Kudos to Senators Josh Hawley (R, Mo.) and Marsha Blackburn (R, Tn.) for attempting to really drain the swamp. Their bill, S. 2672, would move “90% of the positions in 10 Cabinet-level departments out of D.C.” What a great idea: break up the place! The thought occurred to me some time ago as the Trump-collusion imbroglio was gaining steam and I was reading Geof Shepard’s “The Real Watergate Scandal” on my Kindle. Come to think of it, a real state depression in DC wouldn’t be such a bad thing for the country.
Blackburn and Hawley.
All those minions scurrying about DC have created a world all their own. The progressives of the late 19th century assured us that the halcyon days of good government would be upon us if only more power was deposited in the hands of degreed professionals who were educated to treat all of reality as a matter for “science”. In other words, people like themselves.
Ironically, they ignored the implications of the “science” of people both as individuals and in large groups. People are simultaneously self-serving and altruistic, and not in equal measure – usually to the detriment of altruism. As a collective, they create a distinct society with its own norms and expectations. It’s a world unto itself.
The skyline of Washington, D.C., including the U.S. Capitol building, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and National Mall, is seen from the air, January 29, 2010. (Saul Loeb/AFP)
A trip into the world of the Watergate scandal sheds light on the brave new world of this administrative state. Let’s examine 3 prominent characters in the now bastardized but popular version of the story: Clark Mollenhoff, Mark Felt, and Bob Woodward.
Mollenhoff was a DC reporter and well-connected lawyer and friend of presiding judge John Sirica (Sirica is another of these networked DC folks). Not only was he well-connected, he got a position in the first year of the Nixon White House. His ambition to have direct access to Nixon and be Nixon’s premier sage was thwarted by learning that he would have to work under Haldeman and Ehrlichman. The job didn’t last much longer than a year. He becomes another of the disgruntled operatives – one among many thousands populating the District – roaming about looking for outlets for their scorn. In clearly improper, if not illegal, ex-parte meetings with Sirica, he would fill that coveted role of “sage”.
Clark Mollenhoff
Mark Felt, ex-Associate Director of the FBI, is another example of a person with stymied high aspirations. Passed over for the FBI directorate – it was handed to L. Patrick Gray – he simmered as second fiddle. He willingly became an espionage agent for Bernstein and Woodward as “Deep Throat”.
Former FBI official W. Mark Felt arrive at federal court in Washington 9/18 for the continuation of his trial on charges of approving illegal break-ins during the Nixon Administration.
Finally, what about Bob Woodward? He made his name in DC circles as an aide to Admiral Thomas Hinman Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His connections would be useful in his second career as WaPo muckraker.
Carl Bernstein, left, and Robert Woodward, who pressed the Watergate investigation, in Washington, D.C., May 7, 1973. (photo: AP)
What to make of all this? The country is governed in a bog-like slough of cliques, the excessively ambitious, and self-serving inter-relationships. If you’re an outsider from Ashtabula, beware!
Trump, does this sound familiar?
Forget all that stuff about rule by the people. Progressives bequeathed to us a government of an unaccountable nomenklatura.
That’s right, Blackburn and Hawley, we have no realistic recourse but to break it up! Break it up, and do so quickly.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dec. 11, 2019.
Like an abused wife in a divorce and seeking to salvage something from her 20 years in a failed marriage, the Democrats comb the Horowitz report on FISA abuse for something to justify their faith in the evils of all things Trump. Granted, the Trump tweets and coarseness in public performances are irritating, but are “traitor” and “shakedown artist” taking it a bit too far? I think so.
Any reasonable observer must conclude that the Russian-collusion angle fell apart. Mueller stumbled his way to the obvious. Nonetheless, the Dems tried to salvage something from the disaster by clinging to the bizarre locution of “failed to exonerate” on obstruction in Volume II of the Mueller Report. But prosecutors don’t “exonerate”. They either indict or they don’t. When they don’t, the matter is dropped. It’s treated as if it never existed.
Now, Horowitz uncovered 17 Justice/FBI FISA misdeeds. That’s the most that one can expect from a departmental IG who is limited to department documents and personnel. Plus, IG’s are famous for being deferential when they reach a dead end in spite of strong suspicions of further wrongdoing. The heavily restricted investigatory arena that they operate within produces constricted conclusions, or lack thereof.
Then we get to the Dems’ death grip on 2 other incomprehensible verdicts in the report: (1) the investigations were properly predicated and (2) a lack of bias in the investigations. #1 relies on such a low bar of cause to launch almost any government effort against a private citizen. #2 takes us back to the “deferential” thing. Without a cabal willing to engrave “We will get Trump removed” in granite with appropriate fingerprints, any suspect’s statement contradicting the obvious will be accepted. #1 and #2 are meaningless, but don’t tell the Dems that.
Still, the Dems must grapple with the clear 17 FISA abuses. The Dems must realize that the 17 misdeeds all break against Trump. An absence of bias would make at least some of the 17 going the other way. That didn’t happen. All 17 instances have the common thread of going after Trump. A chain of one-sided misbehaviors “fails to exonerate” Comey and the gang.
The Democrats are desperate. They’ve spent 3 years peddling nonsense. Unwilling to accept the rejection of their candidate by a broad extent of the country in 2016, they are trying to salvage something from their myth-making. It’s sad to watch on tv.
And the other shoe belonging to Durham has yet to drop. Wait, that promises to be interesting.
William Taylor, left, and George Kent prepare testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2019, during the first public impeachment hearing. (Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool Photo via AP)
Has a mental smog descended on certain socio-political tribes in the American population? It’s a kind of groupthink, and each group with shared interests and much else in common is smothered by it. Is it present at National Review, both online and print? The editors and many of the contributing writers seems to have taken for granted that “impeachment is political”, as if it is “only” political. But is it? I think not.
Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Ramesh Ponnuru (l) of The National Review join Judy Woodruff of PBS News Hour to discuss the week’s political news, Oct. 4, 2019
Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor, in his piece , “Rush from Judgment” in the October 28 issue, repeats the boilerplate. If we accept impeachment as being political, I recoil in horror for its vicious consequences.
Impeachment wasn’t always considered such. It mustn’t have been since there were so few, and only 3 presidential ones in 230 years. “Political” impeachments would have to be, by necessity, partisan in nature, especially since the onset of political parties nearly at the gitgo (Federalist, Democrat-Republican). Still, the fact is, we didn’t have our first presidential impeachment till 1868 and it was under freak circumstances. The 40th Congress in the wake of the Civil War was awash in Radical Republicans waving the bloody shirt (Republican campaign tactic to remind voters of Southern and Democrat perfidy). 45 of the 53 Senators were Republican. The R’s dominated the House 143 to 45.
“The Situation”, a Harper’s Weekly editorial cartoon shows Secretary of War Stanton aiming a cannon labeled “Congress” to defeat Johnson. The rammer is “Tenure of Office Bill” and cannonballs on the floor are “Justice”.
Yeah, the episode was political in a narrow sense but even the firebrands, chomping at the bit to get Andrew Johnson, had to pay heed to statutory violations, all emanating from the recently passed Tenure of Office Act, over Johnson’s veto. Certainly, the Act was an impeachment trap, but even they couldn’t rely on Johnson’s alleged drunkenness and overall instability in office to remove what they considered to be a huge political obstacle. There’s something about impeachment that Ponnuru and company miss. Our current chattering classes omit an earlier and widespread understanding that politics wasn’t nearly enough.
It can’t be boiled down to Ford’s specious dictum: “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” Ford was foolish, and so would we be to take it seriously.
Today, it’s become fashionable to reduce impeachment to politics, the easier for our social betters, deeply entrenched in our cultural centers and DC, to get Trump. If you think about it, the “politics” of impeachment stare at you in the face. The two political houses of the first branch get to pass judgment on the second political branch. They are political in nature, with their political parties and partisan fights, and are given the power to remove a president. The situation lends itself to political shenanigans; however, there’s more to the story.
Government cannot avoid “politics”, despite the progressives’ futile crusade to insulate as much of the state from the grubbiness of politics. As we learned recently, all they succeeded in doing is creating a political and unaccountable administrative state. Politics never disappeared; it just entered the bloodstream of the ever-expanding Leviathan.
Come to think of it, the third branch (judiciary) isn’t above the muck of the political sewer since many state and local judicial posts are elective posts and the federal judiciary all the way up to the Supreme Court is caught up in the power of legislating. Speak “government” – any part of it – and you will be bellowing “politics”.
“Politics” is not all there is to government, though. We get a hint in our professed belief that we are a nation of laws, not men. Overhanging the messiness of the politics of law-making is the principle of equity (basic impartiality), and after the the law is produced, the law’s adjudication demands more equity in the form of due process. We’re not perfect in our legislation. Samuel Johnson exclaimed that sometimes the law is an ass. Nevertheless, bounds are placed on our penchant to enlist the state in service of our demands at the detriment of others.
Similarly, bounds are placed on the act of impeachment. The actors are political but the process isn’t. The thing shadows normal jurisprudence. The charging power (impeachment) is in the House and a trial is conducted in the Senate. The Constitution outlines the statutory violations of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”. At the time of the Constitution’s writing, the new federal Congress didn’t exist and therefore it hadn’t produced a single word of statute. Thus, the list of transgressions had to be general in nature, but are still statutory nonetheless. As in a regular court hearing that it adumbrates, regular due process can’t be ignored. Congress can’t do whatever its little political heart desires.
Robert S. Bennett, a nonpartisan attorney, defended President Bill Clinton during impeachment proceedings. (NICK UT/AP 1998)
Yet, Ponnuru tries to bolster his case for “political” impeachment by dredging up the 1804 impeachment and removal of Federal District Court Judge John Pickering. Ponnuru gets the incident wrong by distilling the case against Pickering to one of “low character”.
But what of Pickering’s “low character”? The “low character” was one of observable deterioration of mental capacity, instability while performing official duties, rulings glaringly discordant with standards of jurisprudence, drunkenness behind the bench, etc. The guy was a mess and didn’t live up to his oath of office. The problem was so noticeable to staff and the other judges in the federal circuit that they acted to suspend him by moving his caseload to Circuit Judge Jeremiah Smith. Pres. Jefferson sent the evidence to impeach to Congress and it quickly became embroiled in the partisan food fight between Federalists and Democrat-Republicans. Still, if impeachment can’t be applied here, it can’t be applied anywhere, regardless of the spit and fuming of the parties.
Judge John Pickering
The “low character” of Pickering is something far more than the bumbling and coarseness of Trump; something far more than a rambling phone call to the Ukrainian president.
I suspect that a residuum of animosity exists among the editors of the magazine against the “imperial presidency” (completely understandable) alongside Trump’s 2016 attack on the magazine. If so, I’m with you, but I can’t make my indignation a selective one. Essentially, all 20th and 21st century chief executives – with the exception of the 1920’s execs – abused their powers for over a hundred years, and so deserve the adjective “imperial”. Theodore Roosevelt saw himself as ringmaster of his own political Barnum and Bailey Circus. Woodrow Wilson gave us War Socialism, which was an extension of is own vastly expanded Leviathan. After a brief interlude in the 1920’s, the electorate foisted FDR upon itself for four terms.
FDR at one of his famous fireside chats.
And, ohhhh, there’s FDR. He presents a special case of defilement of the Article II powers. Not only was he given carte blanche to destroy something that was rationalized as farm “surpluses” (march livestock to the death pits, bribe people not to be productive) in the Agricultural Adjustment Act – thus giving “adjustment” a sinister ring – and to impose socialistic cartelization on nearly the entire American economy in the quasi-fascistic National Industrial Recovery Act, he was profligate in the application of his new-found powers for his personal political benefit. He was famous for lavishing taxpayer largesse on supporters and rejecting it for opponents. No wonder the guy got four terms.
We ought not to leave this very special political specimen without mentioning his persecution of Samuel Insull. Just like the Elizabeth Warrens of today, FDR wanted scalps for the Depression in a grotesque display of unrestrained reductionism and vicious class warfare. Insull was a successful businessman with his own holding company (the industrial equivalent of a broad-market mutual fund) that was responsible, by the way, for electrifying much of the country. It collapsed in the market crash, thousands lost their investments, and FDR was elected as the avenging demon. Insull fled. Our president-as-tsar went hither and yon to hunt him down, using his executive powers for a political vendetta in a manner that would make George III cringe.
Samuel Insull jailed after his extradition from Turkey in 1934.
Well, His Majesty’s imperial guard caught up with Insull in Turkey and brought him back in irons. Insull was soon marched off to 3 separate trials and before judge and jury was promptly acquitted of all charges. Is there a moral to the story? It might be that the innocently accused will win in the end (or, then again, maybe not), but not till after personal ruination. He died penniless in a Paris subway in 1938.
Do I need to mention LBJ, Nixon, and Clinton? Clinton had a hard time keeping his fly zipped, was caught in flagrante delicto with an intern, feebly tried to intimidate witnesses, and lied before a federal grand jury. He was allowed to finish his term, but a warning to minors was issued (probably unsuccessfully as per the Epstein case).
Going further down history lane and we arrive at Obama. Is it any surprise that a community activist would give us a community activist presidency? Let’s see, we had Fast and Furious, which was an attempt at entrapment of the Second Amendment. A border agent got killed in that one. Let’s see, there was the use of the IRS as an attack dog against Tea Party opponents. Let’s see, there was Obama’s discovery of his “phone and pen” to issue imperial decrees. And, finally, let’s see, we had the recruitment of the intelligence agencies and the FBI into his Praetorian Guard in a bid to defame Trump. A full accounting has yet to be written for that sordid tale.
And then there’s lowly Trump. He’s accused of soiling the office in a feeble and rambling conversation with the president of … Ukraine, of all paces. Trump comes off as a piker when compared to his predecessors.
Expect more excursions into impeachment-based political vengeance if impeachment is distilled to mere politics. Our penchant for divided government (different parties controlling different branches) would create a conga line down impeachment lane. Every two years could produce the precursors of impeachment lynch mobs. Is that what the Framers had in mind? Is it healthy for our system of governance to be constantly on the brink of volume 11? Once we become inured to the political cannabis high of impeachment, what’s next? The meth of civil war?
Nothing good can come of “political” impeachment. It’s not only wrong. It’s dangerous.
Gerald Ford (R. Mich.) as quoted in the Congressional Record for April 15, 1970: “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers [it] to be at a given moment in history.”
President Ford appears in 1974 at a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing regarding his pardon of Richard Nixon.
Does Ford’s famous comment on impeachment make sense? Kinda, if you don’t have anything else to go on. Well, Yale law professor E. Donald Elliott and his mentor, Yale law professor and Dean Harry H. Wellington, would ask you to reconsider. Ford’s comment stems from a highly contentious legal philosophy called positivism or “legal realism”. Positivism straitjackets the meaning, purpose, and assessment of law to “the acts of government officials”.
Ok, so what’s the rub? Simple, according to Wellington, the idea lacks a “theory of mistake”. The concept has no place for the law being wrong. To put it bluntly, it is what it is. Thus, it’s a convenient theory for freeing up the law from any connection to morality. The 20th century’s thugocracies – fascism, communism, Maoism, Stalinism, Jim Crow – found it useful. And so do our own progressives and law-making guiding lights. Perform an official act and there’s no need to rack your conscience about the morality of it. Just do it, as Kaepernick intones.
Jim Crow in the deep South. The intimidation of blacks at a polling place is depicted here.Jim Crow as segregation in water fountains.Oskar Dankner, a Jewish businessman, and Edele Edelmann, a Christian woman, are humiliated in public for having an intimate relationship. The signs read: “As a Jewboy, I always invite only German girls up to my room!” and “I am the biggest sow in town and only have dealings with Jews.” Cuxhaven, Germany, July 27, 1933
The Dems agree, “Just do it” – impeachment that is – even if untethered from the Constitution’s standard of “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors”. Though it must be admitted that quid pro quos, the firing of an ambassador, disagreements over foreign policy, and a person’s deportment as president don’t quite fit the Constitutional bill. For Schiff and company, no matter. Make it “official” even if it’s based on rank innuendo, hearsay, and politically useful bureaucratic carping.
Plenty of injustice was committed under the banner of legal positivism. Just because a past Republican mouthed the dangerous nonsense doesn’t make it any less dangerous.
Accounts of the last moments of Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi depict him retreating into a tunnel with a dead end and blowing himself up with three of his children. The tale proves that a dead end is what you make of it. For al-Baghdadi, it was off to his 70 virgins (I don’t know where the kids ended up in Islamist theology.). For the Democrats in their incessant drive to impeach Trump, similarly at a dead end of facts, they are weaving a fairy tale in order to create the illusion of the light of dastardly and impeachable offenses at the end of the tunnel. The reality is that there is nothing but a wall of rock and compacted dirt.
Let’s see, we’ve experienced a “whistleblower” complaint which proved to be a collection of hearsay water cooler and lunch room talk among the minions of the administrative state.
The conspirators couldn’t spin the call at the center of their scheme because Trump released the transcript to everyone on the planet. Then the story is repeated, nothing much added, in the tales spun by others vaguely mentioned in the initial yarn. If anything is added, it’s nothing but feelings of anger of people who are upset about how the president is conducting foreign policy. They’re flabbergasted that an elected official – the president – would dare skip over they’re unelected, self-anointed wisdom. Then they’ve attempted to establish a “quid pro quo” as if something that is common in the course of foreign relations is somehow illegal, while it clearly isn’t. What does all this add up to? Nothing!
Shakespeare spun a tale of “Much Ado About Nothing”. The Democrats are trying to steal the mantle of master poet laureate. Their fiction, though, says more about them than Trump.
Go Astros! I had no dog in the hunt that is called the 2019 World Series. Sunday’s rude crowd at Nationals Park changed that. If you can’t find a good reason to root for someone, rooting against someone may just fit the bill, particularly when they behave like vulgar buffoons. The boos and the oral flatulence of “Lock him up” were glaringly repulsive. Go Astros!
It was fitting justice that the Astros pummeled the swamp things 7-1 on boo day.
Conversely, the chant at Trump rallies, “Drain the swamp”, has gained new relevance. The “swamp” in this case is DC’s polyglot population of government workers, government influencers, partisan operatives, and the net of white-collared professional handlers and manipulators. The city’s only industry is politics, or the many ways to finagle something for somebody at somebody else’s expense. The controlling party is, of course, the Democratic Party – the party of big, and ever bigger, government.
The crowd in the stadium is a microcosm of this swamp: the assemblage of over-paid schemers who can afford the $1,000 tickets. These folks aren’t the peanuts-and-beer bleacher bums at Wrigley or Dodger Stadium. The Series at Nationals Park is reserved for these well-heeled destroyers of American wealth.
Now the swamp denizens have a professional baseball team to shower their affections upon. Why the new team to replace the caput Senators in 1960? It’s simple: the market got bigger. DC grew into the obese metroplex that busted its lap belt of boundaries, most recently thanks to Obama.
2016 election results by county in Virginia. Note the blue counties across the Potomac from Washington DC.
Its girth flooded into the Maryland and northern Virginia ‘burbs producing one-party Democrat enclaves who’d support Nicolás Maduro if he was the nominee. The consequence is a deeper-blue-approaching-charcoal Maryland and a Virginia about ready to take the plunge into California governance.
What’s my chant? Shrink DC! A depression in DC is a renaissance everywhere else. Go Astros!
The Coriolis Effect: the natural bending of global air and water currents due to the earth’s rotation on its axis.
The global oceanic gyres from the Coriolis effect.
I’ve often wondered why liberals since the late 19th century have a reflex to lean ever further left. The tendency is very pronounced in today’s Democratic Party. Propositions that were soundly rejected only a couple of years ago have morphed into near dogma in the party. Take for instance the almost universal embrace of gargantuan social engineering in Green New Deals; or the racially charged seizure of wealth from one generation to fund awards to a current and specific racially-favored group 150 years removed from the wrong; or the open and broad avowals of faith in socialism, while, for some, still denying it; or the proud espousal of confiscatory taxation in spite of its historically ruinous effects (JFK would be shocked.).
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn presents a possible answer in the second volume of his 3-part historical novel, “The Red Wheel: November 1916”. In describing the rise of Russian left radicalism in the decades prior to the 1917 revolutions (there ended up being two in March and October), he compares the liberal’s leftward reflex to the natural phenomena of the Coriolis effect. Here’s how he puts it:
“Just as the Coriolis effect is constant over the whole of this earth’s surface, and the flow of rivers is deflected in such a way that it is always the right bank that is eroded and crumbles, while the floodwater goes leftward, so do all forms of democratic liberalism on earth strike always to the right and caress the left. Their sympathies [are] always with the left, their feet are capable of shuffling only leftward, their heads bob busily as they listen to leftist arguments – but they [are] disgraced if they take a step to or listen to a word from the right.” (p.59)
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
Makes sense to me. Daniel Pipes in his magisterial works on the Russian Revolution described the blind spot in the outlook of the liberals as they deposed the Tsar in March of 1917 and tried to build a constitutional republic. If there was a threat, they were convinced it would come from the right. They ignored the warnings of the intelligence services that left extremists, the Bolsheviks, were arming and planning a seizure of power. Low and behold, Petrograd was left mostly undefended and the rest of Russian history thereafter is one of villainy and misery.
The 1930’s Holodomor, or Stain-engineered famine to destroy peasant resistance in southern Russia and the Ukraine.New arrivals to the expanding chain of concentration camps as part of Stalin’s war against the peasants in the 1930’s.
What lies in store for us as we approach the momentous date of November 2020? We have a president wounded by the incessant drumbeat of an increasingly radical left Democratic Party with numerous allies in the media, academia, entertainment, and among the campus and street mobs. His opposition, the Democratic Party, has become the vanguard of the radical left’s implementation of an all-encompassing transformation of all of society to fit their warped vision.
Antifa protesters burning American flags.
Will the political Coriolis effect in modern America duplicate the misery foisted on Russia? This is the time for some serious adult thinking on the question … before it is too late.
Proverbs 18:17 (ESV): The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.
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A 1930’s Stalinist show trial in the Soviet Union.Adam Schiff (l), chairman, and some of the House Intelligence Committee members.
The madhouse in DC over impeachment is more reminiscent of Stalin’s show trials during his purges than American jurisprudence. The House spectacle is all about a predetermined verdict being sold behind a facade of serious-sounding rubbish. The American public is being misled. Putin is taking notes.
The Democrats have been on a jihad since November 8, 2016. The latest gambit hinges on a nefarious Trump “quid pro quo”. If the ploy was limited to that, it’s a nothingburger. “Quid pro quo” literally means “something for something”. If that was all there was to it, it’s a very thin reed to support a massive structure of impeachment. Does the Louisiana Purchase remind you of anything? International relations are almost solely conducted on a quid-pro-quo basis.
Really, though, what the show-trial prosecutors are trying to conjure is something more: a quid-pro-quo-or-else. And that, the call’s transcript doesn’t support. The “favor” doesn’t mention the Bidens till further down in the conversation. At the top of Trump’s mind is the skulduggery conducted against him in 2016. The Bidens were an afterthought. Many interpretations are possible whenever a verbal conversation is put to paper, but you can’t say that only Schiff’s reading is the viable one.
The “or else” part is the withholding of a weapons sale, or so they say – while confusing a “sale” with “aid”. Well, whatever, the Ukraine got the weapons a month later. The only president to withhold military aid to Ukraine was Obama. And further, Zelensky and his government wasn’t even aware that they were being allegedly coerced. It’s a strange quid-pro-quo when quid has no knowledge of the purported quo. This is nonsense on stilts.
US javelin missile. It was the key part of Trump-approved weapons sale to the Ukraine.
Schiff and his sorcerers have to create the illusion of a grand evil out of thin gruel. How? It’s simple: control the process! In other words, hold a show trial but call it something else. The Dems liken this charade to a grand jury. They’re right in an infantile way: charges (articles of impeachment) come out of it. But there the resemblance ends. It’s a strange grand jury proceeding when people representing the defense (Republicans) are present alongside people representing the prosecutors (Democrats). Instead, the whole affair has the adversarial characteristics of a trial. As such, the situation cries for full due process, not the secret hearings with Schiff the only one allowed to call witnesses and his serial leaking of cherry-picked statements to make his fiction seem like non-fiction. All the while, the Republicans are muzzled by keeping the thing secret. This is scandalous.
Another underhanded excuse is often bellowed to make the outrage more digestible. The process is said to be exclusively “political” in nature. But is that true? No. Impeachment is a blend of politics and statute. If “politics” was the sole driving force, once we developed political parties in the late 18th century, opposing parties controlling the Presidency and Congress would be embroiled in impeachments right and left. The fact that we have had so few impeachments tells us something. It tell us that something more than the fulfillment of political vendettas should be at the core of the process. It must be anchored in a clear and unmistakable violation of the Constitution or a serious criminal statue. A high bar is required, not the low bar of grotesque interpretations of paper transcriptions of phone calls or previously Court-approved exercises of executive privilege.
U.S. President Bill Clinton points while being asked questions regarding his relationship with former White House intern [Monica Lewinsky] during his videotaped interrogation before a grand jury on August 17. The four hour videotape was released by the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee along with 2,800 pages of [Lewinsky] case evidence.If Trump is guilty, what of Obama’s use of his “phone and pen”? He created by his lonesome new categories of immigration law violators to be free of those same laws. Is this an example of the Article II branch acting like the Article I branch? What about “faithfully executing the laws”? Or how about the Fast and Furious episode in an entrapment scheme against our Second Amendment? Have we forgotten the IRS vendetta against Obama’s political opponents? There’s more here against Obama, using Pelosi’s standard, than there ever is against Trump.
Republicans, remember this time. It’s no holds barred regarding impeachment. The Democrats have unleashed the tactic of hiding election loss anger and ideological and policy disagreements under spurious claims of misbehavior. You too, Republicans, can follow the same show trial script when the time comes.
Prelude: The 19th century Progressives bequeathed to us a many tentacled Leviathan. The monster grew out of the progressives’ fundamental premise that life is too complicated to be left to individuals. We need, they asserted, “experts” to guide and assist us in achieving our highest potential. They did not see the monster developing a mind of its own with distinct interests from those it was intended to serve. You might say, a culture evolved from its peculiar ecosystem. Out of this unique culture arose a predilection for certain views, born of its circumstances and concomitant norms and expectations. The 2016 election threw back the rug and exposed the thing for what it really is. It is a living and breathing thing no longer moored to its original raison d’être. Its purpose for existence is itself, not the country and the country’s citizens.
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At times Tucker Carlson drives me nuts. One of his favorite bogeymen is “neocons”, which occasionally crowds out his infatuation with UFO’s. To him, free markets are “just a tool”. He completely misses the point that they are what happens when the state leaves people alone. Free markets blossom when a state is created to protect our natural rights, not the creator of them. But I have to admit that he is onto something in most things Trump. The latest Trump furor erupted over a whistleblower complaint about his phone call (later referred to simply as “the Call”) to Ukrainian President Zelensky. A CIA veteran appeared on his show to present his view of the whistleblower’s complaint. His observations should raise at least a few eye brows. Watch.
The complaint (read here) according to former CIA officer John Kiriakou reads too polished and legally suave to be a product of a single person. In his view, the complaint by the time it got to Congress had passed through multiple hands. Maybe this is normal, but today’s political environment isn’t normal. Multiple hands might mean a coordinated effort. There are concerns that the administrative state is a hyper-partisan outfit, particularly in its DC stomping grounds. Is it possible that our bureaucracies in DC are a well-oiled special interest group with a clear ideological cast? Is the “whistleblower” a pseudonym for a cabal of apparatchiks intent on removing Trump?
Details about the complaint and the complainant are only now beginning to emerge. The existence of an accusation was known to Adam Schiff (D, Ca.), chairman of the House Intel Committee, as it was gestating in the intel bureaucracy (read about it here). According to the latest information, the accuser interacted with a Schiff aide and was referred to a lawyer. Who’s the lawyer? It’s none other than one of the many revolving-door Democrat apparatchiks who populate the environs of the DC Mall, Andrew Bakaj with Mark Zaid as co-counsel.
Andrew Bakaj of Comparr Rose Legal Group, PLLC
Previously, Bakaj has been at the center of insider politics to frustrate Trump appointees. In 2018, he went after Christopher Sharpley, Trump’s nominee for CIA Inspector General, ironically a holdover from Obama’s tenure where he served as deputy IG of the CIA, and functioned as acting IG under Trump. Out of the woodwork arose a cadre of former apparatchiks to blast Sharpley for allegedly punishing “whistleblowers”. At the tip of the spear was Bakaj. They successfully torpedoed Sharpley’s nomination when he withdrew his name rather than face the Dem gauntlet. And who was retained as Bakaj’s legal counsel in this earlier jig? It was Zaid. You can read about the episode here.
It’s time to clear up this business about “whistleblowers” before we go any further. “Whistleblowing” can be more than just a sincere exposure of those of public trust who cook the books. It also lends itself to partisan political crusades. Whistleblowing at this level looks a lot like leaking. Whistleblowing has the potential to be legal cover for leaking.
The motivations of the complaining actor (or actress) can be of a partisan nature. Speaking of partisan, look at Bakaj’s political background. The guy is fully marinated in Democratic Party politics. He interned for Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton in the Spring and Fall of 2001 according to his Linkedin page. He was employed at the CIA’s IG office during the Obama years. That’s where he ran afoul of Sharpley, the CIA’s Deputy IG, at a time when Obama was petrified over leaks. Even Democrats at that time were aware of the blurred line between “whistleblowing” and “leaking”.
Bakaj is now part of the web of professional handlers who are on speed dial with Democrat officeholders with a political ax to grind. So the Call’s digestive tract might look like this: leaker > Schiff aide > Schiff? > Bakaj > Zaid. As more information comes to light, we may have to add more entrails to the guts of the beast.
The Call’s coming to light is starting to eerily resemble the sliming of Kavanaugh. At the root of that campaign was Debra Katz, the DC lawyer who represented Christine Blasey-Ford and her completely unsubstantiated allegations. Is her’s (Katz) a fully objective legal mind? Are you kidding? She once crowed not long after Trump’s inauguration, “This administration’s explicit agenda is to wage an assault on our most basic rights — from reproductive rights to our rights to fair pay . . . We are determined to resist — fiercely and strategically.” She’s a charter member of the Resistance.
Debra Katz at The Wall Street Journal CFO Network on June 12, 2018. (Photo: Paul Morse for the WSJ)
Into this boiling stew is thrown the Call. Cutting through the bombast, we find the complaint adds nothing, other than what appears to be Democrat boilerplate. Trump trumped them by releasing the transcript of the Call. The very thing that was to be the accelerant for a full blown uproar was now equally in the possession of any congregation of people at a barber shop or supermarket. The mom with a basket full of groceries knows just as much as the “whistleblower”. With the transcript, we get to compare the whistleblower’s account of what was said with … what was actually said.
The New York Times’s report on the complaint refers to it as following the released transcript of the Call. Of course it does. Dah! But there’s much more to the complaint that sounds more like a legal brief than a singe person’s recollection. In-between references to the Call are interpretations and embellishments. These could have just as easily come out of the Resistance hothouse or Adam Schiff and the worst of the Democratic caucus. Examples are in order.
Example #1: Right at the start, in the introduction, the complaint rattles off a partisan indictment: “… the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”
This is not in the transcript. It’s in the mind of the complainant, and whoever else helped him (or her) write it. As we know, Trump requested assistance from the Ukraine in our investigation of possible governmental misbehavior surrounding the 2016 election. We have treaties for this purpose, one with the Ukraine. Any reference to the Bidens is brief and offhanded, and fleetingly mentioned to make the point of possible corruption and other wrongdoing of recent vintage. As for a “quid pro quo”, to be blunt, there ain’t one. This is clear if you listen to a dramatic reading of the Call in natural conversational tones and rhythms (One was performed on the Hugh Hewitt Show, Hour 2, 10/2/2019).
Example #2: Here’s chilling reminder of the cabal within the unleashed Leviathan: “Over the past four months, more than half a dozen U.S. officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort.” Further, “It is routine for U.S. officials … to share such information with one another ….” Additonally and astoundingly, we have this admission: “I was not a direct witness to most of the events described. However, I found my colleagues’ accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another.”
“Fact patterns”? “Multiple officials”? “Share such information”? What are “fact patterns”? They are opinions usually fueled by bias. In today’s climate, there’s no hotter bias than DC Trump-hatred. As for the “sharing” and “multiple officials”, that sounds to me like “intrigue”. I would like to remind the Dem caucus that interpretation equally applies to the complaint as it does to the Call.
Example #3: The frequent appearance of the word “pressure” to characterize Trump’s request for assistance from Zelensky, president of the Ukraine, underscores the partisan bombast. “Pressure” is a very loaded verb. Once again, a natural oral recreation of the conversation conveys no such “pressure”. It is a provocative verb enlisted for the sole purpose of advancing a political agenda. The complaint has the odor of DNC press releases.
Example #4: To further the charge of Trump “pressuring” Zelensky, a quid pro quo was stitched together by the author(s). First, they attempt to paint White House officials as “deeply disturbed” as they “witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain”. The “abuse” relies on cobbling together a line from the Ukrainian president’s account of the talk on his website with the fleeting reference to the Bidens. Here’s the Ukraine line in the complaint:
“Donald Trump expressed his conviction that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve Ukraine’s image and complete the investigation of corruption cases that have held back cooperation between Ukraine and the United States.”
Attach the above with this:
“Aside from the above-mentioned ‘cases’ purportedly dealing with the Biden family and the 2016 U.S. election, I was told by White House officials that no other “cases” were discussed.”
And you have a “quid pro quo”. Really? Yeah, in the minds of those in the fever swamp. So, we are supposed to believe in the space of a limited conversation that the mere mention of the Bidens is ipso facto proof of “give me dirt on the Bidens or we’ll let you die on the vine”. The only way to get away with the accusation is to be unfamiliar with the Call. Now that we have it to read during our morning constitution, we know that the shenanigans of the intel community and the FBI in DC, along with Crowdstrike, were mentioned. “No other cases”? The Bidens were one of three, all brought up during the length of a short phone talk. The complaint’s author(s) are lying.
I could parse more of the thing by going beyond the first 3 pages of the 9 in the screed. The document is risible. It will become more of a farce as more comes to light, maybe more about the complainant. Some reports have revealed the author to be a registered Democrat. Something not unexpected given the natural affinity between the party of government (Democratic Party) and the employees of government.
Neighboring states around DC all of a sudden have a predilection for Democratic Party candidates. The federal government grows and Democrats flock to DC and its environs. Examine the map of Virginia from the 2016 election. Notice the northern state house districts on the south side of the Potomac, a few bridges away from DC?
Republicans venturing into DC are lambs stumbling into a den of wolves.
The tale of the Call is the story of the sunset of popular sovereignty. We must recognize that the government is so big that it cannot be controlled through elections. In fact, if elections go against the lunch room zeitgeist, the new officeholders will be undermined or removed from office. Welcome to modern impeachment in the age of the institutional radical left.
Stay tuned for more from the impeachment clown show.
The transcript is a Rorschach test exposing the realities of domestic and international politics. What does it mean? Here’s my take.
(1) Politics brings out the crudity in people. Yes, Trump is crude, him being a political neophyte with all the rough edges and a huge ego. But have you watched the Democrats’ presidential sweepstakes lately? It’s insanity on parade. Their rants include more than wacko ideas but also serial insults to Trump (“punch him in the face”, etc.) and half of the electorate (“racist”, “anti-gay”, “we’re going to forcibly take your guns”, etc.). Trump is crude and the Democrats are crude and unelectable.
(2) Washington, DC, is a cesspool – not the city but the environs around the capitol. There is a Deep State and it’s in those dozens of blocks encompassing the Mall. The “whistleblower” apears to be a never-Trumper. The whistleblowing complaint apparently is based on scuttlebutt from water-cooler or social banter. The complainant wasn’t tapped into the president’s line. If he’s a never-Trumper, he (or she, et al) will have to join the hierarchy in the State Dept., Justice Dept., and intelligence community in 2016 and 2017. A partisan leak has been recast as whistleblowing.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
(3) The transcript shows the nature of politics as it has existed since political power was wedded to a human being. Trump’s call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is not unknown in history. For example, FDR’s shenanigans in going after Samuel Insull, a prominent utility CEO, just because he needed a scalp for the Depression, was sickening. After they finally got their hands on him, and after much chicanery with France, Greece, and Turkey, all FDR and the boys (girls, et al) got was an innocent verdict on all counts. Do I need to delve into the more egregious antics of JFK, LBJ, and Richard Nixon?
Samuel Insull
(4) Trump’s call has an interesting predicate: Joe Biden’s on-air boast in 2016 that he got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired. He was the same prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma Holdings for corruption at the time his son was on the Board of Directors. Intriguing, eh?
Viktor Shokin
(5) The transcript of Trump’s call shows no quid pro quo: as in, you give me the dirt on Biden and I’ll give you American aid. You could argue that it is implied, but that would be no more dispositive than Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, demanding the end of investigations critical of Robert Mueller’s probe. They demanded that he “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.” You can read about the episode here.
Yuriy Lutsenko
(6) The Ukraine seems to be as entwined in American politics circa 2016 as Russia was alleged to be. Trump’s call makes it abundantly clear. First, Ukraine may have been on helpful terms with at least Obama if not the Democrats in that election cycle. How helpful? The transcript shows Trump mentioning two things: Crowdstrike and the US ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. The ambassador was, not surprisingly, an Obama administration conduit to the Ukraine, and given the spying capers on Trump in 2016, would be involved in any Ukrainian hanky-panky. Speculation? Yep, but no different than the knee-jerk cries of “outrageous” regarding anything Trump. And there’s the mention of the cyber-security firm Crowdstrike. It was the company who was paid by the DNC to take possession of their server and examine it for evidence of hacking. It’s out of this Democrat-funded escapade that we have the Russia-hacked-our-election chant. What’s the Ukrainian connection? Well, there’s enough intriguing evidence for John Durham to be looking into it. You can read about it here.
I’m sure that more can be said and will be said in the coming days. As for me, as of right now, one more thing needs to be mentioned. The Democrats are out to reverse an election. Suburban voters in the 2018 elections handed power to a party bent on imposing socialism and removing a president. Is this what these voters wanted? I kinda doubt it, but they are getting it anyway. Indeed, they should have known this would happen because the party leadership said as much since inauguration day 2017.
The 2018 elections show one weakness of democracy. It was indicative of how an electorate can be whipsawed from detestation of presidential behavior to handing power to the irresponsible. The individuals who were elected in swing districts may not be like the core of the party, but the newcomers will help a party with statist socialism in their political DNA to gain majority status. Those 40 reps pale when compared to the 195 others. It’s simply a matter of math.
Thank you swing-district voters. Now we have an impeachment-palooza and socialism on the cusp of being the law of the land.
