National security risks

The New Neo Posted on by

Democrats and the MSM seem completely unconcerned with the risks inherent in divulging a president’s – any president’s – phone calls with foreign leaders. Perhaps they believe that because they dominate the agencies doing the leaking, it will never happen to a Democrat and so that makes it perfectly okay.

Trump has been the target of such leaks from the start; for example, see this from August of 2017. And this approach to Trump’s administration was planned even before Trump was inaugurated, as I described in this post which quoted a DOJ employee saying, in this Vanity Fair article from January of 2017:

…”You’re going to see the bureaucrats using time to their advantage,” and [the person] added that “people here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable,” by whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complaints. Others are staying in contact with officials appointed by President Obama to learn more about how they can undermine Trump’s agenda

Leaking Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders began early. As far as I can recall, this has never happened to any other president, including any Republican.

It is my strong suspicion that if such calls of other presidents had been leaked, most presidents (of either party) would have been guilty of far worse than anything in any of Trump’s leaked calls. Not only could no president on earth stand up to such scrutiny, but no president has ever had to.

Why is that? I believe that it’s only recently that a large enough number of people in the federal bureaucracy and in the press believe that the ends justify the means, and that it is perfectly okay to jeopardize the security of the US and the world in order to harm a president they don’t like.

It’s not that no one felt that way before. But I believe it has reached a critical mass. And it has destroyed trust – on the right but not limited to the right – in all government institutions.

This is a terrible development, but such trust is no longer warranted. I realize that’s not a new thing; it’s been building for decades. But now, even people who have long resisted the notion cannot deny it any more.

I wonder – I don’t know but I wonder – how many people in the middle are now feeling this same sense of distrust. The MSM has been distrusted for a long long time, but strangely enough, that doesn’t seem to have diminished their influence much. Lies repeated often enough and widely enough have a power all their own.

[NOTE: During the last week or so, the anti-Trump propaganda has reached a fever pitch. When I was trying to research this article, I once again was forced to confront the fact that Google is now a propaganda organ. When I searched for something such as “leak of Trump’s phone calls is a national security risk” on Google, I only got anti-Trump articles. When I did the same search on DuckDuckGo, I got a mix, although it was no surprise that the articles in the MSM criticizing the leaks were several years old. For example, here’s one that appeared in The Atlantic in August of 2017. It was by David Frum, of all people, who is a NeverTrumper but a Republican. It contains plenty of criticism of Trump, but Frum was still wary of leaks as a weapon against him:

Leaking the transcript of a presidential call to a foreign leader is unprecedented, shocking, and dangerous. It is vitally important that a president be able to speak confidentially—and perhaps even more important that foreign leaders understand that they can reply in confidence.

Thursday’s leak to The Washington Post of President Trump’s calls with the president of Mexico and the prime minister of Australia will reverberate around the world. No leader will again speak candidly on the phone to Washington, D.C.—at least for the duration of this presidency, and perhaps for longer.

As I said, Frum is a NeverTrumper. I haven’t seen any mention of phone leaks and security risks in anything he’s written recently, although if you find something please post a link in the comments because I’d be curious.]

[NOTE II: I realize that Mark Felt aka Deep Throat, who was instrumental in Watergate, was the associate director of the FBI at the time he become Woodward and Bernstein’s source for information that implicated Nixon. But the American public was not aware of that till much later.]

Hillary’s Ukrainian connection

The New Neo Posted on by

What a difference a few years makes.

The WSJ reports that back in January of 2017, a short time before Trump’s inauguration, Politico wrote an article that stated:

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation…

It’s a very long piece, but it seems to be describing the same fact situation I wrote about in this recent post, particularly the excerpts from Andrew C. McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion. This is hardly new information, but it’s information the MSM seems to have no interest in anymore.

Another day, another racial hatred hoax

The New Neo Posted on by

This.

And I agree with this:

Why, then, was [the supposed racial incident in the school at which Karen Pence worked] originally reported with such blind acceptance and an utter absence of critical thinking? Because, similar to the Jussie Smollett hoax, it suited the liberal media’s narrative: That America is an evil, racist country, and the Trump administration can in some way be blamed for incidents of hate.

The connection [to the Trump administration] is extremely weak? So what. The story turns out not to be true? Shoulder shrug. The left-wing media outlets in question might update their stories. A few will even probably issue retractions. But they’ll still all do the same thing next time a story like this rolls around.

And you know why? Because a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on. In fact, most people never even hear the correction. The MSM knows that full well, so they have learned the value of publishing the lies, Big and Small and In-Between.

Whatever was going on with this sixth-grade girl that caused her to fabricate this story, the real culprits are a press that publicizes incidents that have no business being in the newspapers, chasing after sensationalism and political gain for the left.

Frostian thought for the day: on justice vs. mercy

The New Neo Posted on by

Anyone who’s read this blog for a while is well aware of how much I admire both the poetry and the thought of Robert Frost.

For example, there’s this [in the excerpt that follows, Frost uses “justice” in the traditional sense rather than in the leftist “social justice” sense]:

Frost was convinced that the conflict between justice and mercy in human affairs is an eternal and universal moral problem of humanity, and not merely a contemporary political partisan concern…

With these facts in mind Frost’s criticism of the New Deal as “nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,” is clearly more than mere partisan politics. In 1936, in the midst of attacks on [his collection of poetry] A Further Range by the political Left, Frost wrote to Ferner Nuhn, a young New Deal acquaintance and friend of Henry Wallace, that “strict justice is basic” for a free society, and freedom implied that some people succeeded and others failed. The winners reaped the rewards of their talents and efforts, but what about the losers? Frost acknowledged that government “must do something for the losers. It must show them mercy. Justice first and mercy second. The trouble with some of your crowd is that it would have mercy first. The struggle to win is still the best tonic. . . . Mercy . . . is another word for socialism.” Frost believed that what was commonly called “distributive justice,” the attempt to spread the wealth of society to the masses, through graduated in-come taxes and other such devices, was really distributive mercy misnamed. Frost drew out for Ferner Nuhn the logical consequences of a system of socialistic mercy:

“The question of the moment in politics will always be one of proportion between mercy and justice. You have to remember the people who accept mercy have to pay for it. Mercy means protection. And there is no protection without direction. A person completely protected would have to be completely directed. And he would be a slave. That’s where socialism pure brings you out.”

California’s Jean Valjean law

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought perhaps it might be nice to look at something besides Trump and impeachment and Ukraine today. And so as a non-refreshing palate cleanser we have this:

In 2014 California passed Proposition 47, which made theft of property valued at less than $950 a misdemeanor offense.

The previous threshold was $450…

After searching police reports and arrest records, CBS13 found that while the rate of these grab and dash crimes is on the rise, the rate of arrest is down. We turned to law enforcement and the retail industry for answers. Both blame a California law intended to make “neighborhoods safe.”

“It’s a boldness like we’re seeing never before and just a disregard for fellow human beings,” said Lieutenant Mark Donaldson, Vacaville PD.

He explained these crimes have evolved into more than just shoplifting. It’s organized retail theft and he says it’s happening across the state. Cities like Vacaville, with outlets and shopping centers located near major freeways, tend to be a target for these organized retail crime rings.

“They know the law,” Donaldson said. “One of the first things they ask us [is] ‘Can’t I just get a ticket so I can be on my way?’”

He explained many suspects know theft under $950 is now a misdemeanor, meaning most get a written citation, a court date and are released.

Unintended consequences:

[Proposition 47] was a feel-good solution to address the over-crowding in the prisons related to California’s 3-strikes law. A couple years after its passage, police in San Jose were dealing with a surge in violent crime…

The Police Chiefs Association are hoping to get a new ballot measure approved: “Reducing Crime and Keeping California Safe Act of 2020.” It would restore the penalties for serial thieves and theft gangs.

These negative consequences may have been unintended, but surely they should not have been unforeseen. The intended consequences were freeing up room in prisons for more serious offenders as well as getting funds for more rehab treatment for drug addicts. But it’s not hard to see in advance that the lack of a felony charge for repeat offenders would encourage career criminals to go on sequential sprees, each totaling under the cutoff point. That’s elementary.

There is another problem that has emerged that might have been foreseen with a little thought, although it’s not quite as obvious. It was written about in National Review over a year and a half ago:

In addition, DNA samples aren’t collected from misdemeanor offenders. Thus the DNA database has shrunk, making it more difficult for law-enforcement agencies to solve cold cases, including those involving rape and murder.

Another thing I’m curious about is why this was decided in a referendum. It was a popular proposal at the time, and the California legislature is so overly Democratic that I can’t see that it would have had any problem passing. So why the resort to direct democracy rather than representative government?

Happy New Year!

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. A Happy New Year to all who celebrate the holiday!

Rosh Hashanah customs include sounding the shofar (a cleaned-out ram’s horn), as prescribed in the Torah, following the prescription of the Hebrew Bible to “raise a noise” on Yom Teruah. Its rabbinical customs include attending synagogue services and reciting special liturgy about teshuva, as well as enjoying festive meals. Eating symbolic foods is now a tradition, such as apples dipped in honey, hoping to evoke a sweet new year.

Don’t be too hard on him, after all he’s only a kid

The New Neo Posted on by

If you’re wondering who Jake Sherman is and why I’m picking on him:

Jake Sherman is a senior writer for POLITICO and co-author of POLITICO’s Playbook, the nation’s leading political newsletter. He is also the co-author of New York Times and national best seller, “The Hill to Die On: The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump’s America,” which was published by Crown in 2019. Jake is an NBC and MSNBC political contributor.

Senior writer. Pretty good credentials as far as the news business goes.

So, how old do you think Jake Sherman is? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.

Sherman’s thirty-three years old. Another cub journalist who has become a senior reporter at a very young age.

Also from Sherman’s Politico profile:

Since 2009, Jake has chronicled all of the major legislative battles on Capitol Hill, and has also traveled the country to cover the battle for control of Congress.

So he started as a political journalist ten years ago, when he was 23.

If you think about it, it’s not the least bit surprising that Sherman didn’t know that Nixon was not impeached. Sherman was born eleven years after Nixon resigned, and he would have been in high school during the 90s and college during the two-thousand-oughts. Are the details of modern American history something students learn in any of those venues these days? I very much doubt it. And if you don’t know what you don’t know, you don’t know you don’t know it.

Sherman’s defenders on that Twitter thread are all too happy to go to bat for him, as they would any good Democratic member of the MSM. Some of their excuses go like this: “The outcome was the same so it really doesn’t matter.” “Well, he wasn’t but he would have been.”

The other thing about Nixon’s resignation, as opposed to what’s happening today, is that the pressure brought to bear on Nixon was bipartisan. I would guess Sherman doesn’t know that either, and what’s more would not understand its significance.

“This is the dawning of the Age of Hysteria”

The New Neo Posted on by

New song lyrics by Gerard Vanderleun. It helps to know the original.

Actually, I think the Age of Hysteria may have dawned quite some time ago. But that’s a minor quibble.

Also, let me add that I think it’s cold calculation and planning on the part of the Democratic and leftist leaders, for the most part, in order to induce a feeling of hysteria in their followers.

ADDENDUM: And this might be as good a place as any to put a link to this clever bit of satire.

Leninthink

The New Neo Posted on by

Another great article by Gary Saul Morson has been published in New Criterion. He’s the author who wrote a piece about Solzhenitsyn that I discussed previously here.

This time Morson is writing about Lenin – or rather, about the thought process Lenin used to justify what he did, and about the way it affected Marxist, Communist, and Soviet thought. A few excerpts will suffice to give the flavor, but I can’t urge you strongly enough to read the whole thing:

By the same token, Lenin always insisted on the most violent solutions. Those who do not understand him mistake his ideas for those of radicals like the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who argued that violence was permitted when necessary. That squishy formulation suggests that other solutions would be preferable. But for Lenin maximal violence was the default position. He was constantly rebuking subordinates for not using enough force, for restraining mobs from lynchings, and for hesitating to shoot randomly chosen hostages…

Until economic collapse forced Lenin to adopt the New Economic Policy, he demanded that grain not be purchased from peasants but requisitioned at gunpoint. Naturally, peasants—Lenin called recalcitrant peasants “kulaks”—rebelled all over Russia. In response to one such “kulak” uprising Lenin issued the following order:

“The kulak uprising in [your] 5 districts must be crushed without pity. . . . 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages . . . . Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry . . . . Yours, Lenin. P. S. Find tougher people.”

Dmitri Volkogonov, the first biographer with access to the secret Lenin archives, concluded that for Lenin violence was a goal in itself. He quotes Lenin in 1908 recommending “real, nationwide terror, which invigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.”…

His more naïve followers imagined that rule by sheer terror would cease when Bolshevik hold on power was secure, or when the New Economic Policy relaxed restrictions on trade, but Lenin made a point of disillusioning them. “It is the biggest mistake to think that nep will put an end to the terror. We shall return to the terror, and to economic terror,” he wrote. When D. I. Kursky, People’s Commissariat of Justice, was formulating the first Soviet legal code, Lenin demanded that terror and arbitrary use of power be written into the code itself! “The law should not abolish terror,” he insisted. “It should be substantiated and legalized in principle, without evasion or embellishment.”

Here’s the article’s explanation for how a Communist (or Leninist or leftist or Marxist) can believe, truly believe, that 2 + 2 = 5 if the Party wills it, something Orwell dramatized so powerfully in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is based on Lenin’s formulation that whatever is good for the Party is what is moral and that no morality exists outside of that:

…[A] true Leninist does not decide whether to lie. He automatically says what is most useful, with no reflection necessary. That is why he can show no visible signs of mendacity, perhaps even pass a lie detector test. La Rochefoucauld famously said that “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue,” but a true Bolshevik is not even a hypocrite.

Read the whole thing, if you can stomach it.

[NOTE: I actually think that Orwell’s O’Brien was wrong when he said this about the Communists:

The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us [the leaders in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four] in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

I think O’Brien is describing Lenin and Leninthink as well, because Lenin did not seem to believe that they had seized power for a limited time and that the terror would come to an end.]

The Deep State hatched its plot against Trump very early, and they told us so

The New Neo Posted on by

Right after the 2016 election, I read some articles describing people in government who had decided to stay put and secretly sabotage Trump. These articles weren’t exposes written by the right; they were proud confessions from the left, part of the righteous Resistance.

We are seeing the fruit of that today.

I hadn’t noted the links to any of those articles at the time, so recently I got curious to see whether I could find one. Here’s an excerpt from one typical article of the type, published in Vanity Fair on February 1, 2017, twelve days after Trump’s inauguration [emphasis mine]:

Others, however, view resistance as a part of the job. “Policy dissent is in our culture,” one diplomat in Africa, who signed the letter circulating among foreign diplomats, told The New York Times. “We even have awards for it,” this person added, in reference to the State Department’s “Constructive Dissent” award. One Justice Department employee told the Post, “You’re going to see the bureaucrats using time to their advantage,” and added that “people here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable,” by whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complaints. Others are staying in contact with officials appointed by President Obama to learn more about how they can undermine Trump’s agenda and attending workshops on how to effectively engage in civil disobedience, the Post reports.

Let me emphasize that again: whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complains.

And then we have this, from the same article [emphasis added]:

When asked how the opposition emerging at this stage compares to past administrations, Tom Malinow­ski, who served as Obama’s assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, sarcastically told the Post, “Is it unusual? There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.”

The “nothing unusual” part was sarcasm, of course. But the rest was deadly serious. The plan was in place from the start, and it’s not some wild conspiracy-mongering to say so. This is a clandestine conspiracy, but not a completely secret one in the sense that we were told about its general thrust in advance by the proud perpetrators themselves. An interesting detail from those quotes is that “Obama officials” were apparently in charge of orchestrating this.

Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist also noticed the trend back in the beginning. She wrote the following in an article from January 17, 2017. That’s a few days before the inauguration:

Dwight Eisenhower warned that if we didn’t stay vigilant, the military-industrial complex would start creeping into politics with pernicious motives all its own. The intelligence community’s war of leaks against Trump before he’s even taken office is just the latest questionably politicized action in the decades since Eisenhower’s farewell address. And it’s safe to say that the intelligence community pushing unproven and absurd allegations about a president-elect’s sexual perversions is probably way worse than anything Ike imagined.

In order to understand how we got to this perilous place and get a handle on what’s going on, it’s worth taking a closer look at the motives and allegations of political operatives in intelligence agencies, as well as the basic timeline of allegations of Russian electoral interference in the last few months. Far from discrediting Trump, it paints a worrisome portrait of the deep state gone rogue, desperate to stop a man who, whatever his considerable flaws, is an outsider to Washington.

She then goes into a series of warnings issued to Trump to beware of ruffling the feathers of the intelligence community. The most famous one, with which you might be familiar, was issued by Chuck Schumer:

…President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

Remember, this was before Trump was inaugurated.

More:

Presidential historian Timothy Naftali said on a CNN panel that Trump should stay “silent” lest harmful information be released against him.

NeverTrumper David Frum wrote a tweet that said, “CIA message to Trump: you mess with us, get ready for a leakstorm of Biblical proportions.”

The rest of Hemingway’s article is well worth reading, despite its age. Or maybe because of its age. It’s a reminder of how many things happened very early in the game that are congruent with and basically telegraphed what would happen with Russiagate and now Whistleblowergate.

The Steele dossier and the whistleblower complaint were just the pretexts for the investigations

The New Neo Posted on by

This is what I conclude at this point.

The Steele dossier was cooked up in order to get to the FISA court, which gave the FBI the permission to expand the spying on the Trump campaign and administration. It was fake evidence to get to the fruit of the otherwise-forbidden tree.

The Ukraine phone call whistleblower report was cooked up to go all out on the current “impeachment inquiry.” The inquiry will in turn give the Democrats much more power for discovery and snooping (official power, that is, rather than the clandestine power they already have had through leaky moles in various government agencies).

Of course, once the Democrats won the House, impeachment was in the air, but Pelosi seemed to (at least in her public utterances) quash it. A lot of people felt it was because she really was more moderate than her left flank. I don’t see any moderation in Pelosi; I see practicality. I figured that her hesitation was because she thought it was politically inexpedient, and wouldn’t result in a Senate conviction, rather than any inherent reluctance to do it.

But now I believe it merely was a matter of timing. The Democrats were all in on the Mueller report, the investigation that emanated from their first plan regarding the Steele dossier. By the time the report was released in April of 2019 they had control of the House, which meant they had the power to impeach. But the Mueller report was a bitter disappointment, and what’s more they probably had known for a while that it would be.

So at some point – either April or even earlier – they had to regroup and activate Plan B. They were probably trolling around, with moles reporting to them on various possibilities, and they decided to go with the Ukraine phone call whistleblower approach. The timing of the release of that information was carefully planned, starting with some hints by Adam Schiff about a month ago, and culminating in the story a few days ago.

For a moment it may have seemed odd that the Democrats reacted so instantaneously by opening this “impeachment inquiry,” with Pelosi solemnly intoning her righteous indignation at Trump. But it is highly likely it was all ready to go (these rule changes were probably part of it), and so it’s really no mystery at all.

The Democrats also know they can count on the MSM to be fully cooperative, as they have been for a long time.

I don’t know how this will go down. The Democrats are counting on Trump’s unpopularity and the help of all their allies in the press and government (not the least of them being the NeverTrumpers). They also believe that most people don’t care about how rotten the process might be. The end justifies the means, for way too many people.

[NOTE: Here are some other reasons why I believe Pelosi has decided an impeachment drive is a good idea now.

It has become clear that the Democratic field for 2020 is terrible, and they probably would lose to Trump if he remains relatively unhindered. Impeachment does a number of things – and she doesn’t have to go through with an actual impeachment; a big inquiry might actually have the same effect. It takes energy from Trump and occupies his thoughts and the thoughts and efforts of his defenders. If he is put under a cloud, it hamstrings him with foreign leaders who don’t know how long he’ll remain in power. Democrats also were hoping for a recession, but that has started to look more and more unlikely, and the uncertainty of an impeachment process could easily drive a recession and take care of that. All of these are potential pluses for Pelosi, I think, although they are all terrible for the country.]