*Grab a cup of coffee, sit awhile for I have much to get off my chest. My readings during my recent 10-day eastern Mediterranean cruise have given me much to ponder.
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Frank Norris in 1901 had his “The Octopus: A Story of California” published, a novel of crafty control of state government by a railroad monopoly. Today, a different octopus has a grip on the federal government in Washington DC and the blue states. This one has personality traits that are a mixture of the ideology of progressivism with its obsession for perpetually fungible oppressed classes (neo-Marxism) and an overweening administrative state, mindless immersion in the FDR and Kennedy auras, deeply entrenched, and a proven capacity to drain the vitality of a once-great civilization. Ours!
One can get a whiff of the putrefaction (decay) just having to go through TSA/customs at San Francisco airport (SFO), without having to actually step out onto the filthy, crime-plagued streets of the city-by-the-Bay. The labyrinth is mind-boggling, and in stark contrast to the relative ease in old world airports in cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, and Athens. I kept thinking to myself as we were navigating the SFO maze, “This is what civilizational decline looks like”: the meaningless scurrying through an array of channels and corridors, checks and rechecks, picking up luggage and hauling them to additional check-ins, and the near strip-search to add to the one already performed by the German federal police in Munich. And this is for people who never left the confines of airport security walls from Munich to the gulag-type walls of SFO – not much opportunity to acquire a cache of weapons and bombs to further the jihad. It’s reminiscent of the late-stage Ottoman sultanate, and look at what happened to them in 1919. It disappeared, and so is the population of San Francisco and California.
The nation is quickly resembling the condition of California: a society living off the fumes of the past. Its essential infrastructure is crumbling as the state, and now the country, pursues the suicide pact of substituting high-density energy (fossil fuels, nuclear) with low (solar, wind). There’s plenty of money for subsidized abortions up to infanticide, transgender mutilations of tweens absent parental cognizance, the effective repeal of the nation’s immigration laws leading to immense social costs, and million-dollar payments to descendants of ancient relatives of a distant history’s wrongs, but nary a cent to expand water deliveries or clean up the streets of the crime and the mental- and drug-addled. Prices go sky high, nothing seems to work, and that scent of social decay overhangs nearly everything like a suffocating blanket of smog. Welcome to our modern, putrefied sultanate.
The reason why nothing seems to work is that we are governed, essentially managed, by a class apart: the minions of the administrative state and assorted interconnected functionaries in allied institutions – a socially incestuous tribe of Ivy League graduates and academics, the media, and a cadre of self-appointed arbiters of culture. They operate like a hive but resemble an octopus like the railroad monopoly in Frank Norris’s “The Octopus”. It’s an octopus of and for the octopus. Benefitting society’s citizens runs second to power, protections, and rewards for it. They do well, we don’t.
It is vengeful when challenged. We see how it operates by examining the Trump saga and, going back further, to Watergate of the 1970’s. The recently released Durham report draws back the curtain on partisan chicanery targeting Trump by the FBI and Obama holdovers in the Justice Department and lesser minions in the national security agencies. Nearly an entire presidential term was handcuffed in meaningless impeachments and massive investigations. No evidentiary predicate existed to support them. They were efforts of the octopus to remove an interloper – really, the American people through their electoral choices.
It’s the same template used against Nixon. Geoff Shepard in his book, “The Real Watergate Scandal”, from 2015 performed the role of John Durham in exposing this older skullduggery from the early 1970’s. What has come to light since those heady days is a tale of judicial and prosecutorial collusion, serious beaches of due process, and the octopus of mostly networked Democrat operatives from Ivy League campuses filling power positions in DC. They’re amazing in their nearly homogeneous partisan makeup, with only a sprinkling of publicity-hound Republicans joining the phalanx. They form a Praetorium Guard protecting the interests of the Democratic Party and its ruling progressive orthodoxy in the upper reaches of power that is DC.
On Shepard, he was a second-tier assistant to the president, not in any way connected to what came to be called Watergate. He’s got two letters from Watergate prosecutors clearing him of any involvement. As a member of the administration, he knew many of the principal players in the story and oversaw efforts to comply with court orders on such matters as the famous White House audio tapes. On what later came to be popularly referred to as the break-in and cover-up, he had intimate knowledge of the indicted and the so-called evidence. The popular story didn’t compute to him back then and has only been drawn into more question as more information has since come to light.
Foremost, the octopus – or hive if you will – that swarmed Nixon and his people. A cursory examination of the key players in what can only be described as an anti-Nixon jihad would illustrate the workings of octopus. The principal presiding judge, the publicity hound John Sirica, a nominal Republican, barely passed the bar exam. He floundered as a U.S. attorney, went into private practice and faced an even more dismal experience (his “starving time” in his own words) before he was rescued by the eminent Democrat lawyer, fixer, and influencer Edward Bennett Williams. Riding in the wake Williams’s prestige, Sirica got himself appointed to the DC District Court by Eisenhower. The Williams connection and friendship would benefit him for the rest of his life. The DC social Borg at work.
What of the first Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox? Here’s a who’s who from the Ivy League/Kennedy nexus. From Harvard College to Harvard Law to the law school faculty, a lifelong Democrat and Kennedy clan confidant, he advised JFK and wrote many of his speeches in the 1960 campaign. He filled the slot of chief federal litigator as Solicitor General under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother.
If Cox’s prosecutorial team – often called Cox’s army – faced the inevitable appeals from Sirica’s gung-ho, get-Nixon style, waiting in the wings to handle the appeals was the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, David Bazelon with a judicial majority on the Circuit to back him up. A veteran of the Truman administration as assistant attorney general, he was known to harbor a dislike of Nixon since Nixon’s days on the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigating Alger Hiss, another Democrat/FDR protégé but since proven to be a Soviet spy. Compounding the octopus’s Nixon antipathy is Nixon’s 1950 elevation to the Senate through his upset win over the much-loved, former star of stage and screen, firebrand progressive, and favorite, Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon was the bête noire of the Democrat DC octopus in an obvious Democrat town.
That’s just a sampling. There’s more, much more. The lineup of hired guns in the Special Prosecutor’s office under Cox and Jaworski exhibited the same partisan and social affinities.
The city’s demographic profile displayed, and continues to display, the same hard-edged partisanship. For instance, the city’s overwhelming electoral base for the Democratic Party is a prosecutorial force multiplier for any judicial proceedings with Republicans in the dock. DC is a Democrat city run by and for Democrats. The city’s growth owes much to FDR’s centralization of power, the patron saint for all subsequent Democrat administrations. Back in the 1970’s, grand and trial juries were drawn from the city’s three-quarters Democrat voter base. Today, it’s worse; 90% is more like it.
The galling Nixon 49-state sweep in 1972 didn’t faze the 78% DC election count for the humiliated Democrat candidate George McGovern. This presents a tricky problem for Republicans elected from the hinterlands and who now must reside in a sea of hostility. Partisan crusades – think Sen. Ted Stevens, Russia collusion, civil proceedings against Trump, anything drummed up against Republicans – will have a good shot at convictions and seeing Republicans in pin stripes. The maw of DC awaited Nixon and still lies in wait for any Republican officeholder today.
The Constitutional protections for a fair trial, fair jury, fair, balanced and conscientious prosecutors, and due process are trampled under foot in this one-party city. If you think that legal mechanisms such as preemptory challenges to remove biased prospective jurors are adequate protection, think again. There aren’t enough challenges to compensate for a 78%-90%+ Democrat jury pool in an atmosphere ginned up by a longstanding local Democrat-friendly media.
A change of venue to a more balanced jurisdiction is laughable when the DC appellate and trial courts collude with prosecutors to ensure prosecution-friendly presiding judges and appellate judges who are noted for their progressive proclivities. Appeals are stymied and so is due process. Once in a DC court, you’re never going to be allowed any other place. Republicans beware if you find yourself before a DC jury.
Washington DC is an obese city gorging itself on the extracted wealth from the provinces – er, states, as in fourth-century Rome. Its output is government, and more government, and has no relation to the generation of goods and services that compose real economic life for the nation’s citizens. It grew and benefitted from the party of government, the party’s progressivism, the party of the administrative state, the Democratic Party. The city’s denizens vote as if they know their benefactors. From this lair, the octopus extends its tentacles to encompass nearly all facets of national life.
The situation has deteriorated to the point that for the nation to thrive, Washington DC must not. The chances of national prosperity improve if DC fell into a deep commercial and residential real estate depression. We have too much government rooted in abstract, ideological crusades, and possessing too much power to interfere in daily life. Shrink the government and acquaint some of the federal workforce to the pink slip. Strip the city of all operatives except for the minimum necessary for physical proximity to the heads of the three branches of government. The functioning headquarters of the Department of Agriculture in Wichita, the base of the FBI and Justice Department in Columbus, Missouri, the operational centers for the four military service branches scattered from Mobile, Alabama, to Minot, South Dakota, might be just a thought, but certainly an appealing one. Oh, how about the headquarters of the EPA ensconced somewhere in Ohio or West Virginia, surrounded by the victims of its regulatory excess?
Strangle the octopus and reinstitute popular sovereignty. The type of people of Archibald Cox’s background have too much sway, and have only proven to possess the capacity to muck things up. How’s that for a path to “make America great again”?
RogerG
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* Of all the books that I have read on Watergate, this is the one that resonates: “The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down”, Geoff Shepard, 2015. By now, in light of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the tale ought to sound like a familiar one. Of particular note, refer to pages 184-5, “The D.C. Jury Pool”, to understand the ingrained partisan prejudice against Republicans in D.C. Please go to “The False Heroes of Watergate”, page 12-17, for a deep dive into the backgrounds of people pursuing Nixon and his people.
* Geoff Shepard’s Watergate account reads like John Durham’s 316-page report of May 12, 2023: “Report on Matters Relating to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns”, John Durham, at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Durham-Report.pdf