A Scandal of Gross Ineptitude at Best

The FISA Scandal Is about Corruption, Not ‘Sloppiness’

By David Harsanyi
National Review

When 96 percent of spy warrants reviewed contain serious errors or omissions — that’s wholescale fraud, not a few little slip-ups.

Consider this scenario: A federal lawyer is filling out applications requesting FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance) warrants to spy on American citizens who work for a major presidential campaign to determine whether the campaign staffers are collaborating with a foreign power to steal the presidency of the United States.

They must know that such a conspiracy, should it be exposed, would be the most explosive in the history of the nation — towering over the piddling criminality of Watergate or the Teapot Dome scandal. And any genuine effort to ferret out criminality and sedition within one of the nation’s major parties — perhaps going a high as the future president himself — would be supported by unimpeachable underlying evidence and undertaken with abundant care and meticulous oversight.

So what are the chances that a good-faith investigation would botch nearly every request to spy on the campaign when the FISA court is already signing off on over 99 percent of applications? What are the chances that the FISA applications of a good-faith investigation would be riddled with errors and rely on “misleading and inaccurate” information based on a fabulist document paid for by the opposing political party?

You would think that this kind of potential abuse by the Justice Department would pique the interest of mainstream journalists. No such luck.

A Scandal A Week

It's Hard to Keep Up

How on earth does it come to pass that a Ministry of the Crown could fund the purchase of pine tree seedlings to plant in a block of unsuitable land?  Did no-one actually go an inspect the land before the seedlings were purchased.  Yup--apparently that is the case.  

The pine tree seedlings had to be dumped--wasting $400,000 of tax payers hard earned money.  But, what's a few exuberant exaggerations, eh, when your heart's in the right place and stupid taxpayers are funding your mistakes with no questions asked. 

Forestry officials working on the Government's flagship One Billion Trees plan ordered more than one million pine seedlings for a block of land so choked with scrub and weeds planting couldn't go ahead.  Forestry Minister Shane Jones told the Herald "ambition" and "enthusiasm" had a part to play in planting delays which struck the $32 million inaugural joint venture on the Far North forestry block.

Official documents show the Government planned to plant 1100ha with pine this year and had ordered about 1,100,000 seedlings for that.  The number of seedlings able to be planted collapsed to 191,000 as the condition of the land was revealed.   The Ministry for Primary Industries has yet to put a dollar figure on the cost to taxpayers, but market rates for seedlings put the cost of the order at about $400,000.  [NZ Herald]

Now, we shouldn't get the idea that Minister Jones was in an awful hurry and that no-one around him knew that the land was unsuitable to plant in pine tree seedlings.  He had plenty of time to organize a special "planting trowel" engraved with his name for the celebration when the project kicked off.  It was a great photo-op.

Letter From America: At Last--Some Sanity From the Left

Let’s Not Get Carried Away

David Brooks
New York Times

I was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal at the peak of the Whitewater scandal. We ran a series of investigative pieces “raising serious questions” (as we say in the scandal business) about the nefarious things the Clintons were thought to have done back in Arkansas.

Now I confess I couldn’t follow all the actual allegations made in those essays. They were six jungles deep in the weeds. But I do remember the intense atmosphere that the scandal created. A series of bombshell revelations came out in the media, which seemed monumental at the time. A special prosecutor was appointed and indictments were expected. Speculation became the national sport.

In retrospect Whitewater seems overblown. And yet it has to be confessed that, at least so far, the Whitewater scandal was far more substantive than the Russia-collusion scandal now gripping Washington.

There may be a giant revelation still to come. But as the Trump-Russia story has evolved, it is striking how little evidence there is that any underlying crime occurred — that there was any actual collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russians. Everything seems to be leaking out of this administration, but so far the leaks about actual collusion are meager.

The Obamian Legacy

Codswallop Was The Major Achievement

Recent history is being rapidly re-written amongst the Democrats in the United States.  It's the old story--narratives about the past are merely tricks which the living play upon the dead.  And so Obamians are rapidly attempting to gloss the presidency of Barack Obama, re-writing history with the febrile intensity of a Gatling gun.  

What can be left to salvage after an anticipated four years of Democratic control?  Obama's signature "reform" (by his own declaration) was Obamacare.  It is looking likely that few of the 33,000 pages of the Affordable Care Act, with its rules, regulations, directives, and mushrooming bureaucracy will survive. Meanwhile,  Obama's foreign policy is in tatters.  It's hard to identify one triumph or success.  His incessant humanitarianism and progressivism has fallen on deaf ears.  The majority of his countrymen don't appear to want to march to the beat of that particular out-of-step drummer--nor does the rest of the world, it would seem..

What can revisionist historians seize upon to trumpet the significance of President Obama?  Here it is: the signature achievement of the Obamian era was there were no scandals during the time of President Obama's tenure in the Oval Office.  Presumably that includes achievements like Obama not committing adultery whilst in office.  Which is a small kind of achievement.  But it gets pretty desperate when adherence to fundamental ethical standards that bind most human beings must needs be trumpeted as a major success.  What a world we have come to.

Sadly, however, the claim that there were no scandals under Obama's watch is a pure fabrication.  It is make-believe codswallop.  The perpetrating of the codswallop is itself scandalous.  Columnist John Hayward has been keeping score and reckons there were at least 18 scandals attaching to the Obamian era.

Invincible Ignorance

Dear Cosmo: Being A Christian Is Not A ‘Scandal’

Cosmo writer Laura Beck is walking a familiar beat: the oblivious journalist who suddenly discovers the alien and inscrutable beliefs of the Christian people.

Daniel Payne
The Federalist

For both Christians and non-Christians it is worth reflecting on what the great evangelizer Bishop Robert Barron calls “the scandalous cross of Jesus:” how the crucifixion of a Jewish criminal from an irrelevant rural backwater became the saving moment for all of humanity. We have had 2,000 years to become inured to the sheer awesomeness of it all, and we’ve forgotten how it must have sounded to first-century Jews and Gentiles alike. It would indeed have sounded bizarre, insane, unbelievable, and blasphemous: in a word, scandalous.

But while the Christian religion itself was and remains something of a scandal—as outrageously subversive as it was and is—there is nothing particularly “scandalous” about being a Christian, not, at least, in the way that Cosmopolitan magazine uses the word.

Cosmo, you see, recently took a break from writing about the Fifty-Five Most Quantumly Mechanical Sex Positions Ever Created to write about “the 16 Biggest HGTV Scandals of All Time.” You may not have known that HGTV (a television station whose most iconic program involves people looking at several house, debating which one to buy, and then buying one) could ever possibly experience anything resembling a “scandal.” But I guess a television network isn’t legit these days unless it’s had at least 16 bouts of sordid drama.

Among all of the house-related ignominy, Cosmo writer Laura Beck touched on a “scandal” that seemed curiously out of place. Noting a BuzzFeed article written last month about “Fixer Upper” stars Chip and Joanna Gaines, Beck reported: “Last month, BuzzFeed wrote about the Gaineses’ affiliation with a non-denominational evangelical church whose pastor, Jimmy Seibert, opposes homosexuality and gay marriage.”

Is that all there is to the “scandal?” Reader, that’s all there is to the “scandal.”