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.]

No, your account has NOT been suspended

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP. Scroll down for new posts.]

A lot of people are getting that message (“Your account has been suspended”) when they try to comment.

It is a glitch that has been fixed. I have no idea why it happened, but everyone was getting that message—including me! It may persist for a while because of caching. I suggest clearing your cache and if you’re on wifi you may also need to unplug and then replug in your router.

Sorry about that. Very strange, but apparently not a hack, according to my host.

After you try the cache clearing and the unplugging and replugging, you should be able to comment. If you still have problems doing so, please email me.

[ADDENDUM: Strangely enough, the long-lamented and deeply-desired edit function seems to have come out of hiding for a lot of people. Let’s hope it’s not just a cameo appearance.]

Conveniently changing the rules: blowing that second-hand whistle, hard

The New Neo Posted on by

The long-held definition of what constitutes a whistleblower seems to have been changed just in time for the hearsay/secondhand/gossip Ukainian phone call whistleblower to file his complaint.

Fancy that.

Some conspiracy-minded people think that just because the DNI suddenly changed decades-old rules which only allowed those alleging direct, first-hand witness testimony of wrongdoing to file a whistleblower complaint, to suddenly permit second-hand hearsay gossip, then that means that maybe Deep Staters at DNI changed the rules specifically to allow their coconspirator to file his second-hand hearsay gossip complaint that same week.

This all happened last month– the sudden change to stop requiring first-hand information, and then the “whistleblower,” coincidentally I’m sure!, being the first to hop on and use those changed standards to file a non-IC related complaint with the ICIG.

See this by Sean Davis:

The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.”

The internal properties of the newly revised “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form, which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed.

The complaint alleges that President Donald Trump broke the law during a phone call with the Ukrainian president. In his complaint, which was dated August 12, 2019, the complainant acknowledged he was “not a direct witness” to the wrongdoing he claims Trump committed…

“The [Intelligence Community Inspector General] cannot transmit information via the ICPWA based on an employee’s second-hand knowledge of wrongdoing,” the previous form stated under the bolded heading “FIRST-HAND INFORMATION REQUIRED.” “This includes information received from another person, such as when an employee informs you that he/she witnessed some type of wrongdoing.”

This is terrible. Even if there had been no whistleblower allegation against Trump’s Ukraine call, this sets a very dangerous precedent and allows mere gossip to become whistleblower material.

As it already has, to be used against Donald Trump.

John Solomon on Biden/Shokin/Ukraine

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote a post about whether Ukraine’s former head prosecutor Viktor Shokin, fired after the pressure from Joe Biden, was actually corrupt. I found plenty of articles alleging that he was, but not much about the substance of said corruption. One thing that’s clear is that Ukraine is a country swamped by corruption, which has also been intermittently (and apparently so far unsuccessfully) fighting corruption.

Today John Solomon has published some documents connected with the case. This is apparently the first of many such reports by Solomon. Today’s revelations center on the contention by the fired prosecutor Viktor Shokin that his firing was a response to Biden’s pressure, which was in turn was motived by Biden’s desire to protect his son Hunter.

Solomon writes:

Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents — many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles — conflict with Biden’s narrative.

And they raise the troubling prospect that U.S. officials may have painted a false picture in Ukraine that helped ease Burisma’s legal troubles and stop prosecutors’ plans to interview Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

For instance, Burisma’s American legal representatives met with Ukrainian officials just days after Biden forced the firing of the country’s chief prosecutor and offered “an apology for dissemination of false information by U.S. representatives and public figures” about the Ukrainian prosecutors, according to the Ukrainian government’s official memo of the meeting. The effort to secure that meeting began the same day the prosecutor’s firing was announced.

In addition, Burisma’s American team offered to introduce Ukrainian prosecutors to Obama administration officials to make amends, according to that memo and the American legal team’s internal emails.

The memos raise troubling questions:

1.) If the Ukraine prosecutor’s firing involved only his alleged corruption and ineptitude, why did Burisma’s American legal team refer to those allegations as “false information?”

2.) If the firing had nothing to do with the Burisma case, as Biden has adamantly claimed, why would Burisma’s American lawyers contact the replacement prosecutor within hours of the termination and urgently seek a meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case?

Ukrainian prosecutors say they have tried to get this information to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) since the summer of 2018, fearing it might be evidence of possible violations of U.S. ethics laws. First, they hired a former federal prosecutor to bring the information to the U.S. attorney in New York, who, they say, showed no interest. Then, the Ukrainians reached out to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, told Trump in July that he plans to launch his own wide-ranging investigation into what happened with the Bidens and Burisma…

Some media outlets have reported that, at the time Joe Biden forced the firing in March 2016, there were no open investigations. Those reports are wrong. A British-based investigation of Burisma’s owner was closed down in early 2015 on a technicality when a deadline for documents was not met. But the Ukraine Prosecutor General’s office still had two open inquiries in March 2016, according to the official case file provided me. One of those cases involved taxes; the other, allegations of corruption. Burisma announced the cases against it were not closed and settled until January 2017.

After I first reported it in a column, the New York Times and ABC News published similar stories confirming my reporting…

In a newly sworn affidavit prepared for a European court, Shokin testified that when he was fired in March 2016, he was told the reason was that Biden was unhappy about the Burisma investigation. “The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,” Shokin testified.

“On several occasions President Poroshenko asked me to have a look at the case against Burisma and consider the possibility of winding down the investigative actions in respect of this company but I refused to close this investigation,” Shokin added.

Shokin certainly would have reason to hold a grudge over his firing. But his account is supported by documents from Burisma’s legal team in America, which appeared to be moving into Ukraine with intensity as Biden’s effort to fire Shokin picked up steam.

There’s way way too much to quote; you’ll just have to read the whole thing. But it is deeply troubling.

And it’s also troubling that most people in this country will probably never look at it.

Please also read this article on the subject by Mary Chastain at Legal Insurrection, which also contains Shokin’s statement.

The whistleblower is Christopher Steele 2.0

The New Neo Posted on by

John Hinderaker at Powerline writes:

…I am starting to think the Ukraine matter may have been orchestrated just as fully as the Steele dossier/Russia collusion hoax…

We now know that the “whistleblower” had nothing, just as Christopher Steele had nothing. His complaint consists of rumor and hearsay that turned out to be wrong. But, just as it didn’t matter that Steele’s dossier was nonsense, it hasn’t mattered that the “whistleblower’s” complaint was inaccurate, and perhaps fabricated out of whole cloth. It nevertheless serves the Democrats’ purposes.

It seems obvious that the Democrats have been planning for a while to proceed with impeachment against President Trump. I infer this from the fact that almost immediately after Nancy Pelosi announced publicly that House committees would proceed with impeachment inquiries, Democratic politicians of all kinds were sending out emails that recited nearly identical talking points and concluded with the assertion that President Trump must be impeached–not investigated, but impeached. This was not just a Nancy Pelosi operation, it was coordinated by the Democratic Party more broadly….

The Democrats pretend to believe the whistleblower just as they pretended to believe Steele, even though in both cases, there is clear evidence that the claims against Trump are false.

No matter: the Steele dossier was used as the pretext to fraudulently obtain FISA warrants to spy on the Trump presidential campaign and the Trump team post-election, while the already-refuted Ukraine complaint is nevertheless the pretext for beginning impeachment proceedings.

I think this is absolutely correct. It explains, for example, the speed of Pelosi’s actions re impeachment. It also explains the nearly-monolithic refusal of the MSM to cover the story properly.

I may have missed it, but did a single Democrat criticize Schiff’s little performance yesterday in which he falsely “paraphrased” Trump’s call and then, when criticized by Republicans, stated that it was a parody? I have never seen such behavior in a hearing of that type, and it is part and parcel of the same disinformation campaign.