Sherlock Holmes cracks the case:

Debbie — see, Deb knows what 1940s American tough guy detectives called “stuff” or “the inside skinny.” Debbie knows stuff about Washington, about Democrat politicians and big shot donors, about 2016 election shenanigans and about Hillary Clinton. So does a man named Imran Awan who is now under arrest for bank fraud. He worked as Debbie’s IT tech, which means he ran Debbie’s office computers — very high-speed silicon and electrical versions of your brain, Sherlock. Imran’s originally from Pakistan and he tried to flee to Pakistan, so his involvement internationalizes this scandal, to the point I may seek the opinions of a couple of other great fictional Brits, George Smiley and James Bond.

Holmes’ eyes kindled and a slight flush sprang to his thin cheeks. “Why bother with them?” he demanded.

Because Debbie gave Imran, a foreign national with a sketchy background, access to highly sensitive national political information and possibly intelligence information.

Holmes rolled his eyes. “At the national level political information is intelligence information. It provides insight into decision-making. Smiley will affirm that. Awan had access to personal information about senior American leaders.” He leaned toward me and in a stage whisper said “Fodder for blackmail. It’s elementary.”

It sure is. And who better to look into the intelligence aspects of this than the great George Smiley, anyway?

Austin has really outdone himself with this one; read all of it.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

The truth about Swamp-gate will continue to be buried by a media that is using the First Amendment as weapon to mortally wound our democratic institutions. (At The New York Times, for example, freedom of the press does not include appearance of any pro-Trump columns, or letters to the editor; and news reports are overwhelmingly hostile and insulting to the president.) For the Swamp’s denizens, the purpose of American democracy is to serve those seeking, quoting Madison in Federalist No. 57, the “ambitious sacrifice of the many to the aggrandizement of the few.” Mueller’s grand jury proceedings are, essentially, a disinformation effort for the convenience of the Nullify November 8 media. The disinformation campaign has already raised, falsely, the cry that the rule of law must be protected from Trump.

The democracy-hating left has no more use for “the rule of law” than it does for constitutional government. The aggrandizing forces behind surveillance-gate, leak-gate, unmasking-gate, and Russia-gate have no respect for the rule of law. For them, the law is what they say it is. The most glaring example of The Swamp’s disdain for the rule of law, of course, is its contempt for our immigration law — and its brazen use of “sanctuary cities” to defy Congress — that is to say, the will of the people — on immigration.

As the left rejects immigration law, it rejects the election of President Trump.

Madison, in Federalist 41, offered another sage observation.  “A bad cause seldom fails to betray itself.”  Swamp-gate is a very bad cause, indeed. It represents a campaign by desperate people to destroy once and for all the American spirit of liberty.

Hamilton in Federalist No. 1 pointed out that history shows that liberty-loving republics are usually overthrown when politicians first pander to the people, starting out as demagogues, ending up as tyrants. The Democrats are doing their part to affirm Hamilton’s insight that demagogues are tyrants-in-the-making. Sadly, when a Republican senator, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, appeared on ABC’s “This Week,” August 6, with a Democrat colleague, Chris Coons, in support of legislation to elevate Special Counsel Mueller above reasonable accountability, we have bipartisan collusion to make The Swamp, not America, great again.

Well, not exactly, no. To have “bipartisan collusion,” we’d need to have two political parties, one in opposition to the other, wouldn’t we? Instead of just the one group of charlatans, grifters, and frauds in gossamer-veiled collusion with each other like we have now, I mean.

Hate to contradict the Bible and all, but: the love of money is the root of all evil? Personally, I prefer the career-politician idea for that ignoble distinction, myself.

Get to it, man.

And now Mueller has this grand jury impaneled, which, you know, I’m reading all these guys, “It’s not that big a deal, Rush. Grand juries happen all the time in these –” No, they don’t. There aren’t grand juries in counterintelligence investigations, and that means this has become a criminal investigation. And we now know that Mueller has hired yet another Hillary donor, another Hillary judge, another Hillary fundraiser from a white-shoe New York law firm who left the law firm. That means this guy expects to be earning money on Mueller’s team for years.

I’ve heard people say, “Rush, you can’t have obstruction of justice without a crime.” Yes, you can. You know, I’ve made the point that Mueller should not even exist because the special counsel regulations in the DOJ require a crime to have been committed. You cannot appoint a special counsel and an investigator without an underlying crime. Well, there isn’t one. They’re looking for a crime. That’s exactly what’s going on. These people are shopping for a crime, and they’re even going back eight, 10 years to Trump’s businesses and whoever it is that might have purchased or leased apartments in Trump Tower, for example.

Now, Trump has drawn a red line, and he has said if Mueller goes over this red line, if Mueller starts looking at my business and stuff that has nothing to do with what these people have been caterwauling about, I’m gonna get rid of him. Well, it’s gonna be really tough to fire a guy who just impaneled a grand jury. Also, you’ve heard that Congress is trying to pass a couple of Trump-can’t-fire-Mueller bills. Those are not constitutional, but it’s not gonna stop them.

If they’re able to pull this off, if they’re able to get rid of Trump with their silent coup, what it will ultimately mean is that they, in the establishment, will be able to nullify any presidential election they disapprove of. Uncharted, dangerous waters. The Constitution is in great peril here. And the great irony is that this is the case even though people who have, over the course of their lives, sworn to uphold it and protect it are the very ones launching this assault on it.

This is effectively voter nullification. The powers that be in Washington are simply saying, “You know what? We don’t like who you chose. Doesn’t matter to us who you chose, you don’t count, you’re irrelevant, screw the Constitution, we’re gonna get rid of this guy. And if we can’t get rid of him, we’re gonna paralyze him so that none of what (he) wants to do, none of what you want him to do is gonna get done. (Raspberry) you.”

Precisely so. Which is why, despite any misguided political considerations that may be causing him to hesitate, Trump should shut this charade down immediately. He has the power to do it, but power unused is power lost—thrown away, actually. It’s not going to make any difference in how the Deep State leeches treat him; they’re going to go right on hammering him anyway—thwarting him, undermining him, vilifying and smearing him, hampering him. It doesn’t matter in the least what he does or does not do, he is never going to get a second’s worth of cooperation or forbearance out of any of them. Never.

So do it, Donald; pull the damned trigger. Just do it. Fire Mueller, shut down his little circus. Prosecute Hillary and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, go after Comey, vigorously hunt down the leakers and prosecute them too. Cut off the federal money-pipe to sanctuary cities, turn ICE loose and let them deport every illegal they can catch. Don’t let anybody sway you, intimidate you, or deter you. Do what we sent you to Mordor On The Potomac to do, and let the chips fall where they may.

Punch back twice as hard; We the People got your back. If you should somehow fail, don’t let it be for lack of trying. That’s the one thing we will neither accept nor forgive.

And after that, it’s tar, feathers, pitchforks, torches, and heads on pikes for the whole detestable lot of them.

Ms Lindsey Grahamnesty, D-Transgender, throws down the gauntlet. And, perhaps inadvertently, lets slip the mask.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham today warned that there would be “holy hell to pay” if President Donald Trump fires Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“This effort to basically marginalize and humiliate the attorney general is not going over well in the Senate,” Graham told reporters today. “I don’t think it’s going over well in the conservative world … If Jeff Sessions is fired, there will be holy hell to pay.”

He added, “Any effort to go after [special counsel Robert] Mueller could be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency, unless Mueller did something wrong.”

So, wonder which of his rock-ribbed “conservative principles” Ms Grahamnesty is upholding by siding with his Democrat Socialist partners and sustaining the RUSSIARUSSIARUSSIA! witch-hunt?

On the other hand, that take on things renders this statement sort of…um, puzzling:

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox News and CNN that the Senate Judiciary Committee learned from Bill Browder, the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital, that Fusion GPS, the firm behind the dossier that contained false information about President Donald Trump, also worked for the Russians. He said:

“What we learned today is that the Russians were behind the organization that tried to get dirt on Trump. The dossier against Donald Trump was created by Fusion GPS and their organization and, guess what, the Russians were helping them. This man said the Russians were behind Fusion GPS.

We all know that the Russians hacked into the DNC and John Podesta’s email. And we now know that the Russian lawyer that met with Donald Trump, Jr., Manafort, and others was actually working for the Russians, too.

So they’re trying to play both sides against the middle and I hope the country wakes up to the threat Russia presents to us all.”

So: standard Mark I Mod 0 neocon saber-rattling, with a side order of NeverTrumpTard pissyness, maybe? Dunno, but for those of you who have been waiting for the whole RUSSIARUSSIARUSSIA! subterfuge to start splashing back on the Democrat Socialists, well, here ya go:

RussiaRussiaRussiaRussiaRealbitofnewsRussia
RussiaRussiaRussia…

Wait a minute, what was that?

On Monday night Imran Awan, the principal IT aide to former DNC honcho Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was arrested at Dulles Airport attempting to flee the country. “IT” means information technology, as in computers, as in hacking, as in what the Democrats insist happened to the election.

Mr Awan’s wife, Hina Alvi, has already flown the coop. In March, she pulled their three kids out of school and skipped back to Lahore, with (according to the FBI) “numerous pieces of luggage” and over $12,000 in cash.

Monday’s airport arrest follows the seizure of broken hard drives from the garage of the Awans’ former home. The hard drives had been smashed with a hammer. Whether it was the same ceremonial DNC hammer used to smash Hillary’s Blackberries has not yet been determined.

What we have here, for the benefit of American reporters who may be unfamiliar with the concept, is an actual news story – an unusual event that’s happened in recent times. It thus stands in contrast to, say, speculative fancies about whether or not money-no-object special counsel Robert Mueller is expanding his “Russia investigation” to set the many Hillary donors on his payroll into investigating Trump’s sale of some property in Florida in 2008.

What connects the “fake news” and the real news is the DNC. The Russia “story” exists because the election wasn’t hacked but the DNC was. Wikileaks released the Democrats’ embarrassing emails to the world, although, helpfully, the US media mostly declined to report on them, and, in fact, CNN’s Chris Cuomo lectured America that it’s totally illegal for you mere citizens even to glance at these leaked emails. As it happens, the world’s most inevitable presidential victor somehow managed to lose the election, and casting around for a reason the Dems decided that blaming it on a stiff tired unlikeable legacy candidate with no message and a minimal campaign schedule was too implausible. So instead they decided to blame it on Russian “hacking”.

Are the “Russia investigation” and the Awan story comparable? Well, they’re both about hacking, and both about DNC computers. One of them has actual arrests, on-camera political interference, destroyed evidence, and a proven money trail from foreign politicians. The other has no arrests, and a meeting with a minor Russian lawyer arranged by an Azerbaijani pop star’s publicist.

And just like that, the fog begins to lift a bit. Both these scandals—the fake one and the real one—are likely to wind up biting the Democrat Socialists in the ass way harder than they ever will Trump. How severely Lindsey Grahamnesty will contort himself in the course of defending his Uniparty partners in DC business-as-usual will be quite interesting to see.

As for what Trump can and cannot do about Sessions according to Her Royal Highness Grahamnesty, he most certainly CAN fire Sessions any time he wants—and should. If the useless frauds in the Vichy GOPe want to bluster and screech and threaten Trump with refusal to hold confirmation hearings, let them…and let President Trump make a recess appointment of whomever he damned well pleases, with the understanding explicitly spelled out that his or her first order of business is to be the removal of Mueller and the immediate end of his partisan fishing expedition.

Then again, there’s another possibility here:

He hasn’t begun the investigation into leaks, which is a big deal and he’s recused himself from Russia. So today Sessions announces… Well, it’s said that he’s gonna announce a new investigation into all of the illegal, felonious leaking that is taking place. Sessions may be… I’ll tell you what this means. He may be about to open investigations into Democrats. Stick with me on this. Hillary Clinton, Debbie “Blabbermouth” Schultz — and, believe me, is there ever fertile ground to investigate Debbie “Blabbermouth” Schultz and the DNC and her IT staffer, Imran Awan of Virginia.

He was caught trying to flee the country at Dulles International Airport yesterday, last night. Fertile ground. So I’m sure Sessions’ investigation may also include him, Imran Awan. The WikiLeaks leaks. Podesta. Russia. But not from the angle that the Democrats are interested in. If this is announced, if Sessions announces this — when he does — it will follow a week minimum, maybe two weeks, of all of these Democrats defending the honor of Jeff Sessions.

Praising his integrity, talking about what a raw deal he’s been getting from Trump. But the point is, go back to the campaign, fast-forward to the transition and Sessions’ nomination to be attorney general, the confirmation hearings. “What a pig! What a racist! What an absolute joke! What a danger! This guy… Beauregard? Ha! We know what that means. The guy may as well own a plantation. He probably still has secret slaves. Beauregard? Who names their kid Beauregard?” They’re out there trying to impugn Sessions.

Now they’ve been defending him and setting him up as one of most integrity filled people of all, ’cause Trump’s going after him. He announces an investigation. Because they have spent all of these news cycles praising Sessions and defending Sessions from the evil Trump, now what do they do? Well, they’ve gotta double back. “You know, forget it, he doesn’t have any integrity. He doesn’t have any honesty. He’s not a great guy. He’s doing this investigation, he’s a sop, he’s a coward. Trump starts complaining, look what he does.”

Limbaugh goes on to discuss with a caller how Sessions is quietly chugging along on immigration:

RUSH: The thing is that Sessions’ real value to Trump in terms of his agenda is he is single-handedly moving Trump’s immigration agenda forward.

The Russia thing was not an agenda item, I mean, during the campaign. This whole Russia thing, there was nobody endorsing Trump because they knew the Democrats were gonna be — I mean, the true Trump agenda, the number one reason he got elected was immigration, illegal immigration, getting a handle on it, building a wall, stopping it, what that meant for the culture, what it meant for employment, what it meant for sanctity of the United States. And Jeff Sessions is leading that agenda item and doing so marvelously well. It makes no sense to get rid of him. And you’re right, there aren’t any leaks about it; it’s just happening.

Interesting, to say the least. It may seem a mite too complicated and convoluted, I admit. But I ain’t just real confident in assuming that the President isn’t smart enough to think of it or cunning enough to pull it off, either. We’ve seen them all rubbing their hands and chortling with glee, “Oh, we’ve REALLY got him now!” only to get handed their heads in the end too many times now for that.

In any event, as I’ve said so many times here over the years: to hell with Mrs. Lindsey Grahamnesty, D-Spineless. And in case anybody was wondering: no, I don’t give a shit whether he’s actually gay, of course. It just provides such a convenient ladle for basting him in delicious, sizzling-hot contumely, that’s all. Yeah, it’s obvious; yeah, it’s too easy. But it still makes me laugh. And considering all the damage he and his pal Juanny Mav (D-MayHeBurnInHell) have done to the country over the years, it’s pretty much laugh or cry at this point.

This, too, would be part and parcel of draining the swamp.

Trump must eventually fire Robert Mueller, a partisan tool carrying water for his Establishment pals as he oversees an utterly corrupt “investigation” where the only person we actually know committed any wrongdoing is his bestest buddy Jim Comey. But Trump can’t just lash out and do it, though it is well within his political and moral right to do so. No, he’s got to do it cleverly, with cunning, in a way that shows the American people exactly why Mueller’s witch hunt is a flaming dumpster fire of conflicts of interest and contempt for the right of normal Americans to have a say in their own governance.

Trump has to set the stage before he pulls the trigger and puts the coup de grace into the temple of this appalling fiasco. He has to do it so the American people will see and understand why ending this idiocy is so absolutely necessary to preserve our Republic despite the mainstream media’s best effort to hide the truth.

Trump needs to seize the initiative from Leaky Bob. You know, I keep hearing how Mueller was this squared-away Marine officer, but through these incessant leaks his organization demonstrates a complete lack of both integrity and discipline. Mueller seems unwilling or unable to exercise any kind of leadership over his team of Hillary donors, or to instill a culture of seriousness and impartiality. The continuing misconduct of his out-of-control, ever-expanding fiefdom demonstrates that he must be relieved of command. And here’s the letter the president should send to him to set the stage to do it.

Y’know, every time one of these Deep State termites is brought in by the establishment to head an investigation inquiry blue-ribbon panel witch hunt against somebody they dislike or fear, there’s always much blather puked forth from Business As Usual Washington about his “impartiality,” his “integrity,” his fearless determination to grapple honestly with the facts and get at the truth no matter where the chips may fall.

And every time, every single damned time, it ends up being some transparently partisan, obedient Deep State functionary like Comey who cheerfully dances to the Left’s tune and roots around until he can contrive a way to send somebody or other to the slammer, usually somebody who had little or nothing to do with the original “crime”—like, say, Martha Stewart or poor old Scooter Libby.

Sessions should never have allowed this maleficent farce to go forward; it’s a matter of no small curiosity to me why he did. But now it’s down to Trump to send the Left’s latest tapeworm packing. Schlichter is right that it will need to be deftly handled, and his letter would be a great way to lay the groundwork. Such as:

You were appointed to investigate the baseless and politically motivated claims of collusion with Russia. While I am frustrated at the partisan innuendo and improper leaks, I respect this process. Yet these false claims have interfered with my administration’s ability to deliver on the promises I made to the tens of millions of Americans who voted for me last November.

[This is where the President makes clear that he will not let these bogus charges derail the policies the American people voted for. You establishment creeps want to go back to business as usual? Win an election. Your coup fantasies? Not happening.]

3. On June 14, 2017, the news media reported a leak from inside your investigation to the effect that I was personally the subject of an investigation for “obstruction of justice.” This leak was widely perceived as a bureaucratic maneuver designed to prevent me from exercising my prerogative under the Constitution of relieving you, a subordinate executive branch officer, of your duties. Recently, there were leaks about you unilaterally further expanding the probe beyond the bogus Russian collusion claims to my personal financial matters from a decade ago. Fairly or not, these shameful betrayals of your confidence by members of your team (assuming the media is accurate, which is questionable) portray you as using the kind of tactics that resulted in my mandate to “drain the swamp.” And these endless leaks are especially troubling in light of Mr. Comey’s admission that he leaked information to manipulate the special counsel process, while hiding from the American people the fact that I was never under investigation for collusion with Russia.

[Time to remind people that Mueller is not leading a group of dedicated professionals pursuing the truth but a liberal agenda-driven, undisciplined band of Hillary hacks who are just another set of Washington insiders playing the same old political games.]

If these leaks are accurate, please explain the steps you are taking to identify who on your team violated your trust and the trust of the American people. If the leaks are not true, please unequivocally state that fact. Please also explain the steps you are taking to ensure that your staff will act professionally and with integrity in the future in order to regain the American people’s confidence in the impartiality and fairness of your investigation.

[Boom. Put it back on Mr. Integrity™ to explain what he plans to do to restore some professionalism to the circle of jerks that is his team.]

And THAT’S the most repulsive irony of all: so far, the only real crime committed in this whole phony “scandal” has been the multitude of leaks, at least some of which exposed classified information and put clandestine sources of intelligence at very real risk.

Trump needs to fire Mueller. He needs to subject Comey to an investigatory proctoscopy, and prosecute the hell out of him for the games he played with classified information in seeking to get Mueller or some other compliant stalking horse appointed. He needs to go after Hillary too, and see to it that she faces justice at long last for her use of an illegal private server that had more holes in it than the Democrat Socialists’ faltering “Russia collusion” subterfuge.

In the end, it all comes down to the same thing: he needs to drain the damned swamp. Printing out a copy of Schlichter’s excellent letter on White House stationery, signing his name to it, and couriering the thing over to the tapeworm Mueller toot fucking sweet would be a fine step in the right direction.

Don’t piss on ’em, Mr President; kick their asses. Good and hard, until they’re wearing ’em for a hat. Nothing less is going to suffice.

Let’s get on with it. It won’t be easy, it won’t be quick. But it couldn’t be more vital.

Anxious Trump voters have been understandably frustrated by the lack of speed with which President Trump is able to force the MAGA agenda onto an unwilling DC political apparatus. However, if you step back and look at the scope of the challenge, the situation is entirely understandable.

Donald Trump was a 100% pure political outsider, a citizen politician. There was never any underlying organizational apparatus to support victory. There was Dan, Hope, Michael and Corey; later Paul then Kellyanne and Steve. Everything else needed to be constructed from scratch and even the party apparatus didn’t support candidate Trump.

On November 9th 2016 President-elect Trump did not wake up with a staff of 50 political career employees sitting at Trump desks with Rolodexes filled with a network of affiliate political allies, personnel and associates to call upon to create the Trump administration. Consequently President Trump needed to import the entire administrative personnel architecture to support the move to the White House.

President-elect Trump approached that challenge by hiring the Chairman of the RNC, Reince Priebus to fill out the hundreds of empty chairs. Priebus brought a staff mostly from the RNC and his own network of contacts. Many of those people were not self-described deplorables, or MAGA-minded; hence, the leaking etc.

The Heritage Foundation, and a few other late-coming allied political groups were brought on to provide some more legislative-minded bodies to help turn the Trump populist and pragmatic campaign platform into actionable policy and legislation. There simply wasn’t a decades old MAGA think tank as a resource.  Again, sub-contracting needed.

Understanding the dynamic of building out the administrative architecture leads to an understanding of the visible frustration. However, this is exactly what citizen political operations look like absent of career political operatives familiar with all historic national political efforts.

Many people might wonder what took so long. However, when we take time to understand the nature of a complete political outsider winning the office of the Presidency and all that encompasses, we begin to understand the best part of what we voted for is only possible when the architecture to support it is fully in place.

We are nearing that point.

Winter is coming for the intransigent professional political class.

We can only hope. The very idea of a “professional political class,” of such creatures as “career politicians,” was anathema to the Founders, and very rightly so. It’s the source of nearly all our current woes that it hasn’t remained so with us, and until the idea of ordinary citizens doing their term or two of public service and returning to private life becomes the norm again rather than a concept as bizarre and alien to us as…well, as three-headed aliens from Mars walking the streets among us, we will have little hope of putting things right again.

The very notion of an enormous, intrusive, all-powerful central government ruling us via a “professional political class” of supposed “experts” is surely Progressivism’s greatest triumph. But our having allowed ourselves to be trained to humble acceptance of it as simply the natural order of things would have to rank near the top of the list, too.

If he can pull it off, Trump’s most resounding and meaningful achievement will probably be to clear out the DC rat’s nest of every last Obama appointee; thoroughly and entirely fumigate the out-of-control bureaucracies and burn out the deadwood therein; remind the vermin in the executive-branch departments so clearly determined to cripple his agenda a-borning of just who it is they’re supposed to be working for; and bring the Ruling Class firmly to heel at last. I repeat: not easy, not quick. But absolutely vital.

It’s real, and its tyrannical overreach is SPECTACULAR.

A new analysis of documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden details a highly classified technique that allows the National Security Agency to “deliberately divert” US internet traffic, normally safeguarded by constitutional protections, overseas in order to conduct unrestrained data collection on Americans.

According to the new analysis, the NSA has clandestine means of “diverting portions of the river of internet traffic that travels on global communications cables,” which allows it to bypass protections put into place by Congress to prevent domestic surveillance on Americans.

The new findings, published Thursday, follows a 2014 paper by researchers Axel Arnbak and Sharon Goldberg, published on sister-site CBS News, which theorized that the NSA, whose job it is to produce intelligence from overseas targets, was using a “traffic shaping” technique to route US internet data overseas so that it could be incidentally collected under the authority of a largely unknown executive order.

US citizens are afforded constitutional protections against surveillance or searches of their personal data. Any time the government wants to access an American’s data, they must follow the rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, a Washington DC-based court that authorizes the government’s surveillance programs.

That’s a laugh. The FISA “Court” is a pretext and a subterfuge, and almost never turns down a request from the murky mishmash of politicized police-state intelligence and law tyranny-enforcement agencies to get permission to spy on whoever they wish. And if you think this particular technique is all they have going on without the people’s knowledge or consent, you probably also believe the Constitution is still in effect, or even matters at all as anything other than a document of purely historical interest.

DAMN those Democrat Socialists for inflicting such a thing on us, anyway!

The so-called Executive Order 12333, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, went on to become the bulk of the NSA’s authority, expanding the agency’s collection capabilities to both foreign and domestic targets. The order is far more permissive than the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as enacted by Congress, as it falls solely under the watch of the executive branch and is not reviewed by the courts.

Um. Uhhh. Oh. Never mind. You’d think Saint Ronnie would have known about mission creep, and its inevitability in any bureaucracy. Then again, maybe he did. He’d have to have been the sort of “amiable dunce” the libtards always claimed he was not to.

Personal security? Right to privacy? Might as well face it, people: you got none. Along with their rest of your supposedly Constitutionally-guaranteed “rights,” they’re as dead as the dodo, as useless as teats on a boar-hog, and as empty and meaningless as a politician’s promise. Meanwhile, the Deep State witch hunt/coup attempt grinds ever on:

The FBI launched a criminal probe against former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn two years after the retired Army general roiled the bureau’s leadership by intervening on behalf of a decorated counterterrorism agent who accused now-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and other top officials of sexual discrimination, according to documents and interviews.

Normally I’m damned skeptical of sexual discrimination claims, but this one seems damned credible—and if you read on for the detailed account, you’ll see that the whole thing has that all-too-familiar odor to it of a rogue, out-of-control federal bureaucracy claiming sneaky vengeance for any disruption or exposure of its clandestine agenda.

It’s one hell of a Deep State swamp President Trump has set himself the task of draining. We can only hope he—and we—are up to it.

Update! More evidence, as if any were needed, via Insty:

A producer for CNN admitted in a newly released undercover spy video that President Trump is “probably right” in accusing his opponents of engaging in a witch hunt as it relates to collusion with Russia.

The video, published online Monday night by conservative sting activist James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas website, shows John Bonifield, a CNN producer who covers medical issues, saying, “I just feel like they really don’t have it [proof of collusion] but they want to keep digging.”

He continued, “And so I think the president is probably right to say, ‘Look, you are witch hunting me.'”

Bonifield also says in the video that that federal investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government “could be bullshit” and that it’s “mostly bullshit right now.”

It certainly is. Thank God for people like O’Keefe, Snowden, and Assange. Their motives may or may not be suspect at times, but they’ve done us all a service by exposing this wriggling, slimy mass of dung beetles feeding on the mouldering corpse of the old Republic nonetheless.

Bogged down in pedantry and minutiae is a feature here, not a bug. In fact, it’s the whole point.

Senator Sessions will be testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee at 2:30 p.m. today. The event has not received as much fanfare as COMEY DAY did, but it will be watched by many who are hoping for a smoking gun or gotcha moment that will land President Trump and all his people in jail immediately.

We know one of the issues on which the committee will be focused will be Sessions’ two meetings with THE RUSSIANS and the mysterious, new third meeting in April of 2016. It’s important to get the facts straight before the inquisition committee meets so you are able to discern what is spin and lies and what is truth.

No it isn’t. What’s important is to realize they do nothing BUT spin and lie, and the truth is irrelevant.

Let’s talk about what the meeting with THE RUSSIANS in Senator Sessions’ office (“the second meeting”) actually means. Senator Jeff Sessions met with Ambassador Kislyak in September in his Senate office. That’s because he was a senator who sat on the Armed Services Committee, as well as the Budget, Environment and Public Works, and Judiciary Committees.

Sessions also met with the ambassador for the Ukraine prior to meeting with Kislyak; in fact, he met with 30 different ambassadors over an eight-month period.Senators regularly meet with ambassadors. Here is a picture of a meeting with Democrats Reed, McCaskill, and Landrieu and Russian Ambassador Kislyak. The media and the Democrats would have you believe Sessions’ meeting with an ambassador is out of the ordinary and exotic. It’s not; it’s part of his job.

Now I’m sure Liz thinks she’s doing important work here, unveiling the skullduggery and fraud integral to this whole manufactured circus. I’m even willing to consider the notion that maybe, in some very minor way that won’t matter one iota in two weeks’ time, she actually is.

But…well…dammit, NO. What she’s doing, in my view, is dancing to their tune. The Democrat Socialists/Deep Staters have been doing this sort of thing for years, and the Vichy GOPe has been going along with it far too willingly and far too long now for me to just assume they’re all merely stupid. We’ve seen this shitshow before, plenty of times. We all ought to know by now how it ends, and we certainly ought to know what the real motive behind this latest iteration is.

Trump ought to fire Mueller immediately—without a single word offering any explanation to anybody at all, preferably via Twitter. He ought to fire the shadowy Deep State troll who hired him, Rosenwhateverthefuck, too. He should probably instruct his employees at Justice to begin an investigation of Comey’s criminal leaks, and he also ought to see to it that Loretta Lynch is brought to justice for her collusion with the Clintons.

Yes, he can do all that. He probably doesn’t much want to, but if he intends to do any really effective draining of any swamps, he may have to. I would have probably picked the EPA or the State Department first before all this, but now Justice is looking more and more like a great place to start.

This whole “investigation” is nothing more than a sham based on a lie. It is a pretense, a fishing expedition to see if Trump’s enemies can either find, exaggerate, gin up, or stitch from whole cloth any excuse at all to either impeach Trump (extremely unlikely), hound him from office (again: unlikely), or simply tangle him up so thoroughly he can’t get anything done.

I don’t think that’s particularly likely either, since he’s been quietly beavering away and doesn’t seem much bothered by any of this nonsense so far. Seriously, consider: he’s removed us from the idiotic Paris “accords.” He’s put the Muslim nations in the Middle East on notice, in very clear terms, that they have some swamp-draining of their own to do, and they need to get to it. With a single Tweet (HORRORS!) he reduced London’s silky-smooth, too-glib, false-flag, jihad-supporting mayor to incoherent spluttering and a public endorsement of the repulsive notion that regular terrorist attacks are something big-city residents will just have to “get used to.” He’s cutting regulations like a fiend, as I mentioned the other day. A new coal mine has opened in Pennsylvania, the first one in decades.

No, he hasn’t repealed Obamacare; that’s a legislative matter, outside his proper purview, and not something he can do a whole lot about beyond advocating and lobbying hard for it—which he has done. His attempt to expand Obama’s travel restrictions on seven Muslim terror-sponsoring states has so far been stymied by politicized courts, for thoroughly specious reasons, and he needs to find a way around that, and get on with it.

But he has the entire Deep State apparatus trembling with rage and fear; he has the Democrat Socialists and their rabid, dysfunctional, America-hating constituency foaming at the mouth and revealing their true repellent nature every single day, to the disgust of real Americans who can finally see them for just what they are. He’s also exposed the Vichy GOPe collaborators for the double-dealing, fork-tongued frauds they’ve gotten away with being for so long.

With all that going on, I refuse to be distracted by a bunch of trumped-up hooraw about who Sessions did or did not talk to, when and where and what might have been said. Yes, the Russians tried to influence our elections; they’ve been doing it for decades, and they always will do it…and we do it too, all over the world. But there is absolutely no evidence at all that a single fucking vote was bought, stolen, hacked, erased, bribed into existence, or changed because of their efforts. NONE.

The whole bullshit Russia story was cooked up by Hillary and her team within a day of her humiliating defeat, to try to rationalize why she got her ass beat like a big bass drum. It has staggered on, zombie-like, because the Democrat Socialists and their constituency refuse to accept the results of the election, and will do anything at all to hang onto their illegitimate power. If there’s any election-stealing going on here, it’s them that’s doing it, right now. And they’re doing it brazenly, in broad daylight. And they’re doing it without the least apparent concern over what real Americans’ reaction might be should they somehow pull it off.

They’d better be damned careful what they wish for. Because the fact is, it isn’t just Trump they hate, and it’s not just him they’re trying to defy, disenfranchise, and dislodge. It’s US—the people who elected him to do exactly the things he’s been trying to do, whose agenda we endorsed by making him President. Ultimately, it’s our outlandish uppityness in imagining that we maybe ought to have some small say in how we’re governed that they’re trying to dispense with here.

Why, the AUDACITY!

I keep saying: it’s a coup they’re attempting here, nothing less. And while Trump is the legal target, it’s aimed at us every bit as much as him. They are violently opposed to the result of the last election; rather than accept it, they intend to overturn it.

But like I also keep saying: careful what you wish for, assholes. Because should you get it, you’ll very likely wind up getting a whole lot else shortly thereafter. And I feel extremely confident in asserting that you won’t like it nearly as much. I expect it will involve torches, pitchforks, tar, feathers, and rails for riding off to a midnight splash in the Potomac. It will probably move on to ropes and lampposts shortly thereafter. I doubt heads on pikes and drawing and quartering are entirely out of the question.

This far. No farther.

Time to end WH press briefings.

The role of press briefings is to create two complementary illusions. The first illusion is that the administration is providing new and useful information. That rarely happens. And when it does, it could have been done more easily in the form of a press release in response to a written inquiry. A written response can be faster than a press briefing because it doesn’t depend on a scheduled meeting time in the future.

The second illusion created by the press briefings is that “news” is being manufactured in that room. The reality is that artisanal “gotcha” moments are lovingly crafted by the press. That means the so-called news from press briefings is generally fake news, and that would be true no matter the administration in power.

It can be super-expensive for a news organization to do investigative journalism. It might take months to do the research and it can result in no story at all. But the gotcha questions at a press briefing are cheap, and they are the incubators of fake news that feed the media machine. That’s good for the press, but the public doesn’t need any of that, except for entertainment.

The other big reason for eliminating press briefings is the uniqueness of President Trump. No surrogate can speak for our current president and expect to stay consistent and accurate. The president’s persuasion system involves a lot of flexibility with the facts, as well as moving people’s attention and energy where he needs it. Realistically, no surrogate can hope to match what President Trump does, or even to stay consistent with it. And as long as the president is willing to do lots of on-camera interviews, the press should get plenty of easy-to-mine news right from the source. No press briefing needed.

It might be different if the press was what it claims to be: honest, impartial conveyors of information on current events. They are no such thing, and only the most obtuse of us don’t know it by now. There is no reason in the world for Trump to submit himself or any of his underlings to daily interlocution by his enemies, especially when they’re so entirely lacking in integrity, and so tireless in their dedication to undermining and crippling his Presidency by any means they can contrive. It serves no good purpose, and has the potential to do great damage instead.

As the good doc says: something’s fishy, that’s for sure. Basically, though, it still comes down to this:

It’s nearly incontrovertible that a slow-motion coup d’etat is now taking place. Since November 9, 2016, forces within the U.S. government, media, and partisan opposition have aligned to overthrow the Electoral College winner, Donald Trump.

To achieve this they have undermined the institutions of the Fourth Estate, the bureaucratic apparatus of the U.S. government, and the very nature of a contentious yet affable two-party political system. Unlike the coup d’etat that sees a military or popular figure lead a minority resistance or majority force into power over the legitimate government, this coup d’etat is leaderless and exposes some of the deepest fissures in our system of government. This coup d’etat represents not the rule of one man or even many, but by the multitude of our elites.

This is NOT a Trump fan saying this, mind—he emits the now-obligatory “Trump is a stupid buffoon” gassy belch in the very next paragraph, which reflexive spasm is becoming just tiresome at this point—but he most ably runs down the tactics, mechanics, and general skullduggery behind what is as I have said all along: a serious attempt at a soft coup.

i think I’ve adequately covered the potential for disaster built into another civil war; others have written at length about the unlikelihood and unworkability of any sort of separation or partition of the country, and I’ve linked and commented on those posts in general agreement.

But the other thing that is becoming clearer by the day is this: we can’t for very much longer share a nation with these people. Their desire for authoritarian rule over us is wholly incompatible with our desire to live in freedom; their meddlesome and intrusive inclinations—their smug and unshakable conviction of a Divine right to rule established by their presumed intellectual superiority (in evidence nowhere outside their own thick skulls)—cannot be reconciled with our inchoate desire to be left alone.

This nation was founded on a presumed notion of some commonly-held values: liberty, limited government, individual responsibility, the right to decide for oneself what ambitions might be worth pursuing, and the pursuit of them, provided no damage was done to others.

We are far, far beyond abandoning those values now; they have been flung down and danced upon by an elitist ruling class eager to gather all possible power to itself, to then dispense freedom in limited, grudging dollops to us lesser folk. The core ideal of Progressivism since its inception—absolute rule of a benighted populace by supposedly enlightened “experts”—does not allow for the flourishing of those ambitions, the creativity that inspires them, nor the free pursuit of them.

Progressivism is about limits; it is about establishing impenetrable boundaries around the people under its rule. America was established with the shattering of those boundaries as its motivating ideal; the idea of the Founders was to establish boundaries and restrictions not on the people, but on the government. It says so explicitly, in no uncertain terms, in our founding documents. The failure is not in our Constitution; it is in ourselves, for failing to hold our government strictly accountable to it—for allowing ourselves to be bought off by cheap bribery, gulled by promises of security, and outright deceived by manipulation and skullduggery.

Whether we realize it or not, the price we’ll pay for even the partial re-establishment of the proud legacy left us by the Founders, whether it’s exacted by partition or open war or both, will be steep indeed. They knew this, and they fought and bled and died anyway to grant us the rich legacy we in our shortsightedness and folly too blithely squandered. Some now mock and scorn that Constitution as a flawed instrument, a hollow document that guaranteed nothing, a failure. But I haven’t seen them shedding any blood for human liberty yet themselves. Their chance is going to come soon, I have all too little doubt of that. If the establishment coup against Trump succeeds, it might come for all of us a lot sooner than we think.

I know I’ve been quoting Rush maybe more than I should lately, but he’s been nailing it.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Rush, two things. First of all, when President Trump addressed the nation through the State of the Union, his favorability ratings went up. I don’t understand why he does not do like Reagan did or Obama and address the nation on a monthly basis.

RUSH: Uhhh, A, I don’t think Reagan did. Obama went longer without press conferences than most presidents. Obama didn’t need to address the American people; the surrogates of his administration were the media, and they were getting the word out. Reagan… In fact, in Reagan’s second term, he practically was invisible after the Iran-Contra thing happened. Now, Trump is addressing the American people. This is why I wanted to accept your call, because Trump is, every day, addressing the American people via Twitter.

CALLER: Yeah, but don’t you think it’d be more effective if he sat down calmly and humbly mentioned the things that he accomplished and then calmly addressed the lies that are being spewed out there? I think Trump supporters like myself would love to see that, ’cause we’re frustrated. I know he does the Twitter, but if he addresses the nation, he’s very impressive when he does that.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. He IS addressing the nation—via Twitter, as Rush mentioned, which disallows Government Media from spinning, lying, selectively editing, and basically standing everything he says on its head to mean the opposite of what he actually did say.

We’ve heard it from the very beginning, but think, if you will, about just who it is that’s continually bitching about Trump being on Twitter: Democrat Socialists and—perhaps to an even greater degree—Trump’s Republicrat opposition. The only people who are upset by Trump’s Tweeting are people who don’t like him, who opposed him from the start, and are working even now to thwart and hogtie him. Going hat in hand to Old Media, seeking their indulgence to use a megaphone they control, over airwaves fewer and fewer of us even bother with anyway—well, where the hell is the upside to that?

It would amount to assisting the resurrection of a slowly expiring near-corpse—one which is gasping and shuddering for its last desperate breath but was virulently and unalterably hostile in life, and is only going to resume attacking you once you get him back on his feet again. I don’t know, but I would have to guess Rush’s caller is an older guy, one still wedded to old modes of thinking and not remotely tech-savvy, who still perceives Old Media as the gatekeepers of all information.

Happily, they aren’t. Not anymore they ain’t. They are damned near irrelevant now, and if allowed (or forced) to keep treading in the same worn-out track will soon be entirely so; the election itself demonstrated that clearly enough. Trump has found a way around them, to their outrage and horror. There is no benefit I can see to his pretending they still matter. The only way they can cause much damage now is if they’re allowed to.

Stick to dancing with who brung ya, Mr President. That would NOT be ABCBNBPBS, MSNBC, CNN, or any of the rest of the dinosaur establishment propagandists. Let them go on spluttering and gagging and shrieking in outrage. Let them choke on their sad-sack, also-ran status. And let them finally shuffle on off to oblivion at long, long last—unmourned, unlamented, and unnoticed.

But here’s the meat of it, the bit I really wanted to get to:

I think now, folks, there is a golden opportunity. I don’t know how big an opportunity, but it’s an opportunity. It’s an opening. Since they’ve announced this stupid special counsel investigation, just head full speed down the road of the domestic agenda. Let’s get going on repealing Obamacare. And use the force of Trump’s personality and his victory to get Republicans in Congress signed up and doing this. Ditto on tax reform. The one thing — the one thing that’s gonna provide Trump some insurance here is actually making America great again, is actually improving the circumstances.

It’s gonna be hard, because the Republicans don’t want to do it!

The Republicans are scared to death of this counsel. “Oh, no!” They’re afraid they’re gonna go down with the boat, afraid they’re gonna go down with the ship. But it’s time for Trump to marshal every bit of these special powers he has — as a negotiator, as a leader — and if he’s gonna make a speech about anything, it ought to be about this, about how he is dedicated, rededicated, whatever, to the agenda on which he ran. And that we have gotta continue working as hard as we can doing everything we can to move forward on repealing Obamacare, on dealing with illegal immigration and make the circumstances even better, moving on to tax reform.

And make speeches about that. Address the nation with what. You know, don’t tell the nation that he’s a victim and to feel sorry for him because of all this. Instead, cast it as people trying to stop him from completing his agenda for the American people. Make it known that what’s going on here stands in the way of the betterment of life for the American people. Let it be known here that this is as much about denying the American people improved economic standards, standards of living and the Trump agenda as he can. That’s the way to get the people behind him.

It’s much better than trying to rally them to his cause via sympathy and how unfortunate, how unfair it is he’s being investigated. He is still president of the United States. He is going to be president of the United States for the longest time. Send a signal every day he’s not cowering in fear. Send a signal every day he’s not gonna resign; it’s not in his vocabulary. Send a signal every day he hasn’t done diddly-squat and this is typical, that he expected this. This is the last dying gasp of the establishment trying to destroy everything he stands for and you, the American people.

And get moving as fast as he can on continuing to implement his agenda. Turn the tables on these people and make them feel depressed! The best way to do that is for Trump to double town on the agenda and get going on it and to make it look like all of this is having no effect on him whatsoever. Now, they’re not gonna go away. They’re never gonna go away. They’re never gonna stop trying to get rid of Trump. He may as well take advantage of his position and use the extraordinary powers he has as an influencer, as a negotiator, to keep the country moving in the positive direction that it is moving since he became president.

THIS; precisely this. You were sent to drain a swamp, Donald. The alligators don’t wish to see the swamp drained; the muck is their milieu, and they’re going to wallow in it until the last one is dragged out by his slimy tail. Nobody should be too surprised by that. And it ain’t just Democrat Socialist alligators, either. One of Rush’s other callers put it best:

CALLER: Oh, yeah. Well, the thing about it is, you have to understand now we’re looking at it as it’s not Trump against, you know, the Democrats. It’s the people and Trump against the swamp.

Absolutely, precisely, incontrovertibly so. What we’re looking at here is a last chance at possibly averting a civil war. It may well come anyway, who knows. But if Trump falters or fails or capitulates, it certainly will, and probably sooner rather than later too.

Update! Dang it, forgot to include the title when I first posted this. Fixed.

Williamson totes another righteous beating.

I make no bones about that fact I don’t like Kevin Williamson, the house rumpswab at National Review. I have no tolerance for people who put on false fronts and Williamson’s quill pen act is as phony as a three dollar bill. George Will did the same thing for decades, but he at least had a first class education and did some time as a university instructor. He was a gold-plated phony, but at least he had some credentials. Williamson has none of that. He’s just a real life version of Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.

Gratuitously mocking fat guys is not a good look so I resist the temptation by doing what most everyone does and that’s avoid reading National Review. It’s not that hard as the only interesting thing about conservative commentary these days is the remarkable dullness of it.

Regular readers of this blog will know that my view of the Official Right and their slow-witted little brother, Official Libertarianism, is that they trail along behind the Progressives, as they flit from one fad to the next. Their contempt for the Dissident Right is not about ideology. It’s that they think the scruffy trouble makers to their Right make them look bad to their friends on the Left. It’s hard to make $30K from college speeches when the people running the college are blaming you for the alt-right hate-thinkers.

Maybe that’s why there is a market on the Official Right for the type of contemptuous poverty porn Williamson is peddling. The Left has made hatred of working class white people that shop at Walmart a centerpiece of their identity. Hillary Clinton ran for President on a platform of “White People Suck.” Perhaps the Official Right is just aping what they see, but with their own spin on it.

Of course they are. It’s what they do: follow the Left’s lead, do what they’re told, pretend to be in opposition as long as their subordinate place at the big DC table is reserved. Talk big, do nothing. Lap up whatever crumbs the Left deigns to throw their way, and be grateful. Crow about how things will really be different Next Time….but Not Yet. Not ever Yet.

Well, screw them, every last man Jack of them. As far as I’m concerned, the Republicrats are way more despicable than the Democrat Socialists. At least the libtards don’t make any bones anymore about their desire to see America That Was destroyed, humbled, and dragged through the sewer.

Not so with Conservative Inc. They’re way more devious, or so they’d like to think. They lie about all sorts of things, from their reverence for the Constitution to their desire for smaller government, while never harboring the slightest intention of doing anything at all about any of it. Even after being handed the Congress entire, the Presidency, and the overwhelming majority of governorships and state legislatures, they still lament their powerlessness, their hopeless inability to respond in any meaningful way to the clearly-expressed will of the people who elected them.

They’re not just liars, frauds, and cowards; they’re lickspittles and collaborators to boot—in league with those they claim to abhor, advancing an agenda they’re pledged to thwart, and hoping we won’t notice any of it.

They mouth platitudes they don’t respect, in support of an agenda the exact opposite of the one they profess in order to keep their snouts in the trough for a little bit longer. As such, their treachery is the deeper, their treason is the more grotesque; their gross infamy should trail them for a thousand years. They are as corrupt as any other mouldering, rotten corpse; for the health of the foundering Republic, their overdue excision from the body politic cannot come soon enough.

For treacherous Republicrats, at the very least. Or so we must hope.

No one voted for Trump because of the “Access Hollywood” tape. They voted for him because of his issues; most prominently, his promise to build “a big beautiful wall.” And who’s going to pay for it? MEXICO!

You can’t say that at every campaign rally for 18 months and then not build a wall.

Do not imagine that a Trump double-cross on the wall will not destroy the Republican Party. Oh, we’ll get them back. No, you won’t. Trump wasn’t a distraction: He was the last chance to save the GOP.

Millions of Americans who hadn’t voted in 30 years came out in 2016 to vote for Trump. If he betrays them, they’ll say, “You see? I told you. They’re all crooks.”

No excuses will work. No fiery denunciations of the courts, the Democrats or La Raza will win them back, even if Trump comes up with demeaning Twitter names for them.

It would be an epic betrayal — worse than Bush betraying voters on “no new taxes.” Worse than LBJ escalating the Vietnam War. There would be nothing like it in the history of politics.

He’s the commander in chief! He said he’d build a wall. If he can’t do that, Trump is finished, the Republican Party is finished, and the country is finished.

And all will deserve it, too. Not so much Trump, actually; he’s fighting a three-front war here, and the way the deck is stacked against him means his supporters (me included) are willing to overlook a lot. And I doubt any of us are ready to throw in the towel a mere hundred days into a four-year term.

As I’ve said from the very start: anybody who thinks Trump can fix all this all by himself is delusional; anybody who thinks he can do it in a few months is a fool. But he’s going to need to start improvising ways to end-run the DC shitweasels somehow, and that right soon—lest the unrealistic and faint of heart begin to abandon him in droves. Loss of faith he can ill afford; loss of hope will be the end of him.

Update! Vox nails it:

The God-Emperor should begin each day by looking at his schedule and telling himself two things.

1. Does this help me build the wall?
2. Does this help me drain the swamp?

If anything on his schedule does not fit into those two categories, he should cancel it and replace it with something that does.

By George, I think he’s got it. I’m not ready quite yet to say Trump’s time is running out. But there is certainly a limit on it, and I can’t see any good reason for him to flirt around the edges of it. Just do it, Donald; all you ever did have backing you all along was we the people, and that’s still enough. Republicrat and Demican Powers That Be skullduggery aside, we still got your back. All you really have to do—all anyone expects or hopes for—is to keep dancing with who brung ya; keep trusting us as we’ve trusted you. Just do that, and you really can’t fail; we’ll take care of the rest, by any means we have to.

Roger Simon nails it pretty good overall, but shies away from acknowledging the now-obvious.

The Republicans in the legislature are a disgrace.  They can’t get it together to compromise on anything and move forward — no tax reform, no healthcare, no nothing.  They are overwhelmed by a combination of overweening ego and rigid ideology — a lethal cocktail.  What their behavior is doing is creating an inevitable situation where they lose control of Congress and ultimately the White House to the Democrats, when they had everything handed to them.  Evidently, the Republicans can’t stand prosperity.  Or maybe they really are the Stupid Party.

At the same time, the Evil Party today is worse than it ever was, an amalgamation of aging Marxist professors, snowflake Social Justice Warriors with an allergy to free speech, thugs in Guy Fawkes masks who smash windows and pick fights with just about anybody for no discernible reason, leftover identity politics exploitation hacks like Maxine Waters and equally leftover feminists, and, oh, yes, some rich Hollywood and media types who love to virtue signal their love for the common people while cavorting on a superyacht in Polynesia — not to mention lying or moronic (you pick) politicians who still insist on claiming Trump is in collusion with Vladimir Putin! Do we seriously want to give control back to them?

Of course not. But the real question is: did the Republicrats ever really want to take it away?

I have to admit I was stunned and gratified when McConnell actually did go through with invoking the Reid option to confirm Gorsuch, so maybe there is still some hope. But it couldn’t be more clear by now that most of the time, they’re going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into fulfilling the promises they’ve been mouthing since 2010 at least.

Yes, there are some good ones alongside the DC-status-quo apparatchiks, but not all of them—maybe not even most of them—are persuaded by Trump, even yet. There will certainly be times when some truly conservative resistance to Trump’s more liberal tendencies might be perfectly in order. I don’t think that time has come yet, but I am willing to countenance the idea that it may happen.

But not yet.

All speculation aside, the fact remains: we had to go around the GOPe to get an outsider into the Presidency at long last, pushing Trump hard against the machinations of the business-as-usual types from both Uniparty wings. There’s nothing that says we must always and forever choose between two parties, and that those two parties must always and forever be the Demicans and the Republicrats. The GOP establishment needs to remember the saga of just how their party came into existence in the first place…and why.

Bill summarizes Hillary!™ (no, not THAT Bill).

She was the wife of a governor and a president who, on her own, totally screwed up her husband’s efforts to impose socialized medicine on America. Afterwards, in a triumph of political nepotism, she became a bootlegging do-nothing Senator from New York, and was then appointed to the position of Secretary of State by Barack Obama as a sop for getting her ass kicked by Obama himself. In that office she distinguished herself with treachery, treason, corruption, and pathological dishonesty.

“Vastly experienced?”

At what?

Why, at being the most perfectly representative example of Democrat-Socialist competence, intellect, veracity, and integrity since Barrack Hussein Obama…or her husband.

Is there anybody the lawless Ogabe junta DIDN’T wiretap, surveil, or spy on?

Drip, drip, drip.

It’s no surprise that US spooks intercept foreign officials’ calls. But intelligence community reports don’t disclose the names of US citizens on the other end. To get that info, a high official must (but rarely does) push to “unmask” the Americans’ names.

Bloomberg’s Eli Lake now reports that Rice started doing just that last year.

That was perfectly legal. But we also know that the Obama administration later changed the classification of the “unmasked” transcripts, and other similar material, in order to spread the information as widely as possible within the government.

The motive for that was (supposedly) to prevent Team Trump from burying it all once it took over. But the result was that it made it relatively safe for someone (or someones) to leak the info to the press.

Those leaks have produced a nagging political sore for the new administration — leading to the ouster of national security adviser Michael Flynn, helping to drive down President Trump’s approval ratings and making it harder for him to push his program through.

Which, of course, was really the ultimate goal here. Republicans should never forget: they intend to rule, and they will stop at nothing, absolutely nothing, to see to it that, one way or another, they continue to do so. Any GOPe hack sincerely bleating about “reaching across the aisle” or “bipartisanship” to “work with the Democrats” is either a turncoat, a blowhard, or a fool. There is no compromise with such as them; there is only victory, or defeat.

Rice certainly wasn’t politically naive about the political uses of intelligence information. She was, after all, the Obama official who famously made the rounds spouting the false “Our intel says it was about the video” line on the Benghazi attack back during the 2012 campaign.

All of which is a reminder that two issues are in play here: Russian meddling in the election, about which the nation already knows plenty — and the Obama team’s efforts to sabotage Team Trump.

For the Left, no government not controlled by them is legitimate; no election result unfavorable to the Progressivist agenda is due any recognition, respect, or allegiance; and anything at all they can do—legal, illegal, or nakedly, unabashedly treasonous—to overturn such a result and bring down such a government is perfectly acceptable.

Which is PRECISELY how they should be dealt with from Day One should they ever hoodwink and defraud their way into power again.

Remember my rule: you’ll only really start to get Obama when you start assuming the absolute worst about everything he says or does. Assume good intentions on his part, and you’ll be scratching your head over things from now on.

The abuse of presidential power by Barack Obama and his minions is Watergate on Steroids.

In the past month, we have learned:

• The Obama administration openly shared classified information with political appointees about Donald Trump in the summer of 2015, and likely earlier. The citation.
• Obama’s attorney general sought warrants to spy on President Trump’s campaign team last June, and was denied last June by a federal judge. The citation.
• Obama’s attorney general sought warrants to spy on a server at Trump Tower last October and was granted one by a federal judge. Ibid.
• The Obama administration spied on President Trump’s transition team. The citation.

This information alone — supported by mass media news reports — is enough to warrant a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice, as well as a civil rights investigation into Barack Obama’s possible violation of Donald Trump’s right to seek the presidency.

“The citation” in the above list refers to the supporting links Don provides, which I didn’t transcribe. He goes on to reference this AmThink post by the esteemed Clarice Feldman, who sums things up quite pithily:

There’s so much in print and online about the House and Senate intelligence committees and Russian “collusion” with Trump that I can’t blame people with real lives to lead who just throw their hands up and garden or go hiking. Some will assume there’s got to be a pony in there somewhere, as Ronald Reagan used to joke about the kid digging through manure. I think there is, but it isn’t that Russia corrupted the 2016 election, it’s that Obama and his closest aides, including some at the highest level in the intelligence community, illegally intercepted one or more Republican candidates’ communications before the election, circulated them widely to their cohorts and then tried to use this information to defeat and later to hamstring Trump when Hillary — to their surprise — lost the election.

I also suspect that the attacks on Flynn have nothing to do with his Russian contacts which he disclosed, but, rather, to misdeeds respecting the Middle East, particularly Iran, the country he observed as Obama’s head of the DIA.

Perhaps the easiest thing to do is to just consider everything the Democrats say, directly or through the media, which just prints as truth handouts from the same Democratic sources, as a lie.

Annnnd bingo. If there ever was a good reason to do otherwise, I can’t think of it right now. Over to Limbaugh for the ugly denouement:

Every year until the last two years the Democrats loved the Russians, and they loved the Soviet Union, and they loved the KGB, and they loved the instruments of authoritarian power wherever they found it around the world.

Now they hate the Russians. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe they’ve actually turned into us on the Russians. Do you? We’re supposed to sit here and believe that they have become anti-communist, anti-authoritarian, anti-Russian, after decades and decades of being pro all of that? When Julian Assange first surfaced and began leaking the Edward Snowden stuff, they loved Assange and they loved Snowden because he was betraying authoritarian governments, although there was Obama. Now they’re embracing all these people that they used to despise and dislike.

This whole story is causing them to do 180-degree shifts of loyalty. And that’s what I mean by discombobulated, because the sole focus they have been consumed with — they’re a big hate group now, and they’ve been consumed with their hatred for Trump, consumed with their hatred for the American people who voted for Trump, consumed with their hatred for open elections, consumed by their hatred of the fact they can’t get rid of Trump.

(Break transcript, new link—M) The Russians! They used to be in bed with the Russians and with the Soviet Union. Now they’re turning…In other words, this scandal — and Donald Trump — is forcing the left and the Democrat Party to turn itself inside out. They are so discombobulated that they are abandoning lifelong allies and embracing lifelong enemies because the only objective here is to get rid of Trump, and I think at this stage… I say this as a bit of an exaggeration, but I don’t think they even know specifically why Trump has to be gotten away, other than he won the election. But when you…It’s gotten so far out of control that they can’t even tell you why now.

So it turns out there was a government interfering in the presidential election. It was ours. It was the United States government, at the time being run by Barack Hussein O and his minions.

Anything, anything at all, to hang onto power; their lust for it, their sense of absolute entitlement to it, couldn’t be more obvious now. Their megalomania is the only “principle” they have left. They were so close—sooooo close!—to having us all under their thumbs completely, to subjugating us to the Progressivist program forever. They believed that with the grand success of their Long March through the institutions (most especially their control of the government schools) there would simply be no turning back.

Throw in the government takeover of the health-care system—as I’ve long called it, the Progressivist brass ring, their ultimate achievement in their quest for absolute power—and no one could blame them for thinking they really were home free at last, securely in the driver’s seat for good, to mix a couple of metaphors there.

Sadly for them it turns out that, as faint and forlorn a hope as we really have for restoring the Constitutional Republic, real Americans aren’t quite ready to accept the bit quite yet. To their stunned amazement and spluttering outrage, there was still enough fight left in those of us who live outside their urban redoubts to toss a largish spanner into their nefarious works in the person of one Donald J Trump.

And now they’ve gone completely bug-fuck nuts over it—even as small a setback as that was enough to push them over the edge into certifiable public madness. The beautiful irony here is, though, that the more they froth and shriek, the more they flail and fail and whine and obstruct, the more of us see them for what they truly are, and always were. The mask of reasonableness and sanity is being ripped away now not by those of us who have an interest in exposing them, but by their very own words and deeds. I’m not sure whether they don’t realize it, or are just incapable of stopping themselves. Either way, it’s hilarious to watch.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of assholes, if you ask me.

Are you fucking kidding me? Of COURSE he did it.

The former Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, appears on NBC with Chuck Todd and categorically denies there was ever any wire tapping of Donald Trump in Trump Tower as a candidate or as a President Elect.

Now, the obvious caveat is that DNI Clapper has previously lied to congress about meta-data collection, or mass surveillance of communications of Americans; later claiming it was the ‘least possible lie’ he could come up with.

So, unfortunately Clapper is not necessarily trustworthy.

There are dozens of New York Times, Washington Post and various left-wing media articles –SEE HERE– which point to the stories around these “Wire Taps”.

Additionally, there are exponentially more politicians who are ‘on-the-record’ giving their opinion about the intelligence “leaks” that are framed around these supposed “wire-taps” actually taking place. Heck, the entire ‘muh Russian‘ conspiracy is necessarily dependent on the existence of leaks which are founded upon these “taps”.

So an entire media apparatus which has decried the label of being called “Fake News”, are now either going to have to admit their prior presentations were, well, actually fake news; or they are going to have to refute DNI Clapper and stick to their position. Don’t look for the latter, and they’ll ignore the former.

Plenty of Washington Generals conservatives have too long been fond of falling back on a comforting but false formulation that has no basis in reality: the idea that “since this, they can’t POSSIBLY that,” or “because of this, they must now THAT.” And every time, every single time, the Left has run rings around them by simply ignoring such trifles as integrity, honesty, consistency, or logic.

These pitiful, floundering rumpswabs need to recognize plain fact: THEY DO WHATEVER THE HELL THEY LIKE, and they don’t give even one damn what conservatives—or anybody else except their shrieking, rabid base—think about it. They are not one tit or jottle interested in conservative opinions about their hypocrisy; they could not possibly care less about how their self-serving duplicity might look to anyone outside their circle.

All they care about, all they’ll ever care about, is one thing: advancing the Progressivist agenda. Does the phrase “by hook or by crook” ring any bells, people? Maintaining the gains they’ve made during the eight long years of Obama’s destruction is paramount to them. They do not intend to let a trifling little antique known as the US Constitution stand in their way. And when did they ever allow it to before? If they were so willing—eager, in fact—to wipe their asses with it all along, why on earth would anyone think they’re going to be the least bit reticent about flushing it now?

Yes, they’ve been spying, wiretapping, surveilling, intimidating, and threatening anyone who gets in their way all along. Yes, Obama knew about it and approved of it, whether or not he signed documents specifically instructing his flying monkeys to do so. Anybody who still wants to allow themselves to get lost in the weeds about the details and minutiae of any particular incident is either a fool or a collaborator. THIS IS WHO THEY ARE; THIS IS WHAT THEY DO. Here’s a (very) partial recap:

It is not unfounded that former President Obama would wire tap President Trump during the election process.  This is because he has done this before.  Here is a list of individuals who were wire tapped by the Obama Administration.

WikiLeaks released the following list on February 23rd (see link here) of Obama Administration wire taps:

• The US National Security Agency bugged a private climate change strategy meeting; between UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin;
• Obama bugged Chief of Staff of UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for long term interception targetting his Swiss phone;
• Obama singled out the Director of the Rules Division of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Johann Human, and targetted his Swiss phone for long term interception;
• Obama stole sensitive Italian diplomatic cables detailing how Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to help patch up his relationship with US President Barack Obama, who was refusing to talk to Netanyahu;

And those are just a handful from Hoft’s listing of the foreign-relations bugs Obama had planted to spy on his enemies; there’s plenty more, and it’s doubtful if even Jim managed to find them all. His list goes on and on and on before getting to the American journalists His Imperial Majesty’s rogue, out-of-control junta illegally spied on. Now tell me, why would anyone assume for one moment that he’d have been above doing the same to Trump—or to anybody else he damned well pleased?

This might be a pretty good time for the people who pooh-poohed those of us with less clouded vision who early on declared Ogabe a would-be dictator to be doing some serious thinking about their own inability (or stubborn refusal) to see the treacherous mountebank for what he truly is, no? And it might also be an opportune moment for all of us to remember that as long as it was Obama or some other Democrat Socialist swine doing it, the Left en masse will not be bothered in the least by it. In fact, most of them will approve of it, even if some will find it politically expedient to furrow the brow a bit and weakly express some phony “concern” over it.

The bottom line remains what it has been all along:

The fact that that’s what’s driving this still even though countless news sources have affirmed they can’t find a shred of evidence — and yet it propelled everything that we are still going through here, which is the effort to stall, to undermine, to sabotage the Trump presidency. Now, since November, since the election, the Democrats, the left, the media, have all been throwing around this stupid phrase, “The Russians hacked the elections.” You know, wouldn’t it be funny when this is all over if what we find out is that Obama hacked the election and Hillary still lost? Wouldn’t that be just juicy? Wouldn’t that be just deserts?

So and again, I want to remind you, New York Times, January 20th: “Wiretap Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.” There’s no question that somebody was wiretapping somebody. And Trump’s allegation — a serious charge — has got more basis in fact and reality than the charge that the Russians hacked the election. Trump’s allegation about Obama and his administration has much more legitimacy, much more weight, much more credence than the one thing that’s driving all of this opposition to Trump, because without that they’ve got nothing.

I said just now that the liberal-fascists will never let a flimsy irrelevancy like the Constitution stand in the way of their dreams of absolute power and domination, but there’s another minor little thing they won’t let interfere with the fullest realization of the Progressivist project: elections. It all just confirms once again my longstanding guideline: if you want to uncover what the Left is really doing themselves, look to whatever it is they’re complaining the loudest about, and accusing their opposition of.

Fly, my pretties, fly!

Advisers to President Donald Trump are urging him to purge the government of former President Barack Obama’s political appointees and quickly install more people who are loyal to him, amid a cascade of damaging stories that have put his nascent administration in seemingly constant crisis-control mode.

A number of his advisers believe Obama officials are behind the leaks and are seeking to undermine his presidency, with just the latest example coming from reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions met twice last year with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. and apparently misled senators about the interactions during his confirmation hearing.

They ARE behind the leaks. And Sessions didn’t mislead anybody; his recusing himself was a sign of weakness, and it shouldn’t have happened. It will only be chum in the water to Obama’s sharks.

That was coupled with a New York Times story that Obama appointees spread information about the investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia in an attempt to create a paper trail about the probe. Trump’s aides have also blamed Obama appointees for other damaging leaks, like Trump’s erratic phone calls with foreign leaders.

“His playbook should be to get rid of the Obama appointees immediately,” said Newt Gingrich, a top surrogate. “There are an amazing number of decisions that are being made by appointees that are totally opposed to Trump and everything he stands for. Who do you think those people are responding to?”

The reality, however, is more complicated: The White House has thousands of open jobs across the agencies, many nonpolitical civilian employees are critical of the administration, and some Cabinet secretaries say they need the Obama people during a rocky transition.

Bullshit. Just because they’re “civilian” does not at all imply that they’re “nonpolitical”; they’re the grinding gears of the Deep State, and they’re as partisan as they come. And…”rocky transition”? It’s rocky ENTIRELY BECAUSE OF the skullduggery and machinations of these Deep State termites. They have absolutely NO interest in seeing the swamp drained; THEY ARE THE PROBLEM WE ELECTED TRUMP TO DEAL WITH. Rush nails it:

I’m going to demonstrate the folly and how they got rid of Jeff Sessions. Well, they didn’t get rid of him yet, but making him recuse himself — forcing him to recuse himself — from these upcoming investigations between whoever, “Trump’s… ehhhh… Russians rigging the election.” So bogus. I can’t tell you how all this infuriates me, because I’m not the only one that knows this. I’m certainly not the only one who can figure this out.

But what has happened here is Jeff Sessions is… There was no need for him to recuse himself. He was being asked questions about something that never even happened. And he wasn’t even asked if he’d done anything. The question that he was asked: “What would you do if any of this was true? What would you do?” They’re now trying to say he committed perjury and that he’s gotta go. It doesn’t matter that he did or didn’t. That’s not the point here. They’re going to take as many scalps as they will be permitted to take.

Precisely. I said coup in my title, and I meant it. That’s what we’re dealing with here: it might not involve the usual décolletage of a coup, like guns, bullets, and quiet back-lot executions, but it is one nonetheless. It is Black Jesus and Pals hamstringing a duly elected President by means quieter and less obvious—which means more nefarious—than tanks in the streets. It is Obama’s bid for a third term.

And the truly maddening thing is, the Vichy GOPe is helping all it can, as is its wont. Ladies and gents, I give you your Vichy Republican “resistance” to all things Obama and Progressivist:

“AG Sessions should clarify his testimony and recuse himself,” House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) tweeted early on Thursday.

“I think, the trust of the American people, you recuse yourself in these situations,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Thursday morning. McCarthy, in a later appearance on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” backtracked and said he wasn’t calling on Sessions to recuse himself. “I’m not calling on [Sessions] to recuse himself,” McCarthy said. “It’s amazing how people spin things so quickly.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) joined in during an appearance on NPR on Thursday morning. “It is potentially the case that there is going to be Justice Department recommendations or referrals based on anything regarding the campaign, he said. “Depending on what more we learn about these meetings, it could very well be that the attorney general, in the interest of fairness and in his best interest, should potentially ask someone else to step in and play that role.”

During a CNN town hall on Wednesday night, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Sessions couldn’t be trusted to investigate the Trump administration.

The GOPe gotta GOPe, apparently. These useless swine are playing the same tired game they’ve been playing for years now: talk up a staunch, tough fight against Progressivism; slide all sorts of promises they have no intention of keeping over their greasy, forked tongues; then get right back to colluding and collaborating once they think no one is looking.

There can’t be any doubt by now that the Vichy GOPe is going to be a bigger problem for Trump than the Democrat Socialists ever could or would be, given their discombobulated state, and the electorate’s resounding rejection of them and all their iniquitous works the last three elections. I like Vox’s response to this:

I love McCarthy’s confused self-contradiction, in light of the way he’s criticizing Sessions out of context. So, we’ve got a tongue-tied Californian, a Mormon cuck, Lightshoes Lindsey, and Mr. Foam Party himself all eager to pile on Sessions over nothing. I wonder why?

“Mr Foam Party“; I love that one. Although Lightshoes Lindsay sounds just a little bit off to me; around these parts, we refer to his sort as being “light in their loafers,” which is admittedly a bit tougher to work into a pithy nickname than “Lightshoes.” But hey, that’s just nitpicking.

And let’s not leave out George W Fucking Bush—who, after remaining utterly silent the last eight years while the Barrackorrhoids bent this nation over and had their way with it, now feels compelled to abandon his previous “classy” detachment to blast all things Trump. Here’s a guy who never met an illegal immigrant he didn’t want to have replacing an American worker; he’s the guy who, after hitting the right notes in the wake of 9/11, went off the rails into bootless nation-building and popularized the “Religion of Peace” bushwa. Shoulda stayed retired and silent, George; if you think for one moment the Obama Left will ever thank you for your efforts on their behalf now, you’re as delusional as John McCain ever was.

Here’s the deal: Obama and Pals fully intend to consolidate the gains they made in their fight against America That Was by any means they can contrive. This is, truly, a soft coup attempt on their part; those NSA documents got passed around for a reason. Obama’s intention is to maintain his influence and burnish his shameful legacy of decline and dishonesty by undermining and crippling his duly-elected successor. It’s worth reviewing the actual statement Sessions made to Leftist chowderhead Al Franken that was the root of this whole phony scandal in the first place:

FRANKEN: These documents also allegedly say, quote, “There was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.” If it’s true, it’s obviously extremely serious, and if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?

SESSIONS: Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate a time or two in that campaign, and I did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.

Bear in mind that “these documents”—this whole horseshit manufactured “scandal”—had their origins in the entirely phony “dossier” ginned up by a Brit intelligence agent with connections to the Clinton slime machine, at the behest of NeverTrumpTard Vichy GOPers, and that they have absolutely no basis in reality whatsoever.

The scum flies thick and heavy in the DC Swamp, splattering everything in its path. The villainous traitors flinging it—organized and inspired by their Leftist godhead, Barrack Hussein Obama—are going to resist any potential draining with every means at their disposal. I will guarantee you that by now, death threats are being floated around in certain quarters—entirely credible death threats, made by people who know how to make it happen with complete impunity. The people on the receiving end know this, and know the chance they take by defying the ones making them. Who could really blame them for folding under the pressure?

And, yes, high treason is being committed here. This is a serious, unflinching attempt at a soft coup, nothing more, nothing less. Obama and his flying monkeys—seeded throughout the Deep State for just this purpose—are attempting to overthrow a legitimately elected President, if not by impeachment or outright revolution, then by rendering him entirely ineffective and without the ability to see the agenda he was elected to enact put in place. That’s the plain truth, and it’s time to face it, whatever that might mean in the end.

Leftists never stop. They never give in. They never compromise, they never stop pushing, they never back off or take a pause. And they are unaccustomed to losing. With Obamacare, they thought they had us firmly in their teeth at last, and could finish chewing us up at their leisure. They are now deeply unhappy to find out that perhaps that wasn’t so. DEEPLY unhappy.

They intend to keep this country careening over the cliff no matter what, to fetch up at the bottom smashed and ruined on the jagged rocks of Progressivism. They made great progress over the last eight years, and they intend to prevent its being undone. The steercotted Vichy Republican vermin intend to protect their own meager perks and position by doing their little all to help out while pretending otherwise, just as they always do.

In a more just world, they would all—every last fucking one—suffer a traitor’s fate, and would be hung by the neck until dead. Enemies to the Right of him, enemies to the Left; I keep saying it: Trump is in a war here. A real one, albeit one without bullets, bloodshed, and bodies as of yet. All he really has on his side is the same thing he’s had all along: his love of country, and We, the People. May both prove equal to the hard fight ahead. It’s going to be neither easy nor quick, that much I know. Since I linked him several times already—and since he’s been magnificent in both his analysis and his support for Trump of late—I’ll give Rush the last word:

They didn’t win anything. What they believe has been repudiated. Exception: California. What they believe has been repudiated for the last three elections! They didn’t win! They do not have the numbers in either legislative body to stop the winners, and yet who appears to be running the town still? The American people sent the Democrat Party packing. If you give an inch, if you try to cross the aisle, if you extend the hand of friendship — whatever you try to do to engage in the time-honored art of bipartisanship with these people — you are gonna get shafted.

Yep. As I’ve been saying here for years now: there is no coexisting in peace and forbearance with them. Our differences are insuperable. They are no longer in any meaningful sense our countrymen, united with us despite any minor disagreement by a reverence for the core freedoms enumerated in the Constitution. They will never, ever consent to just leave us alone; to respect our opinions and beliefs, to let us pursue our own individual destinies without breaking us to tyranny’s leash.

My God, they will no longer even agree to live with the results of a perfectly legitimate election—one in which no fraud or malfeasance has even been alleged, let alone proved. With every riot, every hysterical shriek, every treasonous machination, they declare openly: our way or war. You will live as we demand, you will capitulate, or we will pull an entire nation down around all our ears.

Well, dammit, so be it then. It’s an awful truth, and you guys all know by now that I hate like hell to even think it, much less say it. It’s going to wind up taking us all into grim, horrible places none of us really wish to go, and the price is going to be incomprehensibly steep and painful. As in 1860, they know not what they do; they are sowing a fierce wind indeed, and none of us know to what hellish places the whirlwind will carry us.

But here it is, at long last: Liberty, or Death. Some of us still hold to that; we don’t like the implications, we don’t wish for that stark choice to ever have to be made. We would much rather carry on with our lives as we have known them. We have adjusted ourselves to an overlarge State far beyond the bounds of the Constitution; we aren’t happy about it, but we’ll be content to let it be for the most part, as long as we can at least be allowed some small say in our governance. Even Trump isn’t talking about a total and immediate return to Constitutional boundaries, and absolutely no one expects it of him.

That said, though, we do still have our limits. Ultimately, we just want to be left alone, to the extent that that’s possible in today’s overwhelmingly Progressivist-dominated world. We’re resigned to the welfare state; we’re resigned to cameras on every urban street corner; to our smartphones tracking us and reporting our movements to God only knows which Deep State agency; to the subtle shocked contempt barely concealed from us when someone finds out that we own guns, we hunt or fish, we believe in the God of our Christian fathers, we don’t want pathetic, mentally-skewed deviants sharing a bathroom with our young daughters. We don’t want to be forced to live cheek-by-jowl with murderous, 12th-century barbarians ill-equipped to learn and abide by our ways and culture, and uninterested in doing so anyway.

We’d like a little space, a little freedom, a little tolerance and respect for our views. A little less hostility for harboring them, a little less sneering contempt and dismissal when we have the temerity to express them. Where we live, those views were mainstream, a given, up until a very short time ago in realistic terms. They are by no means Neanderthal, oppressive, or unenlightened. They are not unreasonable, and tolerance of them isn’t too much to ask—especially not of those who have so fetishized a twisted perversion of “tolerance” and “diversity” as to make them meaningless shibboleths by now.

Maybe we’ll find a way out; maybe they will come to their senses at long last, rediscover moderation and tolerance, respect the democratic process, and dial back the hysteria enough to avert the nightmare. Maybe they’ll realize that this time, we really are fed up with business as usual; that this time, we’re not kidding around. But if not, well…

There is liberty, or there is not. There is only victory, or defeat. Trump is our President; we elected him to do exactly what he’s been doing so far. He won by a resounding margin, under the Constitutionally-established system and rules. The traitor Left can either back off of us…or they will be shoved. Hard.

They won’t like it. None of us will, in truth. But it will happen nonetheless. Count on it. Dread it, rue it, pray it won’t happen, but…count on it just the same.

Update! Bill nails it down in way fewer words and with less rambling than I did:

Look. This is all part of the overall DNC/Soros plot to somehow “prove” that Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate. They are desperate to bring him down. One CIA/Obama figure promised that Trump would “die in jail.” They keep doubling back (and doubling down) on the “Russian Connection,” thinking that if they just hit it hard enough, loud enough, and long enough, it will somehow be proven true. And even if not, they may be able to convince enough people that it is true to make real trouble. They are the political equivalent of the Soros/BlackBloc goon squads punching people in the face, rioting, and vandalizing and burning property. They seek to smear, intimidate, and destroy.

These people hate Trump, hate America, and hate those of us who support both. Prepare yourself for the oncoming battles, and act accordingly. 

Yep; ugly as it all is, that’s about the size of it.

And then massaging the reporting on them to better fit Teh Narrative™.

President Donald Trump’s job approval rating stands at just 44 percent — a record low for a newly inaugurated commander-in-chief — and half of Americans say that his early challenges suggest unique and systemic problems with his administration, according to a new poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal.

Leaving aside for the nonce that, since the LibMedia’s phony polls have been consistently, unceasingly, hilariously wrong about Trump since the day he announced he was running, there’s absolutely no reason to start paying them any mind now, watch the fun as Jazz Shaw pulls these creaky old bones apart:

Wow. That’s pretty bad. But there were a lot of portions of that survey which didn’t receive any mention. I started browsing through them last night and was quickly reminded of a quote which is often (though perhaps incorrectly) attributed to Winston Churchill, stating that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. The NBC poll didn’t just ask about the nation’s feelings toward Donald Trump. They covered a number of other powerful figures in Washington DC as well. How did they fare? Let’s take a look.

Before getting to the individuals cited on the above list I’ll mention one figure which didn’t appear in that summary. That’s the approval rating for Congress as a whole. Trump is the figurehead of the executive branch, while Congress is the legislative branch. The approval rating for the combined House and Senate stands at 29/60. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise because for a very long time now Congress has enjoyed rankings which are perhaps only slightly higher than that of Charles Manson. Still, if President Trump can take consolation from anything it’s the fact that the White House is still more popular by a margin of double digits. Also of interest is the “Right Track / Wrong Track” number. Last September it stood at 30/62. This month it’s at 40/51. Not stellar, but at least heading in the right direction.

How about the political parties themselves? The Republicans, sitting at 32/60, are about as welcome as ants at a picnic. In fact, you couldn’t be much less popular than the GOP unless you happen to be… Democrats. They managed to slide in at 31/58.

In terms of the individual power players inside the Beltway, Donald Trump might be able to find at least a small bit of “good news” when the mirror is held up to other influential figures. In the House of Representatives, Speaker Paul Ryan might be feeling rather glum about his 34% approval mark which is even worse than Trump’s. The only thing which might cheer him up a bit is to see that his colleague Nancy Pelosi is sitting at 19. Over on the Senate side, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer are nearly in a dead heat racing for the bottom with rankings in the low to mid teens.

It’s at least somewhat interesting that you rarely hear any of these other numbers discussed on cable news or written about at any length in the nation’s major newspapers. Bad news for Donald Trump is a headline. Bad news for other government leaders (particularly Democrats) seems to be of far less interest.

But hey, I don’t want to spoil the party for the mainstream media. You just keep on talking about how unpopular Donald Trump is. That should boost your ratings one of these days.

Yeah. After all, nobody can be this ludicrously ass-backwards and wrong forever, right? Sooner or later, they’ve got to come to their senses and start just reporting the news instead of always trying to manipulate it to further their own political ends, right?

Right?

Ummm. Never mind, I take that back.

(Via Insty)

Another apt Animal House reference, this one from Schlichter.

It wasn’t a press conference – it was a kinky dungeon session where masochistic journalists eagerly sought out the delicious pain Master T was dealing. Hack after hack stepped up, tried to play “gotcha,” and ended up whimpering in the fetal position. The best part was CNN’s Jim Acosta, fresh from whining about how conservative outlets now get to ask questions too, basically handing Trump the cat-o-nine tails. Dude, next time keep from talking yourself into more public humiliation by biting down on the ball gag.

The media’s safe word is “Objectivity,” but none of them uttered it.

The wonderful thing about Trump – and the thing that sets the Fredocons and wusspublicans fussing – is that he gives exactly zero damns about the media’s inflated and ridiculous self-image. He doesn’t pay lip service to their lie that they are anything but what Instapundit calls “Democratic Party operatives with bylines.” Trump called them “the enemy of the American People,” to which normals responded with “Yeah, sounds about right.”

Trump sees them as the enemy, which they are, and he calls them what they are, just like he calls radical Islamic terrorists “radical Islamic terrorists” instead of generic “extremists” who shout “Allah Akbar!” as they commit acts of “workplace violence” whose motives remain elusive and unknowable. It would be ironic that the media hates it when a politician tells the truth, except no one still believes the media is in the truth business.

Only a fevered hive mind, poisoned by unearned self-regard and a delusional sense of its own moral superiority, could seriously equate a politician pointing out the obvious fact that today’s reporters are mostly lying, incompetent jerks with Hitlerian press censorship. Tell you what – I’ll believe you when the National Guard shows up to shut down CNN by padlocking the makeup room.

Then there’s the Russians/Flynn nonsense, a non-story that America non-cares about. Oh, there’s a real story there, but the press isn’t interested in that. Here’s the real story – the intelligence community under the Obama administration was obviously eavesdropping on Trump’s campaign in violation of practically every law ever written. Whether it was direct tapping of phones and emails, or illegally accessing the communications swooped up by the NSA in its nets, it’s clear that Obama’s people were spying on Obama’s political opponents. The transcript excerpts of Flynn’s phone call with the Russian diplomat leaked because it could be played off as targeting the Russian, though this was still an outrageous disclosure of American spying capabilities. What these criminals can’t do is release the communications between Americans that they possess because doing that confirms what we all know – that Obama’s people spied on his political opponents like his IRS persecuted them. The only question really is what did Obama know, and when did he know it – interestingly, on his way out the door, Obama made it easy to hide the source of the leaks by opening up access to the information across a bunch of agencies. There’s your story, a scandal that makes Watergate seem microscopic, and the mainstream media will not touch it because it would destroy the media’s political allies.

But wait, what about Trump’s bathrobe? Better flood the zone, stat!

Well, hey, one is helpful to the phonus-balonus narrative they wish to push. The other…must never, ever be mentioned again.

It’s all about true conservative principles, man.

TINVOWOOT, I’m afraid.

We have reached a point where it is heads they win, tails we lose. The game has been rigged to make reforming the system within the rules an impossibility. When a majority of the people favor a policy that the managerial class opposes, the policy gets hamstrung by the rules of the game. All of a sudden, the process is sacred. When the managerial class wants something for their masters, they change the rules so it either flies through or simply happens without anyone noticing. The process is not all that important.

All the blather about America being a nation of laws is just cover for the fact that ours is a lawless nation ruled by lawless men. An obvious example is the Ninth Circuit judges, who have fabricated a legal justification for throwing sand in the gears of a wildly popular executive order issued by President Trump. These are not men enforcing the law or respecting the laws. These are men who hold the law in contempt. All that matters to them is obedience to the weird secular cult we have come to call Progressivism.

If what it takes to break the stranglehold this cult has on society is a dictator willing to toss a few judges from a helicopter, then sign me up for dictatorship. I’d much prefer to live in a society where me and my neighbors meet once a month to govern ourselves and our community, but that’s not on offer. What is on offer now is the post-modern theocracy that uses the corrupted and degraded tools of 18th century liberalism to maintain its grip on society. Squads of government men rounding these people up in the middle of the night sounds pretty good right now.

The only way to break the totalitarian stranglehold may be with an authoritarian willing to bust down doors and crack some heads. Authoritarianism is only concerned with political power and as long as that is not contested it gives society a certain degree of liberty. You can still have judges falling out of helicopters as we saw with Pinochet, but the people can still go about their lives, free from the hectoring of secular fanatics living off the tax payers. Trump ordering the execution of the 9th Circuit is not ideal, but it beats the hell out of being ruled by angry lunatics from San Francisco.

America is headed for a bad end unless things change quickly and radically. The suicide cult that has control of our society is not going to stop until we’re all dead. At some point, you have to use every means necessary to prevent a catastrophe. If that means Lindsay Graham winds up in pit covered in lime, so be it.

Yeah, I find myself not terribly bothered by that prospect either. In fact, I admit I’d be fine with that whether it would do any good for the nation or not. Either way, it’s certain that Trump has his work cut out for him:

By the 1970s, disillusionment with what became derisively known as “big government” fed a series of campaigns and commissions to curtail the regulatory powers of the federal government. The popular energy behind them even helped deliver Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980. If there was ever a moment where the stars aligned to help put an end to big government and runaway regulation, this was most certainly it.

So how did Reagan do?

Not so good, as we all know by now. The DC swamp is going to take a lot of draining, if it can even be done at all; it’s by no means a given that it can, so entrenched are the parasites and so tenaciously will they dig in to prevent it from happening. But I can’t think of a guy better equipped than Trump to do it; if it can be done short of pitchforks, torches, and lots and lots of rope, he’d have to be the man. No way in the world would any professional politician be able to manage it.

And said what he meant.

Republicans hoped he would turn out to be a conventional conservative. Democrats hoped he would not do anything too drastic, and maybe even strike a few deals.

But the best guide to what Donald Trump would do as president appears to be what he said he would do as president.

Trump’s executive order banning immigration from certain Muslim-majority countries — one of his most controversial and widely dismissed campaign promises — has sparked a panic among his critics about what else President Trump might actually do: create a Muslim registry, deport undocumented immigrant children, try to take oil from ISIS or kill terrorists’ families.

Those campaign promises were all laughed off and dismissed by many, just like when he tweeted about sending federal enforcement into Chicago or stripping flag burners of their citizenship — or even changing libel laws to sue reporters or throwing Hillary Clinton in jail.

“I was one of the folks that had hoped that he was just saying things to get elected and that he didn’t really believe in them,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who after the election sent an email to his supporters urging them to move past the election and be proud of a peaceful transfer of power. “I’m now convinced that I was wrong. We should not give him a chance to govern. I believe he is a danger to the republic.”

No, actually, he’s a danger to the dysfunctional, staggering, contra-Constitutional shitrapy you and other evil megalomaniacs replaced the Republic with. But watch as another status-quo blind pig finds a truffle:

“People are just not prepared for the fact that we’re not dealing with a regular Republican-versus-Democrat battle here, we’re dealing with an administration that in its first week has demonstrated that it doesn’t have much respect for the rule of law,” Schneiderman said. “We’re in for a bigger challenge to our constitutional fabric than we’ve faced in a very long time in this country.”

That challenge passed already, and we were regrettably found wanting in confronting it—until now. But he’s right that this is no longer the regular Republicrat/Demican bait and switch; it’s a confrontation between Statists and freedom-lovers, and we’ve only just begun to fight back—the opening salvos of what is going to be a very long war indeed. An eternal one, in fact.

To Trump’s circle, there’s nothing surprising or problematic about anything he’s done so far, in either substance or manner.

Yeah, for certain values of “Trump’s circle,” which, according to the election results, encompasses most of the damned country, exclusive only of its benighted urban enclaves of Statist ignorance and dependency.

Democrats are already recalibrating to prepare for what’s next.

Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a candidate for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, released a statement Sunday jumping ahead to what he thinks will be one of the coming battles: “Expect Trump and his henchmen to push restrictive photo ID requirements, limit early voting and make it harder to even register to vote.”

Gee, a fraudulent Muslim jihad-supporter lecturing the rest of us on reasonable, common-sense measures to ensure an election process somewhat less corrupt than he’s accustomed to (and reliant upon) in those same benighted Democrat Socialist-run urban swamps. Measures, mind, that are in place in most of the rest of the world. Quelle horreur!

Cry me a river, tyrant. And do your worst. We’re ready for you now…and waiting.

(Via Insty)

Delicious update! Via Ed: YOU’RE FIRED!

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Monday fired Sally Yates, the acting attorney general and a Democratic appointee, after she refused to defend in court his controversial refugee and immigration ban.

The firing came hours after Yates directed Justice Department attorneys not to defend the executive order, saying she was not convinced it was lawful or consistent with the agency’s “obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right.”

In a statement, Trump said Yates had “betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States.” He named longtime federal prosecutor Dana Boente as Yates’ replacement.

Thanks, Mr President, and well done indeed; keep up the good work, we’re all behind you one hundred percent. As to Yates and every single last one of the despotic usurpers of Constitutional governance: don’t let the door hit your ass etc, scum. And don’t drag your feet on your way out, either. The sooner you’re all gone, the better. Bonus effect: Glenn notes a comment from this article: “Hysterical Facebook friends and insane protestors continue to bolster my confidence that I voted correctly.” Heh. Indeed.

KNOW thine enemy update! Telling quote:

Let’s be clear: the American people didn’t give the GOP a stamp of approval or a mandate to ram through an ideologically-driven, far-right agenda. If the election was a mandate for anything, it was for elected officials in both parties to break through the gridlock to finally start producing results.

Gee, sounds like the exact same thing the Democrat Socialists say after every election they lose, don’t it? Wonder which Democrat Socialist mouthpiece uttered the words this time?

Yeah, I wonder.

JJ says: “The showdown is coming soon between the dead-enders in the GOP/Whigs and those who are with the president and the people, whether for real or just for political expediency.” Actually, we already had it—and the Republicrats lost just as surely as the Dem-Soc’s did. But like their partners in crime, the GOPe turncoats don’t seem to know it, or won’t admit it, at least. Rush adds:

I checked the email during the break and there’s a bunch of them in there obviously. One of them stood out. “Why are you saying, Mr. Limbaugh, the Republicans are the choke point?” You ever heard of Obamacare repeal, folks?

…the real threat that Trump faces is from traditional Republicans afraid and scared of this kind of thing ’cause they fall for the trick that this represents a majority of thinking. The Republicans have been in the minority for so long it’s hard to stop thinking of themselves that way.

Actually, I don’t think that’s it at all. Occam’s Razor suggests something else entirely: that these Republicrat swine aren’t feeble, or hapless, or lacking in the self-confidence required to assert the mandate given them by the people who voted for them, and to start governing according to the clearly expressed will of that majority.

No, Occam’s Razor demands that we finally admit something ourselves: the Republican Party as currently constituted is in no meaningful way the opposition to the Democrat Socialists; they are its partners, collaborators, and enablers. It’s really very simple, if completely sick-making. But once you can choke that down, everything suddenly makes sense. It all comes down to this:

They are gonna continue this kind of thing and it’s going to intensify with each instance it doesn’t work. So buckle up, folks. This is what it was always gonna look like. You don’t take on the Washington establishment and have them just bow down and get out of the way. They’re not gonna give it up. It was always gonna be like this. If you voted for Trump, you should have known — probably did — this is what it’s gonna look like every day.

…Republicans are gonna be Trump’s biggest obstacle, not these protesters, not these leftists.

They—all of them, the entirety of the DC swamp—will keep coming at him in the same old way. And if the history of the last two years is any guide, he’ll keep kicking their treacherous asses in the same old way, too.