86 Comey, and 23 Skiddoo to you too, pal.

Steyn provides a little historical background.

Back in the Nineties, I used the term “eighty-six” in The Sunday Telegraph in London. It not being an expression familiar to Britannic ears, my editor demanded I explain it to readers, which proved rather complicated:

It apparently started in the Thirties as soda-fountain slang for an item that was not available: “I’ll have a chocolate malt, please.” “Eighty-six on that.” It quickly evolved to become the act of making something unavailable by killing it. On Broadway long ago, I once heard a producer instruct his director: “Eighty-six the dance number.” To a certain type of ne’er-do-well, it then advanced further to become a synonym for making you unavailable in a more permanent sense by putting you in a concrete overcoat and lowering you into the East River. To explain all that to non-Americans would have taken up half the column, so I eighty-sixed the “eighty-six” and replaced it with the more familiar “off” (per Webster’s, intransitive verb: “to kill, murder”).

Yet we are now expected to believe, even in the dirty stinkin’ rotten corrupt craphole of federal law enforcement, that James Comey could ascend to the heights of FBI director, the head G-man lui-même, without ever having a clue that “some folks associate those numbers with violence.”

As far too many Americans have come to learn, a citizen “lying” to the FBI is in big trouble. But an FBI man lying to the citizenry can do so with impunity. Yet “86 47” does not seem capable of being interpreted in any way other than a call for the violent termination of the lawfully elected president. So we have the most famous FBI honcho since J Edgar Hoover selling sea-shell arrangements on the sea shore and encouraging another shot at the President after two actual assassination attempts, one of which came within millimeters of blowing Trump’s skull apart on live TV. At the very least, it suggests that this weird creepy dweeb is too psychologically unhealthy ever to have been permitted anywhere near the Director’s office.

It is not normal to have a public discourse where senior civil servants are slavering for the murder of their political opposition. Have Comey’s official portraits in the Hoover building gone the way of Thoroughly Modern Milley’s in the Pentagon? UPDATE! DNI Tulsi Gabbard wants him “behind bars”. Preach it, sister.

Amen to that, brother Steyn. The whole godawful gang oughta be locked up in the hoosegow for the duration, beginning with the execrable Comey and working our way down from there: Fauci, Brennan, all the RussiaRussiaRussia “collusion” hoaxters, Pencil-Neck Schittforbrains, the Bribem Crime Family entire, &c.

Uncool update! After hilariously batting the Comey Seashell Blunder about for a bit, Kunstler gets down to serious funtime with Fake Jake Fapper, his co-author Alex Thompson, and the rest of the journ-o-rrhoids currently professing themselves to be shocked—SHOCKED!—to learn of something the rest of the country (or hell, the whole world) had been observing with their own lying eyes all along. To wit:

Also, not so cool, in the grand annals of the resistance, is the new book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by journalists (cough cough) Jake Tapper (of CNN) and Alex Thompson (Axios). The book purports to explain how the entire governance apparatus of the USA hid the mental decline of “Joe Biden,” the phantom president. Realize, please, that the news media is a vital part of that apparatus, and has been since the invention of the printing press, with its crucial role (until lately) as a regulating mechanism on the engine of public affairs.

In fact, it is precisely the role of the news media to notice things that public officials try to hide, so as to keep citizens apprised of what is really going on. And that is exactly what the news media intentionally declined to do during the four years of “Joe Biden.” But then, at least half the country, seeing “Joe Biden” in action on video, did not fail to notice his ever-worsening feeble bewilderment. Tapper and Thompson seek to shift the blame for this game of Pretend onto the gremlins behind the scenes in the White House who ran the “Joe Biden” show.

Tapper and Thompson are lying, of course, and in exactly the same brazen way as the bigwigs in the Democratic Party who sponsored this treasonous fraud. Jake Tapper, for one, stated repeatedly on-the-air from 2021 onward that “Joe Biden” was a capable and effective chief executive and denounced anybody who tried to argue otherwise. Just as Thompson, while accepting the Award for Overall Excellence at the White House Correspondents’ Annual Dinner in April, lied saying, “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story.” Really? Then what, exactly, was “excellent” about his reporting?

Once they got going with that business model in 2016, they wrecked the news media’s credibility. And virtually everything after that has been an ongoing cover-up for their dishonorable malfeasance and the crimes of the party they fronted for. But the levers of power are in other hands now. There will be consequences for government officials who go to war against the people of this land, committing sedition and treason. Suggesting the murder of a president on social media is no light matter. By the time this blog is up, officers of the Secret Service may be visiting Mr. Comey at home. No need to batter down the front door with guns drawn, though. That would be so un-cool.

T’is a consummation devoutly to be wished, certainly. But I wouldn’t be holding my breath waiting for it if I were you.

Unexpected update! Might my earlier assessment have been a wee bit, umm, premature? Could be, could be.

Via Insty. As is so often the case, I’d be quite happy to be proven all wet on this one, folks. If the above report turns out to be accurate, I’d guess we have dear old Tulsi Gabbard to thank for it, bless her stout, undauntable heart. Along with Hegseth, whom I also have high expectations for, she may very well turn out to be one of the very best of Trump v2.0’s hires; among other things, she really does seem to be dialed in perfectly to the MAGA frequency, IMHO.

Last word update! Gotta be Bayou Peter’s.

The expression “to 86 someone” is a well-known reference to killing them; and President Trump is the 47th President of the United States. The message was instantly understandable to anyone who knows modern slang and “street talk”. For Mr. Comey to deny that he was aware of that hidden message is so ridiculous as to defy belief. As a prison chaplain, I heard similar expressions almost every day from gang-bangers intent on murdering a rival, or a snitch, or anyone they regarded as a threat. Street cops heard it far more than I did.

Sorry, Mr. Comey, but I simply don’t believe you. Your excuse doesn’t pass the “smell test”.

So . . . what does one do with a former Director of the FBI who has publicized a message that calls for the murder of our President? If he denies in court that he meant, or understood, any such thing, how can we prove he’s lying? The fact that any law enforcement professional or associate knows exactly what that message means can’t be used to call him a liar – to do that, one has to be able to prove that he knows/knew that he was lying. Implication or “common knowledge” is not evidence admissible in court.

This is what the progressive left does all the time. They call for crime and violence, while “disguising” – sometimes very thinly – the reality of their message. Criminals do it all the time, too.

Mayhem-pimping progtards, violent criminal thugs—waitwaitwait, you telling me there’s a meaningful distinction to be made betwixt the two or sumpin’?

As for “what does one do…” with a smarmy, slimery little rumpswab like Comey: unfortunately, the concept of the Rule Of Law doesn’t leave civilized people with a whole lot of wiggle-room on this. Yes, we all know deep down inside what ought to be done about/to/with “people” of his stripe—the phrase pour encourager les autres springs immediately to mind at this crucial juncture—but there’s a bright red line holding us back from going all-in, kicking ass without even pretending to care about taking names. Ultimately, we should probably all be thankful for the practical restraint which reins in our darker impulses, however frustrating it might be in circumstances like these. If there’s a pat, one-size-fits-all answer to this thorn-rife dilemma, I sure couldn’t tell ya what it is.

At the end of the day, I suppose, we can only content ourselves with the frail hope that, when the time for vigilantism, violence, and mob retribution against lying Stasi goons of James Comey’s loathsome breed arrives at long last, we’ll recognize that it has, and can then govern our behavior accordingly. Admittedly, “trust your instincts” isn’t exactly the sturdiest hook to hang an entire civilizational/societal construct from, but for the nonce it’s all we got. As our Founding Fathers innately understood, once the bullets have begun to fly you’ve passed the Point Of No Return—the only way out from there is to square your shoulders, grit your teeth, stiffen your resolve, shoulder your weapon, and slog straight on through to the (bitter?) end.

Can any of us propose with much or any real certainty that the Founders’ unswerving faith in the righteousness of their cause was so powerful, so all-consuming, that it simply didn’t permit them to even imagine the possibility of defeat at British hands? Did the OG Patriots’ religious faith shore up their absolute conviction of ultimate victory over the hated Redcoats to such an extent? With the confidence and clarity born of 20/20 hindsight (not to even mention the verdict of history), such speculation becomes effortless, the lone conclusion altogether obvious in contemporary eyes. Even so, it doesn’t seem entirely reasonable to think that, as Washington made his tortuous crossing of the ice-clogged Delaware River that storm tossed, inky-black night, he wasn’t gnawed the whole trip by serious doubts as to what the outcome of this life-or-death struggle he and his ragtag “army” had fallen ass-backwards into might eventually turn out to be.

After the passage of so very many years since that darkest of American nights, who among us would dare claim ourselves capable of identifying so closely with General Washington and his bedraggled, half-starved, nigh-frozen, exhausted men that we might somehow see those historic events as their own eyes beheld them? Not me, that’s for sure. Reviewing the writings of those extraordinary men at the time—private correspondence, broadsheet op-eds, rabble-rousing propaganda pamphlets, high-minded philosophical essays, and such-like—the blanket rejection of tyranny and fervent devotion to liberty, independence, and individual self-determination proclaimed so passionately therein certainly seems to have been sufficient to see those uniquely doughty, intrepid souls through the hardship, deprivation, and major setbacks of all and every sort, allowing their small band of like-minded Revolutionaries to wrest a new nation for themselves and their posterity from the once-steely but steadily-loosening clutches of the mightiest King on Earth at the time, come what may.

What strikes me as perhaps the most incredible aspect of all is that our noble Founders’ words, thoughts, ideals, and heroic deeds are all but ignored in American public schools in our own era, rather than being respected, reverenced, and studied intently as exemplars for contemporary Americans to model their own lives upon as they of right ought to be, as in fact they deserve to be. The thought of some wooden-headed fourth-grade teacher making mock of the Father of His Country for his wooden dentures or sermonizing about Thomas Jefferson as just another despicable slave-owning chaser of that sweet, sweet Brown Sugar before a classroom of giggling airheads is sick-making to me, it truly is. The one and only saving grace I can come up with here is that said giggling fourth-graders aren’t paying any attention to Teach anyhow; hey, they never do, amIright?

This weird attitude adjustment is more than just bizarre, it’s downright incomprehensible to me. In any event, the radical shift from profound admiration of our Founding Fathers and their world-altering deeds to near-total indifference for them—a course willfully, knowingly charted by ill-intentioned malefactors as part of a broader agenda—has proven gravely injurious to our once-great nation and Her people alike, as well as to the future prospects (if any) of both.

How do we fix all this? Again: don’t know, can’t say, won’t even attempt to right now. The one and only thing I DO feel certain of is that, at some point, the whole shebang is going to necessarily come down to shooting and bloodshed, most likely a great deal of both—more than any of us cares to think about, in fact. As history’s greatest cavalry officer, the peerless Nathan Bedford Forrest, famously summed up, “War means fighting, and fighting means killing.” It ain’t comfortable, it ain’t soothing, it’s pretty darned scary to think about for very long, but…well, as I always say, here we all are nevertheless.

The sad, inescapable fact of life in Amerika v2.0 is that men who would be free cannot live peaceably cheek-by-jowl alongside Leftists—it’s unpossible, for the very simple reason that Leftists won’t allow it. “Peaceable coexistence” is against their fundamental nature as bred-in-the-bone Leftards; they couldn’t change this even if they wanted to—which, if their readily-observable public behavior is any guide (PRO TIP: it is) they assuredly do NOT. If the last sixty-eighty years or thereabouts of ever-escalating confrontation, strife, and prideful, in-your-face interference, intrusion, and obnoxious personal vituperation being thrown our way at any time, in any place, for any reason or for no reason at all, ought to’ve taught Real Americans just one single lesson, this would have to be it.

CHANGE it? For Heaven’s sake, why would Leftards ever even dream of doing such an outlandish thing as that? How very silly, just complete twaddle; after all, in their stunted, enfeebled minds they’re the Good People, vastly superior in every conceivable sense to us greedy, bigoted, ign’ant, selfish, unevolved Bad People. Moreover, they’re right and we’re wrong, on pretty much every topic, policy, and/or issue you can think of.

Labor unceasingly to undo—by hook, crook, or extra-judicial decree—the results of the last election, after several years of whinging bitterly about their opponents allegedly doing the selfsame thing? Of COURSE they are! Duh Peepul chose poorly last time ’round, so they must be punished for their blind stupidity, piss-poor decision-making skills, and abject disregard for Muh Sacred Democracy™, which to Leftards is merely another, slightly wordier way of saying Government. Fucking slope-browed ridge-runners!

Hound the duly-elected President from his very first day in office until the day he departs, preferably before his term is finished and under considerable duress? You betcher! Fabricate from whole cloth an extensive litany of “felonies,” most of which aren’t even against the law at all, either local, State, or Federal, then clout said duly-elected sitting President about the head, neck, and shoulders with his supposed “crimes” without surcease, on every “news” program willing to book you for an appearance? MOAR, pleeze! Cobble together a weak-tea rotogravure of “articles of impeachment,” not a one of which even approaches legal justification to impeach? OH, you kid!

Hurl an assortment of slanders, smears, and baseless lies in the teeth of the sitting President accusing the poor fellow of everything from forcible rape of a butt-ugly, badly-aging serial rape-accuser in the Ladies’ Shoes department of a toney NYC department store to maniacally slashing the throats of Underprivileged Children Of Color with a dull butter knife on Pennsylvania Ave in broad daylight before a whole slew of eyewitnesses to declaring the US officially a Russian vassal-state being run by, for, and from the Kremlin to cheating on his high school senior-year math exam to ohh, you name it, then mindlessly regurgitate said opprobrious calumnies into every live microphone which intersects your immediate plane of vision as if they were all nothing but the God’s honest truth.

All this and worse being the case, then, all of it being dutifully pimped and parroted by the Straitjacket Left continually, ‘round the clock day and night 24-7-365, and it appears to me that direct, violent conflict with the batshit Left has now become a matter of “when” and not “if”; no longer is violent intranational struggle a distant albeit regrettable possibility which might still somehow be forestalled before any real harm has been done but a literal, widely-accepted inevitability—no getting around this one, not for you, not for me, not for anybody, no way Jose.

Once again, I refer you to Mike’s Iron Law #873 for a concise explication of what brought this unpleasant, dangerously toxic state of affairs crashing down around our ears all unlooked for, right out of a clear blue sky, as it were. Think of it, say, as one of those mid-summer Southern hit ’n’ run cloudbursts that come roaring in out of nowhere, raise immortal hell all over the place for about five-ten minutes, then are gone like spit on a skillet, leaving things even hotter, steamier, and more intolerably muggy than they had been before the T-boomer blew through and you’ll have the basic idea of what I’m talking about here. The grass and/or mud will be completely dry again in about half an hour, the streets, sidewalks, driveways, and/or other paved surfaces a little longer than that thanks to the inches-deep puddles in the runoff areas.

Just another example of something I’d sincerely LOVE to be proved all wet about, but can’t honestly say I expect to be.