More on Barr’s use of the word “spying” and the media’s reaction to it
Oh boy, does Sean Davis have their number.
Earth to MSM: when an argument is weak, it’s actually pretty vulnerable to attack.
But I know; I know—the MSM is aware that the people they are trying to indoctrinate with a certain idea don’t usually read someone like Sean Davis (or Red State, or this blog for that matter).
yeah, well i am still waiting for us to realize there was never such a thing as the “American colonies”. If ya haven’t noticed that one, Sean’s work is quite the irrelevant tear in a salty sea…
Sean Davis and Mollie Hemingway have been real standouts in their coverage of this entire saga. In a sane world they along with Chuck Ross, Byron York and Kimberley Strassel would be huge names in media with their own shows on cable news if they so desired.
Bryon York interviews Rep. Mark Meadows (via Sean Davis Twitter) at Ricochet podcast: https://ricochet.com/podcast/byron-york-show/who-was-spying-on-whom/
Meadows fills in a number of blank areas. Worth a listen.
What Griffin said, above. Davis, Hemingway, Ross, York, and Strassel have been real journalists in this mess.
Covert surveillance is horrible when done by agents of a Republican administration, or even by New York City law enforcement, to try to prevent Islamist atrocities. It’s good when used against white racists, and it’s good when used against the Bad Orange Man. For leftists, it’s all relative.
The rules for the media are – If a republican is accused of something, side with the accuser, attack the accused. If a democrat is accused of something, attack and try to discredit the accuser, defend the accused.
I highly recommend reading the article by Eric Felten in RealClearInvestigations
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/04/11/fbi_mans_testimony_points_to_significant_wrongdoing_beyond_spying.html
on the testimony of Bill Priestap, assistant director of FBI Counterintelligence Division.
It is an eye-opener.
“the people they are trying to indoctrinate with a certain idea don’t usually read someone like Sean Davis (or Red State, or this blog for that matter).”
Boss…don’t forget our favourite little pet Manju…he may not always read what you write, but he’s ours nonetheless.
Aren’t you little fella?
I’m not sure what the problem is.
Some people took spying to mean what the man who thinks the communists were right to invade Afghanistan said it meant: an “attempted coup”, “illegal spying, unprecedented spying”.
But you assure us that all it means is “surveillance approved by a FISA court” and other lawful activities. Trump and his associates are somewhat analogous to Muslim Americans who sympathized with and communicated with Al Qaeda.
Fine. I’ll just go with your view. Who care what “I believe Putin” boy says. He can’t even control his own borders.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/rod-rosenstein-defends-barrs-handling-of-special-counsel-report_2877329.html
So, Barr should have taken longer on the summary than on preparing the report itself for release?
Can’t the Democrats even pretend to have some consistency in their clamoring?
While we are on the subject of boomerangs — sort of, anyway:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-considers-placing-illegal-aliens-exclusively-in-sanctuary-cities_2877560.html
“The Radical Left always seems to have an Open Borders, Open Arms policy – so this should make them very happy!”
They Dems are complaining, of course, just like they complained when the Congress dared to hold a vote on their own Green Nude Eel plan.
Unfair!!!! They aren’t supposed to have to actually live with their own policies!!!
Not too happy that my state is one of the target environments, but as Alinsky says, Make them live up to their own rules.
AesopFan,
The mayor of sanctuary city Seattle was not to happy about this. Called it in humane.
This was a pretty damn funny play by Trump as the left responded exactly like you would expect.
No edit I meant the mayor called it ‘inhumane’.
LOL – remember this tidbit?
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/04/11/fbi_mans_testimony_points_to_significant_wrongdoing_beyond_spying.html
“Weeks before Priestap’s testimony was taken last summer, the efforts of Halper, an American scholar who works in Britain, had been exposed. Republicans had been spluttering with outrage that the FBI would deploy a spy against an American presidential campaign. Democrats had been countering that while the bureau used informants, only the ignorant and uninitiated would call them spies.”
continued…file in “weasel words,” “meaning of is,” and “not real spying-spying.”
“So there we have it with all the decisive logic of a Socratic dialogue: The FBI could not possibly have spied on the Trump campaign because bureau lingo includes neither the noun “spy” nor the verb “to spy.” Whatever informants may have been employed, whatever tools of surveillance may have been utilized, the FBI did not spy on the Trump campaign – didn’t spy by definition, as the bureau doesn’t use the term (except, of course, to describe the very same activities when undertaken by foreigners).
What’s telling about this line of questioning is that it inadvertently confirms Republican suspicions — and Attorney General Barr’s assertion. If House Democrats believed there had been no spying on the Trump campaign, they could have asked Priestap whether the FBI ever spies on Americans, given the common meaning of the verb “to spy.” They could have flat-out asked whether the FBI had spied on Trump World. Instead, Democratic counsel asked whether, given the FBI’s definition of spying, the bureau would “internally ever describe themselves as spying on American citizens.” It would seem that Democrats were every bit as convinced as Republicans that the FBI spied on Trump’s people.”
More than ever, where you stand depends on where you sit.
Roy, I’m sitting in the cheap seats eating popcorn.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1116303757615218689.html
About those people-who-shall-not-be-called-spies:
(via PowerLine headlines)
https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/11/fbi-steele-credibility-warrant/
“An FBI lawyer told Congress last year that investigators were assessing the reliability of Christopher Steele as of late November 2016, a month after the bureau cited the former spy’s anti-Trump dossier to obtain a warrant to snoop on Carter Page.
They spied, they lied. Over and over on the lying; and now, lying about the spying.
How many indictments by July will we see? 2, 3, 5? 0?
When does McCabe get indicted? Craig?
Who’s next?
Tom Grey: “They spied, they lied. Over and over on the lying; and now, lying about the spying.”
LOL +10 Tom! Trump should grab that line and hammer it again and again, it’s perfect.
I’m glad Red State got rid of Patterico. In his blog yesterday or the day before he admitted that his readers, 85% of them, have left and the people who read and comment are people who hate him.
Horowitz is coming with his report that has been blocked by Mueller for years. That will set off the meltdown.
The sanctuary city theme is another great example of Trump trolling his enemies.
AesopFan–It seems to me that Trump’s idea of transporting illegal aliens to sanctuary states and cities, and leaving them there, is the perfect blend of Cloward-Piven–i.e. overload the system, and the “Rules for Radicals” tactic of making your enemies live up to their professed ideals.
I see my old comrade, Beth Abrams, still has her shoulder to the Sanctuary City wheel in San Francisco.
https://www.bacpaje.org/about-us
Beth was, and I presume still is, a lovely person. She was a dancer and a dance instructor. In the 80s she was moved to join the Sanctuary movement from her experience of Salvadorean refugees.
There was a case to be made for sanctuary in those dark days when Roberto D’Aubuisson, the head of the El Salvador death squads, was running wild and killing nuns, priests and many thousands of peasants, forcing many Salvadoreans to flee. Those who came to the US were refused asylum and went underground.
I helped make food runs for Beth’s Grupo de la Comida and I have no regrets. I’m not sure what the US should have done back then, but El Salvador in the 70s/80s was an utter horror and we backed some very bad people.
MS-13, one of the most brutal criminal gangs operating in the US, has its roots in that conflict. I am not surprised.
Here’s a great political poem based on an American poet’s encounter with Roberto D’Aubuisson:
___________________________________________
The Colonel
WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On
the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had
dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of
bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief
commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot
said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed
himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last
of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some
of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the
ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
May 1978
–Carolyn Forche, “The Country Between Us”
huxley – thanks for the story, and the poem.
Those were terrible times, and the US doesn’t have a good record on distinguishing real refugees from others without such dire needs (cf: turning back Jews in the 1930s and 1940s; slow-walking Christian refugees from the Middle East). Dire, of course, is relative; everyday living in most of the third world is dire, but doesn’t rise to the level of active genocide.
However, that doesn’t excuse the current Democrat (and some Republican) conflation of harmless (but still illegal) and harmful “refugees” that are mocking the country they are invading.
Amidst all the hoopla about Trump sending illegals to sanctuary cities and states, um, illegally: has anyone ever quoted the precise statute that defines where and how the executive can disperse refugees and asylum seekers awaiting adjudication?
AesopFan: Thanks for hearing me!
I agree that, however understandable Sanctuary was when it began, it’s become something else now.
Eric Hoffer, a fascinating character who emerged from a tragic childhood and working on the docks as longshoreman to become what wiki calls “an American moral and social philosopher,” (they were right for a change) provides a brilliant quote:
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
huxley on April 13, 2019 at 6:02 pm at 6:02 pm said:
…
Eric Hoffer,…
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
* * *
Works in tandem with Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
And this just in from a commenter at Althouse’s on the Sanctuary Cities Travel Brochure:
Bobber Fleck said…
Fen’s law applies:
“The Left doesn’t really believe in the things they lecture the rest of us about.”
4/13/19, 11:25 AM
Might as well add: With the Left, the issue is never the issue; the issue is power.
Paraphrasing what David Horowitz said:
“An SDS radical once wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” In other words, the cause of a political action – whether civil rights or women’s rights – is never the real cause; women, blacks and other “victims” are only instruments in the larger cause, which is power.”
https://genius.com/David-horowitz-a-modern-machiavelli-2-lyrics
Fen’s Law is exactly what I was getting at in my comment on the other thread.
From this immigration thing of the last couple days to Algore and his massive carbon foot print many don’t believe this stuff.
An SDS radical once wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.
AesopFan: I’ve seen that Horowitz quote and wondered who the SDS radical was. But it sure is true.
There’s a Jonah Goldberg quote I can’t find in which he imagines debating a current issue with a leftist and after hearing the leftist out, Goldberg says, “OK. We’ll give you that. Is that enough? Will you ever stop?”
The answers, of course, are no and no, they will never stop.
The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.
‘They will never stop’
Gay marriage is the best example. All we used to here is we just want the same rights as everyone else we don’t want to stop people from believing anything. Then they won the war and now they expand to this trans nonsense all the while roaming the country taking out the losers in the gay marriage war.
Free speech is another. When they were the out of power group they were all for speech rights now they are the in power group and they are all for speech codes and language is violence.
They should never willingly be given anything again. Period.
Democratic socialism: one man, one vote, one time.
Sorry about the misogyny, but the euphony is more important.
Meanwhile back at the topic of the post:
did someone already cite this one about whether the FBI was spying-spying?
https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/12/spying-by-any-other-name/
“Only an idiot could look at what the FBI, and let’s be honest, the CIA and others, did and say, No, this couldn’t reasonably be considered spying. So of course James Comey took a break from posting weird emo pictures to Instagram to say he never thought of “court ordered electronic surveillance” as spying. What synonym for spying would you prefer? Watching secretly without being detected? Observing someone furtively? Tapping into their electronic communications without them knowing it? Comey and the various bureaus of deep state propaganda are being willingly obtuse.”
PowerLine Picks high-lights a real spy, who is one we can be proud of.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-forgotten-female-wwii-era-spy-who-stayed-silent-under-gruesome-nazi-torture/
I live in southern California, I embrace the prospect of the President taking away the tax benefits of the wealthy with regard to real estate taxes and making our elected officials and their supporters live by the tenents of their professed beliefs. Sanctuary city indeed! This will expose the nonsense of this destructive virtue signaling. Either the laws are for everyone, or no one.
Oops. Meant for this comment to be in the sanctuary city thread.