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A Little History to Soothe the Savage Beast

Jerrold Nadler (D,NY) on MSNBC, Jan. 09, 2019

The Democrats in charge of the House side of Congress, and their long media retinue, are in high dudgeon over the Mueller Report and the whole Russia mirage.  Their epileptic seizures could be calmed by the application of a little history.

A huge part of the problem is their hatred of Trump which has deluded them into going whole hog on the Trump Manchurian candidate story.  It was always an illusion, but illusions must be kept alive in the quest for power.  Remember John C. Calhoun’s twisted logic in defense of slavery to keep the slavocracy in power in the South?

Remember the 1934 persecution-by-prosecution of William Insull – the man, more than any other, responsible for the creation of the nation’s electrical grid in the 1920’s – by FDR’s Justice Department as the scapegoat for the Depression and to further FDR’s grand scheme to place the economy, and much of life, under bureaucratic control?  If you’re interested, after a 7-week trial, it took a jury only 2 hours to acquit Insull and his 16 co-defendants of all charges.

Examples abound.

Insidious illusions will be always, like the poor, with us, especially if power is at stake.  For the Resistance true believers, Trump has to be guilty for him to be dethroned.  Belief cometh before proof.  So, Nadler and company are issuing subpoenas and contempt charges like a mad counterfeiter, as the media ballyhoo the latest round as Fort Sumter.

But what of Eric Holder?

AG Eric Holder held in contempt of Congress, June 2012.

Obama’s AG refused almost any information and documentation on the DOJ’s still-murky 2010 Fast and Furious operation.  17-21 Democrats in 2012 joined Republicans in approving civil and criminal contempt charges against Holder.  The story barely lasted one news cycle in the mainstream media.  That’s because contempt of Congress claims are essentially censure votes.  These aren’t “contempt of court”.  If anything, the targets are holding in contempt the excitable and riled partisan majority in the House.

And there are differences in the Barr and Holder cases.  Barr released the whole report with the exception of parts falling under long-established rules and laws, like Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure (FRCP) 6(e) regarding the secrecy of grand jury proceedings.  The law’s secrecy mandates were recently confirmed by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (McKeever v. Barr).

The Dems are trying to hang their hat on the exceptions to non-disclosure, but that would stretch “intelligence” and “counter-intelligence” officials to include power-hungry politicos and their staffs as they distort jury deliberations for political ends.  How long would it take for the pipeline to the WaPo and NYT to be turned on and the mud to flow?

By the way, the full unredacted Mueller Report is available to selected House members at the DOJ’s skiff, if they want.  But they don’t want.  They want power and that means Trump’s scalp.  This isn’t about the truth.  It’s about naked, raw power.

In contrast, Holder ignored and dissed Issa’s House Oversight Committed request for information.  Barr gave to Congress and the public almost the whole thing.  Holder is free to go on the lecture circuit and bash anyone with a “R” after their name.  Barr is daily pilloried on CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the brooding media big sisters.  Go figure.

In some cases, we may have to wait for the afterlife to get justice.  Humanity’s “crooked timber” holds sway in this life.  In the meantime, a little bit of history may help us get beyond the worst that lies within.

RogerG

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Burden of Proof Be Damned

Attorney General Barr at press conference annoucing the release of the Mueller Report, April 18, 2019.

The Mueller Report is out.  Does it really matter?  No.  Partisans with no “reasonable cause” will still invent cause to pursue their political opponent.  They’ll grasp at any straw to continue the inquisition.  Burden of proof be damned.  The entire course of western civilization is to be turned upside down to get Trump.  That’s it in a nutshell.

There’s a reason for those with the power to take your life or freedom to meet the decency of a burden of proof when they make claims against a person.  Yet, political and media partisans hang their hat on minor and loosely related evidence and even the absence of evidence.

That’s right, the absence of evidence.  The “We cannot reach conclusions” or “We cannot charge” is morphed into “cause” by political partisans to pursue the accused that can’t be accused.  Read the last bit of that sentence again. This is ludicrous.

In other words, “innocent till proven guilty” means something … or is supposed to.  If you can’t prove a charge, then the actions at the root of the accusation are treated as if they didn’t happen.  It’s up to the authorities to prove their case, not the accused to prove they didn’t do it.

The citizen’s right to silence is related.  The target of the charge doesn’t have to say anything.  He or she can just sit there quiet as the people doing the accusing are expected to make the case.  If they can’t, then nothing happened regarding the accused.

That’s our law, and keeps us from exercising Stalin’s show-trial style of justice.  It’s how we avoid the last moments of Bukharin, Kamanev, and Zinoviev beginning with a long walk down a lonely basement corridor and ending with a bullet to the back of the head.

RogerG

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A Nothingburger

I know. I know.  The title engages a noun that has entered cliché territory.  Still, it applies to Mueller’s tome after an expedition of the likes of Alexander the Great’s invasion of Persia to the ends of the world.  In the end, after $40 million and almost 2 years, all Mueller got was indictments of a bunch of foreigners who’ll never face an American judge and questionable actions against bit players for after-the-fact infractions/crimes.  The whole rectal exam was about “collusion” – even the “obstruction” barking – and, in the end, there’s no there, there.

The brouhaha proved an old axiom that if you intensely look long enough, you’ll find something – even if that something amounts to … nothing.  Turn a building inspector loose on my property for 2 years and he’ll find “something”.  How many violations of law did you commit after waking up (maybe before), knowingly or unknowingly?  We live in a world of a straightjacket of laws and regulations.

Bottom line: no collusion, and the charge of “obstruction” is silly – so says both Barr AND Rosenstein.  The point raised by Barr before his elevation to AG is dispositive.  If there’s no crime, for what reason could Trump be obstructing?  Key to obstruction is evil intent, something deep within a person’s mind.  If there’s no outward sign of it, and if there’s no reason for doing it, why put credence in it?

The reason for the Dem death grip on “obstruction” is politics.  The Dems want Trump’s scalp at any price.  They’ll pour over the encyclopedia-length full report to stitch together an impeachment indictment.  They’ll hang onto any language in the report to keep the issue alive.  “Do not exonerate” (in the Mueller summary) is an example.  “Exonerate” is a measly word when an investigator does not exonerate.  Either they recommend charges or they don’t.  To pass the buck to Barr as if there’s a hint of a case, in spite of the lack of evidence and sound Constitutional reasons to reject it, will stoke the Dems’ impeachment fire.

Adam Schiff and Andy Kaufman. Any similarities?

In the end, we went to the Mueller café and got … nothing.  It’s the equivalent of an air-burger on an empty plate.

RogerG

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Smelly Environs

In testimony before the House Oversight and Judiciary committees on Thursday, FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok described his role in the investigations of Hillary Clinton’s email server and Russian interference in the 2016 election as acts of patriotism. | John Shinkle/POLITICO

It seems a whole lot of things are pungent these days. Peter Strzok, with the olfactory glands of a bloodhound, is hot on the scent of Trump voters as if thoughts metabolize into odors – “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support…”. As for something that’s really beginning to take on the stink of a deer carcass in the summer sun, the FBI’s Hillary and Trump investigations are becoming quite ripe. I’ll withhold judgment till after the Mueller report but the stench is maturing beyond a whiff.

Strzok maintains that he faithfully abided the “bright line” between personal beliefs and work. Who’s he kidding? The email investigation – of which he was central – wreaked: exoneration before the target was interviewed; clear and plain evidence of the destruction of evidence; suspects in the criminal conduct are allowed to represent and collaborate with the target of the investigation; proof of violations of national security statutes messaged into the bland “extremely careless”. The fix was in, and Strzok’s fingerprints are all over it.

Fresh off that sham, Strzok jets off to London to moonlight as DNC oppo research coordinator on the FBI dime. But Trump won the election and upset the apple cart. The 2016 machinations of the DOJ/FBI lawyers at the top of the DC pile were exposed. Instead of savior, Strzok and company ended up with a diet of crow, and maybe facing a few criminal indictments to boot.

The aforementioned reference to Strzok’s uncanny ability to sniff out Trump voters shows another side of this sordid affair. The condescension for the people outside the Georgetown bistros and wine socials and upper middle-class northern Virginia suburbs was as palpable as London fog.

Borrowing Strzok’s “smell” metaphor, his texts smell like the cultural divide at the root of our politics. The Democratic Party is the party of the blue dots (dense urban cores) and the few states wholly beholden to their blue dots. The culture in the blue dots has evolved into a brew of social libertinism, dreamy multiculturalism, and fascist intolerance. Yet, they hold their snouts high in the air at the people who patronize Walmarts. Reagan said that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left him. A more up-to-date version would be, “America didn’t leave the blue dots; the blue dots left America”. The blue dots changed into something that the rest of America didn’t want any part of — thus the election of Trump.

It’s a cultural divide possibly as stark as the one in the 1840’s when a person crossed the Ohio River from free Ohio into slaveholding Kentucky. The places developed as differently as if they were on different continents. For instance, today, the blue dots are at war with traditional standards. One’s simple expectation about the occupants of a public restroom has to be revised as blue dot media mavens propagate the fantasy of 40 genders. You can’t even be certain of the chromosomal makeup of the participants in a girls’ track meet. The cultic philosophies of victimhood and shallow identity-mongering are rampant. And that’s only a start.

Trans wrestler Mack Beggs won the girls’ 110-pound category in a state wrestling tournament for the second time.
Transgender female Andraya Yearwood of Cromwell won the 110 and 200 meters at the 2017 Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference Class M track meet. (Jeff Jacobs, Hartford Courant)

The experience of a person fresh from a Baptist Sunday service and passing through West Hollywood must be akin to the Ohio resident stepping off the ferry into 1840’s Kentucky. Culture shock anyone?

It’s fascinating to wonder if Strzok and Page were caught up in one of America’s premier blue dot bubbles – DC – so much so that their muscular confirmation bias would not appear as a choked worldview but as the only true reality. Insular echo chambers work that way. In the meantime, the notion of a government of enlightened “experts” free of the prejudices of the average person is as shattered as Conan [the barbarian] throwing a 20-lb sledge hammer through an untempered glass window.

RogerG

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Cross-Fertilization of Two Investigations and the Bane of Progressivism

I have long sought to keep separate the FBI’s Trump/Russia probe and their “MYI” [Mid-year Investigation] into Hillary’s server. The IG report of this past week shattered that assumption. The two are linked by the same personnel, a coterminous but muddled boundary in time, and an obvious unity in partisan bias. All of this is nestled in unbridled DOJ and FBI higher-ups in DC and its satellites. We’ve got a real mess on our hands.

The legacy media oracles responded as if they are on a mission to contradict conservatives and simple common sense. A bias in its own right. They serve to mystify and cloud what is increasingly becoming apparent: powerful organs of our government engaged in crass partisan favoritism in both official queries.

If this doesn’t dispel the progressive dream of the benign, above-the-fray rule of a clerisy of “experts”, nothing will. Progressivism has its roots in upending the understanding of our nature dating back to Genesis. It used to be accepted as axiomatic that humans are corrupted by an imperious selfishness. We were counseled by our traditions to restrain it. The late 19th-century progressives jettisoned this human nature and replaced it with a person cleansed by an expertise born of formal education (the “expert”). In other words, people like themselves.

This has profound societal consequences. The design of our Constitution is predicated on the overriding inclination of people to pursue self-interest, and thus it is true to our traditions. The founders’ structure sought to fight selfish faction with selfish faction by distributing power with separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism.

No need for that kind of thing under the progressives’ scheme of rule by a degreed priesthood of technicians. According to Churchill, though, “The French have a saying, ‘Drive Nature away, and she will return at the gallop'”. The episodes in 2016 and 2017 reveal those technicians to be riven by the same weaknesses as our sandaled and later-wigged ancestors. All that we’ve done is insulate the powerful from accountability in a massive bureaucratic pyramid.

The officials with the guns now have a political eco-system to facilitate great damage. Free of popular sovereignty, their base instincts are free to flower.

Recourse to official ombudsmen – like the IG – as a corrective is fruitless. They are too often infected by the same natural defensiveness as the rest of us. Thus we have the IG report’s equivocations, contradictions, and voluminous mind-numbing prose stretching beyond 500 pages. A glaring example from the report: on the one hand there exists coarse bias; on the other, we can’t attach the bias to any actions. What? How does that work?

There’s the rush to exonerate the favorite (Hillary) while they jump at the slightest unproven provocation to bedevil the targeted villain (Trump). It’s laid out in the report’s timeline and public record. But we’re expected to believe that what’s in the head of Strzok, Page, McCabe, and untold others is somehow unrelated to the clearly observable actions adjoining the thoughts. It’s simply Orwellian.

Trump/Russia and Hillary’s server are two investigations that share the same DNA. Questions about Mueller’s probe are similarly warranted. Like the others, Mueller is taking on a flavor akin to the previous machinations. The same or similar people are scouring for Trump people to ensnare.

Has it been happening for years? You know, the underhanded tactics to flip people, empire-building of imaginary cases, the incestuous relationships – some sexual – between big journalism and big law enforcement, the hounding of people into incriminations, and all of it unchecked. A look under the rug at the Carl Icahn-Phil Mickelsen-Chlorox-Tom Davis imbroglio, shepherded by FBI honcho David Chaves and the DA of SDNY, might be instructive.

Yes, we’ve got a mess. The sooner we discard the demigod status of government apparatchiks, the sooner we’ll make sense of it all. Only then will we be empowered to restrain our own government. Accountability need not be something necessitating a 500 page report.

RogerG

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Russians Indicted, Not Trump

Tears and shock at Clinton election night party.

This whole Russia dust-up is only about one thing: the Dems were shocked on Nov. 8, 2016. Then, the deligitimization campaign kicked into high gear. Hillary oppo research was leveraged into a smear operation. They were assisted by bureaucratic sympathizers who stretched their authority and an ideologically sympathetic legacy media to keep the fantasy on the front burner.

The Russians weren’t anymore prescient about the election result than Gallup. Their efforts were really done on the cheap. As a matter of fact, we have been famous for interfering in foreign elections. Ask Brexit supporters or Benjamin Netanyahu. Or take a look at the 1980’s Soviet disinformation campaigns in support of the nuclear freeze movement and domestic efforts to block Reagan’s decision to install medium range missiles in Europe. Many lefties, including lefty Dems, benefited from the succor. The current Dem obsession is divorced of any context, except their displeasure about losing.

Really, it’s all about the election result. As for the Russians, they tried to weaken the clout of their expected winner: Hillary. Now, the Russkies are focused on delegitimizing Trump. Pardon me for noticing the commonality of purpose of our “loyal” opposition and the Kremlin. Collusion anyone?

RogerG