Apparently Ukraine had already re-opened the Hunter Biden investigation before Trump’s call

The New Neo Posted on by

How much press will this get?:

A newly unearthed document shows that Ukrainian officials had opened a new probe into the firm linked to Hunter Biden months before President Trump’s phone call with that country’s leader, Fox News contributor John Solomon reported late Tuesday.

Solomon said Tuesday on “Hannity” that the U.S. government knew Ukraine was planning to look again into activities at Burisma Holdings, an energy company that employed then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son as a member of its board of directors, early this year. The report is noteworthy because President Trump has been accused by Democrats of threatening in July to withhold foreign aid to Ukraine unless its new president pursued an investigation into the company and the younger Biden’s role there.

“The U.S. government had open-source intelligence and was aware as early as February of 2019 that the Ukrainian government was planning to reopen the Burisma investigation,” he claimed. “This is long before the president ever imagined having a call with President Zelensky,” he added, noting Petro Poroshenko was still Ukraine’s president at that time.

Considering what’s been going on lately, this should be covered with banner headlines in all the major papers. But when I Google it, nearly all I can find are news outlets and blogs on the right – plus Microsoft News, which has a video of reporter John Solomon saying it to Hannity on Fox. One other exception is something called The Floridian Press, and their story is here. However, I can’t tell if that paper is on the right or the middle or the left, so if it’s on the right it may just be preaching to the choir.

I wondered whether John Solomon, who broke the story, discussed it on Twitter. I discovered that he did. But if you look at that thread, the usually contentious Twitter crowd all seem to support him, which means that Solomon is also preaching to the choir on Twitter. If people on the left were reading him, there would be a bunch of attacks there but it would at least be an indication that the news was reaching some people on the left. But apparently it’s not.

Which does not surprise me and probably does not surprise you. It’s early, I suppose, so it’s at least theoretically possible that the story could pick up steam and spill over into the MSM. But don’t sit on a hot stove till it does.

And if you can find an article that shows the regular MSM is covering this news, please be my guest and post a link to it in the comments.

How would Hillary do it?

The New Neo Posted on by

Let me say at the outset that I don’t buy this scenario.

But so many people are talking about Hillary Clinton being chosen as the 2020 Democratic nominee for president in the Democratic convention that I thought I’d explain my theory of how this could conceivably occur.

First we have a field of contenders so bad that even most of the people who vote for one of the candidates in the primaries are not enamored of that candidate. That’s my impression, anyway.

Next we have the fact that each candidate has made many statements that could easily sink that person in the general. That might also weaken the support for each candidate, because Democratic voters are focused on beating Trump and may be feeling uneasy about whether any of these candidates can do it.

Thirdly there is the sheer number of the candidates and the fact that the primary voters may not coalesce solidly behind one in particular. If by the time the convention rolls around none of the candidates has the requisite number of votes to secure the nomination (a majority), then the wheeling and dealing starts. Hillary Clinton probably still has a following and because so many Democrats believe that she “really” beat Trump (ignoring the Electoral College system), she might be seen as the strongest candidate.

Lastly, there are the superdelegates. The way the Democratic primaries are constructed, the superdelegates potentially have a great deal of power and are free to throw their votes to whomever they wish at the convention in the scenario I just described in which no nominee secures the majority on the first ballot:

In American politics, a superdelegate is an unpledged delegate to the Democratic National Convention who is seated automatically and chooses for themselves for whom they vote. These Democratic Party superdelegates (who make up slightly under 15% of all convention delegates) include elected officials and party activists and officials.

Democratic superdelegates are free to support any candidate for the presidential nomination. This contrasts with pledged delegates who are selected based on the party primaries and caucuses in each U.S. state, in which voters choose among candidates for the party’s presidential nomination. On August 25, 2018, the Democratic National Committee agreed to reduce the influence of superdelegates by generally preventing them from voting on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, allowing their votes only in a contested nomination.

If no other candidate reaches the required majority threshold, and if the superdelegates and other delegates later decide that Hillary redux would actually be their best bet of the sorry lot, her nomination could happen.

At least, that’s the way I understand it. But as I said, I don’t see it happening.

[NOTE: A couple of people have mentioned the nomination of Hubert Humphrey. Here’s how he did it in 1968:

Humphrey entered the race too late to participate in any primaries, and relied on “favorite son” candidates to help him win delegates. He also lobbied for endorsements from powerful bosses within the Democratic Party, which provided him with necessary delegates. This traditional approach was criticized by the other candidates, who hoped to win the nomination from popular support. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, leaving McCarthy as his only opponent, until the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when Senator George McGovern of South Dakota ran as the successor of Kennedy. Humphrey won the party’s nomination at the Convention on the first ballot, amid riots in Chicago. He selected little-known Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine as his running mate.

Humphrey got the nomination, but was defeated by Nixon in the election. Note that Humphrey actively campaigned and maneuvered to get the nomination through the “favorite son” ploy. Unless Hillary has some similar plan, her path to the nomination would be far more difficult, although not literally impossible.]

Calling all computer experts

The New Neo Posted on by

As a blogger I’ve been forced to learn quite a bit about computers and even about HTML, but I’m still rather easily stumped. So I’m asking for help from you readers who might be able to cast light on a phenomenon that’s very annoying to me.

I began my blog in 2004 at a free Blogger template with the URL http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com . And then when I first transferred to WordPress at neoneocon.com in 2007, the older links to the old blog still worked and there was no need to change them or do any sort of redirect.

There was no problem with that for a long, long time. But a few months ago I noticed that my older Blogger blog had disappeared, and when I tried to go there it changed quickly to a page that asked me if I wanted to buy the domain “blogrolling.com.”

No I do not, thank you very much. I want my old blog back. But clicking on any link to it gets me to that invitation to buy the blogrolling domain.

On that original Blogger blog I used the now-long-defunct blogolling tool to list my recommended blogs. It seemed a harmless enough thing to do at the time, but I’m assuming that has something to do with my old blog’s disappearance. And it hasn’t only disappeared on the front end – that is, what the reader might see – but also on the back end, what the blogger sees.

Well, not “disappeared” exactly. What remains is a small skeleton of a blog, and the URL has been changed (without consulting me) to https://neoneoneocon.blogspot.com . Take a look. No blogroll, no old posts, no description of myself, no photo, nada but a couple of newer posts.

So I can’t even go back to the old blog template and delete the blogroll there and see if the blog pops back up. It’s disappeared even on what’s called the “back end” – that is, the innards of the blog to which I have access.

But the weirdest thing – at least, I think it’s the weirdest thing – is that I know the old Blogger blog actually hasn’t disappeared. It’s there somewhere, as a somewhat wispy ghost. How do I know that? If I (or you) click on any of the old links, the old post in the old Blogger format appears for one brief shining moment as a sort of teaser before the screen changes to that ghastly offer to sell the blogrolling URL. Click on this and you’ll see what I mean.

What does this mean? Does it suggest any remedy? I hate losing all those links, although it might be unavoidable. But I’m curious whether anyone here can offer some advice on how to make those old posts visible again at the old links. I’ve already tried changing the URL of an old link to neoneoneocon instead of neo-neocon, and it doesn’t work. It still takes me to the wretched “blogrolling.com for sale” site.

[NOTE: I still use that old blog as a backup site in an emergency, so please update your notes accordingly to use the URL https://neoneoneocon.blogspot.com if there is some sort of emergency when this newer site goes down for more than a few moments.

And just to clarify: all of my older posts are here at the new blog with thenewneo.com as their URL. They are not lost when thenewneo URL is used. It’s just the oldest pre-2007 links within the old posts, that occur when I link back to something in another post of mine pre-dating the 2007 move, that fail to work because they all use neo-neocon.blogspot.com as their URL.

I hope that’s clear. Nothing is actually lost. The posts just can’t be accessed with those older links to neo-neocon.blogspot.com.]

The left’s encouraging “whistleblowers” from the intelligence community to file complaints for political reasons has a long history

The New Neo Posted on by

I wrote a post recently about how the plan for leaks and “whistleblowers” to undermine, sabotage, and perhaps impeach Trump was hatched before he even was inaugurated.

But it may come as no surprise that this was not a new approach by the left. In fact, I wrote an older post in April, 2006 about the phenomenon as it was used against President George W. Bush during his term. Some excerpts [emphasis mine]:

Fast forward to now. National security officers presently are encouraged to spill information with which they disagree–and are provided with support groups, networking, and free legal advice–organized by none other than Daniel Ellsberg himself…

As I wrote previously, it appears that national security whistleblowers are being encouraged to act as virtual moles within their own organizations, remaining in their jobs in order to gain more of the sensitive material and to reveal it as they see fit, according to the dictates of their individual consciences, and often for political reasons. And the idea that there will be any serious legal consequences for the whistleblowers has been weakened; Ellsberg expected to be charged with treason (and was), but many whistleblowers today seem to consider such possibilities to be idle threats.

I believe that, as in so many things, the pendulum has swung too far in one direction. We would not want go back to the era when something of the scope of a My Lai could be successfully covered up. The exposure of My Lai was a shock, but one of the benefits is that My Lai has been studied in depth and used as teaching tool by the military, which has instituted reforms that make such an event far less likely to ever happen today.

But it hardly seems necessary–or productive–to allow national security employees to leak like sieves to the press, much of the time about matters that are not clearly illegal, and motivated sometimes by pure partisanship. And it hardly seems good to allow the press to be the final arbiter of whether their own disclosures will damage national security or not.

At the time I wrote that in 2006, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame was a big mover in the drive to organize in that way. He’s eighty-eight now, and may not be involved anymore, but I have virtually no doubt that the movement goes on with newer leadership and fueled by self-righteous rage against Trump.

Ellsberg’s group was called “The Truth-Teller Organization.” It’s gone now; the links I had for it give you a 404, and there don’t seem to be new ones. A few remnants remain, such as this, but my guess is that whatever group has replaced it has become far more clandestine.

Note that the approach was already full-blown against Bush, so it is an error to think that this is a reaction to Trump – although the reaction is stronger to Trump because he is doing much more to go against the wishes of the intelligence community and the left than Bush ever dreamed of.

In this post from April of 2006 I also wrote about Ellsberg’s own history and how his leak of the Pentagon Papers was handled at the time. Contrast this to now [emphasis mine]:

Ellsberg hoped that the publication of the Papers would cause people to become upset on learning they had been lied to by their government, and then to clamor for the war to end. As such, his position was essentially political–although it was not narrowly partisan, since the Pentagon Papers was an equal-opportunity disclosure; the information obtained therein implicated both Democrat and Republican administrations.

Like Ridenhour, at the outset Ellsburg did not release the documents to the press, but sought instead to persuade certain sympathetic antiwar Senators (chief among them J. William Fulbright) to go public with them on the Senate floor. His motivation for this scheme was that he knew he would be liable to prosecution if he went to the press, and he fully expected to be sent to prison as a result, whereas Senators would be immune from such prosecution.

But no Senator would take the bait, not even Fulbright. As a result, Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the media. Initially, he made an effort to escape prosecution by hiding out…

However, Ellsberg surrendered voluntarily to authorities only a few weeks later:

“On June 28, Ellsberg publicly surrendered to the US Attorney’s Office in Boston, Massachusetts. He was taken into custody believing he would spend the rest of his life in prison; he was charged with theft, conspiracy, and espionage.”

But Ellsberg never went to prison. In a stunningly ironic turn of events, the actions of Nixon’s “plumbers” (who later carried out the Watergate burglary, but whose nickname came from their earlier attempts to fix Ellsberg’s “leaks”) ended up inadvertently freeing Ellsberg. As in a Shakespearean tragedy, Nixon’s wild overreaching against Ellsberg sowed the seeds of Nixon’s own downfall, through the mechanism of those very same plumbers:

“In one of Nixon’s actions against Ellsberg, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in September 1971, hoping to find information they could use to discredit him. The revelation of the break-in became part of the Watergate scandal. ..Because of the gross governmental misconduct, all charges against Ellsberg were eventually dropped.”

…[T]he above quote describes what a watershed event the publication of the Papers was. Before then, newspapers would have been reluctant to print such things–whether out of loyalty to the government or out of fear of repercussions, or both. After the 1971 [SCOTUS case allowing the publication of the Papers], the gloves were off.

Now take a look at yesterday’s piece by Daniel Greenfield entitled “Impeachment is Built on a Trap That Obama Created for Romney: A weapon against a Romney administration gets used against Trump.” In it Greenfield writes [emphasis mine]:

In the Trump era, whistleblowing and partisan leaks to the media have been conflated by the media. Partisan government workers, some openly aligning with the “resistance” and participating in partisan groups within government agencies, have sought to undermine administration policies through leaks. These leaks were in turn meant to generate congressional investigations of cabinet officials.

The impeachment effort against President Trump takes that ongoing tactic to the ultimate extreme.

The politicization of the civil service is a deeply troubling phenomenon. Efforts by members of the civil service to undermine elected officials is a threat to our entire system of representative government.

This problem goes beyond the ‘Deep State’ and has shown up in a wide variety of government agencies. But its appearance in national security agencies is deeply troubling because these agencies have the infrastructure to act as a police state. The existence of national security agencies in a free country is contingent on their subservience to elected officials. Anything else isn’t whistleblowing, it’s a coup.

Obama’s Presidential Policy Directive 19 opened the door by expanding whistleblowing protection to members of the “intelligence community” and other personnel handling classified information.

A few years earlier, Bradley Manning had ushered in a new era of espionage by enemy state actors using front groups to solicit spies as whistleblowers. While the court threw the book at Manning, Obama commuted his sentence. PPD19 was supposed to avoid another Manning case, which it utterly failed to do when Edward Snowden repeated Manning’s treason on a larger scale before escaping to Russia.

But PPD19 was never really meant to help the likes of Manning and Snowden. Instead it was part of a larger pattern of politicizing national security organizations that led directly to the current crisis.

Greenfield points out that at the time PPD19 was issued, Romney was doing well in the polls, and Obama must have been concerned that Romney was poised to win. So he put in place an insurance policy to be unleashed against Romney in the event that he became president.

Those who believe that the current push of the left against Trump is mainly about Trump himself would do well to ponder this history. The left is neither stupid nor lazy, and they have been working hard at this for a long long time.

And then there’s Hillary Clinton: on impeachment, Watergate, and Whistlegate

The New Neo Posted on by

Interesting that Barbara Jordan said that way back in 1974, isn’t it? The context was Watergate, in which the call for investigation and then impeachment as well as conviction was strongly bipartisan (unlike only slight bipartisanship with Bill Clinton in the 90s or no bipartisanship now with Trump). Therefore Nixon resigned rather than put the country and himself through it.

But there’s more to what Jordan said. Here’s some of the context, the text of Jordan’s entire speech. Some excerpts [emphasis mine]:

My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution…

The nature of impeachment: a narrowly channeled exception to the separation-of-powers maxim. The Federal Convention of 1787 said that. It limited impeachment to high crimes and misdemeanors and discounted and opposed the term “maladministration.” “It is to be used only for great misdemeanors,” so it was said in the North Carolina ratification convention. And in the Virginia ratification convention: “We do not trust our liberty to a particular branch. We need one branch to check the other.”

The drawing of political lines goes to the motivation behind impeachment; but impeachment must proceed within the confines of the constitutional term “high crime[s] and misdemeanors.” Of the impeachment process, it was Woodrow Wilson who said that “Nothing short of the grossest offenses against the plain law of the land will suffice to give them speed and effectiveness. Indignation so great as to overgrow party interest may secure a conviction; but nothing else can.”

Common sense would be revolted if we engaged upon this process for petty reasons. Congress has a lot to do: Appropriations, Tax Reform, Health Insurance, Campaign Finance Reform, Housing, Environmental Protection, Energy Sufficiency, Mass Transportation. Pettiness cannot be allowed to stand in the face of such overwhelming problems. So today we are not being petty…

…the President has counseled his aides to commit perjury, willfully disregard the secrecy of grand jury proceedings, conceal surreptitious entry, attempt to compromise a federal judge, while publicly displaying his cooperation with the processes of criminal justice. “A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution.”

If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that 18th-century Constitution should be abandoned to a 20th-century paper shredder!

So in essence, Jordan’s speech was a defense of the Constitution – although you’d never know it from Hillary’s oh-so-clever excerpt – and of the gravity of impeachment and the necessity for “high crimes and misdemeanors” to justify it. Jordan’s speech occurred on July 25, 1974, about two weeks before Nixon’s resignation. Unlike the situation now, it was preceded by an extremely lengthy bipartisan process that involved a roll call vote in the Senate [77-0] to establish an investigatory committee. The committee was bipartisan as well (I remember particularly Sam Ervin the Democrat and Howard Baker the Republican, but there were others), and there were numerous counsels involved who were also bipartisan.

The difference between the process then and the process now is extreme. During Watergate, Congress was reacting to an event, and launched a bipartisan investigation. Now, one party is using the intelligence corps to create the appearance of an event, with the long-stated goal – one made clear even before Donald Trump became president – of removing this president from office.

One constant, though, has been Hillary Clinton:

In 1974, she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., and advised the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal. Under the guidance of Chief Counsel John Doar and senior member Bernard W. Nussbaum, Rodham helped research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds and standards for it.

Hillary’ trajectory is a sad one. She and her fellow Democrats are now doing exactly what Jordan warned against: engaging in the process for petty, political, partisan reasons. And she is quoting Jordan in order to defend it.

Whistlegate roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

There are so many good articles on Whistlegate that I’m just doing to do a roundup, for starters:

(1) The incurious press, when Democrat malfeasance is involved:

When you asked who cleared Biden, you got no answer except the news media themselves. When you asked who debunked the claim that Biden had pressured the Ukrainian president to fire the prosecutor by threatening to withhold aid, you got no response except that other European countries also wanted the prosecutor fired (as if that proved anything). When the president stymied the impeachment narrative by releasing the transcript compiled by national security officials who listened in on the offending phone call, which proved that the whistleblower was actually blowing smoke, the media circled the wagons. The Washington Post created its own conspiracy theory that up to two-thirds of the call between Trump and Zelensky had mysteriously been elided into non-existence. I debunked that far-left conspiracy theory myself, but hardly any mainstream reporter seems interested in looking at the facts.

(2) Hillary and the Ukrainians.

(3) It’s not just about the Bidens, by Lee Smith at RealClearInvestigations.

(4) Many whistleblowers coming down the pike:

If the rules were that whistleblowers had to be left-handed Lithuanian midgets who enjoyed eating pickles while wearing pink frilly dresses, you can be sure that somewhere, somehow, the Democrats would be able to dig one up. This is basically the same play they ran with Kavanaugh. When it became obvious that Christine Doctor Ford was pretty much lying her ass off, suddenly, a number of other “credible” witnesses suddenly materialized out of thin air, each one with a kinky Kavanagh story more unbelievably bizarre than the previous one, until finally they had Kavanaugh as the captain of a pirate ship doing rape runs up and down the eastern seaboard in between celebratory keggers.

(5) William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection on the Democrats’ Star Chamber.

There are plenty more, too, but I’ll stop there for today.

Justice Thomas illness reported

The New Neo Posted on by

Justice Clarence Thomas has missed the first day of the new SCOTUS session, it is reported.

This is not good news. I hope it’s nothing serious.

But the reality is that every single SCOTUS nomination has now become fraught with vicious politics and peril. There is no doubt in my mind that if Trump were to get the opportunity to nominate a new SCOTUS justice, the Democrats would shriek that because of Garland he doesn’t get the chance, pending the 2020 election.

This would be bunk. The GOP was able to do what they did with Garland for the simple reason that they controlled the Senate at the time, and it is the Senate that is given the power to approve the SCOTUS justices whom the executive appoints. No Senate approval, and the judge cannot be seated. The Garland nomination also occurred close to the end of Obama’s second and therefore last term, so that was given as an additional reason it was okay to wait. But that was actually somewhat irrelevant, because if the Republicans hadn’t been in charge, the postponement would not have happened. That sort of situation would ordinarily only arise with a president of one party and a Senate controlled by the other party.

For now, the Republicans are still in charge, and there is a Republican president as well. So the Democrats could shriek all they want, but to no avail for several reasons. The first is that there is no principle that a president cannot successfully nominate and have approved a SCOTUS justice towards the end of that president’s term (his first term, in this instance, so he might even be serving a second, although the Democrats cannot even contemplate the thought). The Garland action did not establish such a principle. The second is that a postponement of that type cannot be forced by the minority party in Congress. The third is that you, I, and the Democrats all know that if they were in charge and Trump got a SCOTUS pick they would never approve anyone on the right. In addition, they would delay a la Garland if they needed to and their usual character assassination m.o. didn’t work.

Identity, the individual, and the mind: the Hogan twins, joined at the brain

The New Neo Posted on by

The other night I happened across a documentary on TLC entitled “Inseparable: Joined.”

Here’s an article about the people the documentary explored: the conjoined Hogan twins of Canada, who are joined at the brain:

Craniopagus twins, joined at the head, are a rarity — one in 2.5 million. The vast majority do not survive 24 hours.

The Hogan twins are not just joined at the head. They also share a connection of the thalamus called a thalamus bridge. So each twin has a separate brain and her own thalamus, but each thalamus communicates with the other one and probably with more than the thalamus.

The documentary shows this extraordinary and fascinating situation. The twins are doing surprisingly well, but the fact that they are “doing” anything at all, including being alive, is surprising. They have different personalities, and although they have some learning disabilities – perhaps due to some of their other problems, which include epilepsy (and medication for it), diabetes, and celiac disease – if you watch them you can see they are quite intelligent, although slow for their age.

The twins cannot be surgically separated; it is considered too life-threatening. They were 10 years old at the time of the documentary and are 12 years old now. They also seem to have a good sense of humor.

But perhaps the most extraordinary element of their incredibly extraordinary situation is the way in which their brains communicate. It is being studied and is not that well understood, but for example one can be blindfolded and can tell what the other is seeing. In other words, they share some sensory input. But to make it even more complex, one of the twins can see from both eyes of the other, and the other twin can only see from one eye of her twin.

In a somewhat similar manner, one twin can voluntarily move three legs and one arm, and the other twin can voluntarily move three arms and one leg. But they are able to override this and just move the arms and legs on their side of the body, so that their movements can be coordinated. So it is partly voluntary, something they can access or turn off at will.

The thalamus acts like a switchboard relaying sensory and motor signals and regulating consciousness…

The twins say they know one another’s thoughts without having to speak. “Talking in our heads” is how they describe it.

In the TLC documentary I saw, after tobogganing down a hill one twin says, “I was so scared!” and the other proudly announces, “I wasn’t scared!” followed by, “I need to hold onto my sister because she’s scared!” and raucous laughter. They seem to mean this to be some sort of joke. And it’s actually pretty witty because of course they have no choice about “holding onto each other,” and they also share emotions in the sense of perceiving each other’s emotions. Sometimes there is even carryover in which one’s emotions affect the emotions of the other more directly and seem to influence the emotions of the other.

The Hogan twins’ situation conjures up questions involving identity, individuality, and the brain. Clearly, from the example of identical twins in general, we know that DNA does not determine identity because, although all identical twins share DNA, each twin is well aware of having a separate identity from the other twin. The Hogan twins take that one (or two, or three or four or more) steps further. They have separate identities and personalities, but their shared brain connection seems to give them not only a close bond (such as many identical twins have) but the ability to access sensory, cognitive, emotional, and motor elements of each others’ bodies.

[NOTE: I haven’t been able to find a link to the documentary I saw, but here’s a different one.]

Sean Davis on Ukraine envoy Volker’s testimony

The New Neo Posted on by

First Volker’s pending appearance was hyped to the skies by the Democrats: this was going to implicate Trump.

Then Volker was interviewed in closed session, and the results were misrepresented by the MSM and the Democrats.

Now the testimony is out, although the lie probably got halfway around the world first:

Congressional testimony from the former top American envoy to Ukraine directly contradicts the impeachment narrative offered by congressional Democrats and their media allies. Ambassador Kurt Volker, who served for two years as the top U.S. diplomatic envoy to Ukraine, testified on Thursday that he was never aware of and never took part in any effort to push the Ukrainian government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden or his son Hunter. He also stressed that the interactions between Giuliani and Ukrainian officials were facilitated not to find dirt on Biden, but to assuage concerns that the incoming Ukrainian government would not be able to get a handle on corruption within the country.

Volker’s full remarks, which were obtained by The Federalist, can be read here.

Sean Davis has done excellent and thorough work on Whistlegate.

The left thinks it can completely control the narrative on Whistlegate (and everything else), because it controls so many of the organs of the press, and it has successfully demonized the press on the right to a certain extent. But the left can’t control the narrative as completely as it used to, and many people don’t trust the MSM as well.

Remember the Tea Party, and what happened to it?

The New Neo Posted on by

I sure do.

And after all the shouting died, the propaganda against the Tea Party remains because it worked.

And events like that are, as they say, how you get Trump.

Which is the point made here:

I still hear the Tea Party invoked by liberal friends as an example of extremism, despite how calm and collected they were. So few of them even knew that it started in Chicago, on the trading floor, with people upset that they were forced to subsidize failure. It was hopeful and enthusiastic, open to anyone – and the Left treated it like the KKK merged with radical anarchists. The Republicans took their support and generally did nothing.

So, people tried something different. Romney was the ultimate nice-guy candidate. Unimpeachable ethics, a proven record of success, and moderate credentials. The Left chewed him up and spat him out. If Abe Lincoln or George Washington rose from the grave and ran for president, they would get the same treatment.

Thus, after you send in friendly folks with SUV and pickups, then a philanthropist in a limo, might as well send in a tank

That is correct as far as it goes. But I want to add two more weapons that were utilized against the Tea Party. The first was connected with the aforementioned KKK treatment; I think it is important to add that one of the main drivers of that was a specific accusation concocted and/or furthered by two Democratic members of Congress:

“A bright line was crossed on the 20th,” says Christina Botteri, a spokeswoman for the Tea Party Federation. “The left constantly attacks conservatives as racist, as dumb, as evil, but what happened on the 20th is a sitting congressman, with the full voice and credibility of the House of Representatives, accused a group of citizens with whom he philosophically disagrees of assault and then refused to help find the persons responsible. They need to help us find the people responsible or apologize for making it up.”

Conservative Web publisher Andrew Breitbart has accused the congressmen of lying about the incident in an effort to tar the tea party movement. He has gone so far as to offer a $100,000 donation to the United Negro College Fund for proof. Though it appears from footage that at least some of the congressmen’s entourage were filming the walk, no one has claimed the bounty.

“[This] is a slander with real-world repercussions,” Mr. Breitbart asserts on BigJournalism.com. Some in the mainstream press have conceded tea partyers may have a point.

No evidence ever emerged despite lots of looking and much video footage.

The second thing that happened to the Tea Party, of course, was discrimination by the IRS in order to reduce their influence during the 2012 election. That, and the fact that no one was ever prosecuted for such actions, was another reason for ire on the right.

Romney was indeed treated abominably by the Democrats and the media despite his mild-mannered and squeaky-clean profile. He was defeated, as we know, and I personally have many acquaintances who bought every single thing that was said about him. Particularly effective was the idea that he somehow was anti-woman, which they clearly believed was completely true.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It would be a long long post if I was to list all similar events that came together to create the groundswell of popular movement for someone like Trump. The Democrats richly earned him, as did the press.

Trump is not allowed to be a president

The New Neo Posted on by

I think it boils down to two issues for the left regarding Trump. The first is that he’s president at all, and does what presidents do with all the attendant powers of a president. The second is that he is not afraid to use those powers in ways that stand to harm the Democrats and their interests.

They find these two things unconscionable. So they redefine whatever Trump does that they don’t like and/or that may harm them politically as unacceptable, unprecedented, offensive, and even at times criminal.

And always, always impeachable.

But of course all presidents continue to do things that are in their political interests. Most of those things have other motivations, as well – most often, that the president believes that such actions will also benefit the country or even the world. It’s really not rocket science. Among those things can be something like “fighting corruption,” including corruption that occurs at the hands of people opposed to that president. To do otherwise – to give corrupt and/or illegal actions a pass because they are done by political opponents – would itself be a terrible thing.

For example, we have this:

President Trump’s critics are now complaining that he asked the Australian prime minister to cooperate with the Justice Department’s investigation into the origins of the Mueller probe and that Attorney General William Barr has traveled overseas to ask foreign intelligence officials to cooperate with that investigation. The New York Times called it another example of “the president using high-level diplomacy to advance his personal political interests.”…

As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley explains, “It is not uncommon for an attorney general, or even a president, to ask foreign leaders to assist with ongoing investigations. Such calls can shortcut bureaucratic red tape, particularly if the evidence is held, as in this case, by national security or justice officials.”

That sort of cooperation with the DOJ investigation of the machinations that led up to the Mueller report is what Trump asked for in the Zelensky phone call, right after he said “I would like you to do us a favor.” In addition, the US has a treaty with Ukraine concerning mutual assistance with prosecutions.

On the other hand, in that article from the Post that I quoted from at the beginning, author Marc Thiessen calls the Biden probe “opposition research.” I beg to differ. Not all research that involves someone who happens to be a political opponent is primarily “opposition research,” although it is tangentially that. The Biden case has an especially unusual set of circumstances: the fact situation regarding Hunter Biden had already started to be prosecuted by Ukraine long before Trump was president, and had then been dropped by a new prosecutor who replaced the prosecutor that Biden strong-armed Ukraine to fire (with a direct quid pro quo threat from Biden to withhold foreign aid if that prosecutor was not fired). Biden says it was done for other reasons than to stop his son’s investigation, but Biden’s on-record threat has the appearance of tremendous impropriety and corruption. It is perfectly proper to ask for help in investigating that entire fact situation to see what the reality was with Hunter Biden and to also see whether Joe Biden as VP purposely and knowingly stopped a corruption investigation of his own son, using a direct quid pro quo which his position as VP gave him the power to employ, and whether that was the primary reason for the threat.

In the transcript of the Trump/Zelensky phone call there is one single sentence about the Bidens. This is it:

The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.

Absolutely nothing wrong with that as far as I can see. It is irrelevant that Biden is running for the Democratic nomination. Are all the Democratic candidates immune from any investigation into what they actually may have done, including if it involves that person’s interference in a foreign country’s investigation of their own child, when that person held high public office in the US and threatened to withhold aid to that country if the prosecutor wasn’t fired? And if that action of the candidate is on the record, admitted to (and bragged about) by the candidate him/herself? That would be a ludicrous rule, and certainly one that has never been uttered before or even conceptualized.

Trump did not manufacture evidence or get anyone in any foreign country to manufacture evidence against Biden or Biden’s son. And yet that is exactly what the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign apparently did regarding Trump, with willing cooperation and help from government agencies such as the FBI. No one has ever been prosecuted for it. And the very same people who say Trump can’t say what he said to Zelensky then go and defend what Hillary and the Democrat partisans in government agencies did.

On the current state of Whistlegate

The New Neo Posted on by

Mark Levin is not a favorite of mine. Not that I tend to listen to talk radio or to cable news very often, but his voice in particular grates. I always chuckle when I see him referred to (I think it’s at Ace’s) as “Ol’ Yeller,” because it’s such a perfect description of his one-note style of angry yelling.

But sometimes yelling seems appropriate. And Levin’s very smart and knows his legal stuff. I happened to catch this appearance of Levin’s last night, and I thought I’d post it:

Any corrupt official who wants to evade investigation need only run for president on the Democratic side and he’s immune, apparently. Who knew?

Here’s a quieter statement from David Marcus at The Federalist [emphasis mine]:

Asked about what he wants Ukrainian President Volomydyr Zelensky to do about Hunter Biden’s business dealings there Trump said, “I would recommend that they start an investigation into the Bidens.” He also suggested that China should open a similar investigation. But what Trump was mostly saying is that he is the president and there is nothing wrong with saying such things to foreign leaders.

The issue of whether the president may urge foreign leaders to conduct investigations of American citizens running for office has now become the crux of the impeachment inquiry. Long gone now are allegations of any quid pro quo with Zelensky. That ship sailed when the transcript of Trump’s call with the Ukrainian leader offered no evidence that the president was offering military aid as a carrot, which was the initial allegation…

Trump clearly feels that something untoward and perhaps illegal occurred regarding Hunter Biden in Ukraine and China…So the question is, is it illegal for Trump to ask foreign leaders to look into it?

The answer to this question seems to almost certainly be no. In fact, the closest thing the Democrats can pin to the president is a vague campaign finance violation. Is it tacky? Does it violate norms? Yes, probably, but it is just as plausible that Trump wanted answers about family members in the Obama administration getting sweet deals from foreign governments as it is that he was trying to damage a potential political rival.

And what if both things are true? What if Trump is genuinely concerned about corruption in our foreign affairs, and the fact that Joe Biden might be mixed up in it is a just a bonus? If there are cases, which there certainly are, when it is appropriate and legal for a president to urge foreign leaders to investigate potential wrongdoing by Americans, then the Democrats have to prove why in this case is [sic] wasn’t.

Their answer is that Joe Biden is running for president. Their entire argument for impeachment now rests on the idea that Biden’s candidacy makes him immune to such calls for scrutiny. But they will not and can not point to an actual law that Trump violated in the conversation. Rather, they make vague arguments about courting foreign interference in an election and potential campaign finance violations.

Oh, and then there’s this:

Hiding behind the “whistleblower” fiction. How long can that go on, I wonder? The MSM and the Democrats would like it to go on forever, or at least long enough to impeach Trump.

More from Andrew C. McCarthy at The Hill. McCarthy’s no yeller, but he has a lot to say:

What is portrayed as an “impeachment inquiry” is actually just a made-for-cable-TV political soap opera. The House of Representatives is not conducting a formal impeachment inquiry. To the contrary, congressional Democrats are conducting the 2020 political campaign…

When the Framers debated whether to include an impeachment clause in the Constitution, they had serious concerns. They were designing a separation-of-powers system that endowed the coordinate branches with checks and balances to police each other. They understood that impeachment authority was necessary, but feared it would give the legislature too much power over the executive.

They also worried that impeachment could be politicized. If it were too easy to do procedurally, or it could be resorted to for trifling acts of maladministration, factions opposed to the president would be tempted to try to overturn elections and grind the government to a halt.

To address these concerns, the Framers adopted a burdensome standard — high crimes and misdemeanors (in addition to treason and bribery) — that would restrict impeachable offenses to truly egregious abuses of power. Then they erected an even higher bar: a two-thirds supermajority requirement for conviction in the Senate.

All this was to ensure that the electoral will of the people must never be overturned in the absence of misconduct so severe that it results in a broad consensus that the nation’s well-being requires removing the president from power.

Although the House has the raw power to file articles of impeachment based on frivolous allegations and minor abuses, the Senate supermajority requirement for removal is designed to have a sobering effect on the lower chamber. Impeachment should not be sought out of partisanship. There must be misconduct that would convince objective Americans, regardless of their politics, that the president must be ousted — not merely criticized or censured, but stripped of authority…

Every presidential impeachment inquiry, from Andrew Johnson through Bill Clinton, has been the subject of bipartisan consultation and debate. The House has recognized that its legitimacy, and the legitimacy of its most solemn actions, must be based on the consideration of the whole body, not the diktat of a few partisan bosses.

Not this one. This one is a misadventure in exactly the bare-knuckles partisanship the Framers feared. To be sure, no one has the power to prevent willful House leadership from misbehaving this way. But we’re not required to pretend the charade is real.

[NOTE: I wrote most of this post late last night. I realize, on looking at the word “current” in the title, that it’s nearly impossible to actually stay current with this story, since facts are emerging at such a rapid pace.]