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.
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