The Anti-Trump Bourbons

There is a new article out from Victor Davis Hanson, and as always it is exceptional. Let’s take a look.

Just seven months into Donald Trump’s administration we are already bombarded with political angling and speculations about the 2020 presidential race. No one knows in the next three years what can happen to a volatile Trump presidency or his psychotic enemies, but for now such pronouncements of doom seem amnesiac if not absurd.

Things are supposedly not going well politically with Donald Trump lately, after a series of administration firings, internecine White House warring, and controversial tweets. A Gallup Poll has him at only a 34 percent positive rating, and losing some support even among Republicans (down to 79 percent)—although contrarily a recent Rasmussen survey shows him improving to the mid-forties in popularity. Nonetheless, we are warned that even if Trump is lucky enough not to be impeached, if he is not removed under the 25th Amendment or the Emoluments Clause, if he does not resign in shame, even if he has the stamina to continue under such chaos, even if he seeks reelection and thus even more punishment, he simply cannot win in 2020.

In answer to such assumed expertise, one could answer with Talleyrand’s purported quip about our modern-day Bourbons that “They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

Namely, Trump’s enraged critics still do not grasp that he is a reflection of, not a catalyst for, widespread anger and unhappiness with globalization, interventionist foreign policy, Orwellian political correctness, identity politics, tribalism, open borders, and a Deep State that lectures and condemns but never lives the consequences of its own sermonizing.

In particular, the current conundrum and prognostications ignore several constants.

Do Americans Really Believe that Pollsters and the Media Have Reformed?

One, despite the recent Gallup poll, most polls still show Trump’s at about a 40 percent approval rating—nearly the same level of support as shortly before the November 2016 election. That purported dismal level of support is pronounced to be near fatal, when in fact it is not.

That is an important point. Why on earth would anybody believe either the partisan press or the (pretty much) partisan pollsters. They haven’t been right about anything in … (well, I don’t remember, how did Dewey’s Presidency go again).

Do Americans Really Believe the Messenger Nullifies the Message?

As in 2016, many of those who voted for Trump would prefer that he curb his tweets, clean up his language, sleep eight instead of five hours, and follow all the conventional-wisdom admonitions offered about his misbehavior. But that said, nearly half of the country is probably still willing to overlook his eccentricities for several reasons.

Trump now has a presidential record of eight months. Despite the media’s neglect of it, one can sense changes by just getting out and traveling the country. Even in rural central California, one can feel that it really is true that there is a 76 percent drop in illegal immigration, and immigration law is being taken seriously as never before.

It was no accident that the National Council of La Raza without warning dropped its racialist nomenclature and is now UnidosUS (“Together, US”). Why is the Democratic Party now feigning a focus on class, not racial, issues with its new “Better Deal” FDR/Truman-like echo?

Lot in that, isn’t there? We are, for the most part, smart enough to understand that Trump’s Tweeting, if it has any meaning at all, is his method of bypassing the media, which is why they hate it so, especially because it is effective. It’s also one way he controls the narrative, by trolling the Democrats, the Anti-Trump Republicans, and the media (Yes, I did threepeat myself there, there is not a hairsbreadth of difference between them, and we could add more such as the deep state and others).

The trade deficit is even shrinking and lots of companies have announced relocations to the United States, in reaction to record cheap energy costs and a perceived favorable business environment. And all this comes at a time when the United States is neither seeking optional military interventions nor backing away from thuggish aggression, but is trying to thread the needle in restoring deterrence along the lines of “principled realism.”

The point is not just that no one can know the ultimate fate of the Trump agenda, but rather that so far media hysteria and congressional calcification have not stopped perceived conservative progress. The bottom line is that Trump did prove to be far more conservative than Republican establishmentarians had forecast. To his supporters, Trump’s message is usually distinguished from Trump, the messenger. Politically that means pragmatist supporters can focus on his agenda not his tweets, while Trump’s die-hard voters like his Twitter combativeness, viewing it as a long overdue media comeuppance. […]

One of the strangest ironies of the present age is that Trump’s populism (e.g., “our farmers”, “our vets”, “our coal miners”, “our workers”), which saved the Senate and House for Republicans and delivered the greatest Republican majorities on the local and state level since the 1920s, is either ridiculed or ignored.

Yet the more the economy picks up, the more the administration prunes back the regulatory state, and the more the United States restores deterrence, the shriller will be the argument that Trump’s tweets and behavior nullify solid achievement. Just watch.

Will the New Democratic/Progressive Party Really Rebuild the Blue Wall?

Fourth and finally, the less publicized split in the Democratic Party is probably worse than that of its Republican counterpart. The latter did not stop Trump’s victory in the Electoral College, the former helped ensure Hillary’s “Blue Wall” collapsed.

Continue reading The Anti-Trump Bourbons: Learning and Forgetting Nothing in Time for 2020. As always it’s quite wonderful, as one would expect from one of America’s greatest minds. So enjoy, and take comfort in his words, a fair amount of damage has been caused, but nothing is beyond repair, let alone America. Especially as long as men like VDH are writing the truth.

The Swamp and Machete Report.

Senator Steve King had a few things to say about a couple;e of his colleagues, who scuttled the ‘Skinny’ Obamacare repeal the other day,, after promises going back to the corrupt passage of the monstrosity.

He’s right in all details, of course.

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There was a knife attack in Hamburg the other day, which killed one and wounded several. The perpetrator shouted Allu Akbar, or Aloha Snackbar, or something. The police are puzzled by what the motive may have been. I’m puzzled that the Germans keep electing such cretins as Mutti Merkel, but I’m a simple man who believes in right and wrong, and self-defense, as a person, and a society.

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Joe Klein writing at Warsclerotic has some very appropriate thoughts about the war going on between the deep state (in the State Department) and the President.

The State Department’s own “deep state” is trying to sabotage President Trump’s foreign policy agenda. From the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Iran, Qatar and climate change, the State Department, under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, is reported to be in “open war” with the White House. Key high level positions remain vacant as Obama holdovers “continue running the show and formulating policy, where they have increasingly clashed with the White House’s own agenda,” according to the Free Beacon. Secretary Tillerson has reportedly run interference to protect the Obama holdovers from being removed, allowing resistance to President Trump’s foreign policy agenda to flourish within the State Department.

The first casualty of this internal coup by the State Department’s deep state is Israel. The shadow of the Obama administration’s anti-Israel bias was reflected in a report the State Department released on July 17, 2017 entitled Country Reports on Terrorism 2016. It praised Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for reiterating “his commitment to nonviolence, recognition of the State of Israel, and pursuit of an independent Palestinian state through peaceful means.” The report referred to what it called “significant steps during President Abbas’ tenure (2005 to date) to ensure that official institutions in the West Bank under its control do not create or disseminate content that incites violence.”

The State Department report brushed aside clear evidence of a continuing barrage of incendiary rhetoric appearing on official Palestinian Authority and Fatah social media outlets and of inflammatory statements by Palestinian officials, including Abbas himself. Instead, it claimed that the Palestinian Authority “has made progress in reducing official rhetoric that could be considered incitement to violence.”

The State Department report conveniently skipped over the fact that Abbas remains committed to paying regular salaries to Palestinian terrorists imprisoned for killing Jews and to terrorists’ families. Their perfidiously named “Martyrs Fund” has a treasure chest of about $300 million dollars. That blood money comes in part from foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority, some of which is contributed by American taxpayers. President Trump has spoken out against the ‘pay to slay Jews’ terrorist payments, but the State Department has turned a blind eye. Obama holdover Stuart Jones, the Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, is reported to have steered Secretary Tillerson into making the erroneous claim that the Palestinian Authority had ceased spending U.S. taxpayer funds to pay terrorists, according to the Free Beacon’s sources.

Yep, and a good part of this also goes back to the failed GOP leadership in the Senate. That is a large part of why all those Obama appointees are still scattered around the government (and there are tons of them). The Senate under McConnel just can’t find enough votes as the majority party to confirm (with 51 votes out of 100, or 101 is Pence is in the chair). Or maybe they don’t want to, they seem to be more considerate to the Democrats that to the Republican rank and file that elected them. I suspect that Draining the Swamp™ will proceed much better after more than a few GOP Senators get primaried.

 

Swamp Status: Rising, with Alligators

Are you enjoying watching the Democrats run around hysterically demanding investigations and impeachment of Donald Trump? I find it rather funny actually, not least because the sound and fury does signify something. It conceals a scandal. Not that it has anything to do with Trump, except that he might expose it. It belongs exclusively to Barack Obama and our intelligence community. Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today.

In 1972, some employees of President Nixon’s re-election committee were caught when they broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to plant a bug. This led to Nixon’s resignation and probably would have led to his felony prosecution had he not been pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.

But if a single bugging of the political opposition is enough to bring down a presidency — and maybe lead to an unprecedented criminal prosecution of a former president — then what are we to make of the recently unveiled Obama administration program of massively spying on political opponents in violation of clearly established law?

Because that’s what was unveiled last week.

When the FBI wants to wiretap a domestic suspect, it goes to court for a warrant. But when listening in on foreigners, the National Security Agency hoovers up a vast amount of stuff in bulk: Conversations between foreigners, conversations between Americans and foreigners, conversations between Americans who mention foreigners, and sometimes just plain old conversations between Americans.

There are supposed to be strict safeguards on who can access the information, on how it can be used and on protecting American citizens’ privacy — because the NSA is forbidden by law from engaging in domestic spying. These safeguards were ignored wholesale under the Obama administration, and to many Republicans, it is no coincidence that intelligence leaks damaged Democrats’ political opponents in the 2016 election. […]

A report from journalists John Solomon and Sara Carter last week, based on recently declassified documents, exposed what went on. As Solomon and Carter write:

More than 5%, or one out of every 20, searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards President Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa. …

The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying that the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor,” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26.

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans. …  The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard Americans’ privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.

As former anti-terrorism prosecutor and national security expert Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review, this is a very serious abuse. And potentially a crime. If such material were leaked to the press for political advantage, that’s another crime.

McCarthy observes: “Enabling of domestic spying, contemptuous disregard of court-ordered minimization procedures (procedures the Obama administration itself proposed, then violated), and unlawful disclosure of classified intelligence to feed a media campaign against political adversaries. Quite the Obama legacy.”

There is considerably more at the link. But the point Glenn makes, and I completely agree with is this: If this is even medium close to true, and everything I’ve read says it’s much closer than that, then we can no longer afford our intelligence agencies as they are presently constructed. They are a more clear and present danger to our freedom than our enemies.

What we are seeing in the press is no more and no less than a chimera, a smokescreen deployed to protect the guilty, and damage or destroy the innocent. There is very likely no misconduct whatsoever in the Trump administration, particularly at the White House level. But there is more than plenty in our intelligence agencies, sadly it is not designed to work to America’s benefit, but is directly opposed to her interests.

The members of the community that participated in this despicable scheme, from Obama on down need to be indicted, prosecuted and incarcerated, if proven guilty. Nothing else will suffice. That is the overriding mission entrusted to President Trump, and it is a huge one, against very vociferous opposition. Can he do it? I don’t know. Nor do I know if he has the guts for this mission, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t. But maybe that why he is President and I am not. I hope so.

But he must, America itself depends on it.

Hat tip to John at PowerLine

Swamp Status: Undrained

Well, how about some videos on our problems?

or this

This, however, I do like quite a lot

If you’ve never visited our National Battlefield Parks, you really should. These are some of the places where our history was made. Names that ring down history, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Harper’s Ferry, Little Big Horn, and so many others. If your reflective in these places, you can almost still see the shades of the soldiers. And you know, it’s something uniquely American, nobody else has ever done this. It’s very moving and very cool.

Rep Nunes, Trump, and Russia

I think that’s the full version of the press conference, which is what I wanted because I don’t really trust anyone’s editing anymore.

This is my comment yesterday on a Brit blog whose author said they are seeing very little on it. I think it’s fairly close.

My best guess, from my reading (which I’m informed I do too much of, since I managed to cross names on Twitter) is that NSA and/or GCHQ slurp up nearly every electronic communication in the US. That was the point of that hugely expensive new installation in the west. What happened here, I think, is that somebody in the former administration ran one (or more) data searches specifically on Trump and/or his close supporters. The next stage was that Obama quietly authorized wide distribution of that information, and some/most/all of it was leaked, by what we’re currently calling the deep state, and the most supposedly damaging (to Trump) published to damage his administration.

Or something like that. Will we ever know? Maybe, maybe not. The Russians? Why would they favor Trump over a proven non-leader when he was fairly obviously going to revive American business, especially oil exploration and export to their detriment as well as reinvigorating the American military. Putin is simply another fall guy, I think. At least, that’s how I see it, after reading some of Nunes testimony. There are some really wild conjectures floating around, and while I don’t give them a lot of credence, in this “Alice in Wonderland” world, I won’t say they’re impossible either.

I have found Mollie Hemingway to be a pretty reliable source, here’s her take from The Federalist yesterday.

In the last three months of the Obama presidency, significant personal information from and about the Trump transition was collected and widely disseminated at intelligence agencies, according to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes.

Dozens of intelligence reports provided to Nunes by an unnamed whistleblower were floating around during the sensitive transition period following the election, he said. The information collection itself may have technically been legal, but the failure to properly mask the information “alarmed” the California congressman, who notified the White House of the surveillance and dissemination of information on Wednesday afternoon.

Many of the reporters present didn’t seem to grasp the significance of what Nunes revealed. You can — and should — watch that press conference here.

Nunes began his remarks by reiterating his Monday request that anyone with information on surveillance of Trump or his team come forward. “I also said while there was not a physical wiretap of Trump Tower, I was concerned that other surveillance activities were used against President Trump and his associates.” While Nunes’ earlier refutation of Trump’s wiretap claim received outsize attention by the media, his concern about other surveillance did not.

He then dropped the bombshell: “First, I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition. Second, details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value, were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting. Third, I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition team members were unmasked. Fourth and finally, I want to be clear, none of this surveillance was related to Russia or the investigation of Russian activities or of the Trump team.” Again:

Ace did the bullet points for us.

1. “I briefed the president on the concerns I had concerning the incidental collection of data.”

2. The reports I was able to see did not have anything to do with the Russian ties investigation.

3. Reporter gets huffy and demands to know why he is briefing the president about this matter, as the reporter thinks Trump is a criminal and should not be told about the Legal Noose tightening around his gangster neck.

4. He answers that the reason is that from what he saw, the surveillance had nothing to do with the Russian investigation.

5. “Brings up a lot of concerns about whether things were properly minimized or not” (minimized = masking/redacting names of US citizens before disseminating)

6. “What I’ve read bothers me, and it should bother the President himself and his team, because some of it seems inappropiate.”

7. “It definitely goes beyond General Flynn.” “We don’t know how [that name] was picked up [collected, intercepted].”…

More at both links. Well, that what I think, and why I think it. I could easily be wrong, of course. We’ll just have to see. But if I am anywhere right, we have a major problem in the government, and we’d best start thinking how to fix it.

McCarthyism of the Left

It might have been better English if I had said ‘on the Left’, but it wouldn’t be correct. It has become inherent to the Left, an organic part of it, like the riots at the drop of a hat, the general contempt for truth, and an inability to differentiate between good and evil.

In any case, when Ooobie talks, I have learned to listen, one she nearly always right, not least because she knows whereof she speaks. And besides, she’s been there, and knows people who still are.

Joe McCarthy only found 205 spies in the State Department. Imagine that, and all the hysteria surrounding the claim. Quite recently, nine hundred State Department “professionals” signed a dissent channel message that was pretty clearly coordinated with the media for maximum impact. It was an act of political defiance against the president and his supporters among the US public.

But onward to other traitors. There are of late a few serious commentators who are trying to focus public attention on the swelling sociopathic intolerance in the US. This McCarthyism is exercised in its current incarnation by the left, not the right, which only goes to prove the dictum that the extreme left and extreme right are identical in all ugly essentials. Such experts in Russian and US-Russian affairs as Dr. Stephen F. Cohen of NYU are trying to call attention to the dangers of this intolerance, which is expressed in ostracism of and sometimes violence against anybody not on board with the meme that Russia is an enemy of America. They are trying to swamp the airwaves with the idea that Russia in collusion with Trump was responsible for Hillary Clinton’s appalling loss. Cohen disarticulates their allegations brilliantly in his discourses, but the bottom line is: no evidence to prove charges that appear to be politically motivated. He sees the relentless campaign of half-truths and lies as destructive of US-Russian relations and an effort to impede any improvement. He concludes that these goals are part of the Democrat game plan. I myself have never experienced such a wave of hysteria among a public agitated by the propagandists (hence agit-prop). Obama calls these people community organizers and sees himself as the King of All Community Organizers. Their goal: to deliberately undermine the government and remove the sitting president from office. To replace said president with a nominee of the Deep State and its financiers.

In their battle to take the White House, the left long ago sacrificed truth. Truth is whatever serves their crusade for permanent power and global socialism. The Russian card was planted before the Obama Administration left the premises, likely as an ace in the hole, a tasty bit of blackmail against what the planters thought would be be a Republican minority. When the US voters shafted the Democrat party, the Russia ploy took on major importance as a red herring leading the public to focus not on the corrupt Dems and their corrupt candidate as the cause of defeat, but on a treacherous Trump somehow in bed with the Russians. The Dems operate on nearly one hundred percent supposition and assumption. Recall that the first document to kick off the campaign, surfaced by Deep State agent John Brennan, was an “intelligence assessment,” shorthand for this is a result of brain-storming without actual evidence or only bits and bobs of evidence. (See “Intelligence Assessment and Unpredictability” at https://sourcesandmethods.blogspot.com/2014/04/intelligence-assessment-and.html). A few members of the intelligence community came out and gave their blessings to the story, although not all were equally enthusiastic about it. And nobody offered evidence, instead falling back on the old trust us. Long time intel folks were certainly not convinced, no doubt remembering story lines from the past. And our professional diplomats such as Jack Matlock and political ambassadors such as the anti-Putin Michael McFaul are not convinced either. They and the rest of us in this vast field of “Russology” don’t think the Russians are amateurs who leave giant clues around to track their activity. Our own government doesn’t leave tracks, either, and you can ask Angela Merkel about that. So unless we get something substantive as proof, we have to hold onto our doubts.

via McCarthyism Lives | Ooobie on Everything

Keep reading at the link, cause I have little to add except that I think she is correct.