Aesop knows Full Convergence when he sees it. And he knows what’s behind it, too.

Surrendering completely to the hopelessly polluted cultural tides, the Boy Scouts of America announced they will start letting girls into the organization next year.

Of course this is an asinine, self-destructive, and completely wrong move for the organization, but it’s just another proof that it needs to crawl under the porch and die.

First is was the atheists pushing back against reverence, then it was the gay Scouts and NAMBLA would-be scoutmasters pounding out any notion of a scout being “morally straight”.

Both of those are a problem for a post-Christian society run by the most toxic iteration of secular humanism, and now we can add feminism to the list of afflictions.

Because a large swath of bitter, ugly, misandrists is perpetually offended at the idea of boys being boys, and growing up to become men. “We can’t be having any of that.” they say with an upturned nose, and a chip the size of Gibraltar on their shoulder. In a way, it was inevitable, as fathers have been relentlessly pushed out of the home by one-sided divorce courts where due process goes to die, aided and abetted by no-fault divorce, and most boys are lucky if they even know their own father, let alone have one around to go to a scout troop meeting or outdoor adventure.

We can’t let boys be boys, and we certainly can’t have them hiking, running, building muscles and healthy bodies, climbing rocks, shooting bows and rifles, and slingshots, learning responsibility, self-reliance, masculine strength, personal and physical courage, whether on a swim across a lake, or learning to save lives at the pool or when someone is injured, or learning how to do 87 different things to such a degree that most Eagle Scouts should probably be given a college associate’s degree on the spot. They’ll get all self-assured, they’ll tussle, they’ll skin their knees, break some bones, get dirt on the carpet, and generally become the men that women of today still long for (in vain, mostly) if the ratings for Mad Men and Daniel Craig’s rebooting of 007 back to Connery levels were any indication. The sisterhood won’t allow that, for it swims upstream against the currents of the depraved culture, and one glimpse of it undoes hour of tedious lectures on diversity and metrosexuality, while making the buckets of Ritalin and Prozac and Paxil heaped into and hurled at normal, healthy school-age boys a total waste of money.

We have a society of harpy man-hating women, and pussified metrosexual males, that go pale at the thought of raising boys who’d climb mountains, sail around the world solo, join the military and kill people and break things, find buried treasure, hunt pirates, or go to the moon. Only women and people of color should do that, because they’re better than the rich white old male patriarchy that carved the greatest nation on earth out of harsh wilderness with two hands, a strong back, a sharp mind, and guts. Oh, and while we’re at it, stop singing the praises of your mother country. It triggers the snowflakes.

Society now wants boys to shut up, check their privilege, wallow in their race guilt, genuflect to defective dystopian savages, and go sit on the couch in their footie pajamas sipping cocoa. Not bring groceries to a widow and her kids, or mow an old woman’s lawn, or – God forbid! – go to church or synagogue and read a Bible.

We can’t have them building things, building strength, building their minds, building their confidence, and learning to Be Prepared. O hell no! They need to learn to depend on government, and its endless soul-sapping bureaucracy, to let it be the same fount of plenty it is for millions of welfare moms married to the government in fatherless homes, once a rarity, but now, the near-universal norm across all races and every level of economic status.

And the same things that have pussified the rest of society will now become the norm in the troops, as they have in the military, and business, and school, and churches, and in short order, only the pussified priggish beta males will be left there, along with the militant recruiting LGBTEIEIO contingent, and in a few short years, everything the girls who wanted into the Boy Scouts to find will have been driven out of it, by the herds of clueless feral shitting and scratching-up-everything hens that they are, like their mothers before them were.

The men will leave, and the boys, forced into a game where they can’t win, will quickly lose interest, and quit in droves. And so, a once-proud and honorable organization, that had raised millions of exceptional scouts into Star, Life, and Eagle Scouts, and millions more boys into simply decent, confident, and competent men, will fade into obscurity and irrelevance. Which, after all, was the whole point of the exercise driving all the pressure on them in the first place. Mission Accomplished, ye shitweasels of cultural decay, you’ve felled another oak, and rotted another pillar of society.

Ah, but all is not lost. After the final Moslem victory over us, the harpies will be subjugated, LGBTTSTVTPXQ39 will be mouldering in mass graves, the Commie Left will be cowed and its media propaganda arm silenced, and the rest of us will be forced to toughen up a great deal if we’re to manage any sort of effective resistance at all. The BSA won’t be a part of that, alas. But I’d bet a good many troopers from the Old Scouts will.

Schilchter has been so damned good of late, I kind of regret the coming of the weekend, since it means two whole days of eagerly waiting to see who he unloads on next.

You can tell a lot about a people by who they hate and who they idolize. They hate Donald Trump, and it’s because he has no allegiance to them and because he knows them so well from first-hand experience that he has absolutely no respect for them. All their hard-earned status within the hierarchy of the elite? He doesn’t give a flip, and the normals love it. Finally, someone is holding these pompous perfumed princes to account.

But who does the elite idolize? The aspiring elite, college students, seem to idolize Che and Bernie Sanders, as if we needed more evidence of their terribleness.

Our allegedly grown-up elite admired Ted Kennedy, the scummiest scion of America’s scummiest family – you should get a waterproof edition of Howie Carr’s astonishing Kennedy Babylon so you can save time by reading it in the shower. Camelot? More like Clap-a-lot. That bulbous scuzz didn’t just fix a waitress sandwich with Chris Dodd – who, of course, left the Senate to work as a lobbyist for…wait for it…Hollywood. No, he actually killed a woman on a drunken bender, skipping off to new sordid triumphs with barely a slap on the wrist.

And the bipartisan establishment hailed him as “The Lion of the Senate,” never mind the body count.

Don’t forget their other idol, the Stogie-Stasher-In-Chief, Bill Clinton. He was such an icon that the ruling class offered up his wife as its presidential candidate twice. Oh, and plenty of alleged Republicans were cool with that – class solidarity controls, after all.

But the ultimate documentation of the utter moral vacuum in which our elite dwells is noted Hillary donor Harvey Weinstein. Hollywood has, for decades, taken upon itself to chide and chastise us normals for our many, many, many faults, because when you want to learn the difference between right and wrong, you need a movie star to help you out. And, to the surprise of no one, it was all a crock.

They knew. They all knew, and they didn’t care. Meryl Streep’s Sophie’s choice was between her career and her conscience, and let’s just say she didn’t agonize over her pick. Others took his cash to shut up, leaving other ingenues to his sweaty clutches because getting the gigs trumps sisterly solidarity every time.

Hillary Clinton managed to put down her super-sized Chardonnay goblet long enough to issue a 38-word comment/cliché on her pal and benefactor’s icky adventures in gardening. In her defense, she was probably thinking, “I was married to Bill. This guy’s an amateur.”

So why should we normal Americans respect these people? Why should we submit to being constantly scolded, lectured, and treated as morally bankrupt simpletons anymore?

We shouldn’t, and we aren’t, not anymore.

They wonder why they got Trump.

They are why they got Trump.

Read the rest, naturally.

Indeed, a treasonous one. But nobody should be holding their breath waiting for a fully-converged DOJ to take them down.

There is big money behind the street violence tearing apart America from Ferguson to Berkeley.

And there are big foundations behind the big money. The DOJ took down the big crime families. It’s time for it to take down the big leftist foundations.

Many of these foundations were born in sin. And they’ve only grown worse since.

Their bid for “campaign finance reform” shifted the axis of political finance from donations to political organizations to “outside” groups that matched their agendas. We all live in the cracks of the shadowy political system created by the Ford Foundation, George Soros, Carnegie and MacArthur. The lefty foundations spent over $100 million to make “campaign finance reform” a reality. And that gave them enormous power to control national politics through unaccountable networks and soft money.

American politics was radicalized. The left controlled the foundations and the foundations controlled politics. Democracy was replaced with oligarchy. Campaign finance was made unaccountable under the guise of campaign finance reform. The oligarchy operated under the cover of Orwellian labels like the Democracy Alliance where you can help decide how the country should be run for only $200,000.

All this is ominous enough. But the oligarchy has gone from running the country to funding street riots.

And that’s not just subversion. It’s political terrorism.

What do you call powerful and wealthy organizations that subvert the political system with massive amounts of money and then also incite street violence against an elected government?

The big foundations are a cross between criminal organizations and terrorist groups. And they must be brought down.

“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?” an Elizabethan courtier sardonically observed. “Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

Crime never prospers for the same reason. If it gets big enough, it becomes government. And only Attorney General Sessions and the remaining honest Republicans in the House and Senate can stop it.

And CRUNCH, just like that, we founder on the rocks of the real problem here. Sessions? “Honest Republicans”? What, all three of ’em?

Daniel has, as is his wont, done some deep digging and committed an act of real journalism here. But the odds of our wholly-corrupt Justice Department actually doing its job and going after these violent commie traitors currently hover somewhere between “slim” and “you gotta be joking.” Pam Geller, thanks to bitter personal experience, understands it all too well:

The FBI was in on the planning of the jihad attack against the Garland Muhammad art expo in Garland, Texas. They did nothing to stop it, not even giving us a warning that my event was targeted by devout Muslims who meant to kill us Charlie Hebdo-style. We killed those jihadis. It was the security team I hired to protect my event that saved numerous lives, nothing the FBI did. We survived despite the FBI.

The FBI was in on the planning of a Boston plot to behead me. They did not warn me or alert my security team. It was a Boston cop who killed one of the Muslims who had attacked the cop on his way to New York.

The ISIS plot to carry out mass shootings in Times Square, the NYC subway, and at music concerts reported yesterday actually took place this past June. All three were arrested months ago, but the FBI had it sealed. What else are they not telling us?

The FBI knew about the attack before it happened, but did not alert law enforcement or my security apparatus. When I first heard that the FBI had prior notice of the attack, I thought that it was very short-term notice. It was assumed by many people that the FBI had had some sketchy prior knowledge of the attack, but nothing particularly specific.

But we know now they were in on the planning of the jihad attack, and did nothing about it. If you recall, the FBI only got around to a general alert just three hours before our event. It was Garland police, not the FBI, that coordinated all the super security efforts with our own security team.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Obama FBI wanted me and the other speakers at the event dead. Dutch freedom fighter Geert Wilders was the keynote speaker; he has been living with armed guards for years for supposedly “insulting Islam.” My colleague Robert Spencer has received numerous death threats from Muslims. Cartoon contest winner Bosch Fawstin drew Muhammad. Did Obama’s pro-Islam FBI want us all dead?

What other conclusion can be reached?

So I ask you, do you trust anything the FBI is telling us?

Nope, I surely do not. In light of all this, the notion of the DOJ going after Leftist criminal terrorists and their filthy-rich funders—the diligent yeoman’s work done by Greenfield noted above notwithstanding—jumps right from “not bloody likely” to “patently absurd.” It’s worse than a damned shame, sure. But it’s just part and parcel of living under an illegitimate, tyrannical government—the nature and form of which would disgust our Founders to their very bones.

Is Bob Corker.

Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon called on Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) to “resign immediately” on Monday evening after Corker revealed on Sunday that Bannon was right when Bannon said the Republican establishment wants to “nullify the 2016 election” in which Donald Trump won the White House by aggressively running on an economic nationalist agenda.
Corker got into a Twitter spat with Trump on Sunday, tweeting that, “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.”

He then told the New York Times that “except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re dealing with here.”

Appearing on Fox News’ Hannity, Bannon said that Corker “is an absolute disgrace” and should “resign immediately” and allow a real conservative like Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) to be appointed if he has “any honor, any decency.” Bannon said Corker decided to not run for reelection “because he saw what happened in Alabama” and knows he would “get crushed in a primary.”

“He doesn’t have the guts to get back in the race,” Bannon added.

Corker told the Times about the “tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.” Previously, Corker has said that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly “help separate our country from chaos.” He has also questioned Trump’s fitness to be president.

Corker’s comments proved that Bannon was correct when he told CBS anchor Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes that the “Republican establishment is trying to nullify the 2016 election.”

“I think Mitch McConnell, and to a degree, Paul Ryan. They do not want Donald Trump’s populist, economic nationalist agenda to be implemented,” Bannon added. “It’s very obvious.”

It sure is. I was all set to unleash a long rant about all this, and then it hit me that Bannon just said it all. I’ll content myself with restating the obvious yet again: The Republican Party as currently constituted will NEVER be part of the solution. It is a firmly-entrenched, enthusiastic, dedicated, and irredeemable part of the problem. It must be either remade root to bough, or destroyed utterly. Personally, I much prefer the latter; no matter how much re-jiggery and pokery is done, I will never trust them again. What’s the old saying again? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me ten thousand times, and I’m a fucking idiot, and deserve what I get.

I think I got that mostly right, didn’t I?

The redoubtable Jeff Lord adds:

So a look at the results of the 2016 presidential election in the great state of Tennessee reveals the following:

Donald Trump: 1,522,925 — 60.7%
Hillary Clinton: 870,695 — 34. 7%

Seems pretty definitive to me. The people of the Volunteer State voted overwhelmingly for Trump, for change — and against the Establishment, the latter stubbornly unwilling to do what GOP voters have demanded in bringing that change.

Allow me to elaborate. Corker’s behavior is exactly what is wrong with the GOP Establishment. It explains exactly why Breitbart’s Steve Bannon is out there on a mission to get people like this out of the Senate. It explains why Judge Roy Moore won that Alabama Senate GOP primary. More to the point, it explains exactly why Donald Trump is in the White House in the first place.

And it explains what they’re going to get in the next couple of elections, too—and what’s going to happen to them if they ultimately succeed in disenfranchising over half the country and thwarting the clearly-expressed will of the people with their malignant, un-American Swamp skullduggery this time around. Warning to the Ruling Party: any victory you gain now will prove fleeting, and as damagingly Pyrrhic as one could possibly imagine. Continue backing the Left’s coup attempt at your own damned peril, you treacherous, lying backstabbers.

Our self-styled “elite” emperors aren’t wearing any clothes. In some cases, literally.

Amid the condescension, there are contradictions. So a century-old statue of someone dead a hundred and fifty years who does not conform to the identity-group pieties of 2017 must be torn down – whereas an actual flesh-and-blood human being who does not conform to the identity-group pieties of 2017 can stagger around Hollywood and New York and London and Rome treating women like garbage.

And, more specifically, I see from this week’s Multiplex releases that Hollywood is so exquisitely sensitive that, when it options a novel called The Chinaman, it feels obliged to change it to the far more insipid The Foreigner, lest any, er, man from China take offense at the word “Chinaman”. Is that a Weinstein movie? Did he modify the title? “Geez, we can’t call it The Chinaman, are you crazy? Gimme a minute, I’ll think of something – I’m just finishing up with a Chinabroad from the Shanghai accounts department…”

Once upon a time, the elites chafed under middle-class morality, and found sly workarounds for their darker appetites. Then came liberation. And in the ruins of bourgeois society a new moral hierarchy arose: Dreamers trump citizens, sexual identity trumps religious faith, female empowerment trumps the manly virtues…

And yet, as the case of Harvey Weinstein suggests, in the end nothing much has changed: As the old elite declined to be constrained by middle-class morality, the new elite decline to be constrained by their own purported morality. In the end, it’s still about who has power, and who is disposable. As Lee Smith points out, the truth about Weinstein is only in the papers because Hillary lost. Were President Rodham in the Oval Office, this story could not run – because the First Gentleman has done everything and more that their longtime donor has done.

But then Hillary’s very candidacy makes the same point as Harvey’s drenched pot plant – for, if Democrats believed their own pap about “glass ceilings”, they would have found an Angela Merkel or Helle Thorning-Schmidt or Theresa May or Julia Gillard or Helen Clark or Portia Simpson-Miller, rather than nominating not merely the wife of a former president (which is pure banana republic) but the creepy enabler of the most sociopathic exerciser of droit du seigneur in the modern era (which is even more pathetic). And, as the cherry on top, they saddled her with a slogan that sounds like a pledge of solidarity with sexual-assault victims – “I’m With Her” – but is, in fact, the precise opposite: I’m with Hillary, and Hillary’s with Meryl, and Meryl’s with Harvey, and Harvey’s with that gal from the TV station in the corridor to the kitchen, but once he’s zipped up and returned to the fundraiser, he’ll be with Hillary, too.

Oog. I just threw up in my mouth a little at the very thought of it. Note to all the liberal rapists, molesters, pederasts, gropers, abusers, and general perverts, all of whom tend to be physically as well as morally repulsive: put the damned clothes back on, please.

Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. (I know. It feels more like 10 years ago.)

For days, Americans were subjected to an ongoing audio loop of a private conversation in 2005 between Donald Trump and the show’s co-host, Billy Bush. I don’t need to remind you what Trump said because anyone with a pulse can probably recite it verbatim. Some gals even have hats to commemorate Trump’s secretly recorded, indecent remarks.

The ensuing outrage should have been a clue of how intense, consuming, and exhausting the daily political climate would be under a Trump presidency.

Now, here we are, one year later, and the New York Times just published a bombshell expose about one of Hollywood’s most powerful men, Harvey Weinstein. The lecherous behavior of this disgusting man is one of Hollywood’s worst-kept secrets; no doubt the Times could have an ongoing series of articles about this movie-making, sexual predator. Like many Hollywood moguls, Weinstein parlayed his fortune and influence into political power, becoming a major Democratic party donor and fundraiser. Since 1990, he has contributed more than $1 million to Democratic PACs, officeholders, and candidates, many of whom must have been aware of Weinstein’s reputation as a first-rate vulture.

So, let’s take a little trip down Social Media Lane and see how our virtuous, high-minded celebs who wanted Trump charged with rape a year ago have reacted to the Weinstein story.

Do you hear the crickets? I sure do.

And that’s absolutely ALL you’ll hear, too. Read all of it; Kelly’s conclusion is dead on the money, as is all the rest of it. Limbaugh, too, sees the bigger picture clear as crystal:

But let’s just look, from Ted Kennedy to Bill Clinton to Woody Allen, Bill Cosby to Harvey Weinstein, Anthony Weiner to Eliot Spitzer, they all exploited women without consequence because they were card-carrying members of the liberal establishment, which includes the media and Hollywood and Washington.

Not only are prominent Democrats guilty of egregious hypocrisy when it comes to feminism, they are equally guilty when it comes to environmentalism. Leftists denounce carbon footprints. They denounce the overabundant use of CO2. They routinely shame people for their lifestyles and yet produce volcano sized carbon footprints themselves.

On practically every seminal issue, the Democrats mandate, the left mandates a certain behavior for everybody but themselves. They are always exempted from the punitive policies that they want imposed on everybody else. They claim the sea levels are rising. They’re apoplectic in public crying about rising oceans. They shrewdly buy up beachfront property when the cameras aren’t looking. They live in the very places they claim are going to be underwater in a number of years. They know the sky isn’t falling, and they know the oceans aren’t rising.

Liberalism is a con game. They have no intention of using the same health care system they devise for everybody else. They do everything they can to make sure no law affects them. Affordable health care is the kind of stuff they give us. It’s neither health care nor affordable. It’s a sop to their donors. And it turns out they’re bullies, sexual bullies in the workplace.

Equal pay? Equal pay for women, equal pay here, equal treatment there, look at the way they treat women in Hollywood. Equal pay at the Obama White House? That was a joke. Equal pay at the Clinton Crime Family Foundation? We find out that there is no equality in any of these institutions that the left run. There’s no equality, and there’s no safety. Look at Chicago, look at Detroit, look at places they run.

It’s a giant con game that liberalism has going.

It certainly is. Trust me folks, you’re gonna want to read all of this one too.

Know what I think probably rankles people the most about this NFL horseshit? The fact that it all amounts to nothing more than witless whining from a bunch of miserable fucking ingrates.

It’s no wonder that so many of the NFL’s millionaire scumbags are eager to join Colin Kaepernick’s protests against the justice system by degrading our anthem.

It’s because they’re criminals.

And it’s no wonder that the NFL stands behind its thugs. If a team can shrug at abusing women, what’s a little anti-American tantrum by a prize property that makes them millions of dollars?

The only question is why are the rest of us subsidizing it?

NFL teams loot millions from taxpayers to fund their stadiums. The Seahawks have a point about injustice. And the injustice is that taxpayers had to spend $390 million on their stadium.

Who will let Washington taxpayers take a knee and opt out of being exploited by the Seahawks?

Ten New Orleans Saints players sat out the anthem. New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton expressed pride in the players who rejected the United States of America. The Saints not only enjoy a stadium paid for by a billion in taxpayer money in a city with one of the highest poverty rates in the country, but are exempt from sales tax. And receive millions every year in “inducement payments” to stay put.

The NFL is built on government taking money from people and giving it to the industry. Its leftward tilt isn’t an accident. It’s a calculated move. Who are the folks most likely to bail out an industry? They’re on the left. Not the right. If your monopoly is dying, it’s time to go left and hate America.

Anthem bashing is popular with the left. And it’s very popular with the social justice bloggers who increasingly dominate sports journalism, and not just on ESPN. Hating America will score points with the left. It’ll buy the NFL more protectionism from the media and the 2020 Democrats. 

The only question is why do we need the NFL?

We don’t. Daniel also explains the guileful maneuvering that created the NFL monopoly in the first place; nobody should be at all surprised to find that a crooked Democrat was behind it. Given that sordid history, it was probably inevitable that they would descend at last into full-on Leftard style America-bashing and mewling about how horribly they’ve suffered by having to live here.

I went to a Black Lives Matter riot and an NFL game broke out update! Rush makes what to my way of thinking is a pretty lame excuse for the NFL and its team owners:

They have two choices: Side with the employees who are doing what they’re doing and then maybe even look like they support it. Or side with the customers, the fans. If they side with the players as they’re doing, what’s happening? Fans are watching less, attendance is down, the image of the game is taking a huge hit. The owners make a calculation. If they side with the fans then that is going to infuriate the players as a sign of lack of support. They’re gonna say this confirms what we’re saying that we do not have equality and that we’re not treated fairly.

And if the players decide not to show up, then there’s no game. If the fans don’t show up, the game’s still played, and it’s still on TV, but if the players don’t show, and if they keep on not showing. So the owners make this calculation. They’re in, to a certain extent, a no-win situation. I think in most of these owners’ cases, they can’t afford not to express solidarity. That’s why more owners than you’ve ever seen are on the field during the pregame kneeling, linking. I have often believed — no, I should not say this. It’s perfectly totally true, but it’s so distracting, it might get me into trouble.

But let’s put it this way. When 75% of your employees are of a particular race, and that particular race is expressing grievances all over our country with things that are unjust and unfair. If 75% of your employees are joining that way of thinking and you want to keep your team together — and you want the players to think that management has their players’ backs — you have to join them. That’s their thinking. You have to join ’em, whether they agree with it or not.

Now, not all owners did. Not all owners issued a statement. Not all owners reacted to Trump. There’s a whole five or six of ’em who didn’t. And the media jumped right on ’em and asked why and started speculating, “They must be Trump supporters!” They were in the crosshairs. The media tried to do ’em great damage for not joining their players in this display of whatever it is. But the bottom line here is that the league is being harmed, and it is my contention that there are those who seek that very thing.

Yeah, well, you don’t solve that problem and forestall that harm by knuckling under and joining forces with the people harming you. The NFL could have resolved this PDQ by simply enforcing its own rules about the anthem. It ain’t as if they haven’t done it before, after all:

Rich Lowry kind of drops the big one by citing the actual NFL rules on the National Anthem, which specify it must be played before every game, and players must stand for it. So it seems that Trump was… right when he said someone could — and should — fine someone for refusing to stand. (Yeah I know he said “fire,” but you can begin with a fine. And Trump tends to speak bombastically, if no one’s noticed. But they could in fact be fired for repeated violations of the rules.)

We’ve seen the NFL forbid the making of other political statements — Dallas Cowboys players were forbidden from wearing black armbands to commemorate the cops killed by the Black Lives Matter shooter; players were fined for wearing special cleats that honored 9/11. (Those fines were waived — after public controversy about fining a player for honoring 9/11– but the NFL made the point, and we didn’t see those cleats again.)

As always with liberal-fascists, it’s not that they want to ban the making of political statements. They just want to ban the ones they don’t like.

I admit, I don’t think for a second that all these owners lean Left politically, so Rush’s point about them merely making a judgment here about which side their bread is buttered on may be perfectly valid. On the other hand, the owners and the NFL higher-ups could have slapped this silly shit down immediately; it was perfectly within their rights and means to do so—legally, morally, and according to not just their status as employers but the league’s own guidelines.

But there’s also this: the owners are mostly wealthy, older white guys who had been hugely successful businessmen before buying a team (and running to the state and city governments for tax money to subsidize their stadiums). They ain’t stupid; one would think they understand their fan base quite well, and would have to know how much this direct insult to the values fans hold dear by people in their employ and thereby subject to disciplinary action by them would piss those fans off. One would also assume that they’re familiar with the NFL’s published guidelines on the playing of the anthem and the conduct expected of players during it.

They would know the worthless douchebags they have the power to hire and fire were in clear and contemptuous violation of those guidelines; they would also know that this shitshow was going to wind up costing them money, maybe a hell of a lot of it. So one can really only conclude one of two things here: A) that those owners who joined their low-IQ thugs in spitting on the flag and anthem harbor some sympathy for their utterly brain-dead and offensive position, or B) that the owners figured they could placate their overpaid halfwit employees and avert disaster by showing support for this obnoxious nonsense, hoping the fans wouldn’t react by tuning the NFL out. In sum, the owners who joined the protests are either A) garden-variety, perfectly typical America-hating liberal idiots, or B) slimy shitweasels trying to have their cake and eat it too, hoping it will all blow over quickly and be forgiven and forgotten by the very people these fucktards are pissing over.

So how’s that working out for you jackasses, anyway?

Whichever theory is correct, the owners haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory here, anymore than their numbskull employees have. Not having the slightest shred myself of the affection Rush professes for the NFL, I ain’t much inclined to make any excuses for them. The whole sorry lot of them deserve each other, and can collectively go take a flying fuck at a plate glass window any time they feel like it for all me.

Not so’s you’d notice, no. Well, unless you’re targeted by them for the sin of opposition to the Deep State, that is.

During the past few weeks, we have confirmed what we suspected. The Comey investigation of the Hillary email “matter” was a sham. We knew that Comey did not call for a grand jury, did not issue subpoenas, and granted immunity to most of Hillary’s pals. Loretta Lynch told Comey to use the word “matter” instead of “investigation,” and Lynch met with Bill Clinton days before the FBI questioned Hillary. But now we know that Comey wrote the exoneration letter before he interviewed Hillary and before he completed the sham investigation. Now we know why Comey did not put Hillary under oath when questioned.  There was no point to it, since he had already decided to give her a pass. And not putting her under oath saved the additional problem that Hillary would naturally lie under oath, which would have required Comey to explain that Hillary lying under oath to the FBI was done without intent.

Now we know that Trump was correct when he said his lines at Trump Tower were “wiretapped.” Maybe he did not use the exact language required, but everyone knew the meaning of Trump’s charge. James Clapper knew but lied by saying there was no FISA warrant.

Comey knew but lied when he said there was no wiretapping of Trump.

Clapper and Comey knew there was a FISA warrant for Paul Manafort at Trump Tower. They knew that Manafort had worked as Trump’s campaign manager and knew that the surveillance must have picked up Manafort speaking with Trump. Yet both insisted they knew of no such evidence. They both parsed words, in the best spirit of Bill Clinton parsing the meaning of “is” and “alone,” not to answer fully and honestly.

But while Mueller is aggressively pursuing whatever it is he is investigating, spending millions, and creating his own justice department, our attorney general is missing in action. Meanwhile, Hillary is peddling her book, appearing on any TV show that will have her, attacking President Trump at every opportunity, and laughing at us because she escaped prosecution.
 
Attorney General Sessions made a yuge mistake in recusing himself from the “Russia” investigation, which led to the appointment of Mueller. He should have notified Trump that he would recuse himself so Trump could have appointed someone who is not afraid of the Democrats and their cheerleaders in the media. Sessions had a distinguished career as a senator and federal prosecutor, but his recusal and failure to investigate, especially the sham Hillary investigation, are inexplicable.

Not really. It’s not as if he’s “afraid” of the Democrats or the media. Like the rest of the malignant #FakeRepublicans, he’s on their side; he’s as crooked as any other of the Deep State termites, that’s all—a phony, through and through. Just like the Tower of Integrity himself, the bent liar Comey, or the “heroic” John McStain. As such, what Sessions thinks “his job” is and what one would expect from an honest, upstanding AG are two very different things.

If Sessions does not wish to do his sworn duties, he should resign, or appoint a special prosecutor who will follow the law.

That’s the last thing he wants, and nobody should be holding their breath waiting for it, lest they turn blue and fall over. Trump has made a couple appointments that are looking now like costly mistakes; for my money, Sessions would certainly be one of them.

That’s all Obamacare ever was, you know.

The “Medicare for All Act of 2017” would repeal Obamacare, along with most other private and public insurance, and replace it with a government-run, one-size-fits-all, centrally directed system of reimbursement for medical expenses. Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, holds the same opinion of health insurance as he does antiperspirants: “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different sneakers when children are hungry in this country.”

Senators Harris, Booker, Gillibrand, and Warren, who in addition to cosponsoring the bill may soon be fighting each other, as well as Sanders, for the Democratic nomination, are generals re-enacting the last war. They saw how well Sanders did against Clinton, they have marched in the anti-Trump “resistance” movement, and they want to inoculate themselves from accusations of ideological heresy.

Which is why they embrace the thin-skinned and irritable senator whose wife is under federal investigation. What the copycats forget is the future in politics is never a straight-line projection of the present, much less of the bizarre circumstances surrounding the 2016 Democratic primary. “Medicare for All” might strike Warren & co. today as legislation worthy of support for reasons both moral and self-interested. In time, however, palling around with Bernie Bros may become a liability.

For one thing, the policy is remarkably vague. “Mr. Sanders did not say how he would pay for his bill,” writes Robert Pear of the New York Times. “Aides said he would issue a list of financing options.” The “options” are not included in the bill—but they are enough to raise the hair on the back of one’s neck.

The experiences of Vermont, whose single-payer system collapsed several years ago, and of California and New Jersey, whose true-blue legislatures can’t carry single payer across the finish line, and of Colorado, which voted overwhelmingly against a similar plan last year, suggest the tax increases necessary to sustain expanded coverage frighten even Democrats.

Hey, I thought you morons fixed all that with Obamacare, right? You remember, the “Affordable” Care Act? It was supposed to guarantee universal access to health care—for FREE, no less—and at the same time lower the cost, wasn’t it?

And now here they come again, peddling that same old pig in a poke; they’re even by-God brazen enough to use the exact same damned words. “Universal access.” “Lower costs.” I heard some Democrat-Socialist Congressprick on NPR doing precisely that just yesterday. Even the liberal NPR hack interviewing the lying putz seemed flabbergasted by the sheer twisted illogic of the thing. I would love to have seen video footage of the interview, just to see if the greasy shitweasel managed to keep a straight face.

And once they finally do get total government control over the health care system—and make no mistake, they will—well, that’s it, game over. It will NEVER go away short of an actual violent overthrow of the government. After all, it never has, in any and every other country in which it’s been tried.

Nope, the government-health-care “solution,” like love and diamonds, is forever. Just another of those things we’ll all have to learn to get used to and “absorb,” like the occasional Muslim terrorist atrocity, I guess.

I’m just about ready to call it a Deep State victory and wash my hands of the whole thing at this point.

The Trump administration has no plans to charge former IRS official Lois Lerner over her role in the Tea Party targeting scandal, the Justice Department said Friday in response to calls by Republican lawmakers to revisit the case.

In a letter to the lawmakers, the Justice Department said that “reopening the criminal investigation would not be appropriate based on the available evidence.”

No harm, no foul, no action from the guy we sent there to fix this. It’s time to start thinking about what we’re gonna do next…if anything. Personally, I doubt there’ll be any response other than further online grumbling. There ain’t gonna be any revolution, there ain’t gonna be any meaningful reform, and there ain’t gonna be any civil war, either. Hillary isn’t going to prison; how can anyone still think Trump was serious about that, if the woman who weaponized the IRS as a means to steal an election is to face no repercussions more serious than early retirement with a full pension?

Americans are pussies, all hat and no cattle; the idea of them rising up to put a stop to their own oppression when it might interfere with Monday Night Football at the local microbrewery is ludicrous. As Ace says:

It’s almost as if we changed presidents but the actual government remained completely intact.

I don’t know if this is Trump’s call or Sessions’ call or if it was made by subordinates and there’s some doctrine of non-interference from political appointees that prevents them from doing anything about it — but I’m getting very tired of the One Party Government.

Not even a special counsel to look into this independently? Nothing?

Was it all a lie? And if it was all a lie — then what else can I trust?

Well, you can sure trust this: your vote means nothing. Your freedoms are nonexistent, and your Constitution is a joke. You will do as your government tells you; you will take what it gives you and like it, and bleat for more when told it’s appropriate and allowed. And that is absolutely ALL you will do.

In sum, you are now—officially, irrevocably, and in every way that counts—EUropeans. You may complain about the taste, but you will assuredly eat the shit sandwich, to the very last bite.

Back in the late 60’s, my family MD wrote and self-published a book. Its title: Farewell, America. The man was prescient. In fact, I think I still have a signed copy of it someplace, the one he gave my father. But in any event, the writing was on the wall even then, for those with eyes to see and the heart to face up to it.

Hey, remember how Comey was a man of unassailable integrity, a truly honest and impartial man untouched by DC sleaze, unafraid to go wherever the evidence led him—respected and trusted by all, the perfect guy to do the tough and dirty job of getting to the bottom of the controversy over Hillary!™’s illegal email server without a whiff of scandal, whitewash, or other untoward behavior?

Yeah. Right.

Two Republican senators say they’ve reviewed evidence that indicates former FBI Director James B. Comey began drafting a statement to announce the closure of the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server months before key witnesses, including the former Democratic presidential candidate, were interviewed.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham wrote to FBI Director Chris Wray asking for information related to Mr. Comey’s announcement, saying they’ve reviewed partially redacted interview transcripts that indicate Mr. Comey was drafting a statement on the closure of the case months before the July 5, 2016, announcement.

In a departure from typical federal law enforcement protocol, Mr. Comey announced that no criminal charges would be sought against Mrs. Clinton because — although she had been “extremely careless” in her handling of sensitive national security information — investigators couldn’t prove that it was intentional.

The sleazy, greasy, slimy fuck.

Fix: IN. Right from the start. Unless and until Trump has both Comey and Hillary!™ investigated to within an inch of their very lives, the swamp can never be said to have been truly drained.

And losers.

They’ve lost their reasons for not being able to do anything. Reince Priebus was on this program four days after the election, the first thing out of his mouth before I even asked him a question, “I know what you’re gonna say, and you’re right, we have no more excuses, no more excuses.”

But yet they offered more excuses. You know what the new one is? We don’t have 60 votes in the Senate so we really can’t do anything.

Well, not until they do away with the filibuster. But that’s just another false promise they don’t intend to keep.

Now, folks, after seven or eight years of the Republican Party promising every election to do everything Republican voters expect and promising to do these things, Republicans didn’t not promise, they did. They were gonna get rid of Obamacare, replace it, do something. They were gonna cut taxes, gonna stop this spending, and we were going to get control of the border.

It is an interesting question: What happens when the president of the United States is a Republican and the rest of his party is doing everything it can to undermine him and his agenda? What happens? What’s in the minds of Republican members of the House and Senate? After two years of openly opposing Trump, openly thwarting. After seven years of promises and now the chance to do it all, the Republicans have a chance to do everything they said they were gonna do, they control Washington, electorally.

Folks, they have an opportunity to do everything they have been promising to do, a once-in-a-career opportunity. They’re never going to have this kind of power. And what are they doing? Nothing. In fact, it’s worse than nothing. It appears to outsiders that they are part of the effort to thwart and stop Trump.

Do they think this behavior is gonna be rewarded with reelection? Do they think that the American voters are gonna blame all of this on Trump and reelect Republicans and try to get rid of Trump? And what does Trump do when it comes time to run for reelection? Does he run as a Republican or does he say, “This party isn’t gonna exist! This party is killing itself. This party’s eating itself. This party’s committing suicide. I’m not gonna be a part of it.” There are a lot of questions here, the answers to which are open ended.

This party is a false-flag operation, in clandestine collusion with their Uniparty cohorts for years. But now they’re in one hell of a mess, because we’re onto them at last. They now stand irrefutably exposed as frauds, as phonies, as liars; the Obamacare-repeal charade did that all by itself, let alone all their other betrayals over the years—although I’d argue that the loathsome toad McConnell’s declaration of his intent to destroy the Tea Party ought to have been enough to unmask them.

They will never be part of the solution. They are part of the problem. As Bozell said the other day: they aren’t interested in draining the swamp. They ARE the swamp. They’re in a trap of their own devising, and there is no easy way out for them now. In fact, there may be no way out for them at all.

And they better be paying attention to what’s going on in Arizona. Jeff Flake, who wrote this op-ed basically trashing Trump, has an opponent, Kelli Ward. This is the woman that ran against McCain and came up a little bit short. Jeff Flake has just 21% of support from Arizona Republicans for reelection against Dr. Kelli Ward. She’s coming in at 47%. This is a poll from JMC Analytics. It was a survey of 500 Arizona Republican voters. When you’re down 25 points, this is characterized as being an almost irreparable shape.

So Trump has his rally in Arizona, where, what, 19,000 people, some inside, some outside, and there was a headline out there, “Flake Tries to Make Nice with Trump.” That was in The Politico. And we know why. ‘Cause he’s in dire straits here running up against Dr. Ward. Probably has seen these poll numbers.

And here is a pull quote: “That an incumbent U.S. Senator like Flake could be polling as low as 21 percent in his own primary, while a challenger like Ward has pulled 26 points ahead of him at 47 percent, is almost unthinkable with nearly a full year to go until the August 2018 primary…When asked if Flake should be renominated in 2018, an astounding 66 percent said that someone else should represent the Republican Party on the Senate ticket.”

Flake thought that he was endearing himself. Flake’s one of these guys that believes the media presentation of Trump and his voters. Flake thinks ’cause the media hates Trump that everybody else hates Trump so all he’s gotta do is get on the anti-Trump bandwagon and write that op-ed and he’s gonna be celebrated and hoisted up and applauded, and it’s just the exact opposite. And you know the rest of the Republican Party is watching.

They damned well better be. Because a day of reckoning is coming real soon. It’s gonna be a real come-to-Jesus moment for them, and as I said, I really don’t see a way out…except in the “out on their asses” sense.

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

If you ain’t pissed off, you ain’t paying attention.

Every Republican candidate’s stock speech sounds the same, the thunderous roar about a government out of control, federal spending out of control (insert charts and graphs and why, if you stack hundred dollar bills, they will reach the edge of the universe), federal taxes out of control (insert comparisons to socialist countries), the federal bureaucracy out of control (insert metaphors about chains, yokes, and the like), the family shattered with federal funding of abortion a crime against humanity (watch for it — there! The heart-wrenching sob), and our military is emasculated.

Two more items were added to the menu, courtesy of Obama. Obamacare Will Be Repealed! and Illegal Immigration Will Not Stand!

In 2009, the Democrats controlled everything, partly due to the Republicans’ cowardice on Capitol Hill, and in part because of some of the most inept candidates and campaigns America has seen in years. The Obama folks could have played it safe but went for socialist gold, using the power of the legislative and the executive branches (and later the judiciary, thank you Justice Roberts) to advance their agenda.

That included federal spending on a level unmatched in human history resulting ultimately in a $19 trillion in debt we simply cannot pay, and with so many tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities that “infinity” is not far behind. One seventh of the economy was confiscated by the federal government with the passage of Obamacare. Our national borders were declared open and discussions over our national sovereignty closed. And to top it off, the Democrats all but declared themselves above the law.

The GOP harrumphed that this would not stand, by God! If only…if only America would vote them into the majority.

And we all know what THAT got us.

Bozell goes on to recite a litany of betrayal, collusion, and deceit that of right ought to shame even the most brazen professional politician…but, somehow, doesn’t. This would have to be my favorite line of the piece:

There is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Put them together. They are the swamp.

Which would explain why they’re all so damnably resistant to draining it, of course. As I’ve said so many times: no, we don’t need a third party. What we DO need is a second party, to stand in true opposition to the Government Party, the Beltway Bandit Party, the Business As Usual Party.

(Via WRSA)

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.