Ratcliffe confirmed…

The New Neo Posted on by

…as director of national intelligence.

That’s a role that’s been rather in the news lately, isn’t it?

Here’s a take on it from the Guardian that almost made me laugh: “Trump loyalist John Ratcliffe confirmed as new US intelligence chief.”

“Trump loyalist” – how shocking, that Trump might choose someone on his side. When the Democrats do it, they are just electing sober, non-partisan patriots.

Democrats allowed a quick vote on the nomination this week, dropping their usual procedural delays in a signal that they prefer Ratcliffe over Grenell. But most Democrats still opposed his nomination, making Ratcliffe the first DNI not to win broad bipartisan support since the position was first created in 2005. The vote was 49-44.

Democrats said they were skeptical that Ratcliffe would be an independent leader, despite his assurances during his confirmation hearing. The Republican has been an ardent defender of the president through House impeachment and investigations into Russian interference.

The Democrats can’t wait to get Grennell out of there.

Sullivan’s crusade against Flynn: about that perjury charge

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATE: Please see ADDENDUM below.]

First General Flynn was set up by the Obama administration and the FBI. The FBI already knew from their investigations that he was not guilty of any wrongdoing regarding Russia, but they nevertheless set a trap to interrogate him and charge him with lying to the FBI.

Lying to the FBI is not perjury, not technically anyway; it’s a special crime. It’s also a strange crime in that not only does there not have to be a conviction on any primary crime about which the person is lying – and in Flynn’s case there was no such crime and what’s more the FBI knew there was no such crime – but in that it also relies on a record that depends wholly on the FBI agents’ integrity in reporting on what the person has told them. There is no way to independently corroborate the word of the interrogator, and no record other than the one he/she generates by writing down a 302 form about what happened.

In Flynn’s case, the outrages of the government were multiple and serious. Here are some: (1) not telling Flynn he was a target in the interview (2) telling him he didn’t need a lawyer (3) interrogating him about a phone call for which they already had a transcript, and not telling him about that transcript – which means they had no need to question him at all about the call and the entire thing was a trap to accuse him of lying if he differed in any way from the transcript (4) threatening to prosecute his son if he didn’t plead guilty (5) threatening him with the Logan Act, a law under which no one in 200 years has been prosecuted, and which was especially inappropriate for Flynn because he was an official of the incoming government and had a right to talk to foreign officials.

And that’s just the prosecution. There were also offenses by Flynn’s lawyers, and by Judge Sullivan, who suggested in court that Flynn was guilty of treason, and ended up having to apologize to Flynn. And now, of course, the fact that Sullivan has ignored the DOJ withdrawal from the case and stated request to drop it, and appears to have been intent on starting a new quasi-trial for perjury, which was never part of the original charges.

So Flynn has been the victim of multiple miscarriages of justice from multiple parties, really too numerous to mention in this short summary.

Why am I writing another post on this? A few more things came out earlier today in the comments section, and I wanted to expand on some remarks I made there.

First I want to reiterate this SCOTUS (Ginsburg) ruling: “[Judges] wait for cases to come to [them], and when [cases arise, courts] normally decide only questions presented by the parties.” If the party prosecuting a criminal case says “no” to the prosecution and/or sentencing, the judge is supposed to comply. In this case, as we know, Sullivan is not doing so.

Perjury is a legal term that is ordinarily about a lie concerning a statement of fact made under oath. I have never – literally never – heard of a person being charged with perjury for changing a plea. And yet pleas are changed every day. In this case, the plea was originally made because of prosecutor malfeasance and coercion and threats. The original prosecutors and/or investigators should be punished for that, not the defendant.

A plea is usually not subject to a perjury charge. Ordinarily, a plea is entered while the defendant is not under oath, so there is usually no question of charging him/her with perjury. However, in the Flynn case – in which the judge is clearly prejudiced against Flynn, as his bizarre rant about “treason” proved – the judge did something in addition that is apparently odd. That link I just gave is to an author who rails against “right-wing talking points” and appears to approve of Sullivan. But he also made the following telling statement about what happened back then (a year and a half ago, at the same hearing where Judge Sullivan was talking about Flynn having possibly committed treason) [emphasis mine]:

[Judge] Sullivan tore into Flynn and his lawyers. He almost bizarrely put Flynn under oath before demanding that he admit his guilt and deny all the right-wing talking points which have recently been repeated by the president himself. He forced Flynn to admit that he knew he was wrong to lie to the FBI and that there had been no misconduct in how his interviews were conducted. He acknowledged that any possible wrongdoing then-Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and counterintelligence official Peter Strzok may have committed in other areas had no bearing on his responsibility to be truthful to federal agents.

Judge Sullivan openly questioned whether Flynn could have been charged with treason for operating as an undeclared agent of a foreign power while serving as National Security Advisor, suggested that Flynn had dishonored the flag that was displayed in the courtroom, and said “arguably you sold your country out.”

Note that even this writer – who hates Flynn and the right and agrees with Sullivan – appears to think that what the judge did in making Flynn admit his guilt under oath (during a sentencing hearing, if I’m not mistaken) was bizarre. Was it? Why did Sullivan do that? Was it another perjury trap? Was it the judge’s attempt to make it impossible for Flynn to withdraw that plea without being subject to a possible perjury charge? Did it violate a rule against self-incrimination? Was the judge acting as a prosecutor here? Did Flynn’s lawyers object?

And how unusual was this behavior on the part of Judge Sullivan? I have done a lot of searching for further discussion about the “swearing under oath” aspect of that day, but so far (and frustratingly) I haven’t been able to find any additional discussion of this supposedly “bizarre” behavior from Sullivan. At the time (December of 2018), MSM and blog coverage concentrated on Sullivan’s suggestion that Flynn was guilty of treason, a comment that was way out of line and showed not only prejudice but emotional instability (and ignorance of the law and the facts of the case) from the bench. But at present, I am more concerned with the forcing of Flynn to reaffirm his guilty plea under oath, and I have no idea how usual or unusual this is, although I am under the impression it may be highly unusual.

Again, I appeal to lawyers out there who might be more conversant with this than I am. Do you have any insight to add on the matter? I’m not a trial lawyer and never was, and any specific information I might have on the subject of the usual trial practice in this regard is long outdated, as well.

Here’s what Flynn has said more recently (January, 2020) on the matter of his December 2018 reaffirmation of guilt (under oath) in Sullivan’s court:

Flynn in his filing Wednesday said it was a mistake to confirm his guilty plea before Sullivan in his first sentencing hearing in 2018.

“Regretfully, I followed my lawyers’ strong advice to confirm my plea even though it was all I could do to not cry out ‘no’ when this Court asked me if I was guilty,” Flynn wrote.

Not only were Flynn’s original prosecutors and investigators out to frame him, but his defense attorneys were compromised as well, and the judge was vengeful and may have been setting a trap too. The situation Flynn has been put in is outrageous.

[NOTE: See also this for more background.]

[ADDENDUM: I think I’ve got it mostly sorted out now.

From some of the answers I’ve gotten in the comments, I don’t think Sullivan’s putting Flynn under oath in his sentencing hearing was unusual or “bizarre,” and don’t know why the author of that article at Washington Monthly would have characterized it that way, although I certainly think the judge’s outburst about “treason” was bizarre.

But the reason Sullivan can’t get Flynn for perjury for pleading guilty can be found here. I suggest you read the whole thing, but the gist of it is that Sullivan can’t charge anyone with perjury, only contempt of court. In this case, the confusion came from the fact that Sullivan has said he is considering charging Flynn with criminal contempt for perjury. That is not the same thing as perjury, and perjury is not a grounds for criminal contempt. Here’s the important part:

The controlling legal authority from the Supreme Court holds that contempt power cannot be used to punish people for making statements, even under oath, that the judge deems false…

…[A]ny actual prosecution of Flynn under federal statutes for perjury would have to be brought by the Department of Justice…

The federal criminal code specifically recognizes a court’s contempt authority. Section 401 of the federal criminal code provides that a federal court can punish contempt of its authority, consisting of misbehavior in its presence that obstructs the administration of justice…

The Supreme Court held that to convict the witness of contempt for alleged perjury, “there must be added to the essential elements of perjury … the further element of obstruction to the court in the performance of its duty.” …

The D.C. Circuit, which sits over Sullivan, has reinforced the Hudgings limitation and emphasized that “actual, not theoretical, obstruction is the test, and that any claimed obstruction must be proven precisely.”…

Flynn’s statements in connection with his plea did not obstruct the court in the performance of its duty. Thus, they simply cannot constitute contempt of court under long-standing precedent. Sullivan should therefore not embark on any contempt proceeding. Doing so would be a misuse of his contempt power.

But hey, why shouldn’t Sullivan join the club? Power has been misused against Flynn from the start, over and over again.]

DeSantis vs. Cuomo: the coverage is the thing

The New Neo Posted on by

The MSM has it backwards, of course:

A couple of months ago, the media, almost as one, decided that Governor Ron DeSantis was a public menace who was going to get Floridians killed with his lax response to the coronavirus crisis.

In an interview with National Review, DeSantis says he was surprised at “how knee-jerk” the hostile coverage was, but he “also knew that none of these people knew anything about Florida at all, so I didn’t care what they were saying.”…

DeSantis and his team have followed the science closely from the beginning, which is why they forged a nuanced approach, but one that focused like a laser on the most vulnerable population, those in nursing homes.

Good for him. Smart man, as well as brave.

In contrast:

…[A}t the same time DeSantis was being made into a villain, New York governor Andrew Cuomo was being elevated as a hero, even though the DeSantis approach to nursing homes was obviously superior to that of Cuomo. Florida went out of its way to get COVID-19-positive people out of nursing homes, while New York went out of its way to get them in, a policy now widely acknowledged to have been a debacle.

The media didn’t exactly have their eyes on the ball. “The day that the media had their first big freakout about Florida was March 15th,” DeSantis recalls, “which was, there were people on Clearwater Beach, and it was this big deal. That same day is when we signed the executive order to, one, ban visitation in the nursing homes, and two, ban the reintroduction of a COVID-positive patient back into a nursing home.”

DeSantis is bemused by the obsession with Florida’s beaches. When they opened in Jacksonville, it was a big national story, usually relayed with a dire tone. “Jacksonville has almost no COVID activity outside of a nursing-home context,” he says. “Their hospitalizations are down, ICU down since the beaches opened a month ago. And yet, nobody talks about it. It’s just like, ‘Okay, we just move on to the next target.’”

The MSM now reminds me of fortune-tellers and astrologers, as well as those guys with “end of the world is nigh” placards who used to be the butt of this sort of joke. Their predictions are repeatedly false, and yet they just ignore that and go on to make new (false) predictions.

The MSM also brings this to mind:

Susan Rice and the memo: the lady doth protest too much, methinks

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve known for a long time that Susan Rice wrote a strange CYA memo on Inauguration Day that said President Obama:

…wanted to be sure “every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book.’”

The “issue” was Russian interference in the 2016 election, the investigation of Michael Flynn, and what to tell the incoming Trump administration about all of this.

Now we have what purports to be the full and unredacted memo, and today Rice is reported to have added this:

As Ace says:

Everyone knows that note-to-self CYA emails you write at the direction of a lawyer, weeks after the event allegedly being memorialized, is the Gold Standard as regards candor and truthfulness.

Right?

Ace’s sarcasm is highly justified.

My opinion? Guilt or innocence isn’t judged by memos like this, which are the equivalent of someone saying “We did everything just right.” Look at the actions, not the self-serving words. This is true of everyone, right or left or in-between.

The actions of the Obama administration and various agency officials (Comey, etc.) in this matter are highly irregular and extremely suspect in too many ways to list here. Obama, as president, apparently had a fair amount of knowledge of it. Whether or not he directed the finer points, or whether he allowed the lower-downs to do their dirty deeds knowing he could trust them to hurt the Trump administration maximally – but wanted to protect himself from the sort of specific knowledge and involvement that might implicate him too heavily – is unknown. It probably will never be known, because it’s not as though Obama wrote a memo to himself saying “I told Comey to lie to Flynn and to leak to the press…”

And calling something a “conspiracy theory” is merely a description, although it’s a description that carries a lot of baggage. Many conspiracy theories are preposterous. Some are correct, because you know what? Conspiracies do exist.

There is plenty of evidence now that there was a conspiracy – and a mostly successful one, at least until now – to taint Trump falsely as “Putin’s puppet,” to hector and threaten and legally abuse some of his confederates and family in hopes that they will implicate him (falsely, if necessary), to leak classified information to the press in order to harm him, and to set the (false) grounds to impeach him and/or hamper his re-election.

What role Obama played is unclear and may always remain unclear. That is by design.

But I think the “book” Rice was talking about was actually written by Alinsky or perhaps Machiavelli. And it’s only by a series of accidents – in combination with the fact that the GOP is still in charge of the Senate and the AG position – that the plotters have been exposed.

[NOTE: The title of this post is a reference to this passage from “Hamlet.”]

Politics is getting to me, so sometimes I watch this sort of thing

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night I had trouble sleeping, thinking about what’s going on. It’s not just the Russiagate/Obamagate events, or COVID. It’s the brazen duplicity of the reporting around them, and my despair at the fact that so many people are influenced by that. Can they ever be reached, or have their opinions so solidified that no evidence could convince them? I fear the latter.

So here’s something completely different, utterly non-political. This is a guy who has a series on YouTube, discussing singing and playing popular (as opposed to classical) music, mostly from the past.

He’s long-winded, and you don’t have to listen to the whole thing. In fact, I can’t say I understand everything he’s saying. But I think he’s fascinating nevertheless, and I like his genial personality. I never knew that singing had so many complexities to it. Singing isn’t something at which I’m at all skilled, so it’s easy to impress me, and I’m ignorant about technique.

Here’s an example of one of his videos. He’s analyzing Frankie Valli’s performance:

And now I’m going outside to walk.

J’Accuse: Judge Sullivan marches on and invents his own judicial procedures

The New Neo Posted on by

I cannot state strongly enough how unmoored these actions are from the ordinary safeguards our legal system has attempted to provide defendants:

In the case against Michael Flynn the court appointed amicus curiae, essentially a court appointed outside lawyer enlisted to prosecute the case despite the DOJ withdrawal motion, John Gleeson has now filed a motion requesting: (1) a briefing schedule, (2) oral arguments; and (3) the possibility of interviewing witnesses.

It is true that, as described there, John Gleeson is indeed acting as a “court appointed outside lawyer enlisted to prosecute the case despite the DOJ withdrawal motion.” But that is the “unprecedented” part. An amicus curiae does not have that function. You can read this article by Andrew C. McCarthy on how odd it was that Sullivan would ask for amicus briefs in this case, and that was before Gleeson was appointed and it became clear the plan was that he was going to act as a sort of junior judge in a new trial, or at least new discovery for a new trial under new charges (perjury for withdrawing a plea, another previously unheard-of charge). Also please take a look at this article about a recent unanimous SCOTUS ruling that Sullivan is flouting here:

In a nutshell, this concept dictates that judges must decide the case as presented by the parties before them. They are not to go out questing for dragons to slay (or issues to tackle) that the parties have not brought before them. As J. Ginsburg put it: “[C]ourts are essentially passive instruments of government … They ‘do not, or should not, sally forth each day looking for wrongs to right. [They] wait for cases to come to [them], and when [cases arise, courts] normally decide only questions presented by the parties.”

The Conservative Treehouse author of that first article I linked, “sundance,” starts out by saying “This is so far outside the bounds of traditional judicial activity it is unprecedented.” Indeed. But although I also looked at a number of “straight” news articles on the move by Sullivan and Gleeson (the latter of whom had already signaled his anti-Flynn stance in an op-ed written before his appointment), none of them even mentioned the unusual nature of the proceedings.

Meanwhile, Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell had this announcement:

The text of the petition can be found here.

Someone compared this to the Dreyfus case. Just now, looking for who it might have been, I Googled “Michael Flynn is the new Dreyfus,” and got nothing whatsoever that’s relevant. DuckDuckGo gave me this article in fairly short order. It’s from May 8, so the author Gary Spina wasn’t yet aware of Judge Sullivan’s “creative” way of dealing with the DOJ’s decision not to continue with the action, but he says this:

As in the Dreyfus Affair, the prosecutors themselves were the treacherous villains. In the Flynn Affair, Deep State traitors attempted to overthrown a lawfully elected United States president and his administration…

Similarly, Captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 was falsely accused and a court martial found him guilty of treason. Perhaps his real crime was being a Jew in antisemitic France. Dreyfus was found guilty based on the tenuous evidenced of a handwriting comparison on scraps of paper (the bordereau) and a letter addressed to a German military attaché in Paris promising to furnish secret documents. In 1896, evidence was discovered that a Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was the real traitor, but the authorities suppressed the evidence. Mathieu Dreyfus, Alfred’s brother discovered exculpatory evidence, and public outcry resulted in a second military trial. But in 1899, the second military court found Dreyfus guilty. Emile Zola’s famous article “J’accuse” accused the authorities of framing Dreyfus. Zola was found guilty of libel and sentenced to prison but escaped to England. The public outcry was such that French President Loubet pardoned Dreyfus, but only after Dreyfus was broken in body and spirit by the harsh treatment he received at the infamous Devil’s Island prison.

Both the Flynn Affair and the Dreyfus Affair exposed the deep corruption that will forever stain the history of the Washington establishment and France’s Third Republic. Still, some good may result from exposing this tyranny. Hopefully the FBI will be disbanded, the FISA Court stripped of its autonomy and strictly regulated, the IRS declawed and defanged, entrenched bureaucrats subject to firing for malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance, and the Intelligence Agencies swept clean of schemers and traitors.

Ha, ha; dream on. I suppose I shouldn’t be so pessimistic, but that’s where I’m at right now, and unfortunately I think my pessimism is fully justified.

You might also say that Flynn’s legal experience has been Kafkaesque. But there’s also the competing narrative – Alice in Wonderland:

`But what did the Dormouse say?’ one of the jury asked.

`That I can’t remember,’ said the Hatter.

`You must remember,’ remarked the King, `or I’ll have you executed.’

`Are they in the prisoner’s handwriting?’ asked another of they jurymen.

`No, they’re not,’ said the White Rabbit, `and that’s the queerest thing about it.’ (The jury all looked puzzled.)

`He must have imitated somebody else’s hand,’ said the King. (The jury all brightened up again.)

`Please your Majesty,’ said the Knave, `I didn’t write it, and they can’t prove I did: there’s no name signed at the end.’

`If you didn’t sign it,’ said the King, `that only makes the matter worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like an honest man.’

There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever thing the King had said that day.

`That proves his guilt,’ said the Queen.

[NOTE: From Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection.]

Inauguration Day, 2017: your public servants in the Obama administration continually working for you, down to the last possible minute

The New Neo Posted on by

Right up to the morning of Inauguration Day 2017. So dedicated!

Most people are not even aware of this, because the MSM doesn’t cover it for the most part, and when they do it’s to act as though such behavior is normal. It’s not even remotely normal, and in fact I’d wager nothing like it has ever happened before. Surveilling the incoming first family? Surveilling the new administration in the waning minutes of the old administration? It should shock and outrage everyone.

But even if it were to be made crystal clear that it was completely abnormal, the MSM will continue to pretend it’s either normal, or justified in this case because the Trumps are all in league with Russia.
That’s how lies work – they feed on each other to form a seamless whole that offers an excuse for every offense.

The next thing I’m going to mention might seem to be a side issue, but it’s not. Last night I had heard something about the Obama administration unmasking people on Inauguration Day, and also about unmasking the Trump family (not clear when that happened), but I didn’t know the details. So I tried to Google it today, in an effort to get more information. I did a search just now for “obama unmasked trump family inauguration day.” The first article listed was this one from Fox, a very general announcement from five days ago about the release of the basic unmasking information, and expressing a neutral attitude and the idea that only Republicans are interested in this (and I guess, in a way, that’s the case).

The second article in the Google search was this one from NBC entitled “Trump allies push ‘Obamagate,’ but record fails to back them up: Trump and his supporters have charged that Barack Obama and Joe Biden conspired against Michael Flynn, but there’s no hard evidence to support the claims.” Not exactly responsive to my query, to say the least. But apparently it’s the sort of thing Google wishes readers to see. In fact, the entire first two pages of Google’s listings in that search are the tales told by the left, and it isn’t till I got to the bottom of page 2 that I found the first pro-Trump source (this).

And none of the Googled articles were actually responsive to my query, whether they were anti-Trump (the vast majority) or pro.

The list makes clear that Google’s algorithm yields the stories the left wishes to push. Google will say, of course, that the algorithm is based on something entirely different than that goal. But it clearly works that way and there is no reason to imagine it is not intentional, as well as useful for the left. It also is much less specific than it used to be in pointing the reader to articles relevant to his/her search, whether they be from left or right.

In contrast, DuckDuckGo is spot on. Here’s the search I did there. You can see for yourself (although of course it will change over time) that the list is specific to my quest. I only have looked at the first 10 articles, but that’s enough. They are all about Trey Gowdy’s interview or about things connected with what was revealed, and highly relevant. There were plenty of sources on the right – of course, because the story is only being reported on the right, as far as I can tell.

That’s no surprise either. The coverage of this one little fact stands as a good example of the coverage as a whole. I talk a lot about the press here, and there’s a reason for that – and the search engine Google has become part of the press. In terms of numbers, the influence of the MSM and things like Google’s algorithm have an enormous effect on public perceptions.

The polls might say that people don’t trust the press, but it doesn’t matter. It’s like advertising – the propaganda influences people whether they are aware of it or not. And if they don’t hear about a story, if it can’t even be found on Google despite pointed effort, it’s like that tree falling in an uninhabited forest.

NY Governor Cuomo: that’s life – and death

The New Neo Posted on by

From Stephen Green at Instapundit:

See also this:

In March, as Cuomo and his braintrust were running about like beheaded chickens shouting about models and Italy, his administration issued an order that required nursing homes to accept hospital patients recovering from Wuhan virus even if those patients were still contagious. The ostensible reason was moving recovering patients to nursing homes freed up hospital beds to treat the Wuhan created carnage. The problem, of course, was that a) there was no great influx of patients, b) nursing homes, already struggling with problems related to infections, were monumentally unsuited to caring for possibly contagious patients, and c) nursing homes are packed with the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. When challenged, this is how Cuomo responded:

“They don’t have a right to object. That is the rule and that is the regulation, and they have to comply with that”…

It was not hard to have predicted the outcome. In fact, it was simplicity itself. Nursing home patients were already known to be especially vulnerable to dying from COVID.

That was then. This is Cuomo now:

…I have those conversations all day long, with people who’ve lost people, right? We lost 139 people yesterday in hospitals. Who is accountable for those 139 deaths? How do we get justice for those families who had 139 deaths? What is justice? Who can we prosecute for those deaths? Nobody. Nobody. Mother Nature? God? Where did this virus come from? People are going to die by this virus. That is the truth. Best hospital system on the globe, I believe we have. Best doctors, best nurses, who have responded like heroes. Every medication, ventilators, the health system wants for nothing. We worked it out so we always had available beds. No one was deprived of a medical bed or coverage in any way. And still people died. Still people died. Older people, vulnerable people, are going to die from this virus. That is going to happen. Despite whatever you do. Because with all of our progress as a society, we can’t keep everyone alive. Despite everything you do. And older people are more vulnerable. And that is a fact and that is not going to change…Why do people die? Who is accountable?

Party of science, folks.

Let me explain it to Governor Cuomo: Yes, some people in nursing homes would have died anyway. But your actions – yours – caused more of them to die than otherwise would have succumbed. Are you seriously saying that purposely placing COVID patients in nursing homes, forcing the nursing homes to accept them whether they felt protections were or were not adequate, did not increase the number of deaths by a significant amount? Are you stark raving mad, stupid, merely self-serving, or all of the above?

And here’s a song in honor of Cuomo, who also said: “you’re gonna lose people, that’s life…We did everything we could.” Everything you could to what? Hasten their deaths?

Jonathan Turley: on the MSM ignoring/hiding Obamagate

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not easy to write clearly and succinctly about the outrages that have been going on for the past couple of years that have been given various inadequate nicknames: “Russiagate,” “Spygate,” and now – with an emphasis on the role of the previous administration – “Obamagate” or the more comprehensive “ObamaBidengate.”

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed. I’m not saying that to get sympathy, it’s just a statement of fact. It takes many hours to even follow the news each day, much less write about it and write about it clearly. The entire story so far is both horrifying and fascinating. So learning about it engenders several competing emotions at once: extreme interest and strong repulsion and outrage, a sort of approach-avoidance dilemma at reading about it at all.

Amidst the turmoil, I especially admire those who can write about it in a way that’s easy to understand, compact, and yet relatively comprehensive, knowing that it would take a several-volume book to cover it all. And it’s even better if that person is not just parroting the party line he or she wishes were true.

One of those rare people is Jonathan Turley – not a Trump fan, not a conservative, but someone who seems to be more than willing to face the truth. This piece by Turley points out how rare a trait that is. I suggest you read the whole thing, but here are a few excerpts:

For three years, many in the media have expressed horror at the notion of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election. We know there was never credible evidence of such collusion. In recently released transcripts, a long list of Obama administration officials admitted they never saw any evidence of such Russian collusion. That included the testimony of Evelyn Farkas, a former White House adviser who was widely quoted by the media with her public plea for Congress to gather all of the evidence that she learned of as part of the Obama administration.

The media covered her concern that this evidence would be lost “if they found out how we knew what we knew” about Trump campaign officials “dealing with Russians.” Yet in her classified testimony under oath, she said she did not know anything. Farkas is now running for Congress in New York and highlighting her role in raising “alarm” over collusion. As much of the media blindly pushed this story, a worrying story unfolded over the use of federal power to investigate political opponents.

There is very little question that the response by the media to such a story would have been overwhelming if George Bush and his administration had targeted the Obama campaign figures with secret surveillance. That story would have been encompassing if it was learned that there was no direct evidence to justify the investigation and that the underlying allegation of Russian collusion was ultimately found to lack a credible basis.

But the motives of Obama administration officials are apparently not to be questioned. Indeed, back when candidate Donald Trump said the Obama administration placed his campaign officials under surveillance, the media universally mocked him. That statement was later proven to be true. The Obama administration used the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to conduct surveillance of Trump campaign officials.

Yet none of this matters as the media remains fully invested in the original false allegations of collusion. If Obama administration officials were to be questioned now, the coverage and judgment of the media may be placed into question, as even this latest disclosure from the investigation of the unmasking request of Biden will not alter the media narrative.

Actually, nothing will alter the media narrative.

Masks are a good example of why we don’t trust scientists or experts anymore

The New Neo Posted on by

First they say that masks are worthless. Don’t wear them, even though medical personnel do.

Then they say that masks might be at at least somewhat helpful, but not all that helpful unless they are of the N95 type that only health care professionals have access to because there are not enough for the general population, too.

Then many local tyrants officials require us to wear the relatively inadequate cloth masks when outside the home, or suffer arrest and/or fines.

And through all these recommendation changes, it doesn’t appear that the empirical evidence regarding mask-wearing and COVID has changed all that much.

NOTE: Have you noticed that the word “mask” is featured heavily in the news lately, in two guises? The first is the medical mask, as in this post. And the second has to do with unmaskings, a term of art in government spying.

Progressives and progress

The New Neo Posted on by

From commenter “Snow on Pine”:

…[The left adheres to] the idea that, as our knowledge and capabilities have grown, our human nature has also changed–evolved–and that over the last 250 or so years our basic human nature has undergone some kind of “fundamental transformation,” one which requires that we be governed by new principles and a vastly modified and expanded Constitution; one more suited to our new enlightened views, needs, and behaviors.

I, on the other hand, would argue that while the means to achieve our ends have changed, expanded, and grown—as have some of those ends—our basic needs, drives, and motives, what directs us, our basic human nature, has not changed, nor can it (absent some ill-considered and catastrophic “fundamental transformation” of the genetic basis of our nature as human beings), and that the Constitution that was crafted to govern us then, is the same Constitution that we need to govern us now, because our basic nature and fundamental needs, motives, and behaviors have not changed.

That made me think of this older post, featuring some quotes from Allan Bloom that I had written down after listening to a recording of a Bloom lecture from the mid-80s. I lost the link to the recording and couldn’t provide it then, and I can’t provide it now, either. But here’s the relevant portion of the post:

I had tried to transcribe [Bloom’s words] faithfully, complete with hesitations and idiosyncrasies and audience reaction. Bloom—whom I’ve written about before several times, mostly in the context of discussing his wonderful and highly-recommended book The Closing of the American Mind, was a professor of philosophy for most of his life. He was exceedingly familiar with the outlook of university students, primarily in America but also in Europe. Note that what he said back then describes trends that have only intensified since:

“You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad? There were slaves, there were kings—I don’t think there’s a single student who reads the history of England and doesn’t say that that was crazy. You know ‘that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on,’ but they’re not open to those things because they know that that was crazy. I mean, the latest transformation of history is as a history of the enslavement of women, which means to say that it was all crazy—up till now.

“Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves—how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past…Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world. [laughter] We have set up standards of normalcy while speaking of cultural relativism, but there is no question that we think we understand what cultures are, and what kind of mistakes they make.”

Bloom nailed it, about thirty-five years ago.

And meanwhile, progressives are blind to, or adamantly in favor of, the evil they themselves commit.