Tag: politics

It’s Time to Break Up the FBI

It’s Time to Break Up the FBI

On August 8, 2022, the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Biden Administration declared war on the principle of equal justice for all citizens, and told at least half the American population that they are persona non grata. With the unprecedented FBI raid on the home of a former President, we witnessed the most evident sign yet of the Sovietization of America that is already in advanced stages. With that declaration of war, it is time for the gloves to come off in resisting this mortal threat to our democracy and if there is to be any chance of saving what is left of what once was America.

There are numerous steps that are essential to win the war to save the country, and the first and most urgent is the dismantling of the corrupt organization known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI has been out of control for years, and the agency’s previous commitment to the equal administration of justice is long gone. With the raid on Mar-A-Lago by at least 30 FBI agents and DOJ attorneys, there isn’t even a pretext of that remaining. It is the single largest lawless element in the U.S. today, largely as a result of the agency’s politicization at the highest levels.

I don’t like to predict future events, but this raid and the abuse of power it represents has galvanized opposition to Biden and the Dems — already at record levels — and has further galvanized support for Donald Trump. Trump is almost certainly going to announce his candidacy for the presidency — making the raid not just on a former president, but on a future candidate for president. Even more certainly, the Dems are going to lose control of the House by a significant margin in November, and very possibly the Senate as well. While the Republicans have shown themselves on more than one occasion as capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, one hopes they will be as energetic at rooting out the very real corruption and unequal administration of justice as the Dems have been in pursuing their chimeras and bogus conspiracy theories over the past six years. All with the complete and knowing complicity of their co-conspirators in the mainstream media.

Dismantling the FBI

The first substantive post on this blog, Threading the Needle Badly, which appeared on June 9, 2017, recounted the malfeasance committed by former FBI Director James Comey. I continued to report on that malfeasance, which included commission of felonies by Comey, both before and after President Trump relieved Comey of his duties. Comey’s successor, current FBI Director Chris Wray, has further weaponized the Bureau against Trump supporters and opponents of the Biden regime (a legitimate word to use now — calling it an administration is a euphemism, at best).

The first step in rooting out the rot should be dismantling the FBI, starting at the top and working down. The organization, over the past six years and beyond, has shown itself as beyond reform and incapable of dealing with its own wrongdoers. Congress, once the Republicans gain control, needs to make reorganization of the FBI its first, but not only, priority.

This would not be without precedent. In the 1970s, the Church Committee, headed by Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho, investigated abuses committed by the intelligence community, the CIA, NSA, and FBI. That was a different time, when Democrats were concerned about abuses and civil liberties, a far cry from their highly politicized position today. Another case of agency reorganization was the merger of the United States Information Agency (USIA) into the State Department in 1999.

While the FBI and DOJ conduct their ongoing witch hunts against Trump and his coterie, the blatant criminality of the Biden family is blithely ignored. Just as the egregious criminal offenses committed by Hillary Clinton are ignored. It is only if your name is Trump that the heavy hand of justice is mustered against you. The concept of equal justice under the law no longer applies in this country, which should be a cause for concern for every American.

Once the FBI is dealt with, attention should be focused on cleaning out the rot in the CIA and the rest of the intel community, which has declared itself by its actions as a government unto itself. That has no place in our democracy. And yes, I am a former intel officer (in the State Department), and at that time I was always told there was a bright line between intelligence and policy. That line is now obliterated, and that merging of the two poses a mortal threat to the country on a number of fronts.

The Dems’ War on Ordinary Americans

The raid on Mar-A-Lago is not the only front in the Dems’ war on America. This week they also managed to push through, on a purely partisan vote, their fraudulently named Inflation Reduction Act. A key feature of that law is provision of $80 billion for the IRS to double in size, adding 87,000 new agents and other employees. Part of the fraud is the claim that these new agents will be to conduct audits on the uber wealthy, when in fact they’re coming after you and me. Most audits, by a wide margin, are done on people earning under $200,000 a year, and it is estimated that 60% of the audits to be conducted by the new agents will be on taxpayers earning less than $75,000 a year.

Add in skyrocketing crime rates in cities nationwide, an open border that has allowed a record number of illegal aliens, along with a flow of deadly drugs, terrorists, and human traffickers, to enter the country, and the targeting of parents unhappy with their childrens’ non-education — branded as “terrorists,” by the slimy Merrick Garland and the DOJ — and it’s clear the Democratic Party has set its sights on altering life in America as we’ve known it. And their vision is not a pretty one.

Four years ago I realized I could no longer vote for Democratic candidates, reversing what had been my voting pattern through most of my life. With the sell out of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema on the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, we see clearly that there are no trustworthy Democrats. If you vote for someone with a D after their name, you are voting for the Sovietization of the country’s justice system and the destruction of our way of life. Sorry, there is no way to sugar coat that. That’s where we are today. We each have to pick our side — I know which side I am on — and the present and future of the country hang in the balance.

Featured Image: The American flag burns, Lukas Gojda via Shutter Stock. Used under Fair Use.

Keeping America in the dark on illegal entries, Adrees Latif/Reuters, via the New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share this piece.

Nothing to be Proud of

Nothing to be Proud of

In October 2002, following the Chechen siege of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow and the deaths of as many as 204 hostages and 40 Chechen terrorists when the Russian government pumped poison gas into the theater, my Albanian friend Laura called me. She was angry at how the siege was ended, with the deaths of many innocent people, and outraged at the Russian government’s attempt at claiming the use of the poison gas was necessary to end the siege and that the operation was “carried out brilliantly.”

What she said to me after that has stayed with me ever since. Paraphrasing her quote as best I can, she said, “There are things that are done wrong in the United States, too. But the United States fixes them, makes them right. That is the difference between America and Russia.”

At that moment, hearing those words, I never in my life had felt so proud of my country. That my friend, who had grown up under Communism, flourished under capitalism, and had experienced close up some of the inner workings – good and bad – of our government from when I had been posted to the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, had such a positive view of the United States, impressed and pleased me beyond what words could express.

Now, 18 years and some weeks later, in the aftermath of what has gone on in this country over the past four-plus years, and all the more in the aftermath of a scandalous Presidential election and the events leading up to it, I don’t think I’ve ever been more ashamed of this country. I am sorry to say, I think the country has become a parody of its former self, a sham, as fraudulent as the election we just went through, and we have nothing – nothing – to be proud of. Whatever values and strengths this country held before have been so run into the mire of corruption and shameless power grab that they are gone, and whether they ever can be recovered is very much an open question.

I’ve waited a week after the election to write anything about it, any kind of summation of what happened, what didn’t happen, and my response to it. But the election is just a symptom, a result, of a much greater sickness afflicting the nation. That sickness – and it’s not the coronavirus, it is an illness much more grave – is rampant, will remain rampant, regardless who finally is victorious in the election. Honestly, I have been so discouraged about this country and its prospects for the future, no matter how optimistic I try to be, I’ve had a hard time mustering the focus to write anything coherent. It’s even hard to find a starting point, there are so many things wrong in so many ways. I’ll make a stab at putting something out now.

A fraudulent election

I have no problem calling the recent Presidential election a fraud, just as I predicted it would be. I’m not talking about the numerous instances of voter fraud or electoral malfeasance that have occurred in a number of states. Those are bad and widespread enough to merit concern all by themselves, not that it’s the first time in U.S. history that they have gone on, and President Trump’s legal team is challenging some of those that could more likely determine the outcome of the election. No, I’m talking about the entire electoral process, which was designed to create chaos, doubt, and open the door to a Democratic power grab. But what would one expect of a party that dedicated itself over the past four years to the removal of a duly elected President and installed its presidential ticket through would can only be described as surreptitious back-room deals involving party elites and power brokers? Combined, it is the biggest political fraud ever perpetrated on the country.

As I’ve said before, Biden’s real running mate was the coronavirus, which was exploited to create this electoral debacle. There was no real reason why people couldn’t vote in person on Election Day, as has been the rule for a very long time in this country. But fears of the virus provided the perfect excuse for state after state to jump on the mail-in band wagon, setting the stage for the current mess. I had grave concerns about this, as did the President, and we both were right.

By declaring widespread mail-in (or, the bigger problem, mail-out) voting, the only outcome that could be predicted was a disastrous result, especially in states that had never done this before and were ill-equipped to run and manage a massive influx of mailed-in ballots. Those states had weak safeguards in place to avoid multiple voting, stolen votes, voting by dead people, and people who moved to other jurisdictions, not to mention weak processes and insufficient staffing to tabulate the ballots, but this was exactly what those who engineered this mess wanted. In the actual analysis, they have no respect for a fair vote but only sought power.

We now have several states still counting votes a week after the election, with no end in sight. To say this is Third World in nature insults Third World elections. I was an election observer on two different occasions in Albania, one of the poorest and least developed countries in Europe, especially in the 1990s, and even with written paper ballots the results were known the same night. The same in Algeria during my posting there, where results were known by the next day. What we have in this country now is a national disgrace, along with being a fraud, and every American should be ashamed of this travesty.

The accounts of electoral problems are legion. Poll watchers in Philadelphia and Detroit and elsewhere being denied access to observe the vote count, as they are everywhere permitted to do by statute. As many as 40,000 ballots suddenly showing up in one place, every single one of them for Joe Biden. Saddam Hussein would have been proud of such a result, as I’m sure Kim Jong-un would be, too. In Michigan we have a computer glitch that changed Trump votes to Biden votes, and that software was used in half the state’s counties, and in some 28 other states, too. Also in Michigan, poll workers being told to back-date ballots. Envelopes being separated from mailed-in ballots, eliminating the ability to check when they were mailed. And on and on and on.

President Trump has every right to challenge these problems, but he’s criticized just days into the process by the pro-Biden jackals in the mass media and is accused of not wanting to yield power. None of them criticized Al Gore who, in 2000, carried on for 37 days claiming to be President-elect when, in the end, George W. Bush was ruled to be the winner. And that fight involved just one county in one state. The current malfeasance stretches across a number of counties in at least a half-dozen states. So Trump is the bad guy, but Gore wasn’t? And why isn’t Biden calling for a proper outcome of the election, whatever it might be? Doesn’t the confidence of the American people in its electoral process matter enough? Instead, he claims victory.

Pennsylvania is the epicenter of the problems – just as I predicted it would be – and unfortunately Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal members of the Supreme Court he sided with just about guaranteed it would be a mess. The U.S. Constitution, Article II Section 1, gives state legislatures the right to set electoral process in their states. When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unilaterally changed the voting rules, it should have been an easy decision for the the U.S. high court to slap them back. Failing to do that and holding the case in abeyance, once Election Day rolled around it became a matter of putting the toothpaste back in the tube, and whether the mess in the Keystone State can be unraveled is very much in doubt at this point. There is even talk of canceling the entire electoral results in the state, it is such an intractable mess.

I’m also wondering why the Justice Department has not stepped in to some of the more egregious situations. It is the right of every American for their vote to be protected, and that includes protection from having the power of their vote stolen by electoral misdeeds and illegal votes cast. That falls to the Justice Department in the face of local officials, such as again in Philadelphia, openly flaunting court orders. Why the reticence to intervene?

All that said, I can feel good about my own state, Florida, in which more than 11 million votes were cast – almost the entire population of Pennsylvania – and results were known the same night. Whatever issues plagued the state in previous elections have been fixed, thanks in large part to Gov. Ron DeSantis. If Florida can fix it’s problems, so can other states. And it’s time for some sort of more coordinated approach to voter registration and the whole electoral process. As things stand, they’re an embarrassing and catastrophic hodge-podge.

The other issue that I think has to be raised for future elections is the whole question of early voting, not just mail-in voting. U.S. electoral law, in Chapter 2 of the U.S. Code, sets Election Day as the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November. Get it? Election Day. Not Election Season or Election Month or whatever. There is a real reason for having a single election day, with all votes to be cast on that day save for any cast by legitimate absentee ballot, with those counted on or by Election Day. Remember how that was? I do. And I voted in person on Election Day and, you know what, it went fine and I lived to tell about it. The whole virus thing was a sham and a fraud, and that it was allowed to be a factor in the election is yet another disgrace casting its shadow across the nation.

The Biggest Crisis: Media Corruption

I have been saying for years, long before the election of Donald Trump, that the biggest problem facing this country isn’t political but rather the bias and corruption in the mass media. In principle, political problems can be fixed (assuming, of course, a fair electoral process). But without honest and accurate information provided to the electorate, the entire process fails. As I’ve written, democracy dies in darkness, and that’s what we’re seeing right now.

How many American voters got to hear about the corruption and illegal activities of Joe Biden, or the Hunter Biden laptop and the emails it contains laying out the former Vice President’s abuse of power for private gain? Maybe 10 percent? Maybe fewer? Most of the national media – and by extension, local media – not only didn’t cover the story, but when it came up in passing they outright lied and said it was a product of Russian misinformation, which is demonstrably false. Backing up the “Blue Wall,” Twitter and Facebook blocked reports about the laptop and Biden corruption, froze accounts, and censored legitimate reports. Only the New York Post, Fox News, and some online sites with integrity reported the story. The British media carried it more than the American media did. If you didn’t have access to one of those outlets, you never heard about what might be the biggest scandal in political history of the past century (yes, bigger, by far, than Watergate).

Between the concerted cover-up of this story and an election that spread over weeks, the anti-Trump establishment kept the electorate in the dark to influence the outcome of the election. And this same corrupt media protected Biden, content for him to mostly stay in his Wilmington basement, ignoring the obvious signs of his growing dementia, and unwilling to ask him any questions beyond fluff. Who needs Russian or Chinese or Iranian intervention when we have CNN, MSNBC, the major networks, the print media, and Big Tech?

I am astounded when I hear some praising Biden’s “spectacular” campaign. What planet do these people live on? What campaign? It was the biggest non-campaign in American political history. And in reality, anyone with more than two functioning brain cells knows it’s not Biden who will be the real actor in the White House. It will be the largely unpopular Kamala Harris. And people question why I say the Dems depended on people being imbeciles for their victory.

For four years the media, the late night talk shows, and the chattering class spread lies and misinformation about Trump, and those lies and that misinformation echoes through the populace, building on itself. And it’s extended to everyone associated with Trump, to anyone who supports Trump, to anyone who votes for Trump. Being one of those maligned by these despicable characters, I am more than sick of the lies, the bullying, the slander, the threats, the ridicule, the browbeating, and all the rest. I am tired of being called a racist because I support Trump, tired of being called a racist for opposing Obama (that goes back 12 years). The media has cultivated nothing but division and hatred in the country. They have fostered violence. Anti-Trumpers, biolstered by these hateful lies, have threatened to kill (and have actually done so) Trump supporters. The media has this on its head. And it is shameful beyond words.

And now Biden and the Dems and the media say we should forgive and forget and let bygones be bygones? They’ve gone so far as to spread the lie that it is us who want to be forgiven. That is how delusional and dishonest these people are. And some, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are calling for taking names to punish those who worked for the Trump administration. Well, take note: I, and many tens of millions like me, don’t bargain with or submit to those who would steal our democracy from us and turn us into a one-party conformist state adhering in lock-step to a most radical leftist agenda. And I don’t make peace with haters and liars and frauds who refuse to acknowledge and repent of their hate, their lies, their fraud.

Now there are signs that even Fox News is being steered by top management away from being the one contrarian network one can count on to find out what is really happening in the country. I am reminded of how Putin, unhappy with the coverage of the Dubrovka Theater debacle by NTV, the last of Russia’s independent nationwide TV stations, forced a change of management there, effectively silencing dissent. If Fox News goes the same way, we are truly lost.

As the free flow of information is systematically strangled, so is our democracy strangled.

The Bigger Shame on the Nation

The even bigger shame will be all the actors who broke the law, lied under oath, fostered the Russia Hoax, and attempted to bring down a duly elected president in a brazen coup attempt. That it has taken so long to bring these people to justice is a travesty and a shame. Attorney General William Barr and Deputy AG John Durham had ample time to complete investigations and seek convictions. That they haven’t done so underscores my belief that this country has a two-tier justice system – if one can even still use the term “justice,” except in irony – and the likes of Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strozok, John Brennan, James Clapper, and, yes, Joe Biden, all of whom, and others, committed criminal acts worthy of prosecution, will be allowed to skate scot-free if Trump winds up losing the election.

There is something seriously wrong with our judicial process if so much time and resources can be poured into endless investigations with zero results. Or maybe that was the intent all along. Whichever, this is yet one more national scandal, as is the misuse of the FBI and the nation’s intel agencies for political purposes.

Adding insult to injury, some of these reprehensible characters, such as Brennan, already have been offered positions in the Biden transition team. The expectation is that the cover-up will be complete and all the misdeeds will just go away. And, mark my words, there will be prosecution efforts directed against Trump and others in his administration if Biden takes power. This has to be infuriating to anyone who cares about some semblance of justice.

In the final analysis, I think the country has failed itself. All of this was preventable, but decisions were made and actions taken, fostered by ill intent and the power of special interests over the course of decades, that have taken us down a path leading us away from core American values of fairness and honesty and accountability and transparency and justice. And I am left never more ashamed of my country and with nothing I can offer my friend Laura, or anyone else, to show we are better than any other corrupt country.

Featured image: Aggression, John Hain, Pixabay. Used with permission.
Disgrace, Gerd Altmann, Pixabay. Used with permission.
Black-backed Jackal, Geran de Klerk, Unsplash. Used with permission.
Hopeless, Gabriel, Unsplash. Used with permission.

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Democracy dies in darkness. If you care at all about the very survival of American democracy, you should be absolutely terrified of what is happening right now with the cold-blooded and utterly partisan repression of information being perpetrated by the social media giants, bolstered by the mainstream media. Unprecedented in the nation’s history – in the world’s history – it is not government carrying out this bald-faced censorship, but private enterprises, arguably the most powerful corporations on the face of the earth.

This frightening trend toward non-governmental repression, whether it is from the social media giants, cancel culture, or militant forces on the left such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter, was the subject of my recent posting on Banned Books Week: Canceling of Thought in 2020 America on my Stoned Cherry blog. In just two weeks, its prescience has come to the fore in what I would assess to be the single biggest threat facing our democracy.

When the New York Post broke the story confirming what many of us have long suspected, that former Vice President Joe Biden had used his official position to favor the business and financial fortunes of his son, Hunter, and, worse, may have himself gained vast financial benefit, not just in Ukraine but in China, the social media giants Twitter and Facebook immediately shut down the story. They then went even further, and blocked any attempts to repeat the story, such as through retweets, and even shut down the accounts of the Post itself and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. The mainstream media, in lockstep, hardly even mentioned, or downplayed, what the Post reported, and Biden and his campaign have been virtually silent on the story, and has not been pressed on it. You can be excused if you feel you’re in Belarus, Russia, China, or even North Korea, and not in the United States of America, with the concerted attempt to keep the public from even knowing about this story.

What we are witnessing is the utter crushing of the free flow of information in this country, and it is coming from private, but extraordinarily powerful, actors. And it is coming entirely from one side of the political spectrum. This is something I have been warning about on this blog for years now, but it has now reached a critical state.

Keep in mind that the Post is not some frivolous journal. Depending on the method and time of calculating circulation, its readership ranks anywhere from No. 1 to No. 6 nationally, and, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, it is the oldest continually published newspaper in the country. Despite allowing dubious stories negative about President Trump to appear and remain on their platforms, including stories based on anonymous sources and illegally obtained (and never verified) information, Twitter and Facebook justified their actions based on these very grounds, as well as the untrue grounds that the Post‘s information had been “hacked.”

This piece isn’t intended to deal in detail with what the Post found and reported about the senior Biden’s involvement in furthering his son’s business dealings, but rather with the egregious repression of the information to keep it from reaching the voting public. I’d direct you — and strongly urge you – to read the actual stories (we, not being Twitter or Facebook, are happy to be a medium for the free flow of information), which, if accurate, confirm in detail what I previously opined about Biden’s abuse of his office while he was Vice President in the Obama Administration:

The initial Oct. 14 story reporting on emails that reveal how Hunter introduced a top Burisma official to his father

The Oct. 15 story detailing Hunter Biden’s murky business dealings in China

The Oct. 16 story about Hunter’s troubled life and pained soul

The Post stories

In brief, the stories report what some 40,000 emails – as well as thousands of texts, videos, and photos, some showing Hunter in “very compromising positions,” including having sex with an unidentified woman while smoking crack cocaine – to and from Hunter Biden reveal about his personal life, business dealings, and the leveraging of his father’s position to further his business interests and prodigious income, both in Ukraine and China. The emails were on a water-damaged laptop left in April 2019 with a computer repair shop in Delaware, and which was never picked up. While the shop owner couldn’t identify the customer as Hunter Biden, the laptop bore a sticker of the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother, and the email address was that of Hunter Biden at that time.

The shop owner, after numerous unsuccessful attempts at contacting the customer, eventually informed the FBI of its existence, and the agency seized the laptop in December. Meanwhile, the shop owner had made a copy of the hard drive, which he turned over to Robert Costello, attorney for Trump legal advisor Rudy Giuliani. In due course, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon informed the Post about the emails, and on Sunday Giuliani turned the drive copy over to the Post.

While it is true that the authenticity of the emails has not been confirmed, the Biden campaign initially did not deny their existence or authenticity, pointing only to the action by the social media platforms to block stories concerning them as “proof” they weren’t true. Subsequently, the campaign painted them as promoting some sort of “conspiracy theory.” The Democratic smear campaign went into full “Russia conspiracy” mode, with California Rep. Adam Schiff, Liar-in-Chief in the Congress, hauling out that now long-debunked theory to attempt to delegitimize the emails. That there are people foolish enough to continue to believe that sort of nonsense is indicative of the deliberate failure of the media to propagate truthful information in this country.

As further confirmation of the clear media bias that has taken hold, moderator George Stephanopoulis did not ask Joe Biden a single question about the Post reports during Thursday night’s townhall on ABC, and neither did any of the voters posting their softball questions. How this is not considered journalistic malpractice eludes me. Meanwhile, on NBC, moderator Savannah Guthrie, sounding more like a petulant high school girl than a professional journalist, hurled accusatory statements (often inaccurate) at President Trump who, to his credit, responded to them, and the often challenging questions put to him by voters, with grace and directness. Given that NBC came under attacks both from without and within even for hosting the townhall with Trump, can there be any residual doubt that there is almost no fairness or honesty left in the mass media?

There are so many things wrong with this whole state of affairs it leaves one grasping for what to include and what to leave out, so as not to confuse the issue or wind up going on for thousands of words on the topic. With some 20 million people reported to have already voted in this critically important election, how can it be considered a democratic process when virtually all the powerful levers of information are working to suppress reports that, in earlier times, would have been considered crucial to determining the outcome of an election?

Applying the Twitter standard used to suppress the Post stories, the American public would not have known about the Pentagon Papers (hacked), COINTELPRO (stolen), Watergate (unidentified sources), or the revelations of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks (hacked and unidentified soures), or Edward Snowdon (also hacked and unidentified sources). Would America be a different country today were those revelations suppressed? Undoubtedly. Would it be a better country? I doubt many would even attempt to make that argument. Further underscoring the issue, news of the trial of Assange has been largely ignored in the same media that relies on the First Amendment to defend its egregious actions, posing a further threat to freedom of expression, even more under attack in the U.K. than in the U.S.

Pushing back

There are some efforts going on to bring the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, all tech giants, to heel before things go further down the rat hole of Chinese-style repression. Senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley have called for a subpoena to haul Twitter CEO Jack Dempsey to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Oct. 23, and Hawley – a key advocate for limiting the power of social media to suppress ideas they don’t like – is calling for the Committee to subpoena Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Hawley also has joined senators Marco Rubio, Kelly Loefler, and Kevin Cramer in seeking a clarification of the Section 230 rules which protect platforms from civil liability when third parties post false or misleading information. The argument is that the platforms are abusing the special protection Section 230 gives them and, if they are going to censor third-party posts, then they should be subject to the same liability as any media source not given such protection.

Additionally, the RNC has filed a complaint against Twitter with the Federal Elections Commission, alleging that its censorship of the Post stories amounts to an illegal campaign contribution to the Biden campaign.

I would contend that the time for hearings and testimony has past, and it’s time for action. In any event, note that all the concerns are being raised by Republicans. If you think the Democrats are concerned about protecting free speech, you would be seriously mistaken. When they have the weight of what amounts to state media on their side, they remain unmysteriously silent. Partisanship and the pursuit of power supersedes basic American and human rights, as far as they’re concerned. In the one-party Democratic state of California, for instance, an Orwellian-style “Ministry of Truth” has been proposed to seek out and block what it determines to be “fake news,” and a similar measure has been introduced by a Dem in Congress. They see themselves as the arbiters of what is “truth,” and the less you know about what is really going on, the better for them, they reason. But is that better for you?

How would you feel to learn that Joe Biden used his influence and public funds to have a Ukrainian prosecutor, who was investigating the company on whose board his son served, fired? Or that he lied to you about not meeting with a top executive of that same company? Or that he sold out American interests to companies and institutions controlled by the Chinese Communist Party to benefit his son, and very possibly himself? Who, you might wonder, is the “big guy” referred to in one of the reputed Hunter emails, promised a carve out of 10% of a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars with China’s largest private energy company? Might it be Papa Joe himself? And have you ever wondered how Biden got as wealthy as he is, living off his government salary for 47 years?

Read the Post stories and see what you think.

If it’s up to Big Tech, the majority in the mass media, and the Democratic Party, you won’t ever find out answers to these, and many other, questions. And you should be very terrified, indeed. Democracy dies in darkness, and night is closing in all around us.

Featured image: Candle in Darkness, Rahul, Pexels. Used with permission.

The Train Wreck Around the Bend

The Train Wreck Around the Bend

On July 31, 1909, the Milwaukee Road’s westbound Overland Limited went off the tracks and wrecked at Cambridge, Iowa. I’m inclined to see this as an allegory for what lies around the bend for the Democratic Party if things continue to shape up as they are.

It’s not just me saying this. The predictions are coming from both sides of the political aisle, with observers ranging from long-time Dem strategist James Carville to a ménage of commentators on the liberal cable networks, to none other than Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh on the right, echoing similar views.

I’m scared to death,” Carville ranted on MSNBC following the Iowa Democratic caucuses, something of a train wreck of their own. In a subsequent interview, Carville went on to say, “I don’t know. We just had an election in 2018. We did great. We talked about everything we needed to talk about, and we won. And now it’s like we’re losing our damn minds. Someone’s got to step their game up here.”

What has Carville and others so petrified is the rise of Socialist Bernie Sanders as a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nominee to challenge President Donald Trump in November, and the overall lurch of the party – and seemingly all couple dozen of its presidential wannabes – toward the far left.

We have candidates on the debate stage talking about open borders and decriminalizing illegal immigration. They’re talking about doing away with nuclear energy and fracking. You’ve got Bernie Sanders talking about letting criminals and terrorists vote from jail cells. It doesn’t matter what you think about any of that, or if there are good arguments — talking about that is not how you win a national election. It’s not how you become a majoritarian party.”

Right. Think about it. Plan to do it. Just don’t talk about it. You’d be excused for thinking that’s how politicians usually run their games. But that’s not the only cow, maybe not even the biggest one, lying across the tracks. It’s the ascendancy of the far left of the party, represented by Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her left-wing corterie, known as The Squad, in Congress. And it’s the failure of the Democratic establishment’s self-styled savior, former Vice President Joe Biden, to light anything other than a small and flickering flame among Dem voters. More than the chickens coming home to roost, it’s the cows that are coming home to ruminate, right across the tracks.

Old Bernie, backed with a good chunk of the younger vote and others with a weak grasp on the meaning of Socialism or Bernie’s questionable past, eked out a 26.2% of delegate equivalents versus Pete Buttigieg’s 26.13% in the Iowa caucuses (if you can believe the results). And in New Hampshire he came out with 25.8% of the vote versus Mayor Pete’s 24.5%. Not exactly a rousing victory, especially since in 2016 he came away with 60.4% versus Hillary Clinton’s 38% (admittedly in a less crowded primary field). Meanwhile Trump, in the little-heralded Republican primary in New Hampshire, came away with more votes, by far, than any candidate of either party in the history of the state, even doubling the number generated by former President Ronald Reagan when New Hampshire was a far more conservative state than it is today.

The real story of both Iowa and New Hampshire has less to do with Bernie’s numbers as with the crashing and burning of two other candidates, previously considered “front runners” in the contest. In Iowa, both Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden sank respectively to third and fourth place, with Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar hot on their heels. And then in New Hampshire Klobuchar jumped to third place, with 19.9% of the vote, exceeding the combined totals of Warren (from the neighboring state of Massachusetts, from which many New Hampshire residents have relocated) and Biden. Biden didn’t even wait around for the results before bailing on the Granite State and his supporters there and heading off to the Palmetto State, South Carolina, which he has called his “fire wall.” Underscoring Biden’s fall from grace, Sanders’ New Hampshire showing was enough to push him within just a day to the top of the polls nationwide, displacing Biden, the previous choice of the Dem establishment.

Are you beginning to see why this situation could be shaping up as a train wreck for the Democratic Party?

Shades of 1968

Police in Lincoln Park, Chicago
Sihouetted view of a group of police officers as they advance through clouds of tear gas in Lincoln Park in an effort to remove protestors during the Democratic National Convention, Chicago, Illinois, late August 1968. (Photo by Art Shay/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images); used under Fair Use.

To be clear, let me say that, for a number of reasons, I don’t see what happens in June at the Democratic convention in Milwaukee likely to be equivalent to what happened in August 1968 at the Democratic convention in Chicago. Well, probably not quite. The country isn’t as worked into as much of a frenzy over the political divide as it was over the Vietnam War going full bore at that time. And probably more people, especially young people, have other things to concern themselves with today than they did in 1968. But it doesn’t mean that something along those lines might not lie ahead for the party.

Looking at the lay of the land going into the Nevada caususes, the South Carolina primary, and then Super Tuesday on March 3, when 16 states and terrirories hold their primaries, caucuses, and conventions, we have Bernie on the left and set to pick up most of the support on that side of the political spectrum. That’s even more likely given the lack of a viable way forward for Warren. Among the more ” centrist” (though not really) candidates, we have Buttigieg, the mayor of a small city in Indiana and a gay man also seen as beholden to Wall Street; Klobuchar, a lesser known senator from Minnesota with a history of abusing her staff; and Biden, an aging former Vice President who has a hard time putting two sentences together, who thinks it’s okay to refer to voters in terms of a 1952 movie on the Canadian Mounties, and whose credibility and integrity has been cast into serious doubt as a result of the Dems’ ill-fated impeachment fiasco targeting Donald Trump. Oh, and then we have another billionaire besides the President, former New York City Mayor (and ex-Republican) Mike “Stop and Frisk” Bloomberg, who thinks he can buy his way into the nomination by pumping hundreds of millions of his own funds into the race. Speak of a field of poor choices. Now are you starting to see more of the problem?

Through the use of super delegates, the Dem establishment stole the nomination away from Sanders in 2016. Will they do it again this year? If you think the party poobahs in Washington and on Wall Street and out in the bastions of Dem power across the land (such as they are) aren’t thinking about it, I have a railroad to sell you. They have seen the writing on the wall about the virtually inevitable demise of Joe Biden. And so, seeking another alternative, they’ve already bent the rules to let Bloomberg onto the debate stage, even though he doesn’t have one actual donor other than himself, donor numbers being one of the previous standards for deciding who gets on the stage and who doesn’t. But any port in a storm, and somehow these people (who have had nothing good to say about the 2010 Citizens United decision) apparently think pitting one billionaire against another is a good idea and good for America. Or maybe it’s just good for them? Am I being too cynical here?

Let’s say the Dem establishment manages to once more steal the nomination away from Bernie. What then? Undoubtedly a significant number of his supporters will either stay home on Nov, 3, or they’ll vote for Trump, just as they did in 2016. But some of his supporters are talking about a third option.

As stated by Kyle Jurek, Sanders Field Organizer in Iowa, “If Bernie doesn’t get the nomination or it goes to a second round at the DNC Convention. Fucking Milwaukee will burn. The billionaire class. The fucking media, pundits. Walk into that MSNBC studios, drag those motherfuckers out by their hair and light them on fire in the streets.”

This inflammatory rhetoric, videotaped and presented online by Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, must have touched a nerve somewhere out amid Sanders’ supporters. The Washington Post incorrectly reported that Jurek was a mere volunteer, not a paid staffer, and when O’Keede challenged that report as false Twitter blocked his account. Lest you think Jurek is an outlyer, remember that it was largely Sanders supporters who, in true Brown Shirt form, turned out en masse on the streets of Chicago on March 11, 2016, to force Trump to cancel a rally he had planned there that night. Do you remember that scene of political obsctruction by mob? I do.

I also remember, if vaguely, the events of August 1968. If you don’t remember them or were too young to have lived through them, you really should update yourself. If nothing else, you’ll learn there are precedents for today’s political divide, and the divide within the Democratic Party, and you might learn something about the power of the disenfranchised (self-styled or real) to disrupt and make their presence known. [Disclaimer: Following a little 1972 imbroglio with the Rutgers University Campus Police on the Rutgers-Newark campus, I was successfully represented by one Stu Ball, who had been part of the Chicago Seven defense team. Life’s little claims to fame.] One way or another, the chances for a schism within the party is almost fore-ordained. Whether it will lead to the kinds of dramatic events that gripped Chicago in 1968 remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, amid the current churn on the Democratic side, the President is at the highest levels of his popularity since taking office and has every reason to be optimistic about his reelection chances, regardless who the Dems wind up putting up against him.

Who put this cow on the tracks?

While it might take a village to raise a child, it took Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her band of unruly House Dems to help set up the crisis of identity facing the Democratic Party and the chess board likely to lead to the reelection of the President. As I’ve called it in a previous posting, the Dems’ unremitting rage against Trump and their repeated unsuccessful attempts to unseat him and undo the results of the 2016 election is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

Cow on the tracks
Cow on the tracks, The Jack Finn Collection; used under Fair Use.

What the ill-fated impeachment did, besides bolstering Trump’s support, was put a spotlight on the possible corruption of Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Hunter’s business affairs in Ukraine and China. In the process, Pelosi managed to take the shine off her party establishment’s front runner and throw the whole process into even more disarray than it already was. All of Pelosi’s antics, like tearing up the President’s State of the Union address – seen by many as tasteless and lacking in decorum – can’t stop the impending train wreck she may have engineered.

After what will seem like an eternity of sound-alike debates, charges and counter-charges, and jockeying (or pony soldiering, if you’re Joe Biden) for position among the candidates, June is likely to roll around in, say, a mere four months, and then we’ll all get to see if the Dem train stays on the rails or runs off into a ravine. If nothing else, it should be entertaining to watch.

Featured image: Cambridge, Iowa, train wreck, unknown, presumed public domain.

 

Waltzing Merrily Over a Cliff

Waltzing Merrily Over a Cliff

“I  don’t care whether you’re driving a hybrid or an SUV. If you’re headed for a cliff, you have to change direction.”

Barack Obama

That might be a warning that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be advised to heed as the Democrats in Congress push relentlessly ahead in their quest to undo the election of President Donald Trump. On the flimsiest of charges, they appear intent to proceed with impeaching the President, a move born of their hatred for Trump and doomed to fail. As they waltz merrily over the cliff, they are bolstering Trump’s approval ratings and almost certainly aiding his reelection chances.

Depending on what media you pay attention to, you might either, a) think the case against Trump is ironclad and he is nothing short of a tyrant and reprobate, or b) that he’s been railroaded by political animus and blind prejudice. There is plenty of agida stirred up on both sides, largely fostered by selective picking and choosing of what to focus on by various media sources, not to mention plenty of outright lying (I say that having heard it with my own ears) and obfuscation by more than a few supposed journalists.

For instance, as just one example, if your source for news (I use the term advisedly) is CNN, you never would have heard the opening statement of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, a Republican, at the committee’s Dec. 11 session with Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, nor would you have heard Horowitz’s mention of the 17 clear errors and omissions committed by the FBI in seeking the FISA court order that began the whole Russia affair that was scurrilously pinned on Trump. All you would have heard were statements by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein eliciting responses from Horowitz that seemed to indicate all was done properly, which – if you somehow heard the rest of what Horowitz had to say — it decidedly wasn’t. You also would have gotten the full opening statement of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat and one of the leaders of the anti-Trump mob, in the impeachment hearings his committee was conducting.

I’ll be doing a separate analysis of Horowitz’s findings and report in a future posting. For now, let’s just quote what Horowitz had to say about the claim by former FBI Director James Comey – who now has passed from unbridled arrogance to perhaps certifiable narcissism – that the IG’s report vindicates him in his role in initiating the investigations of Trump.

The activities we found here don’t vindicate anybody who touched this,” Horowitz said.

Another Big Swing, A Bigger Miss

At the risk of sounding redundant, the current episode is just the latest in the Dems’ ineffectual attempts to take out Trump. I laid out the basic game plan in my three-part series, “Another Swing, Another Miss.” In Part I I detailed how the Dems’ repeated efforts to unseat Trump amounted to one strike after another. In Part II I detailed how there is indeed a Ukraine scandal, being used as the pretext for the impeachment effort, but the scandal lies not with Trump but with former VP Joe Biden and his son Hunter. And in Part III I described the much bigger, but little reported on, scandal involving the Bidens and China. Now we’re going to see how three strikes aren’t enough for the Dems’ to give it up and how they are following their anti-Trump obsession right over the political cliff.

The process took a step closer to the cliff’s edge earlier on the day I am drafting this as the committee headed by Nadler, the Wiffer-in-Chief, voted entirely along party lines to move two articles of impeachment to the full House for a final vote, ostensibly in the coming week. This followed a contentious 14-hour committee debate that ended suddenly at Nadler’s order at 11 p.m. last night, prompting Republican members to call the process a “kangaroo court” and Nadler’s order “Stalinesque.”

After ridiculous Democrat charges of “bribery” and even “treason” as hearings were under way in the House Intelligence Committee, headed by the shifty Rep. Adam Shiff, the final two articles are nothing less than anti-climatic. The best they could come up with is “abuse of power” – based on the allegations that Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to seek an investigation of his presumed political rival, Joe Biden – and “obstruction of Congress” – based on the President’s refusal to cooperate with the House investigations, which he has termed a “witch hunt.” While the Constitution says a President can be removed for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” there is no federal or state statute against either charge.

Given further that the White House released the full transcript of the July 25 telephone conversation between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in which there was no indication of the quid pro quo Dems’ have insisted was present, and the right of a President to demand an investigation of suspected corruption in conduct of foreign affairs, the first article appears DOA. As for the second article, disputes between an Administration and Congress over executive privilege are legion throughout the life of the republic. This Administration’s refusal to turn over documents or permit members of the Administration to testify would not be the first stand-off between the two co-equal branches of government. Ultimately, the courts could rule on the matter, though the Supreme Court, the third co-equal branch, has been reluctant to wade into such matters.

Let’s not forget that former Attorney General Eric Holder was found in contempt of Congress, too, and the total penalty for him, under the Obama Administration, was a big zero.

Speaker Pelosi, not known for coherent statements, was even more incoherent than usual in trying to defend the articles the committee came up with.

I myself am not a lawyer,” babbled Pelosi. “Sometimes I act like one. Not as often as I act as a doctor. I practice medicine on the side without benefit of diploma, too.” Huh? But wait, she wasn’t done. “This is a decision that was recommended by our working together with our committee chairs, our attorneys and the rest.” Not done yet. “And they (the articles) are … uh … a continuation of a pattern of misbehavior on the part of the President. People are realizing, when they see what that was, they think, the public thinks, that they should be determining who the President of the United States is, not some foreign power.” Well, yeah, and that “public” is who elected Trump as President, isn’t it? The same “public” whose vote you’re trying to undo because you don’t like how it turned out? And finally, “It’s no use having the discussion here. This is a discussion we will take to the floor of the Senate.”

Going Over the Cliff

And that’s where the whole process goes over the cliff. Given that it takes 67 senators to vote in favor of removing the President from office, that there are 53 Republican, 45 Democratic, and 2 independent members of the Senate, and a vote will be almost entirely along party lines, there is no chance the President will be removed from office.

There has been some backing and forthing between Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell over whether it will be a long trial with lots of the witnesses, like Hunter Biden and Adam Schiff, that Trump has said he’d like to call, or a quick process, that McConnell seemed to favor. In reality, it is Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts who would actually preside over the trial and will have a lot to say about its conduct. Regardless, the end result is fait accompli. As McConnell has said, “The case is so darn weak, coming over from the House, we all know how it’s going to end. There is no chance the President is gonna be removed from office.”

Meanwhile, polls have been showing that a majority, albeit a slight majority, of Americans now are opposed to impeachment, and even more opposed to removing him from office, and Trump’s favorability ratings have been rising through all this. At least one major poll, Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll, as of Dec. 13 puts Trump’s approval at 49% (it recently was up to 51%), three points above where President Obama was at the same point in his first term.

None of this can inspire confidence among Dems given that the outlook for 2020 becomes ever more problematic for them. Some major polls are now showing Trump beating all or most of the Democrat presidential front runners in key battle ground states. Throw in the massive Conservative victory in the UK on Dec. 12, and there is plenty of grounds for Pelosi and the left-leaning Dems, to whom she seems to have capitulated, to take heed of Obama’s warning on what to do when they’re headed for a cliff.

Photo Credits: Nancy Pelosi: Unknown; Donald Trump: Reuters. Both used under Fair Use.