Ukraine and corruption and US influence

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I became interested in the question of just how corrupt the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was – the man Joe Biden bragged about pressuring the Ukrainian government to fire. That’s because it is at least possible that Joe Biden’s pressure to fire the prosecutor was a bona fide exercise of US government policy due to that corruption – although it would still remain suspicious because it serves the financial interests of his son, who already appears to be enriching himself from connections related to his father’s position rather than any skills that son may possess.

The search led me deeper and deeper into the complex politics and exceedingly murky atmosphere of Ukraine, where corruption seems to be so widespread you can’t tell who’s who or what’s what, and the good guys are hard to find. Continue reading →

Sean Davis puts the pieces together: “whistleblower” plus leaks plus media plus Adam Schiff plus…

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “sdferr.”]

In one of today’s posts I wrote: “This time they decided to go the ‘whistleblower’ route instead of the ‘leak to the Times‘ route, just to add variety and supposed gravitas.”

And that was true, as far as it went. But it didn’t go far enough.

Sean Davis went further, in this Twitter thread. The m.o. he describes may start to sound rather familiar:

Adam Schiff was tweeting out allegations from the rumor-mongering anti-Trump leaker’s complaint while claiming that he didn’t have access to the complaint.

The complaint was addressed to Schiff on August 12, 2019. This tweet is from August 28, 2019: “Trump is withholding vital military aid to Ukraine, while his personal lawyer seeks help from the Ukraine government to investigate his political opponent.”

And which media propagandist did Schiff use as a prop to hide the true source of his allegations? One of Fusion GPS’s favorite stenographers of discredited Steele-esque innuendo: Natasha Bertrand.

The whole thing has been a Fusion GPS-style info op from the very beginning.

Schiff and his allies even stovepiped information in the same manner as during the collusion hoax: they leak claims to compliant media, media runs with claims, then leakers point to the media reports they seeded as proof of their allegations. They started back in May.

And surprise! The anti-Trump leaker cited as proof of corruption in his complaint the very same articles that Schiff and his allies quite obviously seeded to form the narrative they desired.

This raises the troubling question of whether Schiff orchestrated the complaint.

This pattern of behavior from Schiff, his “whistleblower,” and their media allies makes it all the more necessary for the anti-Trump complainant to publicly testify under oath and answer questions about his team’s interactions w/ media and Democrat lawmakers about his complaint.

And lest anyone forget, Adam Schiff and Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson have a long history of working together in this fashion. Recall that Schiff and Simpson, who perjured himself in congressional testimony, secretly met together in Aspen.

ADDENDUM: Much more in that vein can be found here:

In the lengthy [Twitter]thread, [former CIA analyst] Fleitz first points out that the whistleblower’s intent is clearly political based on the language in the given text and that he/she should never have had knowledge of the July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky.

“As a former CIA analyst and former NSC official who edited transcripts of POTUS phone calls with foreign leaders, here are my thoughts on the whistleblower complaint which was just released,” begins Fleitz. “This is not an intelligence matter. It is a policy matter and a complaint about differences over policy. Presidential phone calls are not an intelligence concern. The fact that IC officers transcribe these calls does not give the IC IG jurisdiction over these calls. It appears that rules restricting access and knowledge of these sensitive calls was breached. This official was not on this call, not on the approved dissem list and should not have been briefed on the call.”

Fleitz goes on to say that the “whistleblower” clearly had help in authoring the report and wondered if he spoke to House Intelligence Committee members beforehand.

“The way this complaint was written suggested the author had a lot of help. I know from my work on the House Intel Commitee staff that many whistleblowers go directly to the intel oversight committees. Did this whistleblower first meet with House Intel committee members?” ponders Fleitz. “It is therefore important that Congress find out where this complaint came from. What did House and Senate intel committee dem members and staff know about it and when? Did they help orchestrate this complaint?”

“My view is that this whistleblower complaint is too convenient and too perfect to come from a typical whistleblower,” he continues. “Were other IC officers involved? Where outside groups opposed to the president involved?”…

“This complaint will further damage IC relations with the White House for many years to come because IC officers appear to be politicizing presidential phone calls with foreign officials and their access to the president and his activities in the White House,” says Fleitz. “Worst of all, this IC officer — and probably others — have blatantly crossed the line into policy. This violates a core responsibility of IC officers is to inform, but not make policy. This is such a grievous violation of trust between the IC and the White House that it would not surprise me if IC officers are barred from all access to POTUS phone calls with foreign officials.”

It really just gets worse and worse for the Democrats, although they rely on the supposition that their buddies in the MSM will not be covering this part of the story any time soon.

What superpower does Trump have?

The New Neo Posted on by

You know that game people sometimes play? The one where you choose which superpower you’d want?

Sometimes the choices are limited, such as in this typical group: “Telepathy, teleportation, super-strength, invisibility or the ability to regenerate your cells.”

But I’ve never seen a list that includes the one Donald Trump seems to possess, which is the ability to drive your enemies crazy and make them do stupid things.

We first saw this in evidence, at least somewhat, during the 2016 campaign. The Republican challengers were surprisingly flat-footed against him. And since his election we’ve seen it over and over and over with Democrats, the press, and NeverTrumpers.

I think what’s going on is twofold. The first is that Trump is very very different from their usual opponents. He’s unpredictable. He hits below the belt and above the belt. Whatever he does, they don’t see it coming.

But the second is that they really truly are convinced that he is the crazy stupid one. Therefore, if they can just rile him enough, he’ll reveal this unequivocally to the world. Plus, he’s not just crazy and stupid, he’s also corrupt, and so – like the boy in the joke about shoveling manure in the barn because he knows there must be a pony somewhere – they know that if they just dig and dig and dig they will find the pony that will sink Trump. This is not a pose on their part; they believe it.

The whistleblower who wasn’t

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, well, well. Not a whistleblower, just a person who heard a couple of people describe something about which they may or may not have had first-hand knowledge. And as we know from the transcript of the call plus the whistleblower complaint, these people mischaracterized that “something.”

You can find the “whistleblower” document here.

This won’t stop the Democrats and the press from going on and on with this, at least for a while. There’s Adam Schiff, for example, making stuff up, as well as promising “to protect the courageous whistleblower.”

Sure Adam, sure. You do that. The “courageous whistleblower” who was found to be biased. But the bigger issue IMHO is that this whistleblower had basically the same connection to reality as the many people who tell rumors of rumors of rumors to the NY Times, which then turn out to be false. This time they decided to go the “whistleblower” route instead of the “leak to the Times” route, just to add variety and supposed gravitas.

Here’s a short version of some of the things wrong with the whistleblower story and the reporting on it. The long version would take a book.

And one of the more interesting things I learned today is that there is a treaty between the US and Ukraine for cooperation in prosecuting crimes. It was passed during the Clinton administration.

The Biden threat video

The New Neo Posted on by

By the way, in case you haven’t seen it, here it is:

Feel free to pass it around, if you’re into sending people links to videos.

My guess is that, just as the left is saying Trump really meant much more of a threat than the phone call transcript reveals, that here good old Joe is just bragging and blustering and didn’t really mean it.

What’s the impeachment craze about?

The New Neo Posted on by

One thing I know is that it’s not about the content of Trump’s phone conversation with Ukraine’s president Zelensky, which you can find here, although the Democrats and NeverTrumpers will pretend it is.

It’s about other things.

The undoing of an election whose result they really really REALLY do not like.

The prospect of a juicy show trial, which Daniel Greenfield discusses here, is another:

Unless the Democrats take the Senate, impeachment would be a meaningless show trial. But Marxist regimes love show trials of political opponents. The Marxist element in the House desperately wants a show trial of President Trump because such a proceeding is an explicit rejection of our political system.

This is in line with other things going on around the world, most particularly in Western Europe, where “elites” wish to ignore the will of the people if that will conflicts with theirs. It’s a new aristocracy which feels it has enough power to accomplish this. Propaganda from the MSM enables them, as well.

Greenfield continues:

Impeachment is not just meant to be a trial of President Trump, but of the voters who chose him. Its outcome, whatever the composition of the Senate, is meant to be an argument for remaking the system of elections, whether by abolishing the Electoral College or tampering with the judiciary, that would take the power further out of the hands of the voters and concentrate them with the right sorts of people.

A Trump presidency is unconscionable to them and was from the start.

Democrats and others in this new aristocracy had grown very used to having a group of opponents – the GOP – who played the game like gentlemen (and that includes the Republican women). Every now and then there had been an eruption from the more combative right such as Clinton’s impeachment or Gingrich’s short-lived Contract With America, but for the most part the left and the Democrats had to deal with people who were only tepidly on the right and often more than willing to play ball with the left, people such as McCain (the candidate in 2008) and Romney (2012). Even George W. Bush was no street fighter and no conservative, although they hated him for other reasons.

The left grew used to having opponents of a certain type, and Trump most definitely was not of that type. That’s why the NeverTrumpers hate him, too, perhaps even more than the left does, because the NeverTrumpers were (and are) of that type as well.

They all feel deeply betrayed, not by Trump but by the American people. And the people must not be allowed to get away with it.

Impeachment is just one part of the war against Trump that has been waged relentlessly since the day he was elected and even before. This latest issue regarding Trump’s conversation with Zelensky is notable for many things, but one of them is the evidence it gives of the relentless surveillance of Trump by moles in the administration willing to report every single thing he does that can be capitalized on by the anti-Trump forces. He can trust no one, and no foreign head of state who talks to him can trust that their communication will not be broadcast to the world.

This is not good for the country, but the Democrats think it’s very very good for them.

[NOTE: As far as the phone call transcript goes and the reaction to it, please read this. And here’s an interesting document, a letter written by some Democratic senators in May of 2018 to the Ukrainian prosecutor.]

[ADDENDUM: Paul Mirengoff at Powerline makes a good point here, one I hadn’t previously noticed:

…Trump asked Zelenskyy to cooperate with Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General Barr in their exploration of the matter…

I draw a distinction between a U.S. president asking a foreign leader to investigate a political rival of the president and asking a foreign leader to assist Americans who are conducting such an investigation or making inquiries.

As I see it, the former — asking a foreign leader to conduct an investigation — is wrong under almost any circumstance. But asking a foreign leader to assist in an American investigation will often be appropriate. When potential wrongdoing by an American (whether a president’s rival or not) involves actions committed overseas, it may not be possible for Americans to investigate without foreign cooperation.

I disagree with Mirengoff’s first sentence of the second paragraph, his assertion that “asking a foreign leader to conduct an investigation — is wrong under almost any circumstance.” It is wrong under some circumstances, of course. But asking a leader to re-open an investigation that the person being investigated (or whose family is being investigated) previously pressured that leader to have closed is not wrong. And that would be the situation here, if in fact Trump had asked that. But he had not asked it.]

The Bee’s impeachment buzz

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been fading for quite some time, but the line between satire and news has now officially disappeared:

“Donald Trump has committed the high crime of TBA,” reads the resolution written by freshman congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, “and should be impeached and immediately removed from office before he can further damage this country by [INSERT SCARY THINGS HERE].”

“He absolutely should be impeached for something, I’m like pretty sure,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters. “He’s a bad man and he made fun of my Green New Deal, which I worked on for like hours.”

And here is the reality, with remarks such as:

What Pelosi has done with her speech announcing the opening of an impeachment inquiry is to keep her options open and throw her base some fish. She is not asking Democrats in the House to vote on anything. She always can do so in the future, if something big emerges from the nets they’re casting.

Do not forsake me oh my darlin’

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m a big “High Noon” fan, and one of the best things about the movie is the music. It runs throughout the entire film, sometimes as a ballad with lyrics, sometimes as the wordless theme on which many variations are worked in order to accompany the action or augment the emotion.

It’s a deceptively simple song that sounds as though it might be a Western folk song. But it’s not. The music was written by Dimitri Tiomkin, a classically trained musician who was born a Ukrainian Jew and emigrated to this country.

So, how did Tiomkin capture that spirit? Darned if I know (until I looked it up; more about that later). But I do know that the song was instrumental (pun intended) in the movie’s success:

Following his work for Fred Zinnemann on The Men (1950), Tiomkin composed the score for the same director’s High Noon (1952). His theme song was “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'” (“The Ballad of High Noon”). At its opening preview to the press, the film, which starred Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, did badly. Tiomkin writes that “film experts agreed that the picture was a flat failure… The producers hesitated to release the picture.” Tiomkin bought the rights to the song and released it as a single for the popular music market, with singer Frankie Laine. The record became an immediate success worldwide.

Based on the song’s popularity, the studio released the film four months later, with the words sung by country western star Tex Ritter. The film received seven Academy Award nominations and won four awards, including two for Tiomkin: Best Original Music and Best Song. Walt Disney presented him with both awards that evening.

Tiomkin composed his entire score around this single western-style ballad. He also eliminated violins from the ensemble. He added a subtle harmonica in the background, to give the film a “rustic, deglamorized sound that suits the anti-heroic sentiments” expressed by the story.

Here’s the background to how he did it:

According to Russian film historian Harlow Robinson, building the score around a single folk tune was typical of many Russian classical composers. Robinson adds that the source of Tiomkin’s score, if indeed folk, has not been proven…

Tiomkin had no illusions about his talent and the nature of his film work when compared to the classical composers. “I am no Prokofiev, I am no Tchaikovsky. But what I write is good for what I write for. So please, boys, help me.” Upon receiving his Oscar in 1955 for The High and the Mighty, he became the first composer to publicly list and thank the great European masters, including Beethoven, Strauss, and Brahms, among others.

Tiomkin didn’t compose the lyrics, by the way. But he composed the music to a lot of other Westerns besides “High Noon,” and the fact that he was good at composing for Westerns in general was apparently no coincidence, either. Music historian Christopher Palmer says:

[Tiomkin] came from a Big Country, too, and in America’s vastness, particularly its vast all-embracingness of sky and plain, he must have seen a reflection of the steppes of his native Ukraine…And as an exile himself, Tiomkin would have identified with the cowboys, pioneers and early settlers who people the world of the Western … . [T]hose like Tiomkin who blazed a trail in Hollywood were actually winning the West all over again.

Tiomkin alluded to this relationship in his autobiography:

“A steppe is a steppe is a steppe… . The problems of the cowboy and the Cossack are very similar. They share a love of nature and a love of animals…and the steppes of Russia are much like the prairies of America.”

Here’s the effective use of his theme in the opening credits for “High Noon”:

I’ve already mentioned the way the theme is carried through in many variations throughout the film. The ending is shown in this clip, an over-8-minute segment that uses the theme over and over in ways that are never boring and are never gimmicky:

Orwell on the will to power for power’s sake

The New Neo Posted on by

I read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was about twelve years old.

You might say that’s too early to truly understand it. And if you said that, you’d probably be right.

But even then, I understood it well enough. I lacked some of the history to make it resonate. But I read it in the thick of the Cold War at a time when a great deal was already known about Communism and its evils. And it made a very deep impression on me.

One of the many discussions we can have and have had about the left is the extent to which it is populated by true-believing Utopian idealists who are willing to do evil because the ends justify the means (or because they don’t even recognize it as evil), and those who are in it for the raw power and don’t care one whit about people or their welfare. The first are the fools or useful idiots, and the second are the knaves in the old “fools vs. knaves” argument.

Nineteen Eighty-Four isn’t just a masterpiece, it’s a complex masterpiece. It is partly an extension of what Orwell personally observed in Communism and its dangers. It is partly a discussion of tyranny as a whole, and in particular tyranny enabled by modern inventions (he imagined the telescreen, but that was just a stand-in for all the ways a technically advanced government can snoop on its people). It is partly a discussion of the use of language to control minds. And it is truly terrifying, one of the most deeply terrifying books I’ve ever read.

Here is Orwell describing the motives of those in power in his dystopia, in which he differentiates them from their Nazi and/or Soviet predecessors:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were- cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us 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?

In his book, Orwell posits a perfectly and completely evil impulse, but he seems to be crediting all the real movements in historical time such as Communism as having at least initially been spurred by some dream of idealist Utopia. It is as though Orwell immersed himself in Communism and its horrors and concluded that in it was the seeds of an even more pure form of horror.

Impeach Trump, now and forever

The New Neo Posted on by

It waxes and wanes, but impeaching Trump is always in the air. The only thing that really changes are the reasons given, as each crisis du jour comes in a steady succession.

The hope now is that Ukraine will do the trick. Or is it?:

The Democrats running for president are leading the calls for impeachment. Again, though, the candidate who may crave impeachment the most is Trump.

Absent massive Republican defections, the president knows how the game ends, even as Democrats struggle with whether the plays are worth pursuing.

Democrats know that the Senate is controlled by Republicans right now, and that any impeachment in the House would be doomed in the Senate. They also know – at least, I believe they know – that impeachment is unpopular and would fire up the pro-Trump forces. But all the talk, and the current ramping up of the talk, is red meat for their base. It also serves the purpose of keeping their options open if the Ukraine thing really does ever pan out to be something more than all the previous brouhahas.

I continue to think that they have no intention of doing it prior to the 2020 election. However, let’s say that in 2020, Trump is re-elected but the Democrats hold the House and control the Senate. I think that they still would have no chance of getting the required 2/3 majority of the Senate, unless something extremely and shockingly awful were to be revealed on Trump’s part. I think that, whatever the Democrats’ failing, they can do math.

However, back in the Clinton impeachment days, the Republicans were unable to do the math, and went ahead with the Clinton trial. Yes, I know that many of you probably think that was the right thing to do. I didn’t think so then (I was a Democrat but not a big Clinton fan) and I still don’t think so, for reasons I’ve explained on the blog before and have no intention of going into at the moment.

The Democrats have been trying to impeach Trump from the moment he won the presidency, and in some ways even before that (if such a thing be possible). They cannot believe he is still in office. They cannot believe his popularity seems to have grown rather than shrunk (I haven’t seen any post-Ukraine-scandal polls, but that was the pattern in the past).

They cannot believe they are not in charge of everything, as they clearly deserve to be.

Good point on climate change and Greta Thunberg

The New Neo Posted on by

Hard to argue with this by Arthur Chrenkoff:

While China now produces more CO2 than the United States and the European Union put together, the Asia-Pacific region (which does include a few industrialised countries, like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, but is mainly in the “developing” category, with China, India and Indonesia the most prominent examples) emits nearly twice as much CO2 as the United States and the European Union combined. And rising…

And while it’s true that in emissions per capita the developing world still leads the rest of the world where all the billions live, the climate only cares about the absolute numbers.

St Joan of Arc of the Children’s Crusade against Carbon, Greta Thunberg, should be going to Beijing or Bangalore and staging her protests there instead of, or at least in addition to, Sweden or New York. She should be hounding President Xi and Prime Minister Modi about their shameful emissions. She should be leading throngs of Asian kids out of schools for her Friday student strikes. She should be castigating the industries and the consumers of the developing world for destroying the planet and killing humanity in the process. She should be doing all this if she were serious about the global nature of the problem. But I won’t be holding my breath.

Eco-alarmists speak as though they are serious – extremely serious – about measures to implement changes to slow and/or stop the trends they see as causing AGW. But there are many things eco-alarmists would be doing if they were to act as serious as they sound. One would be someone like Greta Thunberg focusing on China and other parts of Asia. Another – and a much bigger one, IMHO – would be to promote nuclear power.

But they don’t. That is because, as Chrenkoff also points out:

For some…, such radical transformation is a feature and not a bug, with “climate change” being treated as a convenient excuse to implement their anti-capitalist, anti-growth, anti-freedom agenda. As this week’s “Economist” proclaims, “because the processes that force climate change are built into the foundations of the world economy and of geopolitics, measures to check climate change have to be similarly wide-ranging and all-encompassing. To decarbonise an economy is not a simple subtraction; it requires a near-complete overhaul.” For the formerly liberal flagship that is now the voice of the woke conventional wisdom (“Ecommunist”?), this is something to be looked forward and embraced; for the self-avowed socialist and budding authoritarians like George Monbiot (“For the sake of life on earth, we must put a limit on wealth”), Ocasio-Cortez and Thunberg it is even more so. “A near complete overhaul” of the capitalist economy, which built the modern world and modernity over the past three centuries, is every leftie’s wet dream.

They are playing for very high stakes.