRvLiW1dTQQ
Youtube and online videos is like permanent archives (until WW3 at least).
Here’s a recap of Horo vs West that people may or may not remember.
The “right” has so many weird positions and agents in itself, that it is no wonder people have settled for learning from Alinsky. Whatever works for power and fame.
And then there is the role of the media:
https://spectator.org/the-firesign-theater-media/
A classic “Everything you know is wrong.”
I don’t recall specifically what either of you said during the pre-election debates concerning the rule-of law-precipice upon which we were poised, but I do recall seeing a number of very well-reasoned postings from one or both of you back then.
Comments from that period, can of course be retrieved and reviewed, and I saved a number of threads for ease of citing at the time. For some blogger with unlimited time [Ahem], it might make for an interesting topic: squaring what we now know [Deep State evidence and all] , with what was said at the time. Or it might just look like reheating old hash. Depends on your perspective, I guess.
But I doubt that anyone, other than Bill – who finally openly admitted that he would indeed sacrifice the recovery of the rule of law upon the altar of sympathy and tolerance for illegal immigration – would now state that the “certain Constitutional disaster vs, possible survival” framing, was not essentially correct”
Ted Cruz, himself the target of numerous virulent and harsh Trump jibes, stated as much when he announced that he was going to vote for Trump because the risk to our legal system and way of life was too great not to.
What the promised path back to eventual freedom was supposed to be, once it was lost for 8 to 16 years, was never stated clearly by the Never Trump, Clinton Pollyannas. It was just said that “We” survived worse before”, and that “America will survive”.
But who ultimately survives to inherit once Lois Lerner style commissars are in charge, and what kind of America remains afterward, was, of course, strategically left unstated.
The Democrats will continue to attack on all fronts.
Viciously, savagely, acrimoniously, indiscriminately.
And relentlessly.
Reminding one of the absurd but effective shamelessness of the Politburo of old.
Such that the sheer dishonesty—buttressed by a passionately dishonest media—will be unprecedented in the annals of American political history.
To be sure, the level of aggression ought to indicate to many of those sitting on the fence just how desperate the Democrats are.
In spite of all this, the question will continue to be: who will be the first domino to fall?
Once that happens, the results will prove disastrous to the party that believed and continues to believe that the USA belongs to it.
DNW: Good grief. We went through this Fight 93 frame dozens of times. The OnlyTrumpers could never hear the other side and always returned to bleating about the “binary choice.”
As many of us saw Trump — with an abundance of good reasons — his nomination would likely guarantee a Hillary victory or his presidency would be so disastrous he would guarantee an Obama-like sweep in 2020 or worse leading to the same.
As it turned out, Trump won in the Electoral College with a razor-thin margin of 80,000 votes in three states. There was no inevitability to Trump’s victory.
He’s turned out a much better President than I expected, but if he had run the White House as he ran his casinos and Trump U, we would be in big trouble. There would be a blue wave in the midterms and Trump would be fighting off impeachment, while the Dems would be prepared to crush 2020 like a grape.
What “promised path” would remain for America then?
But Trumpers would never consider that question, much less answer it.
But Huxley….trump did not run the country like he did his casinos. I don’t see the purpose of your comments? RU saying, that we should prepare for a Republican wave in November?
But G. Allistar … why would anyone assume Trump wouldn’t run the country like his casinos and Trump U?
This is what bothered me about Trumpers. They seemed oblivious to Trump’s history.
Their support looked like a blind Hail Mary pass that they just believed would work. It seemed as crazy as the messianic Obama campaign in 2008.
Trump’s presidency has been more effective than I expected, but I see no reason I could have known that in 2016.
Neo, I note that you say,
Well, family’s family. You can’t choose your family.
But you can choose your friends, and perhaps now’s the time to start shaming those among them who’re so blinkered, so intellectually inbred, and so credulous, as to still get their news from the New York Times.
I mean, really: Have you seen that hit piece they put out recently on Jordan Peterson? It wasn’t fit for Weekly World News on a slow day! It’s hard to say whether it more-closely resembled a lost chapter from Kafka, or a first draft of a propaganda piece by Goebbels.
I say “shaming them,” Neo, and I know that’s going a bit far. But I go that far because I’ve been around your blog long enough to conclude that you’re too much of a class act to overdo it, and in fact if you do it at all, you’ll be so genteel about it that they’ll scarcely notice.
But somebody has to wake up these otherwise-highly-functional people, to tell them to look out and around, to get them out of their epistemological closure.
With me, it’s my mother. She doesn’t want to see. So I’ve repeatedly called her attention to the fact that she doesn’t want to see. Now, after a long while, at least she admits that she “doesn’t want to see.” If I continue drawing her attention to the way she tries not to see, I hope eventually she’ll come begrudgingly to notice what it is she’s avoiding seeing.
Friends don’t let friends drink the NYT Kool-Aid. So we need to keep deprogramming the cultists until they snap out of it.
If it isn’t those of us who care about them, who’s it going to be?
I’m not sure what your supposed point is in aid of. It clarifies nothing about the actual situation as it developed and as it stands.
Let’s take a couple of items related to “binary choice” and review them.
1, The accusation that it was false that the choice resolved down to an: ‘either Hillary or Donald’ proposition.
– No alternative candidate on the Constitutionalism side, but outside of the two party system, with any chance of beating Hillary appeared to prove himself. Not before the Republican convention, nor after. Gary Johnson, had little chance to begin with. And, after people who might have considered him in an ideally developing world saw his pouting self-pitying moral collapse, his emotional instability, and his betrayal on immigration, he had none whatsoever. I can’t even recall the name of the Mormon Spoiler, but what he was supposed to offer other than a comforting hand to hold as one committed political suicide was never clear.
2, The accusation that it was false that the political situation was in some ways analogous to a “flight 93” scenario: “either bet on an uncertain Trump or die (lose freedom) for certain”
This was said to be false on a couple of grounds.
A. That Hillary was not actually that morally bad, not that venal and self-serving, not that heedless of law and justice, not that prone to conspire against our heritage of liberties, nor that committed to subverting Constitutional processes for progressive or personal ends.
However: It is now abundantly clear -if it ever was in doubt – that Hillary was in fact all of those things. And it is clear that the so-called “deep state” (presumably, a newly self-conscious American mandarin class determined to evolve and cull the hoi polloi along progressive bien pensant lines whether the simple little yeoman like it or not) was complicit, and that the “deep state” interprets the rule of law much like leftists define stare decisis and “democracy”; i.e., to suit their agenda.
B. That even if Hillary was elected two terms, and the Progs were entrenched in the executive, the bureaucracy, the courts, the military, and the legislatures for another 8 years of generating Lois Lerner, and Loretta Lynch clines, there still would be no lasting damage done to the polity, because “we would survive”.
However: Just who the fuck this “we” who would survive was supposed to be, and how their life-ways would properly be described, and what the hell the law and one’s rights would look like after all that time, was never made clear. But you know, the sun always rises, and therefore “the pendulum swings peaceably back to liberty inevitably and everyone will be made whole again” … or something.
And if you believe that shit, in a wold where ObamaCare was passed at virtual midnight on a weekend, and the SC rolled over for it on a pretext, then, I guess you can believe just about anything … and will.
I won’t even bother to go into Bill’s admission that he would slit the throat of the rule of law, on the altar of tolerating illegal immigration. It was so masochistic and irrational that there is no responding to it.
Hey Neo. Sorry about the language.
Feel free to redact the vulgarity.
DNW
Ted Cruz, himself the target of numerous virulent and harsh Trump jibes, stated as much when he announced that he was going to vote for Trump because the risk to our legal system and way of life was too great not to.
I remembered more than that. Ted Cruz said that people should vote their conscience. Those who were pushing the Trum bandwagon here said that if you voted your conscience, it would be something analogous to siding with Hillary or being a traitor the US Constitution. Both sides of the argument didn’t care about people’s conscience, they just wanted the votes and power.
It’s similar to war hysteria.
When people find others who do not agree with the war hysteria, the emotional matrix of self bias and self deception, says they are “being made fun of”. It becomes an ego and emotional reaction rather than a rational memory.
It’s why so many black people seem to recall racist comments belittling them, and you check the video and “nothing happened”. no spitting. No ACLU worthy stuff. Too strong an emotion creates memories, often self deceptive ones.
The false dichotomy scenario presented in the Flight 93 narrative, leaves out a few things.
1. The Republic is already dead and the Deep State already rules in the shadows, thus Trum cannot save himself let alone save the Republic.
2. It doesn’t matter who gets elected to District of Columbia, they will be sent back in a body bag if they don’t work with the Left or the PTB.
3. People aren’t aware of their real enemy, just as they weren’t aware the Leftist alliance was an enemy to the US.
In order to create an isolated war hysteria false dichotomy, two opposing choices must be presented to a worried and afraid and panicked population. But it means taking out the alternative solutions and options as well.
Well, if you really think that, then maybe you should just ‘pack your bags and go home’. I have other plans.
Wheels within wheels within wheels. Keep the aliminum foil cover in place and say that those wheels grind so fine that nothing can be done to jam them up. How prescient (not).
“bleating about the “binary choice.””
It WAS a binary choice. The next President was going to be either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. No middle ground.