…says that the Democrats are barred from including in the spending bill a plan to give out 8 million green cards, because “the policy changes of this proposal far outweigh the budgetary impact scored to it and it is not appropriate for inclusion in reconciliation.”
But will the Democrats respond with the equivalent of, “How many divisions does the Senate Parliamentarian have?”
I’m not sure many of us were paying a whole lot of attention to what was being said about our withdrawal from Afghanistan before it occurred, but I think it’s instructive to look back and see what people in government were saying. For example, consider this article from April 22, written very shortly after Biden announced his withdrawal schedule.
One of the most curious bits of Congressional testimony to reflect on now was by General MacKenzie [emphasis mine]:
The top U.S. general in the Middle East expressed concern Thursday about Afghan forces’ ability to fend off the Taliban after U.S. troops withdraw from the country.
“My concern is the ability of the Afghan military to hold the ground that they’re on now without the support that they’ve been used to for many years,” Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“I am concerned about the ability of the Afghan military to hold on after we leave, the ability of the Afghan air force to fly, in particular, after we remove the support for those aircraft,” he added.
Pressed later in the hearing on continuing to fund Afghan forces when U.S. troops withdraw, McKenzie said that without “some support,” the Afghan forces “certainly will collapse.”
It says later on that MacKenzie expressed “great concern” about the future of the embassy, and that he refused to state what he told Biden about the withdrawal. But one can imagine. Perhaps MacKenzie didn’t think the collapse would happen in a matter of days, but I bet he wasn’t in favor of the way this was done. Is anyone aware of what he’s said more recently?
Then there’s this:
“The arbitrary Sept. 11 deadline for troop drawdown risks a power vacuum that terrorists will dominate and use to threaten our homeland again,” Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said at Thursday’s hearing.
And Elizabeth Warren should be reminded of this [emphasis mine]:
By contrast, while pressing McKenzie on Taliban gains over the past decade, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Thursday, “It’s clear there is little for us to be gained by a continued U.S presence there.”
“We should have learned by now that a conditions-based withdrawal is just a recipe for staying in Afghanistan forever,” she said.
Sure, Liz. That’s all it was – no need to worry about holding the Taliban to any conditions, like those silly warmongering Republicans were advocating.
People have continued to opine on the subject of Durham’s indictment of Sussman. While I’m inclined to be very skeptical that it will lead to much, more legally informed minds are expressing at least somewhat greater optimism than I. And even if they’re not especially optimistic, they are saying things that shed further light on Russiagate, one of the biggest political crimes in our history and perhaps the biggest.
So I bring you Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection. In a post entitled “Indictment of Campaign Lawyer Demonstrates How Hillary Clinton Is The Most Systemically Manipulative Politician Of Our Lifetime,” he connects the dots to Hillary Clinton via two articles, one by Andrew C. McCarthy (yes, I know; he hasn’t exactly been a favorite since this past January) and one by Glenn Greenwald.
The post is long, but it’s quite fascinating and I recommend it even if you think you know a lot on the subject, and even if you are pessimistic about where it’s all leading. If nothing else, it will inform you in detail if you ever want to argue on the subject of Russiagate with a liberal Democrat.
It’s the awning that surprised me.
A little stroll down memory lane. I was at the Colosseum in 2018. There was a huge downpour, and right afterward I took this selfie and put it on the blog:
Last night I was thinking how the Mamas and Papas song “California Dreamin’,” with its very 60s idealization of California as a magical place for which a person might yearn, could not possibly be written now.
That segued into thoughts of another Mamas and Papas song from that era, “Twelve Thirty,” in which the singer has returned to that idealized sunlit California world after living in New York. It’s less well-known, but I think it probably is familiar to a lot of you:
And then I remembered still another Mamas and Papas song, “Strange Young Girls.” That one’s even more obscure, and although I already was familiar with it I only recalled snatches of the words. What I did remember was a feeling the song gave me of wistfulness and creepiness. For me, the 60s always had that creepiness, that sense that things had spiraled out of control and the final result would not be good.
This is how the song begins:
Strange young girls
Covered with sadness;
Eyes of innocence
Hiding their madness.
Walking the strip–
Sweet, soft, and placid—
Offering their youth
On the alter of acid…
[NOTE: After I composed this post, I noticed this article at American Thinker entitled, “Gone Is the Romance of California.”]
[NOTE II: If you want to read a good but terrifying story about the 60s and the phenomenon described in that last song, I recommend the story “Xavier Speaking” by Charles Baxter. The one-page excerpt at that link is the beginning of the story, which is quite dull (actually, very dull). The story picks up considerably as it goes on and packs quite a wallop, to the best of my recollection. It seems to have been written in the 1970s, but the collection of short stories in which I originally read it was published in 1984.]
In painstaking detail, Durham laid out in the indictment Thursday how Democrat superlawyer Michael Sussmann used Clinton campaign funds to construct a now-debunked memo and other evidence alleging that computer communications between a server at the Alfa Bank in Russia and the Trump Tower in New York might be a secret backdoor communication system for Trump and Vladimir Putin to hijack the 2016 election.
Sussmann delivered the package in mid-September 2016 — just weeks before Election Day as Trump and Clinton were locked in a tight race — to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker, even after the team of computer experts warned the theory was a “red-herring,” according to the indictment.
And then Sussmann falsely told Baker, the prosecutors alleged, he was providing the information to the FBI solely as a good citizen, and not on behalf of any client.
In fact, Sussmann was working on behalf of a tech executive and the Clinton campaign and charged nearly all the work on the Alfa Bank narrative to the Democratic presidential campaign, including his meeting with Baker, the indictment stated.
The alleged lying, Durham argued, deceived the FBI into thinking the allegations were coming from a neutral source — Sussmann had been a cybersecurity expert — and not an election-motivated client.
“In truth, and in fact, and as Sussmann well knew, Sussmann had acted on behalf of and in coordination with two specific clients of the law firm: tech executive 1 and the Clinton campaign in assembling and conveying these allegations,” the grand jury indictment charged.
“Sussman’s false statement to the FBI general counsel was material to that investigation because among other reasons it was relevant to the FBI whether the conveyor of these allegations was providing them as an ordinary citizen merely passing along information or whether he was instead doing so as a paid advocate for clients with a political or business agenda.”
The article also contains somewhat of a summary of Russiagate, which can be helpful to refresh your memory at this point. It’s still both astounding and disheartening that all of this actually happened, that it affected the 2020 election and the country tremendously, and that virtually no one has been punished – and it’s doubtful that anyone ever will be. That includes Sussman, who was a big player but by no means one of the biggest.
If I’m wrong and there’s a snowball effect here, I’ll be pleased. But I very much doubt it.
I’ve seen it over and over – assertions that researchers involved in the Tuskegee study of syphilis, back in middle third of the 20th Century, gave black men syphilis in order to study them. I saw the claim again the other day in an article on COVID and the government and medical establishment, but unfortunately I didn’t take note of where the article was and can’t find it now. However, I do recall that it was by a writer on the right, so this Tuskegee “fact” is hardly limited to dissemination by the left. The “gave black men syphilis” assertion is deeply embedded in the American consciousness at this point and is considered the truth by most people who know little else about the Tuskegee study.
I happen to have written a post on the subject way back in ancient times: 2008. I call your attention to it now. I hope it sets the record straight. The truth about the study was bad enough without lying to make it seem even worse.
The present-day reaction of the government, the politicians, and the health agencies and much (although not all) of the medical establishment to the COVID pandemic has been shocking in its willingness to impose Draconian measures using unknowns or even falsehoods, and in its intense politicization of an issue that should always have been above politics but never was. The corruption, mendacity, and incompetence involved has made it even more likely that people will believe that all the previous horror tales were true. A great deal of mistrust is, alas, justified. But I still think it’s important to try to get the stories straight.
Oh, and while we’re at it, you might want to read my 2007 post on the similar story that the US army purposely gave the native Americans smallpox-infected blankets in order to start an epidemic to help decimate their population.
…to see a friend meant that I skipped writing about a ton of stories. That happens anyway in these days of fast-breaking news flurries. But when I take a significant chunk of time off, it happens even more.
So another roundup is in order.
(1) Biden – the guy who’s never been right about foreign policy in his lengthy public life – was sold by the Democrats, the MSM, and the NeverTrumpers on the preposterous idea that he would be the man who would be restoring our relations with our European (and other) allies, post-Trump. I didn’t see them as all that damaged in the first place, although Europeans certainly looked down on Trump’s style and didn’t like his calling them out on certain failings of theirs. But anyone familiar with Biden’s history should never have thought he’d help the situation – except perhaps through abject capitulation.
So now we have France recalling its ambassador over a nuclear submarine deal Biden made with Australia without informing France.
(2) On the right we already knew – and have known for weeks – that the much-touted post-Kabul airport attack drone strike by the administration on a supposed terrorist was actually almost certainly on someone who had helped the US and included the deaths of a host of children. Now the Pentagon has admitted it.
Watch Rand Paul a few days ago (prior to the admission), questioning Blinken on that (“You’d think you’d kinda know before you off somebody”…:
(3) Illegal immigrants under a Texas bridge.
(4) Another aspect of the recent Woodward book on how Milley’s China call circumvented President Trump in a coup-like action is that the WaPo reporters sat on the explosive story all this time – apparently, in order to sell the book. Here’s Mark Levin talking about it:
(5) Mollie Hemingway has written a book about the 2020 election entitled Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections , which will come out on October 12.
(6) Rapper Nicki Minaj strikes a blow for liberty of thought and against cancel culture.
When these people look you in the eye, the intervening years seem to vanish:
Well, He actually indicted someone.
I’m somewhat shocked.
From the article:
A federal grand jury indicted a former attorney for the Democratic National Committee Thursday, alleging that he falsely claimed to the FBI that he was not advising Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign when he raised concerns about purported ties between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank.
The case against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer at powerful Democratic firm Perkins Coie, is just the second prosecution brought by special counsel John Durham, who was tasked by then-Attorney General Bill Barr in May 2019 with looking into how the FBI’s investigation into claims Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign coordinated with Russian government officials came to be.
Sussmann is accused of a single count of making a false statement to federal authorities on Sept. 19, 2016. The indictment was returned just three days short of the expiration of the five-year statute of limitations.
This reminds me somewhat of Durham’s previous charge, which was against FBI lawyer Kenneth Clinesmith, who ended up receiving probation after pleading guilty. Big deal.
But others think this may lead to bigger fish – for example, see this. Jonathan Turley also sees further possibilities. He lists various people who might end up implicated – although perhaps not indicted, since the statute of limitations may have run out on some. Then he adds this:
The final fight may be over the report itself. Many in Congress and the media may not want it to see the light of day since it is likely to be an indictment not just of the FBI but of the establishment and an enabling media. Yet these same figures demanded “full transparency” over the Mueller report, including secret grand jury material barred from release under federal law. Even in a city that lives on political spin, reversing that narrative to demand secrecy or major redactions may be difficult to achieve in front of an increasingly distrustful public.
I think Turley is naive. Democrats have had no trouble reversing, or turning inside out, every other principle they once said they held dear. Why not that one? And the public is indeed “increasingly distrustful,” but this administration and the Democratic Party in general don’t seem to care about gaining or regaining the public’s trust. They have power, and they appear to think they will hold onto it no matter what.
H. L. Mencken was a famous pundit in the first half of the 20th Century, known for caustic wit.
I’ve never been a Mencken fan, and I don’t share his contempt for people in general and for Americans in particular. However, the guy had a gift for the turn of phrase. And maybe half the time he was right. So I give him that.
For example, in the following quote from 1920, he makes a prediction about the presidency. He blames the problem he’s describing on the stupidity of the American people – Mencken, ever the cynic who thought himself highly superior, looked down on what he called the booboisie, which was the general American public. I don’t think the problem lies primarily with the public – although there certainly are problems there – so much as in the mendacious and arrogant press and “elites,” who are the main conduits from which the public receives its information.
Here’s Mencken’s prediction from about 100 years ago:
But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or count himself lost. … All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
It’s hard to argue very strenuously with that.
Mencken thought Harding came quite close to that unlofty goal. I contend that Biden makes Harding look like a giant:
Describing the prose of President Warren Harding, Mencken quipped: “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights; it is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.”
Better than Biden, I’d say.