The Dismembering of a Putative Soft-Coup

The Sinking Collusion Ship

By Victor Davis Hanson

National Review Online


The end of the Mueller melodrama has marked the beginning of real fear in Washington.
The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always implausible.

One, the Washington swamp of fixers such as Paul Manafort and John and Tony Podesta was mostly bipartisan and predated Trump.

Two, the Trump administration’s Russia policies were far tougher on Vladimir Putin than were those of Barack Obama. Trump confronted Russia in Syria, upped defense spending, increased sanctions, and kept the price of oil down through massive new U.S. energy production. He did not engineer a Russian “reset” or get caught on a hot mic offering a self-interested hiatus in tensions with Russia in order to help his own reelection bid.

Three, Russia has a long history of trying to warp U.S. elections that predated Trump and that had earned only lukewarm pushback from the Obama administration.

It’s also worth remembering that President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation had been recipients of Russian and Russian-related largesse — ostensibly because Hillary Clinton had used her influence as secretary of state under Obama to ease resistance to Russian acquisitions of North American uranium holdings.

As far as alleged Russian collusion goes, Hillary Clinton used three firewalls

Wheels of Justice Grinding Slowly

Sauce For Both Goose And Gander

One of the most offensive things about Hillary Clinton is her apparent belief that sauce for the goose is definitely not sauce for the gander.  In other words, she and her "organization" seem to believe that they are above the rules and regulations to which lesser mortals must adhere.  They convey the impression that rules and regulations do not apply to them.

One of the most alarming examples was Clinton's maintaining a private e-mail server whilst Secretary of State.  Now a Federal Judge has laid into Clinton and her cabal over the matter.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered additional fact-finding in the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server to probe whether or not Clinton's private email system, which she used during her four-year tenure as secretary of state, was a deliberate attempt to bypass the Freedom of Information Act. [The Blaze]

Judicial Watch--an organization dedicated to keeping the government subject to the rule of law--has won a case in which the Clinton machine (and the State Department) was attempting to "keep things hidden".  This, from Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch:

Hillary's Conspiracies

‘They Were Never Going to Let Me Be President'

Hillary Clinton's Version of Deep-State: It's Those White Republican Men Who Control Their Wives

Jack Crowe
National Review Online

Hillary Clinton reacted to news of her electoral defeat with a resigned acceptance, claiming she knew victory was out of reach all along.  “I knew it. I knew this would happen to me,” Clinton reportedly said, according to excerpts from a new book published by The Daily Beast. “They were never going to let me be president.”

Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling, by New York Times reporter and author Amy Chozick, also captures Clinton’s remorse after describing a subset of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”

“I really messed up,” Clinton told aides after uttering the now-infamous phrase during an October 2016 campaign speech in New York, according to Chozick’s book.

Chozick, who spent a decade reporting on the Clintons, claims the description of Trump supporters represented a familiar refrain for Clinton.  “Hillary always broke down Trump supporters into three baskets,” Chozick wrote. “The Deplorables always got a laugh, over living-room chats in the Hamptons, at dinner parties under the stars on Martha’s Vineyard, over passed hors d’oeuvres in Beverly Hills, and during sunset cocktails in Silicon Valley.”

The book goes on to describe the Clintons’ conspiracy theories about the election.

“After the election, Bill would spread a more absurd Times conspiracy: The publisher had struck a deal with Trump that we’d destroy Hillary on her emails to help him get elected, if he kept driving traffic and boosting the company’s stock price,” Chozick writes.

Since her defeat, Clinton has found no shortage of external events and actors to blame, from Misogyny to Russian interference to former FBI director James Comey’s public reopening of the investigation into her email server to the control white Republican men supposedly exercise over their wives and professional subordinates.

False Prophets Abound

Squawks of Malarkey

Readers of the Bible are well aware that the history of God's people is cursed at times with false prophets.  These were "gentlemen" who told the king or the political authorities what they wanted to hear.  Therefore, it's not unexpected that in our day false prophets claiming to speak in the name of God would arise, endeavouring to lead the faithful astray.

We are now told that Hillary Clinton wants to become a preacher--according to an article in The Atlantic.

Hillary Clinton wants to preach. That’s what she told Bill Shillady, her longtime pastor, at a recent photo shoot for his new book about the daily devotionals he sent her during the 2016 campaign. Scattered bits of reporting suggest that ministry has always been a secret dream of the two-time presidential candidate: Last fall, the former Newsweek editor Kenneth Woodward revealed that Clinton told him in 1994 that she thought “all the time” about becoming an ordained Methodist minister. She asked him not to write about it, though: “It will make me seem much too pious.” The incident perfectly captures Clinton’s long campaign to modulate—and sometimes obscure—expressions of her faith.

 What are we to make of this?

NZ Government-Clinton Foundation Rort

The Clinton's Grubby Fingers Are Even in the Pockets of New Zealand Taxpayers

This piece is reproduced from the NZ Taxpayers Union newsletter

Dear Supporter, Another $2.4 million of our money goes to the Clinton Foundation Back in January, we exposed the $7.7 million NZ Aid had paid to the “Clinton Health Access Initiative” a subsidiary of the controversial Clinton Foundation. We hosted a petition calling for the funding to cease and our staff even took to the streets asking people whether there are better uses for taxpayers' money than a political charity. After Murry McCully stood down, we wrote to the new Minister for Foreign Affairs, Gerry Brownlee, asking him to veto further funding. This morning we revealed that another $2.4 million has been paid this year.  Minister Brownlee says the payments will continue because, he claims, the “Clinton Health Access Initiative” is not a subsidiary of the Clinton Foundation and that it is "independent". You can read the details here. Your humble Taxpayers’ Union has dug out the public charity filings of the Clinton Health Access Initiative. They show that far from being ‘independent’, the Clinton Foundation actually appoint the board of the Initiative – President Bill Clinton, and daughter Chelsea are even on it. We have written back to the Minister to point out that the power to appoint the board alone make the Initiative a subsidiary of the Foundation under both New Zealand law and international accounting standards. Either Gerry Brownlee is trying to pull the wool over the public’s eyes, or his officials have completely misled him (and $9.1 million of our money has been paid out on false pretences!). The Australian Government has pulled the plug on funding the Clinton Health Access Initiative.  Apparently, it considers there are higher priorities closer to home.  Hear hear! You can add your name to our petition calling for the funding to cease here, or perhaps call Minister Brownlee's office on (04) 817 6802 to let his staff know what you think about this use of your taxpayer money. Let us know by return email how you get on.

The Ebb of the Tide?

Trump Derangement Syndrome

James Delingpole
BreitbartLondon


Last night in London I took part in a debate staged by the How To Academy on Trump’s 100 Days.
I was on the pro side with journalist Melanie Phillips.

On the anti side of the debate were the Guardian‘s Jonathan Freedland and a flakcatcher from the Clinton era called James Rubin.

Let me tell you the bad news first: Trump derangement syndrome is everywhere, at least as bad in London as it is in the US.

To listen to my debate opponents you would have imagined that the US had recently elected to the presidency a cross between It the Clown, the Boston Strangler, Dr Strangelove and Alger Hiss. I’m fine with a bit of extravagant rhetoric but there were several moments where both Melanie’s and my jaw dropped at the outrageousness of the charges levelled by Freedland and Rubin at the Trump administration.

By what stretch of the imagination, for example, could former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn be described as a “foreign agent”? This was the phrase used by Guardian man Freedland in his speech and it got many laughs from the audience – Trump: the guy so bad he actually has Russky spies in his administration. But if the case against Trump is really such a slam-dunk as his critics seem to imagine, then surely there’d be no need so grotesquely to exaggerate his flaws?

With Freedland and Rubin acting up like snarky kids – and don’t get me wrong, they were good at it: sharp, quick, punchy, witty and relentlessly below the belt – I found myself forced into the unwonted position of having to play the grown-up.

This threw me slightly. I’d brought along my MAGA baseball cap and my Trump camouflage t-shirt – in order to tease the mainly liberal-leaning audience. But you can’t simultaneously play the clown and chastise your opponents for their puerility.

So I tried to keep my line on Trump as straightforward and honest as possible:

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

What Shouldn’t Oughter

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

This is already a very cheerful time of the year, but the Lord apparently thought I needed to be cheered up even a little bit more, and so He very kindly arranged to have the Democrats start yelling at us over the startling news that the Russians hacked our sacred electoral processes.
Now I do need to emphasize at the outset that it is our electoral processes that are sacred. As in, America’s electoral processes. It is quite important not to make a mistake here. When it is other nation’s elections we are talking about—those very pedestrian kind of foreign elections—it is simply the case that the same kind of civic dignity and majesty are not exuded by them. It doesn’t waft off of them, the way it does off of ours. I say this merely out of a desire to use off of twice in one sentence. These are antinomian times.



This is why, for example, there is no problem with President Obama interfering with the British Brexit vote, popping up during their campaign in order to do his sanctimonious professor thing—which he admittedly does very well—so that he might inform the benighted British public that a yes vote on Brexit would have DIRE consequences.

For Want of a Nail . . .

Where is a Decent Spam Filter When It is Needed

OK.  We confess.  We find ourselves chortling with amusement over the public discomfort of the Democratic Party in the United States.  With each news cycle, the discomfort seems to get worse.  

Eventually it will pass.  One can only mourn for so long.  Eventually emotional exhaustion sets in, the stages of grief are worked through, and things begin again.  But at the moment, the cognoscenti and nobility of the Democratic Party are in the "Grinch has Stolen Christmas" phase.  [We note, in passing, that Hillary Clinton is publicly framing and pushing the mourning, eeerr, complaining--which is a sure sign that she and Bill have not given up her aspirations to the presidency.  2020-21 beckons.]

We are surprised that the public discombobulation and mourning has continued this long, but there you go.  There have been a number of scapegoats offered up by Democratic opinionistas as to why the election and the presidency was stolen from she-to-whom-it belonged-by-divine-right.  First vote counting machines were alleged to be at fault.  Then, it was the Director of the FBI.  Then it was the alt-Right.  Now, it is the Russians and Machiavellian, Vlad the Impaler Putin who allegedly hacked into the US electoral process to defame Hillary.

Now, we have no doubt that Vlad the Impaler is not to be trusted.

Is it Draining the Swamp or Partisan Politics?

Removing Logs From Eyes

We recently read an report of the Democratic members of the US House Judicial Committee writing a letter to its (Republican) Chairman asking for strict governance of Donald Trump, lest he use the office of President to extort and extract pecuniary gain.

In a letter to Republican Chairman Bob Goodlatte, all 16 Democratic members of the committee requested a hearing to review any conflict of interest laws or ethical rules that may apply to Trump’s business situation. They wrote:

 Although we do not yet know the details of his proposal, this announcement raises a number of questions, including whether Mr. Trump intends to legally transfer ownership of his assets to his children, or simply allow them to manage his assets[.]

 The letter also pointed out that it remains unknown what role Trump’s children will have in his administration and “whether they will be subject to an ‘ethics firewall;'” and whether “businesses, foreign governments, and others” would be able to “take actions that benefit Mr. Trump and his family” and if Trump would be transparent in any such dealings.

All well and good.  However, the expressed concern would be far more morally compelling if it had been accompanied by an extensive helping of humble  pie.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

On Kicking the Can’t Down the Road

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

I was not surprised at the election of Donald Trump. I was actually expecting that. Neither was I surprised at the decisiveness of his win in Electoral College terms. I was expecting that also. And neither was I surprised that my preferences remained in place—I knew that I would much rather have Trump in the White House than Hillary there. All these things I have addressed in this space already in various ways. But I will tell you what did surprise me, something that I was not expecting at all. I was surprised at the depth of my joy over what happened to the Clinton hubris. I thought I was going to be pleased with the results in Clintonville, but my internal relief thus far has been positively undignified. I am not hugging strangers on the street yet though.

As I have been warning, the danger with backgrounding your principles for the sake of a particular election is that if you win (which the Trump evangelicals did), is that you then find yourself wanting to background them for a longer period, backgrounding them “until a more propitious time.” Your particular issues are not important to the people you helped elect, and so you start kicking the can’t down the road. You start thinking about getting this or that through, you start mulling on the possibility of a second term, and all that stuff, and so you put some important issues down at the bottom of the “old business” part your agenda. If enough time passes, this process is tantamount to forgetting your principles.

One of the places where Trump is positively bad is on the LGBTQ NATO foolishness.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Trumpsit. Golly.


Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

Introduction

So a number of officio-pundits are gobsmacked, flummoxed, pole-axed, and otherwise discomfited. Brexit. The Cubs. And now this. What a year. My initial reactions run along the lines of jumping Jehoshaphat, land of Goshen, and oh, my stars and garters.

But let me make a number of other snapshot observations, perhaps a tad more salient.electoral-map

Alas For The Pollsters

The polls were way off. In the aftermath of that, we are now enduring the spectacle of interviewed experts explaining how it was that the experts had it all wrong. They are experts on that too, apparently. The problem with polling is that even in the best of situations you are talking to 2,000 people in order to find out what 100 million will do. And when you are trying to predict an election, if you do it in any kind of disciplined manner, you will want to poll the “likely voters.” But likely voters are determined by looking at what has happened in past elections, and all the past elections were normal elections. But this was in no way a normal election. How was the most experienced pollster in the world to know how to identify the right people to ask their questions?

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Evangelicals went for Trump in numbers markedly higher than their support for previous Republican candidates. But this was, in my view, a function of detestation, not a function of enthusiasm. Evangelicals clearly have a much higher gakkk! level with regard to Hillary than other groups did.

Expectations

Going into the night I was braced for a Trump victory, and looking forward to a Hillary loss. I was vindicated in the former, and absolutely delighted by the latter.

Taken For A Long Ride

An "Oh . . . . Puleeeze" Moment

Here is something which has generated lots of belly-laughter in the JT household.  The incredulous world was stunned to read/see/hear that the United States FBI is to re-open its investigation into President-elect, Hillary Clinton (just before the election, mind you).

Clearly the soap-opera of American politics needed what those in the trade call a "revitalisation".  To a man, the American media are now frothing at the mouth, shuddering in apoplectic fits.  What a revelation!  What an event!  You never heard of anything like this in Game of Thrones.  This from a breathless Washington Post:

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

A Fight in the Leper Colony

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

INTRODUCTION

It is easy to treat the spectacle that is presidential politics in 2016 as though we were dismayed spectators, but we are not spectators at all. We are all participants. We are not watching a movie that contains a food fight in a junior high cafeteria; we are in the cafeteria. And if it is not too jarring to use the phrase casus belli about such a fracas, the causes for all of this lie deep within ourselves.dont-vote

To change my metaphor, this whole thing is a three-layer hypocrite cake.

THE FIRST LAYER

The bottom layer is the Donald himself, the least hypocritical in this entire business. He has never made much of a secret of the fact that he is a boorish pig, and that he likes being a boorish pig, and so he at least has the virtue of largely being himself, to whatever extent that might be called a virtue. Anybody who was surprised by this recent fiasco is a person who could probably have written Gullible’s Travels in one sitting. There are traces of hypocrisy in his behavior, but for the most part Trump gained the Republican nomination as a known quantity.

This is why the feckless Republican distancing from Trump is so grimly amusing. Republicans who were reluctant to endorse Trump in the first place because of what everybody already knew are now jumping overboard because somebody produced proof of what everybody already knew. “The pope is Catholic? Talk about a bridge too far. I’m outta here.”

Now I don’t mind qualified prophets speaking a word of righteousness to Trump. He needs it, and the religious hacks he has surrounded himself with do not appear to be interested in fulfilling that duty. And the political hacks are not rats deserting a sinking ship. They are rats deserting a ship that some polls indicate might be sinking sometime soon, but there is nothing here that a few polls running the other direction couldn’t fix. If the polls run the other way, so will the rats.

Rapid Shape-shifting

In God We Most Certainly Do Not Trust

Angelo Codevilla's volume, The Character of Nations [New York: Basic Books, 1997] is well worth the investment and reading time--in our humble opinion.  We will probably find ourselves excerpting quotations and citations in this blog over the next six months or so.  

Codevilla's basic thesis is that the ruling "regime" of a nation shapes the character, faith, beliefs, hopes, fears and habits of citizens.  The regime shapes the culture of a nation profoundly.  It has often been argued that as go the people, so goes the State.  There is certainly truth in this maxim.  But the reverse is also true: as goes the regime, so go the people.

As Lorenzo De Medici put it, "What the Prince does then do many, for upon the Prince are the eyes of all."  Codevilla makes the obvious point that there has been a pervasive regime change throughout the West in the last one hundred years.  That change has been from societies grounded in Christendom's doctrines to societies grounded in secular materialism.  The consequent regime changes have been substantial, comprehensive, and profound.

Writes Codevilla:

The ancients, however, realized that changes in political rules favor one set of habits over others and lay down new layers of habits.  We have difficulty understanding this because we are the intellectual heirs of Western Christianity, which made society and individuals less dependent on government than ever before or since.

Corruption on a Grand Scale

Birds of a Feather

We published a couple of pieces recently upon the systemic, habitual corruption of the Clintons.  Their habitual sin is known as simony.  The dictionary definition of simony is:

c.1200, "the sin of buying or selling sacred things," from Old French simonie"selling of church offices" (12c.), from Late Latin simonia, from Simon Magus, the Samaritan magician who was rebuked by Peter when he tried to buy the power of conferring the Holy Spirit (Acts viii:18-20). Related: Simoniac; simoniacal.  [Dictionary.com]

It is clearly an ancient term. But the evil remains alive and well and very modern. Some things never change. The Clintons' version of simony is to sell their office and its influence for pecuniary advantage.  Therefore, they enter into Simoniac bargains accepting money in exchange for special favours.

However, because it's the Clintons--who are donkey deep into the Establishment--few people turn a hair.  The Republic's corruption is a broad river and very deep.  The Clintons will extol their charitable work via the "Clinton Foundation" and will tell all and sundry how many people they have wondrously helped, whilst they siphon off the "charitable" donations to maintain the extravagant lifestyle to which they have become very accustomed and to which they genuinely believe they are entitled.

But what about Donald Trump, Hillary's rival?

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

With Only One of Them Drooling

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

The other day I was—what is the past participle of tweet?—I was twooting about the election, and commented on two possibly inconsistent emotions that were jostling beneath my sternum. You see, I want Hillary to lose in a fireball one hundred yards across, and I want Trump to lose in a fireball fifty yards across.

Both would be bad presidents. But questions immediately arise. How bad? For whom? Where? Why? Someone is going to say that the choice is simple—Hillary would be terrible for Christians, and there is a possibility that Trump wouldn’t be. He certainly promises not to be. But when you have a bad president, you have to reckon with the possibility that treachery is one of the bad possibilities.

Now going into this further would just rehearse my views on #NeverNeither. I don’t agree with those Christians who are going to vote for Trump because they simply cannot handle the idea of Hillary, but I do understand the dilemma. I share the reaction to Hillary. Rod Martin commented on my Facebook thread that there is a difference between Darius and Antiochus Epiphanes. I take the point, although maybe not the spread.

But that is not where I am going this morning. Both parties have nominated terrible candidates, and one of them is going to lose.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Yea, Though She Fall Into the Van

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

The latest thing to take the Internet by storm, and the presidential campaign by storm, and the imagination of meme-makers everywhere by storm, is the video shot of Hillary Clinton collapsing into her vehicle. It was a moment filled with . . . moment, you might say.

Now of course our public discourse immediately began chundering all sorts of things in response to this, and so we are not lacking commentary on it. But I do want to say just a couple of things about all this that might be helpful to Christians.

Moments like this separate those who hate what Hillary Clinton stands for, and who want to oppose her as an evil woman, and those who are simply filled with spite and malice (for whatever reason). Those in this latter group may have begun their anti-Hillary careers innocently enough, but they are ending them filled with bile.

Will Anyone Bother to Vote?

Oh, What a Lovely Election

The upcoming US election will be interesting when one is able to assess the turnout.  Never in our lifetime have we observed an election in that country where both candidates were so strongly disliked--by their respective parties.

It is shaping up to be a Monty Python election.  It will appear as a moral tribute to democracy.  Those cautious of what democracy may produce will be muttering that the most estimable quality of the democratic system is that it produces precisely those leaders that the people deserve.

Donald Trump is so substantial he risks drowning in a puddle.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Two Sorts of #NeverTrump

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

We need to do a little analysis of what it actually means to be #NeverTrump. This is a political issue, and political issues are always slippery. They are slippery because every night someone comes in and slathers them all over with axle grease, or with money, hard to tell which.

The avowal of #NeverTrump sentiments can be taken as a personal vow or it can be taken as an act of punditry. In the former, the person is saying that there are no circumstances under which he or she will support the Donald. In the latter, the sentiment amounts to a prediction that he will necessarily fail as a candidate and that Hillary is going to be the next president.

The two sentiments can exist together, but the former only becomes really relevant if you think he is viable candidate, one who could actually win.

Letter From America (About Respectable Mendacity)

Why Hillary Is Never Held Accountable for Her Lies

The media excuse her mendacity because it serves the progressive cause.

By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

Everyone rightly catalogues Donald Trump’s fibs, distortions, and exaggerations: his assertions about his net worth, his charitable contributions, his initial supposed opposition to the Iraq War, or his “flexible” positions on illegal immigration. After all, he is flamboyant, right-wing in his present incarnation, and supposedly bends the truth either out of crass narcissism or for petty profiteering. So the watchdog media and popular culture have no problem with ridiculing Trump as a fabricator.

But not so with Hillary Clinton, whose untruths far overshadow Trump’s in both import and frequency, but are so often contextualized, excused, and forgotten because of who she is and the purpose her outright lying supposedly serves.

Lying in America has become not lying when “good” liars advance alternative narratives for noble purposes — part of our long slide into situational ethics and moral relativism.

Every new bad idea in America today can ultimately be traced to the university. And it seems to take only about 30 years for academia’s nihilism to filter through the elite institutions and make its way into popular culture. So it is with our present idea of truth as a mere construct.