What happens in Guatemala…

The New Neo Posted on by

…doesn’t stay in Guatemala, according to Mario Duarte, Guatemala’s secretary of strategic intelligence. He has quite a story to tell, which if true indicates another little farewell gift from the Obama administration when it was on its way out:

To give you an example, we have had, in the past, State Department officials identifying themselves as Democrats. “On the day that President Trump was elected, those officials ultimately pushed for specific judges to be appointed to our highest courts in Guatemala — the Constitutional Court.”

Duarte went on, “And what happens when these magistrates or judges were appointed? They started with all these social justice warriors. [They] took away a lot of the rights of companies to be able to run their businesses in a fair way, and they even affected U.S. companies.”…

Duarte remarked, “It goes back to the policies of failure that people have tried to impose on Guatemala. I’m talking about … Democrats in the U.S. government, certain European countries, and even the UN. So we have socialist-oriented magistrates in the Constitutional Court forcing big companies [and] big businesses to shut down and lay off a lot of people, people with big families. These people have to eat and they have to survive, so they will look for an opportunity somewhere else.”

In other word, an increase in emigration.

“These are the same magistrates, so you know, who are right now ruling against President Morales, and are trying to block him from signing this migration cooperation agreement with President Trump,” Duarte stated. “The same people that have shut down all these companies are also trying to block these agreements.”

I have no idea whether what he describes was actually US-instigated. I have no idea how much Guatemala’ left-leaning courts have to do with that country’s current problems.

But Duarte is telling quite a tale, and he’s been saying it for a while. I found this article from February of 2019 in which he alludes to the organized nature of the caravans, and I have read that same accusation from many other sources, although not necessarily about courts and not necessarily about Guatemala (I wrote about it here as well as here and here).

Happy Labor Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

Labor Day is the bookend on the opposite end of summer from its holiday beginning, Memorial Day.

July Fourth is summer’s early peak, with the promise of long light-filled days ahead. But Labor Day is summer’s last gasp, the moment I dreaded as a child because it marked the end of vacation and the start of the school year. Spiffy new clothes, a shiny bookbag, freshly sharpened pencils, and the promise of the beautiful autumn leaves’ arrival were nice. But they couldn’t make up for the fact that a new school year was beginning. Where oh where had the summer gone?

And it goes even more quickly these days. But let’s celebrate the fact that we don’t have to worry about the start of school anymore—except, perhaps, for the teachers among us.

Here’s wishing you all a Happy Labor Day! Barbecues, picnics, parades, beach, just hanging out in your yard, whatever you desire. And for the historically-minded among you, some information the origins of the holiday.

Waking up in a strange place

The New Neo Posted on by

Did you ever wake up convinced you were in one place, and then look around and realize you’re in another?

Maybe you’re on vacation and you think you’re at home, until you look around the room and everything is unfamiliar. And then you remember—oh, I’m in Rome.

Sometimes it’s the other way around. You’ve been staying with friends for a week, and you wake up imagining you’re still there, and you discover that you’re home.

Usually you adjust almost instantaneously. But a couple of days ago I returned from a trip to New York, where I’d stayed for a few nights. I came home in the evening, and the next day I woke up knowing I was at home in my own bed. Strangely, it was the morning after that when I felt the dislocation.

And I felt it more powerfully than ever before. I was so convinced that I was not in my own room, even though everything in my line of sight told me that’s exactly where I was, that I looked around for a full minute or two before I could accept it. All the familiar items—the art on the walls, the mobile hanging from the ceiling, the paint, the rug, the location of the door—everything screamed “home” to me.

And yet it seemed a Potemkin mock-up of my bedroom, and that I was really somewhere else. The feeling was so powerful that for hours I had trouble shaking it entirely, even though I was well aware that I was home.

Had I been dreaming I was somewhere else? Was that the cause of the strange disquiet? If so, I don’t remember. For much of my life I remembered my dreams vividly and in great detail, night after night after night. Sometimes my dreams would linger throughout the day as a mood.

But for twenty years or so now it’s been rare for me to remember a dream, and even when I do it’s usually just a fragment.

…These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Some reactions to the Horowitz report

The New Neo Posted on by

Ordinarily I don’t watch a lot of TV news or opinion shows. But I have a tiny TV near my computer, and every now and then I turn it on and watch cable news if something especially important is happening and I’m curious to see what people might be saying.

The day that IG Horowitz’s report came out, I watched some reaction from the right on Fox. A few people’s remarks interested me—for example, Rudy Giuliani, who has the distinction of having been the person who first recommended Comey for a government job. Continue reading →

The Democratic field right now

The New Neo Posted on by

I think I can identify with the way a lot of Democrats must feel right now. I believe it parallels how I was feeling for much of the 2016 campaign season.

At first I was excited. After eight long years of Obama, he was finally going to be out of office, and his likely successor Hillary Clinton had a lot of negatives. The GOP had a variety of candidates. Some of them annoyed me and none were perfect, but I thought several were strong and had a good fighting chance to defeat the not-very-popular Hillary.

And then Donald Trump started rising, and rising, and rising some more. I had many reasons to dislike him—too tedious to reiterate at this point—but one of those reasons was that I thought he had no chance against her.

Of course, that turned out to be wrong. But that’s how I felt, and I felt it very strongly: nominate him and Hillary waltzes to the presidency.

It was a sinking feeling. It was like watching a batter hit an easy pop-up that could end the World Series with a win for your team, seeing the fielder take his place right under it with plenty of time to spare, and then staring aghast as the sun gets in the fielder’s eyes and the ball plops onto the ground.

Right now the rank and file Democrats must be feeling at least a little of that. They haven’t endured Trump for eight years, but it must feel like eight hundred to them. They don’t have as good a group of candidates as the GOP did in 2016—at least, it doesn’t seem that way to me, unless the voter favors the party’s going hard left.

And Joe Biden is the leader.

Biden is not a parallel to Trump. But he’s strange, very strange. And he’s old (makes Trump look like a youngster). Plus, Biden may be going gaga, at least that’s the appearance he gives at the moment. And yet he remains the frontrunner.

One compensation for the Democrats watching this is that Biden leads Trump in the polls. But Democrats who were around for 2016 also may have come to distrust polls, particularly polls involving Trump.

I don’t sense a lot of enthusiasm or a lot of security among Democrats about Biden or any of the others. I sense a lot of jitteriness. Will this one slip past their glove, as well, against the hated Trump?

I certainly don’t know. But I think I can sense the feeling.

Joe’s “word as a Biden”

The New Neo Posted on by

Joe Biden is starting to worry the left, because it looks as though he might be nominated and would be a really bad candidate. That’s a nightmare they don’t want to relive.

And so helpful outlets such as the WaPo are pointing out some of Joe’s flaws, such as the tall tale he told on the campaign trail the other day, a war story that was “moving, but false.”

And outlets such as Esquire blame it on Trump, naturally:

The emerging consensus seems to be that Biden lied here…

This has launched some think-pieces on whether this is symptomatic of the post-truth world the current president has ushered in, where the facts and the details don’t matter much—or often, in fact, are irrelevant—when you’re in pursuit of some larger goal.

To those of us who have observed the left and the MSM for many decades, that’s pretty funny. The president has ushered in a “post-truth world”? How about—just to take one very small and relatively recent example—Rathergate?

It occurs to me that the Esquire article’s author, whose name is Jack Holmes, might—like so many others in the MSM—be very young. I don’t mean “young” in relation to me—that’s just about everyone—but I mean young in the more absolute sense. And sure enough, when I looked him up on Linked In, I discover that he graduated from college in 2014. That would make him something like 26 years old.

My memory may be getting foggy, like good old Joe Biden’s (I hope not), but it seems to me that years ago no one of the age of 26 would have been the politics editor of Esquire. And yet that is Holmes’ position at the moment. The youth of those in the MSM trying to shape the viewpoints of Americans is something I’ve written about before, however; I refer you to this post of mine from 2010.

But that’s somewhat of a digression, although not entirely. The point is that Biden either lied or is getting a bit gaga, or both.

But Biden has always told tall tales; he is somewhat known for it. Case in point, some things Biden said during his debate with Sarah Palin in 2008. I particularly recall this one, which got a fair amount of press at the time:

“All you have to do is go down Union street with me in Wilmington or go to Katie’s Restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me where I spend a lot of time and you ask anybody whether or not the economic and foreign policy of this administration has made them better off in the last eight years,” said Sen. Joe Biden in the vice presidential debate to bolster his assertion he’s in touch with the concerns of the middle class.

That answer suggested otherwise.

“It came as a surprise to us in Delaware that Joe Biden recently had a meal and talked with patrons at Katie’s Restaurant on Union Street in Wilmington,” said an email to National Review Online.

“Katie’s Restaurant closed years ago. It was on Scott Street in Little Italy.”

The people who fill up at his neighborhood gas station can’t pay for a full tank of gas, Sen. Biden said. Sen. Biden lives in a 7,000 square foot estate on a four acre lakefront lot in Greenville, which is described as “northern Delaware’s priciest area.”

Sen. Biden says things which are not true with passionate conviction.

Yes, yes he does. He delivered his war story the other day with passionate conviction, as well.

More from that 2008 debate, to refresh your memory (we all could use some memory-refreshing, right?—not just Joe):

“Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that’s the Executive Branch,” Sen. Biden said, dismissing Sarah Palin’s expressed intention to play a role in legislative affairs.

Article I of the Constitution defines the role of Congress, the legislative branch, and declares that “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.” That is the only responsibility of the vice president delineated anywhere in the Constitution. Article II describes the responsibilities of the Executive Branch. The election of the vice president is mentioned in Article II, but that Article says not a word about the powers and duties of the vice president as vice president.

Under Sen. Obama’s tax plan, the wealthiest Americans will “pay no more than they did under Ronald Reagan,” Sen. Biden said.

Sen. Obama wants to raise the top income tax bracket to 39.6 percent. Ronald Reagan had lowered it to 28 percent.

“When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon,” Sen. Biden said.

“Biden said the strangest and most ill-informed thing I have ever heard about Lebanon in my life,” said Michael Totten, who reported from there during the so-called Cedar Revolution. “Nobody has ever kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon. Not the United States. Not France. Not Israel. And not the Lebanese. Nobody. Joe Biden has literally no idea what he is talking about.”

Ah, but he became vice-president nonetheless. And in 2020, twelve long years later, he might even be elected president.

One very curious portion of his recent war story is one I haven’t seen too many people focusing on. It’s the finale:

“This is the God’s truth,” he added. “My word as a Biden.”

Very very strange. Was someone questioning his veracity at the time? I don’t think so. Did he know he was lying, and was he “protesting too much“?

What’s more, what on earth does “my word as a Biden” mean? Are the Bidens known for extraordinary veracity? The only Biden of which I’m aware is Joe himself, and his reputation is hardly stellar in that regard. Not only has he been lying blatantly throughout much of his political career, but he’s committed plagiarism multiple times:

“My intent was not to deceive anyone,” Biden wrote at the time [1988]. “For if it were, I would not have been so blatant.”

So once again, what was it Joe Biden meant when he said “my word as a Biden”?

On IG Horowitz’s report and the meaning of Russiagate

The New Neo Posted on by

The revelations in the report by IG Horowitz released yesterday are disturbing on many levels, but one of the deepest and most basic is of the power of institutions such as the FBI if they become corrupted and corrupt. What used to be reserved for the plot of movies has now been revealed to have happened, and the maneuverings easily could have remained secret if just a few circumstances had been otherwise.

Talk about fostering distrust and paranoia!

Here’s just one example:

And in the comments section of this blog earlier today:

Un F’n believable.
A conspirator in the attempted coup to overthrow a fairly elected President, gets away with only a F’n report that says he violated established procedures.
No indictment, no arrest, no jail time pending posting bond; not a F’n thing.
So the lesson here is that members of the “correct” ruling class – appointed or otherwise – can really do whatever the F they want and not worry about getting in trouble…

When the citizenry no longer regards the government as legitimate, that’s when the wheels fall off the wagon of govt.

And from another comment:

Comey is strutting around and running his mouth, as if he knows that he will never be prosecuted, and perhaps whatever friends he still has in the FBI are telling him that—whatever show, however much gritting of teeth, shouting, stamping, apparent anger, whirling around, and head shaking, whatever Kabuki routine might be put on—in the end, that is what is going to happen, like Hillary, Comey will never be prosecuted.

This got me thinking, and a horrible thought at that.

Could it be that we have all been way too naive and blind to boot, and that all of this “resistance” by apparently every high level official in the alphabet agencies—from both those officials already in place, or starting immediately after their appointment—is a sign that the the coup we feared was taking place today actually took place some time ago and, moreover, that it was successful?

That despite the maintenance of the outward forms of our Republican government—now an ossified and dead shell—it is actually the members of the Deep State, working underneath that concealing, protective shell, who are de facto calling the shots and running the country, as they have been doing for quite some time now?

It’s certainly possible—and what’s for certain is that the revelations of what actually happened at the hands of Comey et al, and also what they intended to happen and nearly accomplished but did not, engenders the sort of thinking expressed above. While it’s not true that everyone was naive prior to this—some people have been alleging Deep State control of things for a long time—however naive we were, we are all less naive now. When paranoia, right or wrong, seems justified, it doesn’t bode well for the nation.

And as with Watergate and Nixon (which pales in comparison with this), the question can and should be asked: “What did Obama know and when did he know it?” But will that question be asked by anyone with the power to answer it?

This is not the first time the American public has seen what appears to be a two-tiered system of justice. Some people are hounded, harassed, and found guilty of infractions that seem minor while others (Democrats and members of the Deep State) are winked at when they appear to be committing acts that are far worse. A discerning person, looking at the situation, can’t help but notice it. And way too many Americans are willing to look the other way if the person committing the infraction is a member of their party and is out to kneecap a member of the opposite party. Rule of law? What’s that? That clip I’ve used so many times from “A Man For All Seasons” is once again, sadly relevant.

I do have a caveat, however. The fat lady has not yet sung on James Comey. The IG report that came out yesterday is not in the nature of the final report. It only concerns Comey’s taking and leaking of the memos, and the DOJ declined to prosecute on that issue alone. Many analysts are saying that this was because that was a weaker case compared to other cases that can and will be made later against Comey. So the DOJ’s decision in this more narrow matter doesn’t mean that Comey will not be prosecuted for something connected with Russiagate.

That said, I wonder whether Comey will ever be indicted. I tend to doubt it.

I believe that this entire incident has damaged respect for many institutions: the law and the FBI, for starters. But if they are damaged institutions (which they appear to be, at least for now), we should lose respect for them because they don’t deserve respect.

However, the loss of such respect—and the loss of integrity within these institutions that has caused that loss of respect—is a profound loss to the nation. It leads us down a dark path towards more and more chaos and a scrambling for power with no objective rules. That is the deeper meaning and the deeper threat behind all these events.

IG Horowitz’s report on Comey: he’s bad, but the DOJ doesn’t care

The New Neo Posted on by

We had pretty much been told this is what we would get. And yes, this is what we got:

A scathing inspector general report released Thursday said that fired FBI Director James Comey violated bureau policies by drafting, leaking and retaining memos documenting private discussions with President Trump.

The Justice Department’s official watchdog concluded that the memos Comey kept were, in fact, “official FBI records,” and said Comey set a “dangerous example” with his actions…

While the findings of the probe were forwarded to the DOJ, the department has declined prosecution, as Fox News reported earlier this month. But for Comey, who has cultivated the image of a by-the-book and irreproachable leader since his termination in 2017, the review shined a harsh light on his decisionmaking in the final, beleaguered weeks of his tenure at the head of the nation’s top law enforcement agency.

The 83-page document outlined a series of violations, including that he broke FBI policies and the bureau’s employment agreement…

The report repeatedly and pointedly alleged that Comey wrongly violated policies for personal reasons — in this case, in order to spur a special counsel probe.

I wouldn’t call those “personal reasons” at all. I’d call them political reasons—to use the so-called Deep State to spur a soft coup against the president. Doesn’t sound all that personal to me, although personal reasons—revenge—also factored in.

And is the DOJ setting a “dangerous example” by not prosecuting?

Well, it depends what’s in store for Comey next. Rumor has it that there are much better (that is, worse, and more easily provable in the legal sense) things on which he will be prosecuted.

Time will tell, right?

One thing of which I’m pretty sure is that the left will use this IG report to say “no biggee, move along” while the right sees it (correctly, I believe) as a huge indictment of Comey.

But a metaphorical indictment, not a literal one.

On Democrats who skate

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Art Deco” writes (the first line is a quote from commenter “huxley”):

Not all Democrats skate. Ask Al Franken.

Franken was collateral damage in their campaign contra Roy Moore. If the media / DNC / Capitol Hill complex had been less pressed for time, the scandal, such as it was, would have gone away.

True.

The “me too” campaign and its fallout had many purposes. One of those purposes was to create zero tolerance for the likes of Roy Moore—and hopefully, Donald Trump. Along the way some eggs had to be broken and omelets made.

But I think another principle was too never do anything that would hurt the left too much. Franken was a no-brainer in that respect. The most salient fact about Franken was that his political demise cost the Democrats nothing in terms of power. He was in a very blue state and his replacement was always going to be bluer than blue, so his removal had a neutral effect on the balance of power and gained them virtue points. It hurt Franken personally, but that was not their concern.

Power is what it’s all about.

I’m trying to think of a case where someone was thrown overboard who mattered to the Democrats in the sense of causing a loss of power. The left might be a bit sad about losing Harvey Weinstein’s money, I suppose, but there’s plenty more where that came from.

Bill Clinton was the quintessential example. His sexual behavior was just fine when he was president, and Democrats united behind him to protect him. But after Hillary had lost, and the Clintons no longer mattered, it was okay to jettison and marginalize him.

And then there’s Ted Kennedy.

It’s all purely pragmatic—and if there are exceptions, I can’t think of them right now.

Fighting back: left and right and the press

The New Neo Posted on by

It may seem almost funny to those on the right who’ve been complaining for years (pre-Trump, anyway) about how the right never fights back—but people on the left often say the same thing about the left: that is, that the left doesn’t fight hard enough.

Yeah, tell me another one, you say.

But I get this information from visiting blogs or other sites on the left, which I do fairly often. The subject comes up there now and then, and is met by a chorus of “Yes, we don’t fight back enough. The right knows how to fight. We’re much too nice, too noble. We’ve got to get tougher and even sometimes fight dirty.”

Mirror image of what a lot of people on the right have been saying about themselves, or at least about their elected officials on the right. That’s one of the reasons Trump was elected, of course: as Lincoln said of General Grant, “he fights.”

Which brings us to one of the many current ruckuses at the NY Times:

The mothership of fake news is now complaining that conservative activists are scrutinizing journalists for signs of bias that can be found on the Internet and social media. The lead paragraph in the Times’ front-page story of lament is:

A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.

The most prominent member of the media exposed thus far is Tom Wright-Piersanti, editor at the political desk of the Times itself. After Breitbart exposed this bigot for mocking Jews and Indians, Wright-Piersanti was demoted by the Times (but not terminated). His excuse for his bigotry was that he was in college.

There are others. And through it all, the Times confesses that, although the information released so far is stripped of context – “context” meaning the excuses liberals give for themselves but not for others — it has been authentic and harmful to its targets.

And apparently there are hundreds of other media people on the left who have likewise implicated themselves on social media, mostly as bigots and haters of various kinds.

It often puzzles me why people would be so dumb as to publicly air such comments and sign their names to them. Bigotry certainly exists, but it’s been a no-no in polite society for many decades in this country, hasn’t it? That even includes anti-Semitism cloaked as hatred of Israel, which appears to be the left’s current favored bigotry (hatred of white people is even more favored, but I don’t think that’s considered bigotry these days as long as it’s expressed by someone in a favored minority group or by a virtue-signaling white person on the left).

More:

What is happening is that the bigots in the media are being exposed. And if they are purged, then there may be a chance that the public will get some unbiased reporting. But the liberals don’t like this. It’s okay for them to smear any conservative they want with immunity, but it’s not cricket for the opposition to hit back. Such have been the rules for the longest time. No more.

The difference between Schwartz’s operation and what the media regularly does is that Schwartz’s information is factual. The media, on the other hand, often makes things up out of thin air. Anyone remember Sarah Palin, Brett Kavanaugh, or a boatful of others? This is why Rush Limbaugh coined the term ‘the drive-by media.’ The media will slime a conservative with innuendos and falsehoods, call it news, and then when facts later come out to refute the original charge, walk away as if nothing happened. .

One of the many things wrong with so-called journalists today is that they think very very very highly of themselves. Speaking truth to power, shining a light in the dark places, all the news that they decide is fit to print, and so on and so forth. Why don’t we appreciate them more, these selfless toilers for us all?

Ilhan Omar’s Byzantine love life…

The New Neo Posted on by

…doesn’t interest me all that much. What is far more repellent to me is her ability to smile, and smile, and be a villain in the political sense.

But if you would like to get up to speed on what Omar’s been doing in the sack lately, be my guest. As usual, Powerline will fill you in. They’ve been revealing Omar’s various lies and games for many years now.