Why I don’t blame Trump all that much for Christopher Wray

The New Neo Posted on by

Wray is indeed a disaster. But have you noticed how often these heads of powerful government agencies are out of the same mold: arrogant, mendacious, secretive, elitist, and good with weasel words that say nothing and reveal nothing except their own character or lack thereof?

It’s a type, and it seems to be rampant in government. I’ve seen a lot of it in other fields, too, but government agencies seem to be among the worst offenders. So, whereas a president does often get to chose who will be the head of such an agency, the pool is probably very very homogeneous.

In other words, when you drain the swamp – if such a thing is even possible at this point – is anybody left?

Stephen Kruiser does make a good point in this piece, which is that at the very least Trump should have fired Wray before Trump left office:

As I have said and written many times, it’s stunning to me that Trump didn’t fire this guy as he was on his way out the door. That would have been one small bit of poetic comeuppance. It’s not as if Trump hadn’t grown weary of the FBI head long before that.

But then Kruiser adds this, which is what I’ve long been thinking:

The point can certainly be made that, had Trump fired Wray, his successor may have been equally bad.

I think the answer is not just “may have been” but rather “almost certainly would have been.” There’s probably something about the type of person who rises and get promoted in such agencies that’s baked in the cake. If you look at Wray’s Wiki page you’ll see a typical trajectory: prep schools, Yale Law, clerkship, and then government work mostly in the DOJ working under Mueller and Comey. Then he worked for a while in the private sector and was Chris Christie’s personal attorney; it was Christie who recommended him to Trump.

All these things might set off alarms now, but they didn’t back then. Should Trump have known? Probably. But I think he would have had to have gone way outside the government bureaucratic tangle to have found someone better to head the bureau, and that person would have had a steep learning curve in reforming the FBI. I’m not sure there’s a solution, but there certainly is a problem.

[NOTE: More of Wray’s self-serving, obfuscating testimony.]

The not-so-secure White House

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, we have two choices – either the Secret Service is lying and knows who brought the cocaine into the White House, or they are utterly incompetent at their job. I don’t see any other possibility as an explanation for this:

The Secret Service has concluded its investigation into the small bag of cocaine found at the White House and has been unable to identify a suspect, according to a statement from the US Secret Service.

Secret Service officials combed through “security systems” and indexed “several hundreds individuals” who entered the West Wing in the days preceding the discovery and were unable to identify a suspect, according to the USSS statement. The Secret Service said FBI lab results from the packaging found “insufficient DNA” and could not retrieve any fingerprints.

“Therefore, the Secret Service is not able to compare evidence against the known pool of individuals,” a statement from the USSS said.

Investigators were also unable to identify the particular moment or day when the baggie was left inside the West Wing cubby near the lower level entrance where it was discovered.

For a while, we couldn’t even get a straight story on where in the White House the cocaine was found.

I vote for “they know but aren’t telling,” but complete incompetence wouldn’t surprise me, either. Is there a government institution left in which we can have faith? I think the answer is “no.”

Will Joe Manchin run third party?

The New Neo Posted on by

Now, that would sure be interesting.

I don’t think it will happen, but who knows? Here’s the reason it’s being talked about:

Senator Joe Manchin is headed to New Hampshire next week for an event with No Labels as the group looks to run a third-party candidate in next year’s presidential election and frantic Democrats are trying to stop it out of fears it could siphon off votes from Joe Biden to hand Donald Trump a victory.

Manchin, a former honorary co-chair of the group, will be the headliner of the gathering along with former Republican Governor of Utah Jon Huntsman at the townhall meeting, which will take place Monday, July 17th, at Saint Anselm’s College in Manchester, No Labels told DailyMail.com.

The reason Democrats would fear this more than Republicans is obvious. I just don’t see that Manchin will gain much traction, however.

Long ago, I also would have said he’s too old (he’s 75 at present), but this time he would be one of the younger ones compared to the two frontrunners.

Christopher Wray testifies in his own inimitable way

The New Neo Posted on by

A few tidbits can be found here.

For example:

And this:

People like Wray can do this sort of stuff in their sleep; it’s become second nature and they know that only the right will call them on it. The left will back them up.

From Gaetz to Wray:

…[T]he FBI has broken so bad that people can go and engage in queries that when you come before the Congress to answer questions, you’re, like, blissfully ignorant — you’re blissfully ignorant as to the unlawful queries; you’re blissfully ignorant as to the Biden shakedown regime. And, it just seems like it gets into kind of a creepy place as well…

Just so the American people realize, the Court has smacked you down, alleging — or ruling — “FBI personnel apparently conducted queries for improper personal reasons.” People were looking themselves up; they were looking their ex-lovers up. Who has been held accountable or fired as a consequence of the FBI using the FISA process as their, like, creepy personal snoop machine?

Would that were all that’s wrong with the FBI.

NOTE: Today’s entire proceedings here.

ADDENDUM: And here’s Wray on FBI assets on January 6th:

“I would really have to see more closely exactly what he said and get the full context to be able to evaluate how many agents, or actually agents or human resources, were present at the Capitol complex and the vicinity on January 6,” Wray said. “It’s gonna get confusing because it depends on when we were deployed and responded to the breach that occurred anywhere under federal agents.”

Biggs called him out for obfuscating: “You and I both know that we’re talking different things here, and please don’t distract here because we’re focusing on those who were there in an undercover capacity on January 6. How many were there?”

Wray played dumb: “Again, I’m not sure that I can give you the number as I sit here. I’m not sure there were undercover agents on the scene.”

Please read the whole thing; the bobbing and weaving from Wray goes on for quite some time. He is a master of nitpicky rhetorical obfuscation.

Author Milan Kundera dies at 94

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Commenter “Barry Meislin.”]

RIP Milan Kundera.

Long-time readers here probably recall that Kundera has been one of my favorite authors and almost certainly was my favorite living author, someone I’ve quoted time after time on this blog. You can find a list of these posts here; I highly recommend this one.

For me, Kundera defies description, but of course I’ll try to describe him. He was an expat Czech who had been a Communist in his youth but was a political changer. As a writer, he had one of the most distinctive “voices” ever, and that voice often stepped out of the storyline to make a point that was philosophical or historical or most likely both. Everything he wrote reflected the working of an unconventional mind and spirit, uncategorizable, playful, thoughtful, ironic, and deep.

I first read Kundera before he became famous, when excerpts from one of his works – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – appeared in The New Yorker, which I used to read assiduously. I only had to read one or two paragraphs to realize that this was a writer like no other, someone who was going to matter to me in terms of the evolution of my thinking about life and about politics and history. And so it was.

This interesting profile of Kundera, who was an elusive guy, appears in – of all places – The New Republic. I think Kundera defied all attempts to explain him.

Here’s another profile of Kundera that’s worth reading, with this quote from a 1985 interview:

“For me, indiscretion is a capital sin. Anyone who reveals someone else’s intimate life deserves to be whipped. We live in an age when private life is being destroyed. The police destroy it in Communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and their sense of it,” he told the writer Olga Carlisle. “Life when one can’t hide from the eyes of others — that is hell.”

I’ll close with a couple of quotes from Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that I’ve used on this blog:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

The most beautiful woman in the Netherlands

The New Neo Posted on by

Is a biological male.

Is anyone the least bit surprised at this development, in which Rikkie Valeria Kolle has won the Miss Netherlands title?:

So if the best female athletes are men, now the most beautiful females are men as well. That photo doesn’t look all that lovely or feminine to me, but the standards of female beauty have changed over the last few decades – many many years before this – to what one might describe as a more masculine ideal. By that I mean what I’ve long thought of as an adolescent boy with breast implants. In other words, a tall, very thin although somewhat wiry person with broad shoulders and fairly straight hips for a woman, and breasts that are relatively large relative to that person’s extreme thinness and slender hips.

The first time I noticed this sort of body coming into prominence involved a biological female, Bo Derek, when she starred in the movie “10”. Here’s the poster, to refresh your memory. And here is a very brief clip:

I’m not criticizing Derek, who seems to have a body that’s naturally that type. And standards of beauty are always met only by a small minority. But fewer women conform to that standard of beauty than to the older standards of breasts and hips more in proportion to each other, not quite so tall nor quite so thin, and shoulders less broad. The newer standard of “male adolescent with implants” is probably met more easily by male to female trans people, with the help of hormones and breast augmentation and the like. So get used to more of this, which seems a form of misogynistic usurpation of the feminine disguised as celebration and tolerant inclusion.

NOTE: Here’s a piece on why this win by Kolle is a wonderful thing that we should all celebrate. Comments are mixed, as you might expect.

Charging Luft

The New Neo Posted on by

Your friendly neighborhood FBI and DOJ, hard at work:

A fugitive who claimed to have provided the FBI with information on the Biden family’s business dealings in China is facing decades behind bars for alleged arms trafficking and other charges involving Iran.

Gal Luft, a 57-year-old dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, is charged with acting as an unregistered agent of China and seeking to broker the sale of Iranian oil in violation of sanctions, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said on Monday.

The indictment, handed down by a grand jury in 2022 and unsealed Monday, also accuses Luft of recruiting and paying a former high-ranking U.S. government official on behalf of principals based in China in 2016, without registering as a foreign agent as required by law.

They say the best defense is a good offense, and this is a good offense to protect the Biden family, who appear to be guilty of all of that and more. Of course, I don’t know much about Luft, who may be a scumbag himself. But then there are the other scumbags, including those in the FBI and the DOJ. In the island of the liars, who is telling the truth?

At any rate:

The indictment comes days after The New York Post published a 14-minute video of Luft, recorded at an unknown location, in which he claimed he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying to the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family had allegedly been bribed from a source with ties to the Chinese military.

In the video, Luft claimed to have provided this information to officials from the FBI and the Department of Justice during a March 2019 meeting in Brussels, but this was supposedly covered up.

There are certain types of criminal charges that are very very useful to a partisan FBI and DOJ and partisan prosecutors in certain states such as New York. Among them are FARA violations and lying to the FBI, which are prosecuted differentially depending on the politics of the defendant. It’s quite apparent at this point, and anyone who’s been following the Hunter Biden case at all can see what’s going on.

It doesn’t matter to this administration or to the FBI and the rest. They are flaunting their power and basically saying just try and stop us. They don’t care how it looks, they are that arrogant and confident.

More here:

Robert Henoch, an attorney for Luft, called the indictment “a vicious attempt to silence a witness to corruption.” The attorney said “there was no arms trading whatsoever” and that Luft didn’t act as an agent for a foreign entity or lie to federal agents, as alleged.

The Institute for the Analysis of Global Security also defended Luft in a statement, saying he is an expert on energy security, economics and geopolitics…

Henoch said Luft met with two prosecutors and four FBI agents in Brussels to share allegations about Biden family financial dealings with the Chinese government. “He told the DOJ prosecutors things which they did not want to hear, so they charged him with lying,” Henoch said.

Lying to the FBI shouldn’t even be a crime. And when the FBI lies – which it seems to do almost constantly – it seems that’s perfectly okay. But the FBI has no credibility whatsoever anymore.

Money and that vast left-wing conspiracy

The New Neo Posted on by

Follow the money:

This is the first of two reports based on internal Arabella documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. They provide a rare window into the inner workings of the Left’s dark-money network, revealing just how centrally controlled a vast swath of activist organizations are by a central clearinghouse based in the nation’s capital—as well as the lengths to which Arabella’s leaders go to disguise that control and create the illusion of grassroots political activism.

In recent years, there’s been a lot of big money flowing into the left.

The Brits are contemplating making parental failure to cooperate with transition a form of child abuse

The New Neo Posted on by

I believe a similar law is in the works in California. Coming soon to a state near you?

Jonathan Turley describes the British legislation:

As the debate rages in the United States over parental notification and authority in cases involving transgender children, the United Kingdom is embroiled in a controversy over a law that would not only limit parental authority in such cases but affirmatively require parents to pay for such transitioning. Under the interpretation put forward by police, parents who refuse to use the alternative pronouns for their children or refuse to pay for their transitioning could be criminally prosecuted.

According to the UK’s Code for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), abusive conduct now includes “withholding money for transitioning [and] refusing to use their preferred name or pronoun.” So a parent with familial or religious objections to the transitioning of a child would be required under the law to fund operations or treatments.

As more and more evidence has come out of the dangers of medical transition – drugs and surgery – for minors (and even at times for adults), the main gender clinic in the UK was closed down. However, there will be other decentralized clinics opening, and obviously the trans activists are working on many fronts to codify the idea that transition is a right, that it’s a right even for children, and that parents have no say in the matter unless it is to “affirm.”