Of Presidents, Knaves, and Memes

So the President talked officially to us the other night, about illegal immigration, the wall, and Democratic obstruction of the government’s mission to defend the people of the United States. He is right on all counts. And he hit the nail squarely on the head.

Schumer and Pelosi gave the Democrat’s response, and while it was a self-seeking partisan one, surprising no one, their delivery was incredibly bad. In fact, their appearance became an instant meme, which is never a good thing for your cause. Dov Fischer says this:

[I]n their every press conference and interview rejecting President Trump’s call for a wall along our southern border to help prevent and protect against human trafficking of women and children, the unbridled import of opioids, and the entry of criminals and terrorists into our country, the Democrats maintain that they oppose only the Wall but otherwise strongly support border security. Thus, they state that they prefer drones and hi-tech equipment instead of a wall because, they say, those more modern approaches will do an even better job than will an old-fashioned wall at guarding the border. In other words, they claim to be as concerned as is the President over the chaos transpiring along our porous southern border.

There are two ways to demonstrate they are lying. One way is by sitting and arguing back-and-forth with the other side endlessly, as in a cable news panel discussion. I have come to hate wasting my time watching those. When I have a few moments each day to grab some news on Fox, the only value-added from Marie Harf, Chris Hahn, and Jessica Tarlov is that, while muting them, they offer a few moments for me to check the channel guide or pay a bill or two. But there is a much quicker alternative way to cut through the muck and prove Pelosi, Schumer, and their gang a bunch of liars on border security: […]

So it all is a game. A joke, a lie. When they say they are for border security in every which way — everything, everything except for a wall — there is the truth, the proof. No need for a cable television-news panel debate. This does not take rocket science. If you install a home protection system, but then a crook evades the front-door camera or the home alarm or just defiantly smashes your front window and breaks into your home anyway, do you take the position that you will not shoot the invader or call the police — or first call the police and then shoot the invader — because, well, they got past the alarm, so…SANCTUARY! If you employ an insect exterminator — and, no, we are not comparing illegal immigrants other than MS-13 and opioid smugglers and human traffickers to insects — and if that exterminator does a great job, but you later see an ant or spider or silverfish that got past him, would you not squish it? Or do you look at that centipede and proclaim liberty throughout the land: SANCTUARY!

He’s right, the Democrats don’t give a damn about you, your personal security, that of your family, or anything else. The only thing they care about is their power. That is the ONLY thing that matters to them. That is why their response looked like a drug-induced meme.

“O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!”.

And, no doubt, the constant lying to us, and who knows, perhaps themselves, is how they have turned themselves into a joke, an automatic meme generator, of no real account, in governing the country.

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Comey and Lost Credibility

Victor Davis Hanson has some things to say about James Comey. It’s worth your time.

Fired former FBI director James Comey is at it again.

Last week, Comey testified before members of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. In a single appearance, Comey, on 245 separate occasions, while under oath, stonewalled questions with “I don’t know,” “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recall,” according to a congressional interrogator, Rep. Jim Jordan. (R-Ohio).

If any private citizen tried Comey’s gambit with federal IRS auditors or FBI investigators, he would likely be indicted for perjury or obstruction.

Why did Comey, the nation’s former top-ranking federal investigator, avoid telling “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” while under oath?

The answer is, unfortunately, obvious. Comey has been called to testify before members of Congress on numerous occasions. He has written a long book and gone on an extensive book tour, and his paper trail is long.

He tweets almost daily and is often on television—and in those venues never seems to admit to any memory lapse. And Comey has been at the center of every major scandal involving the 2016 election.

In other words, Comey is realizing that almost anything he might say will likely be at odds with something he has said, done or written prior—and could potentially subject him to perjury charges.

So, Comey dodges and hedges.

So many of these clowns at the clown show in Washington, and in Westminster, Paris, Brussels, and Berlin as well obviously never learned the first law of life, that dad taught me when I was about 6 years old. “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you said.”

It really makes life a lot simpler, although it may not square too well with being a self-righteous, power-hungry, narcissistic, elitist jackwagon, who knows what people need better than they do themselves.

A hell of a lot too many of them have filtered into the political system, a lot of them from the Democrat party, but by no means all. It is also the Republican Party of John McCain, Paul Ryan, Jeff Flake, and many others, as well.

And that’s the problem, America was designed to give us room to make our own mistakes, learn from them and eventually succeed. Whatever success means to us, marrying the cheerleader captain, building a business, raising good kids, all of the those, whatever. It’s designed to let you live your dream, that is the American dream, not whatever James Comey thinks you should want.

But people whose dream is power over other people (which is unAmerican) have in the last hundred or so years come to dominate our political system, and while we have been getting on with life come to dominate it.

VDH ends with this:

There has been no explanation from Comey about why, when, where and how the FBI used an informant in hopes of gaining damaging information against Trump.

Comey’s sanctimoniousness and misdeeds pose lots of questions. Is Comey a mere hypocrite? Or in guilt does he project his sins onto others? Or does he by design pose as a moralist to help insulate himself from future legal jeopardy?

Or all of the above?

Important questions which need to be asked (and answered) of many in the swamp, and soon. There’s another we need to ask ourselves, though…

How did we ever let these sanctimonious, power-hungry clowns come close to taking the Great Republic over, and how do we erect safeguards against such things?

Maskirovka, Deep State Style

A commenter over at Ace’s noted yesterday that Robert Ludlum wouldn’t concoct such a plot as we are seeing in the deep state, it’s too complex by far to be real. He has a point. It’s worse than a daytime soap opera. And yet it seems that it is. Either these folks are geniuses, or it is multiple people acting more or less on their own, in their own interest. Occam’s Law would suggest the latter.

But in any case, I would suggest that all of these moving parts, on multiple continents, may be why the wheels are apparently coming off, thus the desperation we are increasingly seeing, as Leavenworth stares some very powerful people in the face. Or not. We will see.

A point that Sean Hannity makes repeatedly is both valid and very important if Hillary Clinton had won we would likely never known how corrupt and self-seeking our so-called civil service had become. This is likely to be Donald Trump’s greatest service to his country.

In any case, Lee Smith in The Federalist has done some digging on why the leak campaign has switched from offensive operations to defensive. It’s interesting.

There is a huge amount of information here, and I strongly recommend reading it all. I have chosen to emphasize the section that talks about the declassifying of documents (that Trump has now ordered) and that has unhinged (or further unhinged) former DNI James Clapper. Maybe this is part of why.

Now congressional Republicans are urging the president to declassify three sets of documents — 20 pages of the final renewal of the warrant to spy on Carter Page in June 2017; records of the FBI’s 12 interviews with Bruce Ohr; and exculpatory material related to the warrant on Page. Anti-Trump officials continue to dig in, pre-emptively leaking information about CIA and FBI Russia-related operations that appears to combine classified intelligence with some degree of fiction intended to obscure wrongdoings.

Halper’s name popped up again last month in the New York Times. A veteran GOP operative, Halper collected intelligence on Trump associates. But according to unnamed officials quoted in the story, uncovering his identity has “had a chilling effect on intelligence collection” against Russian targets.

The apparent purpose of the article, say sources, is to deter Trump from declassifying documents damaging to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

“Informants close to President Vladimir V. Putin and in the Kremlin who provided crucial details” to U.S. intelligence about the 2016 race have gone silent, the Times reported.

A Washington Post article last year, co-written by Entous, made similar claims about U.S. intelligence sources close to Putin. According to the story, the Obama White House knew of “Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race” based on “a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government.”

If the 2017 Post story is true, that would explain why U.S. intelligence is blind on Russia going into the 2018 midterm elections. After American spies leaked classified intelligence regarding informants in Putin’s inner circles, Moscow would have moved quickly to shut down those channels.

But present and former intelligence officials doubt the veracity of both the Times and the Post stories. “Our sources and methods are sacred, and what we do regarding Russia is extraordinarily secret,” former CIA Moscow station chief Daniel Hoffman told RCI.

Gentlemen: place your bets. In some ways, that’s where we are right now. I’m inclined to quote the old advice, “Expect the worst and hope for the best'”.

Another recent Times story that has raised eyebrows is its Sept. 1 account of the FBI’s efforts to recruit Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch close to Putin, as an informant. Published just days after the release of documents showing that the DOJ’s Ohr was in close contact with Christopher Steele, who was employed by Deripaska’s London lawyer, the Times story reports that the FBI operation included Ohr and Steele.

According to the Times, Deripaska was one among half a dozen Putin associates that the FBI attempted to recruit for the purpose of reporting on Moscow’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. A congressional Republican source who spoke to RCI on the condition of anonymity is skeptical of the Times’ account.

“The takeaway is that in trying to flip a Putin-allied oligarch, the FBI told Putin that they’re investigating his interference in the 2016 elections. That is not a good look. It looks like the story they’re trying to bury is that in the period leading up to the FBI’s using the dossier to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, a senior DOJ official whose wife [Nellie Ohr] worked on the dossier is meeting with the author of the dossier, who works for a Putin ally.”

Sources say the Ohr story is evidence that the leak campaign is continuing, even as it is being exposed. And a precedent has been established with this joining together of political operatives, law enforcement and intelligence officials to prosecute a campaign based on illegal leaks of classified intelligence. It’s not hard to imagine it happening again, regardless of who the next president is, and regardless of party.

And that, of course, is why it is so pernicious. If we don’t get it rooted out, rather like crabgrass, it will haunt us far into the future. And yet, it is going to be very hard to do when it threatens the lifestyle and even the liberty of people, who while they may be important, are even more self-important. In fact, their self-importance is greater to them than the country itself. It is something we need to get done.

Anniversaries

Seventeen years ago today the World Trade Center was hit. It was a disaster visited on us on the scale of Pearl Harbor, made worse because its victims were civilians. It was also an intelligence failure, the perpetrators should have been easy to catch, all were what we now call ‘known wolves’. Our government ignored the warnings.

And so began the so-called Global War on Terror.

Other than the Kabuki theater of airport security, and the invasion of American’s rights by our government, there have been two campaigns. One in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. Neither has been successful, although Iraq came close before Obama ordered the big bug out.

But it has kept a lot of money flowing from the government to a lot of special interests. Seventeen years is a long time – if we can’t win a war against some 7th-century tribesman (and there are legitimate reasons why that is harder than a modern society) in that time, well, maybe we should just call it a day. We can always blow it up again when they get out of line.

No real shame in that. Alexander the Great couldn’t get it done, neither could the British Empire at its height, or the Soviet Union. It’s a quagmire and a money pit.

But six years ago, we saw the results of feckless leadership, we saw it in Benghazi.  Daniel John Sobieski wrote about it for American Thinker.

The arrogance of the man who lied to the parents of the Benghazi dead in front of their sons’ caskets as they were returned to the country they fought for is mind-boggling.  As he attempted to rewrite many chapters of his failed presidency in a speech at the University of Illinois, he called the accurate and documented reports of the criminal negligence of secretary of state Hillary Clinton and himself during the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on our Benghazi compound a mere “conspiracy theory.”

Conspiracy theories don’t produce body bags, sir, but perhaps you don’t remember that night all too well because you spent the time four brave Americans were being killed under your command in Libya readying up for a Las Vegas fundraiser.

Kris Paronto, former Army Ranger and CIA contractor who fought with his colleagues on the roof of the CIA annex in Benghazi, remembers that night and tweeted his response to the then-president’s arrogant and dismissive ridicule of their sacrifice and your incompetence:

Benghazi is a conspiracy @BarackObama ?! How bout we do this,let’s put your cowardly ass on the top of a roof with 6 of your buddies & shoot rpg’s & Ak47’s at you while terrorists lob 81mm mortars killing 2 of your buddies all while waiting for US support that you never sent

Obama and Hillary had plenty of warnings that the security at Benghazi was woefully inadequate, that the compound was swimming in an ocean of terrorist training camps.  They ignored these warnings, and when the attack happened, they did nothing when a rescue mission could have been mounted.  Instead, stand-down orders were given to would-be rescuers, and following the attack, the infamous video lie was concocted and spread over the airwaves, with President Obama repeating it no fewer than six times in a speech before the United Nations.

Hicks, the last man to speak to Ambassador Chris Stevens, has exposed the video lie, documenting how he told Hillary’s State Department what was happening in real time that fateful night and how her State Department ignored warnings from Chris Stevens and others about the gathering terrorist storm and the woeful  lack of security.

Now retired, private citizen Hicks goes farther, telling Fox News Hillary Clinton broke laws while condemning four Americans to death at the hands of terrorists:

Just as the Constitution makes national security the President’s highest priority, U.S. law mandates the secretary of state to develop and implement policies and programs “to provide for the security … of all United States personnel on official duty abroad.”

This includes not only the State Department employees, but also the CIA officers in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.  And the Benghazi record is clear: Secretary Clinton failed to provide adequate security for U.S. government personnel assigned to Benghazi and Tripoli.

The Benghazi Committee’s report graphically illustrates the magnitude of her failure.  It states that during August 2012, the State Department reduced the number of U.S. security personnel assigned to the Embassy in Tripoli from 34 (1.5 security officers per diplomat) to 6 (1 security officer per 4.5 diplomats), despite a rapidly deteriorating security situation in both Tripoli and Benghazi.  Thus, according to the Report, “there were no surplus security agents” to travel to Benghazi with Amb. Stevens “without leaving the Embassy in Tripoli at severe risk.”

Keep reading, there’s more at the link.

This is the action of at best, a feckless, but more likely seditious, if not actually treasonous government. This is the history of the so-called deep state, and why it must be rooted out. It is not American government as we have known it. I’m not sure what label to apply to it, but I want nothing like it in America.

It is the major threat to the liberty of America, and Americans.

Different, but the Same

Two articles I’m going to reference today. In my mind, they have several parallels. Let’s see what you think.

First, Mark Alexander at PA Pundits- International tells us why Trump’s approval rating with black men has doubled in the last year.

Thomas Sowell [once wrote] “Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racist.’”

[Rev. Dr. Martin Luther] King declared: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ … I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. … And if America is to be a great nation this must become true.”

Surveying the rest of the passing scene, I came across a stunning presidential approval report: While an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found that Donald Trump’sapproval numbers are holding steady after last week’s pile on, what really caught my attention was one standout in Rasmussen’s highly regarded Presidential Approval Tracking Poll. Trump’s approval rating among black Americans is now 36%, almost twice what it was a year ago. Now, I don’t expect this trend will show up as dramatically in the midterm elections, but it is clear that more black voters are recognizing that Democrats turned King’s dream into a nightmare.

Booker T Washington wrote in his My Larger Education:

There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. … Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs … There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out, they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.

Keep that in mind as we move forward today. Now we turn to the Colonel on a somewhat different subject (or is it?).

You typically don’t grow a movement by subtraction, but it’s become clear that some prominent figures in the world of conservatism are negative numbers. They are net liabilities, and we need to boot them out of the big tent or they will keep stinking up the place. We need to clean house, to send the cruise-shilling hacks, whiny geebos, and the careerist dillweeds of Conservative, Inc., packing. Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and others, I’m looking at you. […]

 One of the many great things about the Trump era is the great clarification it has provided. His rise, which challenged the establishment’s iron grip on power, clarified who was truly conservative and who was just pretending to be conservative as a career move. I talk about these hacks in great and vicious detail in my upcoming book Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy, except I use a lot of swears there. Their incompetence and treachery earned them.

Who needs to go? How about the aforementioned Mitt Romney, the preening tattle-tale who was Evan McMullin before Evan McMullin was Evan McMullin – we just didn’t know it yet. And to think that a lot of us voted for him in 2012; can you imagine if he won, though? He would have rolled on the climate scam, appointed milquetoast judges, and generally showed his belly to the establishment because he is the establishment. That’s where his loyalty lies – can’t you just see him after leaving office in 2020 following eight years of wheel-spinning, hanging out with his good friends Bill and George and Barack?

Now this loser is running to replace Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, who we drove out of the Senate in shame, as the high-pitched voice of The Vichy Resistance. Mitt is going to really rub Ben Sasse the wrong way, because the Nebraska Nag wants that gig for himself. Sasse loves talking about how Trump – and by extension, us – fails to meet his exacting standards for decorum, decency, and defeat in the fight against progressivism. Mitt threatens to steal his Strange New Respect spotlight, and watch those two have the world’s most passive aggressive mean girl fight for the mantle of leadership of the anti-Trump GOP Senate contingent.

Yeah, I gotta tell you, the greatest pleasure I’m going to have (sadly not this year) is voting against Sasse. I got fooled, so did a lot of us, he talked a really good game – until a real fighter showed up.

These guys need to go because they aren’t interested in winning; they are interested in maintaining the status quo. Conservative, Inc., is all about talking and not fighting – after all, if we win the cultural war, who needs them to write about it anymore? Victory means the donations dry up, and they’ll have to get real jobs like us Normals. That just won’t do.

And there it is, right out in the open. Conservative, Inc. is nothing less than the Republican equivalent of the Democratic Plantation, and we’ve been played every bit as thoroughly as the blacks have been.

Now we know, and now is the time to fix it. With Trump holding the ring, its time for the Normals, black, brown, yellow, white, green with purple polka dots, whatever, to wrench control of our country back from these so-called elites, who aren’t so very elite after all. All they can do is talk a good game, without us, they starve. And it is time, and past time, for them to have to get a real job.

Poll Numbers and Missions

President Trump’s polling numbers seem ridiculously solid, don’t they, no matter what the news? Robert Merry at The American Conservative noticed this too. And he undertook to explain it.

There’s an underlying reality lurking in the remarkable poll numbers released Monday by The Wall Street Journal and NBC News. They showed that Donald Trump’s approval rating declined by only two percentage points. That despite the fact that the president suffered what was by any measure a devastating week, with a former campaign chairman convicted on fraud charges and a former lawyer copping a plea on campaign finance violations and implicating Trump in the mess.

Trump’s frenzied political enemies promptly smelled blood in the water and circled the vessel like hungry sharks. Surely, they concluded, this bolt of bad news would undermine Trump’s political standing and begin an erosion that would lead to his eventual demise, either at the next presidential election or, they could only hope, sooner.

But the WSJ-NBC poll showed that 44 percent of voters approved of Trump’s presidential performance, as compared to a 46 percent approval rating just before last week’s bad news. As the Journal noted in reporting the latest results, the difference was within the poll’s margin of error and hence statistically insignificant.

Welp, I wasn’t surprised, since I couldn’t figure out what any of those charges had to do with Trump, exactly. Does he have some political allies that are not completely honest? Compared to whom? Hillary? Fauxohantas? Bernie? Give me a break, as Senator Bumpers commented in yesterday’s post, likely none of us could stand up to this level of intrusion, let alone a real estate developer in corrupt New York.

And then there is this:

Because this isn’t about the fate of Trump so much as the future of America. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump opened up a series of fresh fault lines in American politics by advocating new directions for the country that no other politician would discuss. They included a clamp-down on illegal immigration and a serious reduction in overall immigration after a decades-long influx of unprecedented proportions; an effort to address the hollowing out of America’s industrial capacity through trade policies; an end to our nation-building zeal and the wars of choice spawned by it; and a promise to curtail the power of elites who gave us unfettered immigration, an industrial decline, endless wars, years of lukewarm economic growth, and an era of globalism that slighted old-fashioned American nationalism.

Yep, I don’t have any real investment in Trump, but I sure as hell do in Making America Great Again, or even as good as it was when I was young. And that is the battle Trump is leading, and so far appears to be winning.

You all know that I spend a good bit of time on British, specifically English, blogs, and have many friends there. Especially with Brexit, they are fighting much the same battle, to make Britain Great Again. What do I hear most from them? “We need a Trump.” And they do, they need someone unafraid to lead, to openly love Britain, and its history, and to work fearlessly to restore its future.

But that base, as Silver’s ongoing survey aggregations and the WSJ-NBC poll make clear, is ironclad. The Trump constituency isn’t going away, and any impeachment initiative from House Democrats in the new Congress is only going to further tighten its knot.

I think that is putting it mildly. Unless they have a clear-cut reason for impeachment, much clearer than the Republicans had with Clinton, and so far, at least, they do not, they risk far more than political capital, they risk the foundations of the Republic. It is that big potentially. And that dangerous, to them, and to us all.

And that is interesting. In 1774 about a third of the colonists, and a third of Englishmen were taking the Patriot side in our dispute with the King. A third of each were taking the King’s (the Loyalist) side. And the remaining third on each side of the pond were doing their best to stay neutral – going along to get along. Not very different really from today, and we know what happened then, and I don’t think we really want a repeat.