The Ruling Class

Two sets of laws

Posted on April 17, 2020April 17, 2020 by Mike

Averting our eyes from the unpleasant truth.

There should not be two standards of justice in this nation—a slap on the wrist for the politically correct who do wrong, while Gen. Michael Flynn’s whole life has been upended for allegedly lying to the FBI.

Flynn has lost his house, livelihood, and reputation. Meanwhile, in contrast, there is a high ranking FBI attorney who allegedly doctored an email to obtain a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant for raw political sabotage, who has yet to be punished.

Writing over the weekend an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (April 11-12, 2020), Sen. Ron Johnson, (R) Wisconsin, noted: “The Steele dossier already ranks as one of the dirtiest political tricks of all time.” The falsified Steele dossier became the pretext by which some FBI officials appear to have obtained FISA warrants.

How can this nation continue to have two standards of law and order? Two standards of judgment? Punishment of conservatives for alleged wrong-doing versus wrist-slapping of liberals for woeful violations of the law.

Dr. Frank Wright, the president of D. James Kennedy Ministries, points out, “Lying has become so endemic in our time that many times when some politicians speak, it’s a given that some of what they say is not necessarily the truth—but rather it’s so-called spin. However, we’ve learned recently that there is serious deception among key government leaders—even in the FBI.”

“MANY” times, is it? Only “SOME” of what they say? We only learned of the FBI’s systemic malevolence “recently”? You’re either being way too kind here, or you’re perilously naive.

Veteran journalist and author Robert Knight said to me in an interview for Christian television: “When I was growing up the FBI were the heroes….and now the FBI has grown into this enormous organization whose powers are far-reaching, and whose powers could be abused if political partisans get a hold of it, which apparently is exactly what has happened.”

“COULD be abused”? “IF political partisans” etc? Can anyone possibly imagine that such wholesale, Pollyanna-ish shying away from obvious realities might be the right way to deal with them effectively?

Knight added, “I don’t recall any time in American history where the FBI was used as a blunt political instrument.”

Then you know very, very little about the FBI, my friend. Just because you thought of the FBI as “the heroes” when you were growing up doesn’t mean they actually were. Read up on how J Edgar Hoover ran the organization and you should realize that the problem was always your too-credulous perception of it. The FBI really hasn’t changed all that much, other than to become bigger and more powerful over time. Reckless, arrogant thugs they were, and reckless, arrogant thugs they will remain.

“There’s a pattern of corruption here that’s far and deep. And Americans are wondering if anybody’s ever going to be punished for it.” Bob said these words in the summer of 2018. To my knowledge, no one involved on the left has yet been punished.

Oh, I seriously doubt many Real Americans who weren’t born yesterday are really wondering all that much about it, Bob. They’re pretty confident that no Leftist Deep Stater will ever be punished for any infamy they might commit, either heinous or trivial. Unfortunately, they have plenty of evidence to back up their bitter cynicism, I’m afraid.

Right all along

Posted on April 11, 2020April 11, 2020 by Mike

Bloody well right.

During the Republican primaries of 2015, I played a funny supercut of Donald Trump on my podcast. I had misjudged Trump then, fearing his flaws too much and appreciating his talents too little. The supercut put together all the times and tones in which he had said the word “China,” and backed it up with a jazzy bass. I found it hilarious.

Well, it was hilarious. But Trump was right about China. Right that its behavior was unprincipled and dangerous. Right that our trade imbalance with them represented a power imbalance that they could abuse. He was right about China when the Democrats and their press were distracting the country’s attention with trivial Russian trolling. And he was right to engage them even though the Wall Street Journal types screamed like a girl in a horror movie over how his “trade war” might affect their portfolios.

Do you remember Trump’s inaugural address when he spoke about the “American carnage” of closed factories and unemployment that was already causing an epidemic of deaths by despair? He was right about that, too. Right that it required attention when every Democrat and his pet journalist said it was “dark” to mention it. Right that it could be fixed when Barack Obama said it couldn’t. And right that it was a matter of policy when conservatives said he was interfering with the magic of global capitalism and, anyway, those lazy, oxycontin-chugging crackers kind of deserved it.

He was right that globalism could not thrive without a strong self-defending nation state, because nations are not just economic structures, they are also moral entities and some (like China) are wicked and some (like us) are good and deserve favor.

He was right that borders must be secured when blithering leftists were ready to virtue signal the west to death and high-minded right wingers like myself were shrugging off a slow-motion invasion, trusting to some imagined protective magic in our creed.

He was also right that the American news media has become corrupt and fake and needs to be regularly savaged until they are shamed into reforming and playing fair with the public. The Left, of course, loves it this way, though it destroys any chance of American dialogue. The Right underplayed the problem and was resigned to long-term death-by-culture.

The current pandemic has only underscored how very right Trump was: it was unleashed by China, exacerbated by globalism and weak borders, and has been endlessly darkened by the lies of a Republican-hating press.

The fact that he’s right on so many things is precisely why he’s hated so desperately by certain people.

Is this something?

Posted on April 10, 2020April 11, 2020 by Mike

I remain skeptical, but my skepticism felt a mite woozy for a sec just now.

AND I LOVE IT.

Laura Ingraham broadcasts the second part of her interview with AG Bill Barr (majority transcribed below). In this segment we can get a sense of where the DOJ is going with the ongoing investigations by U.S. Attorney John Durham into spygate and the current status of FISA against the backdrop of the prior administration abuse.

BARR – “I think the president did the right thing in removing Atkinson. From the vantage point of the Dept. of Justice, he had interpreted his statute; which is a fairly narrow statute that gave him jurisdiction over wrong-doing by intelligence people; and tried to turn it into a commission to explore anything in the government, and immediately report it to congress without letting the executive branch look at it and determine whether there was any problem. He was told this in a letter from the department of justice, and he is obliged to follow the interpretation of the department of justice, and he ignored it. So I think the President was correct in firing him.”

INGRAHAM – What can you tell us about the state of John Durham’s investigation? People have been waiting for the, the final report, on what happened with this, what can you tell us?

BARR – “Well I think a report y’know, may be, and probably will be, a by-product of his activity; but his primary focus isn’t to prepare a report, he is looking to bring to justice people who were engaged in abuses if he can show that there were criminal violations; and that’s what the focus is on. And, uh, as you know, being a lawyer yourself, building these cases, especially the sprawling case we have between us that went on for two or three years here, uh…, it takes some time, it takes some time to build the case.”

“So he’s diligently pursuing it, uh.. My own view is that, uh, the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness, there was something far more troubling here; and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. And if people broke the law, and we can establish that with the evidence, they will be prosecuted.”

INGRAHAM – “The president is very frustrated, I think you, you obviously know that; about Andrew McCabe, uh, he believes that people like McCabe and others just were able to basically flout the laws, and so far with impunity.”

BARR – “I think the president has every right to be frustrated, because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history. Without any basis uh, they, uh, they started this investigation of his campaign; and even more concerning actually, is what happened after the campaign; a whole pattern of events while he was President. uh, So I, to sabotage the presidency; and I think that, uh, or at least had the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”

As I said, I remain skeptical, and will hold to my previous assertions that my faith that justice might be served will only be restored by seeing higher-level Deep State weasels frogmarched off for a stint in the greybar hotel wearing those pretty chrome bracelets with the short chain connecting them around their wrists, helped along on their journey by a close-packed phalanx of burly, unsmiling gentlemen in dark suits and sunglasses.

Admittedly, though, Barr made all the right noises in this interview, and he has been all along. Maybe it’s all just some sort of bait-and-switch, hide-the-sausage connivance or something, a ploy to keep stringing us all along for a while longer. But those are some pretty strong words, the parts I boldfaced especially, and they’re enough to keep hope a-flickering even yet. We’ll see, I guess.

Update! More support for cautious optimism.

First of all, it seems apparent that the Durham investigation has completed most of its evidence gathering–whether documentary or through interviews. That doesn’t mean the investigation is finished. There is also the question of putting together a prosecutive case, and that will probably involve complicated negotiations with the lawyers for the persons being investigated. That, in turn, could lead to further substantive investigation. But the bottom line is that at this point Barr appears confident that he knows what happened and, most likely, who was behind it. As Barr says, this is a “sprawling” case.

Second, Barr several times refers to things that “they” did. Not things that “were done.” So, multiple human perpetrators. That points toward the strong likelihood that a conspiracy case is being pursued that will encompass an attempt to “sabotage the presidency.” As Barr says, this is a “sprawling” case. And this case is very much focused on developing a criminal prosecution of the conspirators.

Third, Barr says that, while Durham’s “primary focus” is not on preparing a report, a report will “probably” result from Durham’s investigation. That’s important. IMO, the American people deserve a report that lays out the narrative of how a group of highly placed federal government operatives conspired to “sabotage the presidency.” Such a report would be unusual coming from a prosecutor, but this is an unusual case that goes to the heart of our constitutional order. The American people deserve to have a report that they can read and readily understand, rather than having to glean the narrative from complicated testimony, court proceedings, and documents written in bureacratic language and, possibly, released without full context. The release of the Papadopoulos interview is a down payment, as are no doubt the firings of corrupt Deep State operatives such as Dan Coats, Michael Atkinson, and others.

We can but hope. And then, should our hope prove vain, we can but head to Mordor On The Potomac en masse with pitchforks, torches, tar and feathers, and plenty of good, stout rope.

China syndrome

Posted on March 22, 2020March 22, 2020 by Mike

Tucker expands on some of those Bigger Problems I mentioned below.

There are serious long-term problems facing America, as we’ve told you about for years on this show. Thanks to outsourcing, this country no longer has the same reserve of stable middle-class manufacturing jobs we did even 30 years ago.

In coastal cities, housing has become astronomically expensive. Prices are rising far quicker than wage growth. And most tragically, an opioid epidemic kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. One of the chief reasons for that is a synthetic opiate called fentanyl that is smuggled in from abroad.

Now, these might seem like unrelated problems, but they’re not. A single theme unites them — a systematic decision by many of our country’s most powerful leaders to sell out America to China.

Those jobs that were outsourced, they went to China. Those rising home prices, all-cash Chinese buyers are a major contributor to that, though it’s almost never said out loud. Fentanyl — made in China with the knowledge and tacit approval of the Chinese Communist Party.

China is no longer simply an economic rival of the United States; it’s becoming a dangerous enemy. But instead of protecting us from this threat, an existential one, our leadership class collaborates with the other side.

The scariest part is that as China has grown more powerful, America has grown more dependent on it. Outsourcing our manufacturing power brought American companies big short-term profits. Head to Florida, and you’ll see the houses they’ve built with those profits. But in the long run, that decision made this country dangerously dependent on a nation that seeks to displace us on the world stage.

The saddest and most infuriating part is that none of this needed to happen in the first place. China didn’t just one day magically overtake us. Our leaders made that possible. They abetted it. They profited from it. They betrayed us.

And Americans voted for ’em anyway, and will again too. Which makes this depressing splash of cold-water reality look more relevant than ever:

Top Men

Posted on March 22, 2020March 22, 2020 by Mike

Bitter Clinger is not impressed.

It’s not just infuriating, it’s depressing, to see how mentally softened our country has become. Reduced to a shadow of ourselves, once the greatest, most inspiring nation to grace the planet. A nation colonized by men that sailed across oceans to a wilderness unknown without modern convenience or assurance of survival to have what they coveted most, personal autonomy. A nation that sent men to the deepest depths of the oceans and planted flags on the moon.

And what are we reduced to by media-induced panic? A nation of cowards, that casts the eye of suspicion on our fellow countrymen for the crime of a public sneeze or clearing of the throat.

My Little Clingette recently travelled to Spain on a school trip, one wrought with government travel bans, social distancing advisories, the ever-present “abundance of caution”, airport screenings, and a rucksack replete with hand sanitizer, alcohol-wipes and the like.

Upon her return, the top men of government, medicine and science have deemed it proper that she be quarantined for a fortnight, because, you see, having travelled makes her a hazard to society, or so say the top men. Mind you these same men of science have informed us that a child, moments from birth, is no child at all and may be summarily executed. These same men of medicine have assured us that injecting livestock with hormones is a dangerous practice, but injecting an eight year old with hormone blockers is sound medicine. These same men of government ply us with sound logical practices such as the forgoing of jurisprudence for the rapists, murderers and drug peddlers that invade our country from lands afar and near that pillage our great nation by way of government trough and illicit acts.

As a child of the internet generation, Little Clingette is given to trust the collective knowledge of the keyboard. So she is convinced that a visit to grandma’s house is tantamount to issuing a death sentence to her elderly maternal role model, and while I love her heart for being so concerned, a part of my heart breaks for her that she is assuredly is symptomatic, not of COVID-19 (or as it is referred to in House Clinger, “The Boogeyman Virus”), but of a deeper, more worrisome disease, one that is increasingly pervasive in our society. She suffers from fear, and fear is a dreadful disease most certainly. For while a bacteria, a virus, a stranger, or whatever other form that risk may manifest as may indeed kill you, fear itself will cripple your growth and life in a way that Polio or Ebola never could.

I still say that if our Top Men—with their superior wisdom, judgment, and access to much information we lesser beings lack—were really all that concerned about CV-19, they wouldn’t be in Washington conducting the usual business in the usual way right now as if there was nothing to worry about.

They’ve lied to us, and lied to us, and lied to us—about everything under the sun, for years and years and years. We know this full well. We know they’re not to be trusted; we know their intentions, ethics, and behavior all habitually fall a good ways short of honorable. Yet now, all of a sudden, we’re going to start believing them? We’re going to start trusting them, we’re going to just take it on faith that they have our best interests at heart—that they mean well after all? That they’re only “here to help,” as the bumper-sticker joke goes?

I could be all wet, I could be overly cynical, I could be a damned idiot, but…nah, brah.

Permanent revolution, permanent crisis, permanent instability

Posted on March 14, 2020March 14, 2020 by Mike

All features, not bugs.

What this means is that socialism, at least revolutionary socialism, cannot function outside of a crisis. It is a last resort position a desperate people will tolerate in times of extreme duress. That’s the odd thing about the concept. It is an admission that the radical program cannot exist in easy times. It can only thrive when the people, or at least a large swath of them, are sure their existence is on the knife edge. It also means the revolution can never achieve its stated goals.

This contradiction within radicalism is important to keep in mind when looking at modern politics, broadly inclusive of current events. In America, we have been in some form of crisis since the turn of the century. Under Bush the Minor, it was Islamic terrorism that put us on permanent war footing. The ruling class stripped away most of our remaining rights in the name of fighting this existential threat. America now has political prisoners and a security state that spies on citizens.

In the Obama years, the permanent crisis over Islamic terrorism slowly gave way to a laundry list of left-wing bogeymen. Racism, antisemitism, various imaginary crimes against imaginary identity groups. The rape hoax on campus was a classic example of trying to maintain the permanent crisis. Coeds were supposed to act as if Chad and Biff were lurking around every corner, ready to rape them. Of course, this warranted preemptive strikes against Chad and Biff in self-defense.

What the last two decades have been, really starting after the Cold War, is the bourgeois version of permanent revolution. The managerial elite maintain a militant and independent approach to politics, seeing themselves outside of society. They are the revolutionary class that is driving progress by driving the revolution. When they shriek about threats to the democracy, they really mean a threat to the revolution, their revolution, the managerial revolution.

The old radicals understood something about the class war they promoted. Marxist intellectuals understood they lacked the stones to fight for their cause. These were soft men who lived soft lives. The working class, on the other hand, had lots of tough guys comfortable with violence. The bourgeois class was also full of soft men, comfortable living the liberal lifestyle. In a genuine class struggle, they would not stand a chance against the working class. They would not fight.

Ahh, but that’s one of the things that demonstrate the true genius behind Gramsci’s revision of Marx’s original revolutionary theory, see. A slow, semi-clandestine takeover of society’s culture and institutions renders it unnecessary to fight. When done according to Gramsci’s clever recommendations, the frog ends up boiled without any struggle at all.

The managerial revolution, on the other hand, is led by radials, who make many of the same assumptions. The difference is there is no working class. They destroyed it by auctioning off the industrial base. Instead they will use their power over institutions, like the police, the security apparatus, finance and so on, to intimidate the middle-class into going along with the program. The permanent crisis legitimizes endless intrusions into daily life by the managerial state,

The thing is, the permanent crisis has another flaw. It channels the natural energies of a people away from industry and community. The permanent revolution becomes a bonfire onto which is thrown the social capital of a people. For the revolutionary, society is the sum of men, exclusive of their inner connections. They place no value on the social capital they burn for revolutionary fuel, because they see no purpose in it. To the managerial class, society is just kindling.

We are getting a glimpse of this with the Chinese Flu. The federal state is paralyzed by the growing incompetence of the managerial class. State and local responses have been incoherent, because the normal social capital that would animate such a response has been largely destroyed. You cannot have a community response when there are no natural communities of people. Clusters of strangers in temporary developments named after what was knocked down to build them are not communities.

The purpose of government either eventually becomes or is from the beginning to grow, to consolidate and then expand its power over its subjects to the widest extent it can. The problem is that it’s just not possible to effectively micromanage a nation as enormous and heterogenous as this one, no matter how overgrown and intrusive the central government may become. The more power it tries to reach, the more its grasp is exceeded, and the more apparent its metastasizing failure.

Worse (for them), this escalating failure drives them to attempt to regain the upper hand by imposing a veritable blizzard of niggling laws and regulations, which only results in most of those petty edicts being either slyly circumvented, ignored, or even contemptuously defied. Lather, rinse, repeat, until one of three things happens: 1)the bloated system collapses under the weight of its own incompetence and futility; 2) the subjects rise up in righteous outrage to overthrow it, either violently or through other means; 3) the whole mess spirals down into exhaustion and irrelevance, the collapse into dissolution, decrepitude, deprivation, and utter futility more or less accepted by its population as just the natural order of things. Unless and until things get so bad that large numbers of them begin to starve, at which point see No. 2.

Why, it’s almost as if God His Own Self might have stacked the karmic deck against Big Government and all its works, ain’t it?

Is this something?

Posted on March 3, 2020March 3, 2020 by Mike

Hmmmmm.

A federal judge Monday granted a request from conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch to have former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sit for a sworn deposition to answer questions about her use of a private email server to conduct government business.

Clinton has argued that she has already answered questions about this and should not have to do so again — the matter did not result in any charges for the then-presidential candidate in 2016 after a high-profile investigation — but D.C. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in his ruling that her past responses left much to be desired.

Of course they did. What we’re talking about here is a person well known to be of extremely dubious moral character, with a sense of entitlement and privilege big as all outdoors—a narcissistic sociopath, really, one long accustomed to being able to get away with murder—literally, in this case. Whenever such a one’s self-interest isn’t served by full and frank disclosure of the truth but by obscuring it, that’s kinda what happens.

“As extensive as the existing record is, it does not sufficiently explain Secretary Clinton’s state of mind when she decided it would be an acceptable practice to set up and use a private server to conduct State Department business,” Lamberth said.

The judge went on to recognize that while Clinton responded to written questions in a separate case, “those responses were either incomplete, unhelpful, or cursory at best. Simply put her responses left many more questions than answers.” Lamberth said that using written questions this time “will only muddle any understanding of Secretary Clinton’s state of mind and fail to capture the full picture, thus delaying the final disposition of this case even further.”

Lamberth even gave some examples of lingering questions about Clinton’s emails, such as how did she come to believe that her private emails would be preserved under normal State Department processes, who told her this and when, at what point did she learn department records management officials did not know about the server, “[a]nd why did she think that using a private server to conduct State Department business was permissible under the law in the first place?”

She knew damned well it was no such thing. Her intention from jump was to flout the law so as to conceal the ongoing criminal actions of the lawless junta she was a part of. As always, she took getting away with it for granted; even if she did get nabbed, she assumed then, and assumes even now, that she’ll never face a serious reckoning. And why the hell not? So far, she’s been correct in every particular.

Given that the settlement attempts and records search took place after Clinton left office, the judge ruled that the deposition should focus on whether she intentionally tried to use her private server to evade FOIA and her understanding of the State Department’s record management requirements.

Oh, fer cripe’s sa….

DUDE, ever hear of Occam’s Razor, perchance? Because trust me, this is the pluperfect place to be applying it, which will suddenly make sorting out this whole kerfuffle a very damned simple project indeed. That’s because it IS simple, in truth, and it always was. To wit: Hillary!™ is nothing but a fucking criminal and always has been, a power-drunk reprobate who unswervingly believes herself to be above the law, wholly exempt from the trifling legalities the rest of us nobodies are held strictly accountable to. As such, she was but one of many Barrackorrhoids who felt/feel likewise, all working for a criminal junta that ditto.

Hats off and all to the judge for making this long-overdue move anyway. Still, though: amazing how hard it can be for some of us to recognize an obvious truth even when it’s staring them right in the eye, waving its arms around wildly, and yelling Hey, look, over here, over here!!, ain’t it?

Some things never change

Posted on March 2, 2020March 2, 2020 by Mike

Daniel Greenfield, as is his wont, jacks another one right out of the damned park.

The truth about disaster relief and pandemic management is that it hasn’t changed much between administrations. The Bush administration dealt with SARS in much the same way that the Obama administration addressed swine flu. And the Trump administration is doing most of the same things.

That’s because the actual decisions are being made by bureaucrats based on existing protocols.

The best example of this was the decision to fly back infected American passengers from the Diamond Princess. This fateful decision helped spread the virus inside the United States.

President Trump had been told that nobody with the coronavirus would be flown to America.

The State Department decided to do it anyway without telling him and only made the announcement shortly after the planes landed in the United States.

According to the Washington Post, as unfriendly an outlet to the administration as there is, “Trump has since had several calls with top White House officials to say he should have been told, that it should have been his decision and that he did not agree with the decision that was made.”

Who in the State Department actually made the decision? That’s a very good question.

It was yet another Obama stay-behind, natch, one Dr William Walters—a State Dept bureau-hack who seems to be of the opinion that officeholders elected by Duh Peepul count for naught. This asshole knows where the REAL power in FederalGovCo resides. He would be correct in that odious opinion, maddeningly enough. The crux of the issue:

You can vote one way or another and the real decisions that matter will still be made by the head of a directorate that is a subsection of a bureau that you never heard of…

And who is almost impossible to fire.

This is how the country is really run. And that’s the problem.

The underlying problem with our government is that it’s too big to control. Voting in an election or even sitting in the Oval Office doesn’t mean you’re in charge. The problem goes beyond the current obsession with the Deep State. The real issue has always been the Deep Industry or the administrative state.

If the coronavirus becomes a critical problem in this country, the blame will go back to an obscure arm of the State Department, but it will never be placed there. Whatever happens a year from now, no one outside a small professional class will have ever heard of the Directorate of Operational Medicine.

The media will spend all its time bashing President Trump, Pence, assorted cabinet members, and perhaps the CDC, without ever drilling down to the facts, even though it has them at hand. The media’s rule of thumb is that natural disasters and disease outbreaks are always successfully managed by Democrats and mismanaged by Republicans. Katrina and Maria were disasters, but Sandy was a success story. The coronavirus is a catastrophe, but the Ebola virus was brilliantly handed by smart people who are handling the coronavirus response. But it’s different because the guy in the White House is.

The truth is that all of these were mismanaged by the same agencies, many of the same people, and by a government infrastructure that excels at drawing up big budget proposals, but is inept at solving problems when they actually emerge, and just follow whatever protocols will cover its collective asses.

Just as after Katrina and Maria, watch for the outpouring of lies, the claims that New Orleans had reverted to cannibalism and that everyone in Puerto Rico was dead, will be matched and exceeded.

There will be a cure for the coronavirus. But there’s no cure for the spread of viral fake news.

There is however a cure for the decisions that led to a coronavirus problem in the United States.

It’s called the Constitution.

America was meant to have a small government under the control of the people, not the bureaucrats. The real disease is bigger than the coronavirus. It’s a fatal illness called big government. Unlike the coronavirus, it has a total mortality rate. No society that has succumbed to it has ever survived.

This one won’t, either. In fact, it’s entirely safe to say that it succumbed a long time ago.

Portrait of a loser

Posted on February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 by Mike

I first posted this one back when it originally appeared in 2016. As something of a counterpoint to my gloomy take below, and with the CF archives remaining hosed for the foreseeable future, I think it’s time to trot it out again.

Sanders spent most of his life as an angry radical and agitator who never accomplished much of anything. And yet now he thinks he deserves the power to run your life and your finances — “We will raise taxes;” he confirmed Monday, “yes, we will.”

One of his first jobs was registering people for food stamps, and it was all downhill from there.

Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. “He was a shi**y carpenter,” a friend told Politico Magazine. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t.”

Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.

The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. “The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”

So he tried politics, starting his own socialist party. Four times he ran for Vermont public office, and four times he lost — badly. He never attracted more than single-digit support — even in the People’s Republic of Vermont. In his 1971 bid for U.S. Senate, the local press said the 30-year-old “Sanders describes himself as a carpenter who has worked with ‘disturbed children.’ ” In other words, a real winner.

He finally wormed his way into the Senate in 2006, where he still ranks as one of the poorest members of Congress. Save for a municipal pension, Sanders lists no assets in his name. All the assets provided in his financial disclosure form are his second wife’s. He does, however, have as much as $65,000 in credit-card debt.

And then, a mere four years on, hey presto! Bernie The Klown somehow finds himself the nouveau-wealthy owner of three (count ’em, 3) palatial mansions. The TeeWee ad fairly writes itself: Are you a shiftless, talentless bum who is completely bereft of any useful skill, incapable of earning an honest living for yourself and your family? Are you nonetheless unshakably convinced that you’re destined for greatness—your ego inflated beyond reason, your sense of self-regard and worth wildly out of whack with your negligible real-life capabilities? Do you believe that your comprehensive failure to contribute anything to society in no way negates your presumed right to dictate how others conduct their lives? Then the career-politician grift just might be the racket for you, my friend…

The choice in this election is shaping up to be a very clear one. It will likely boil down to a battle between those who create and produce wealth, and those who take it and redistribute it.

All our elections come down to that. They have for a good while now, actually.

The Founders were appalled at the awful prospect of the eventual rise of a parasitic professional politician class to plague their carefully-crafted new nation. The sordid tale of how a grubby, toxic little insect like Red Bernie flailed about his entire life with pluperfect futility—a failure, a nullity, a waste of skin without redeeming quality or virtue—until falling assbackwards into the political cesspool, where he prospered far beyond his due, explains why they felt that way…and confirms the wisdom of their opinion, too.

Hey, they don’t call it the Surveillance State for nothing, you know

Posted on February 27, 2020February 27, 2020 by Mike

Rand Paul has an idea for a good start.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump told Sen. Rand Paul that he does not support a clean extension of expiring surveillance authorities, throwing the future of the program into doubt ahead of a fast-approaching March 15 deadline to re-up key features of the Patriot Act.

The Kentucky Republican told reporters that Trump made the comments to him on Wednesday, just a day after Attorney General William Barr told GOP senators that Congress should extend the expiring provisions regarding roving wire taps, lone wolf actors and the most controversial provision: call data collection.

Asked about the discrepancy between his conversation with Trump and Barr’s remarks to senators, Paul said there was “misinformation that got out from some people in the administration” about the expiring surveillance authorities.

“The president was out of the country and somebody mischaracterized his positions. I’ll leave it up to y’all to figure that out,” Paul added.

Paul said Trump is “very supportive” of his amendment to prevent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from targeting Americans, a reflection of conservative unease over the way the Trump campaign was surveilled in 2016.

“FISA warrants should not be issued against Americans,” Paul said on Thursday afternoon. “Americans shouldn’t be spied on by a secret court. I think he agrees completely with that and that’s the amendment that I’m going to insist on. I’m not letting anything go easy without a vote on my amendment.”

Paul’s amendment is all well and good as far as it goes; certainly, it’s a vast improvement over the Barr proposal, which McConnell and Graham also endorse. Myself, though, I’m with Sundance all the way.

Yesterday CTH warned of a scenario where congress would attempt to slip a clean renewal authorization into the Coronavirus appropriations bill. Today, that exact scenario was being discussed on Capitol Hill.

Following the conversation with President Trump, Senator Rand Paul is planning to propose legislation that would force reform to the current FISA authorities.

While CTH disagrees with the Rand Paul proposal, and would rather see the bulk data gathering/collection and opportunities for exploitation eliminated, at least Senator Paul is attempting to stop the system from being abused against political campaigns.

Two issues…and again CTH is not attempting to dismiss the righteous effort by Senator Paul…However:

(A) Isn’t it already illegal, unlawful, unconstitutional and grossly corrupt, to use FISA as a political surveillance tool? If so, why do we need another law or rule change to make it more illegal, more unlawful and more grossly corrupt?

(B) Why do only elected officials or candidates for office get protection from having their fourth amendment rights violated by exploitation of the FISA courts? Shouldn’t the same standard of protection apply to everyone?

CTH understands what Rand Paul is attempting to do, but it’s the FISA process being used against *any* American that is the problem. No American should have their constitutional rights travel through a secret court in order to usurp them. Let FISA apply to “non Americans”; and if there is a need for surveillance or collection of information on Americans, then let the government approach regular Title-3 courts for domestic warrants.

Unfortunately, we know all too well just how likely Deep State operatives are to relinquish as powerful a tool as FISA—a grotesque affront to absolutely every principle this nation was founded upon—has turned out to be for them.

Monsters!

Posted on February 27, 2020February 27, 2020 by Mike

Whoever fights Deep State monsters should see to it that in the process she does not become a monster herself. And if you gaze long enough into the Swamp, the Swamp will gaze back into you.

Because socialism is preferable to someone tweeting mean things about the media. https://t.co/1dXoJ2tkAB

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) February 26, 2020

Poor Megan—now a fully-paid-up DC doyenne now completely adapted and in sync with her environment thanks to her comfy, cozy WaPo sinecure—and her fellow NeverTrumpTard Old Guard pundits still keep using that word, “libertarian.” I do not think that it means what they think that it means. Ashley so-deftly administers the coup de grace:

"I support limited government" and "I want a socialist president" is pretty hard to square up

— Ashley (@luvofUSA) February 26, 2020

Oh, it ain’t merely “pretty hard” there, Ash. It quite literally cannot be done. As they say, one of these things is NOT like the other.

Ain’t skeered

Posted on February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 by Mike

Schlichter’s title contains an unfounded assumption. But other than that, he nails it.

The D.C. establishment and their media rump-kissers went into a full-on spazz mode when President Trump continued his unbroken streak of awesomeness by appointing Ric Grenell the acting Director of National Intelligence, thereby threatening the intelligence community’s unbroken streak of failure. None of our media idiot savants – a term which is only half-accurate – thought to ponder the question of exactly how Ric’s appointment could possibly make the IC worse. Its legacy of ashes is a national embarrassment. But then, the purpose of the currently-constituted intelligence community, the foreign policy community, and every wing of our incompetent, inept, and corrupt establishment is not to serve the people of the United States. Its purpose is to serve the personal interests of the currently-constituted intelligence community, the foreign policy community, and every wing of our incompetent, inept, and corrupt establishment.

Dead on the money so far. But then:

Its denizens fear that this fearless patriot is going to burn down their whole shoddy edifice, and we can only hope they’re right.

Flick that Bic, Ric.

We can hope so, yeah. No real harm in keeping a positive attitude, right?

On the other hand, when has anybody seen any evidence of fear on their part, really? I haven’t. Anger? Yeah. Narcissism? Sure. Assumptions of superiority and entitlement? Absolutely. Vengefulness, pettiness and spite, a strong determination to fight in defense of their presumptive turf? Yep, yep, yep, and damned skippy.

So what real evidence can be cited in support of Kurt’s contention that they’re afraid, they’re very afraid? Or even that they should be? Yes, the Deep State establishment is shrieking, all right. Along with the rest of their ideological confreres on the Left, when are they not? They’ve been shrieking about absolutely everything Trump has done or attempted to do since November 2016, even before. In the case of FedGovCo specifically, however, I do NOT take the anguished caterwauling as evidence Deep State termites are actually afraid of anything. I think of it more along the lines of battlespace prep. Or psyops, maybe.

Kurt goes on from there to laud Grennel for previous accomplishments and overall attitude, and rightly so. Grennel’s appointment bodes well for several reasons. And this bodes even better:

Today, we’re hearing that Kash Patel, a National Security Council staffer and former aide to Devin Nunes, has been tapped as a senior advisor to Grenell. Patel has also been a loyal ally to the President and to Republicans. Patel wrote the famous February 2018 “Nunes memo,” a document which alleged that the FBI used the phony Steele dossier as the basis of their application to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. In his December 2019 report, Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed the accuracy of the entire document.

The importance of having two loyal and like-minded Trump allies in place at the helm of the DNI cannot be overstated.

CBS News’ Catherine Herridge reported that Grenell has been given a mandate which is to “#cleanhouse including a “top to bottom” review of DNI operations.”

This is good news indeed. It appears that President Trump is starting the clean sweep of the government agencies he hadn’t known was so crucial early on.

It’s good news right enough, and I’m glad to see it. Nonetheless, where Kurt sees a glass at least half-full here, I can’t help but also see…well, this:

Three separate stories converged to drive home the obvious truth that America has a two-tiered justice system: the Justice Department’s decision to not indict the guilty-as-sin plotter Andrew McCabe, the attempt to give Roger Stone an outrageous jail sentence, and the Army’s decision to shrug that one of its officers attempted to orchestrate the removal of his commander-in-chief.

There are a couple of simple reasons for this. The most obvious reason is that the entire federal bureaucracy is one giant Democrat machine. This cannot be repeated enough. Nearly every member of almost every single department is a Democrat.

How bad is it? Back in 2016, 95 percent of campaign contributions for the presidential race went to Her Royal Awfulness. The Justice Department overachieved, coming in at 97 percent.

Liberal scolds are always lecturing Americans on how they are racist, imperialist, misogynistic, homophobic monsters, even if they don’t know it due to implicit bias. This is nonsense. But it is curious that these same fools see no problem with implicit bias when the entire government-media-academia complex is one giant exercise in leftist groupthink.

Daniels is talking about the DoJ here, but it’s still relevant; if anything, the IC is even worse. And, as he later cautions, “Identifying the problem is far simpler than coming up with practical solutions.”

It’s as I’ve said all along: a single President is never going to be able to force the Shadow Government genie back into its bottle; no, not even Trump, not even with two terms. The nation has been lured, tugged, and/or dragged—according to which MO seemed most practical or effective at the time—consistently Leftward for nigh on a century now, with a strident, near-continuous effort beginning in the 60s. Anyone seriously thinking that all this might be corrected in a scant eight years, by just one man, isn’t really thinking. He’s dreaming.

“The un-American Deep State and the malevolent Obama administration”

Posted on February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 by Mike

Extremely apt nomenclature and some harsh reality courtesy of John Nolte.

There is no justice in this country, only them the persecutors and we the persecuted.

Democrats and their Deep State allies can lie and leak to destroy innocent people, they can destroy evidence, they can seek to manipulate and overturn democracy, and all they get are movie deals, book contracts, speaking fees, and cable news cash.

And now there’s this…

The Democrat frontrunner for the 2020 presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders, was briefed last month that Russia is attempting to help him win the nomination.

Did you catch that?

Bernie.

Was.

Freakin’.

Briefed.

Briefed.

Bernie got a briefing, y’all — a heads up, a warning…

And you know what? That’s appropriate. That is exactly what should have happened. But…

If you’ll recall, that is not what happened to Donald Trump in 2016.

Nope, in 2016, the un-American Deep State and the malevolent Obama administration did not offer the Trump campaign a heads up, did not give them the courtesy of a briefing over potential Russian interference.

Oh, no…

Instead, the un-American Deep State and malevolent Obama administration chose to use Russian-interference-that-didn’t-end-up-interfering-in-anything as an excuse to spy on the Trump campaign using spies, to wiretap the Trump campaign using wiretaps, to commit perjury against the Trump campaign using forged warrants filled with perjury.

And then, after Trump won in an electoral vote landslide, the un-American Deep State and the malevolent Obama administration committed crime after crime (classified leaks, more perjury) to launch a coup against Trump by way of a three year drip-drip-drip investigation, even though the investigators knew the investigation was bullshit on day one.

We are second class citizens in our own country.

Sad to say, but I think most of us know that by now, or at least we should. Which makes the only pertinent question confronting us all the more unpleasant: What, if anything, are we gonna do about that? The answer:

It’s all got to come down… All of it.

Yep, ‘fraid so.

Misfire

Posted on February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 by Mike

Hrm.

John Bolton Admits Last-Minute Impeachment Leak Was A Publicity Stunt

Curiously, the rest of the article doesn’t quite seem to support its sensational headline.

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton admitted Wednesday that his testimony in President Donald Trump’s recent impeachment proceedings involving Ukraine would have had no impact on the trial’s outcome even after sections of his upcoming book leaked attempting to convict the president in its final days.

“People can argue about what I should have said and what I should have done,” Bolton said at Vanderbilt University Wednesday night during a forum with his predecessor Susan Rice, according to ABC News. “I will bet you a dollar right here and now my testimony would have made no difference to the ultimate outcome.”

“I sleep at night because I have followed my conscience,” Bolton added.

In the final days of the trial however, sections of Bolton’s upcoming book were leaked to the New York Times, featuring Bolton accusing Trump of tying the nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine with politically motivated investigations as Democrats alleged. The leak happened to come on the same day the book became available for online pre-order revealing the move as nothing more than a publicity stunt.

Bold mine. Now I don’t doubt for a moment that the move WAS a publicity stunt, mind. But the above hardly amounts to Bolton himself “admitting” to any such, openly and in plain language; his “confession” in the first ‘graph is pretty specific, and obviously refers to something else altogether, albeit related.

Bolton’s acknowledgment that his testimony wouldn’t have altered the outcome of Shampeachment could be construed as kind of a left-handed, backdoor way of admitting to the leak’s publicity-stunt nature, I suppose, however great a stretch that might be. And lord knows I am not in the least bothered by our side using hyperbole and misdirection as a means of attacking our enemies, just as they’ve always done to us. But such weapons must be wielded competently, craftily, to be most effective. And they ought not be wasted on an irrelevancy, a disgruntled, treacherous non-entity whose 15 minutes of (minor) fame already ticked away.

Could be there’s a case to be made for Bolton having actually confessed to perpetrating a “publicity stunt,” somewhere, somewhen. But if there is, I can’t find it in this brief article.

The truth about “neocon” NeverTrumpTards

Posted on February 19, 2020February 19, 2020 by Mike

The same old Vichy GOPe liberal phonies in conservative mufti: wrong then, wrong now, wrong forever.

Every bit of this — the grinding and gurgling economy of the legacy media and its temporary darlings — relies on this support structure of peer approval. Doubtful? You can most clearly see it play out live on Twitter, like a Discovery Channel exploration of an ecosystem made up entirely of mosquitoes. And the cool kids’ waterboys are the anti-Trump Republicans.

The Never Trumpers are a joke kept alive by this structure of self-support. They haven’t been correct on a thing in years, yet continue to earn their supper and an invitation to the party by wholeheartedly agreeing with their new patrons. They predicted ruin when the president was nominated and doom when he was elected, all while his poll numbers have continued to tick upward. They prophesied the shattering of the Republican Party all while it has maintained near-historic discipline in the face of a unified Democrat-media assault. They assumed the end of the economy because America reacted to unfair international trade practices, and terrible global disasters because Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords and killed Iran’s terrorist general.

All of their predictions are based on the conventional wisdom and assumptions of an insulted and excluded D.C. intelligentsia, and all are wrong. Indeed, Trump’s above decisions have resulted in the very things the Never-Trump Republicans once called for, including closing America’s sizable income gap and maintaining a strength and deterrence that are independent of entangling foreign powers.

These men and women are included for agreeing with a media that has been proven wrong over and over again, but there is no room for self-awareness. The two-or-so weeks of journalistic self-reflection that followed the 2016 election gave way to race-baiting, conspiracies, and inquisitions. A promised focus on the heartland and The New York Times’s apology to its readership gave way to The 1619 Project.

In what industry would this hubris survive except for media? Even in politics, a business filled with corrupt liars not even trying to deliver, its practitioners are held to task by elections. Not here. Unaccountable and self-satisfied, the club marches on, complete with back-handed back-slaps to the boys who carry its water.

Ace says this about this gaggle of contemptible rumpswabs:

“Neocons” were disillusioned Democrats who objected to their party’s excesses.

But never the basic philosophy or priorities. Just the excesses.

The neocons remade the Republican Party into something that Democrats could join — and control.

Now that we’ve taken their control away from them, and begun turning our backs on their preferred Democrat priorities for the GOP, they abandon it.

It was never anything more than a refuge of convenience for them.

Actually, I have my own theory: they’re wishy-washy vacillators who wet themselves in fear over 9/11. Many if not most of the aforementioned bunch had leaned liberal until then; the rest were content to play the role of perennial Noble Losers to their Democrat-Socialist overlords. And then 9/11 hit a bit too close to home, rocking their comfy world as Swamp insiders. The attacks upended everything, they grabbed the Neocon life preserver as the handiest way of coping with their stark terror. They were comforted by Dubya’s initial note-perfect response to the atrocity, and of course perpetual, futile half-a-wars far removed from the DC Elite playgrounds were always okay with them.

Now many years have passed without another mass-casualty Moslem attack against their Acela-corridor home turf, and they feel secure enough to let down their guard and get back to big-government business as usual…and then along comes this damned interloper Trump to crash the party and upset their apple cart all over again. Is it any wonder they’ve all come so completely unglued with hatred for the man?

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