Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman aren’t outliers; they’re living examples of how hatred of Trump has morphed into a willingness to justify the unjustifiable
In the two months since the death of George Floyd, the nation has been beset by often-violent protests and riots. Yet the mainstream media and Democratic politicians have tended to describe the demonstrations as “mostly peaceful,” and to rationalize and minimize them. For many on the left, the real story has not been the violence directed at law-enforcement personnel, the assaults on federal courthouses and police precincts, the toppling of statues, or the destruction of private property; it’s been the use of federal personnel in response.
It is only in that context that we can hope to understand the sympathy being generated for Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman.
Mattis and Rahman are the lawyers who were caught on camera throwing a Molotov cocktail into an empty, already-vandalized NYPD patrol car in Brooklyn. After setting the vehicle on fire in full of view of the cops, they drove away in Mattis’s van and were quickly chased down and arrested. In their possession, officers found yet another Bud Light bottle turned into a homemade incendiary device and the makings of more in the back seat. Prosecutors later said Rahman had offered Molotov cocktails to other protesters, as well.
There could hardly be any doubt about their guilt.
We are in the midst of a revolution, a cultural and racial one, that seeks to refute the past, damn the present, and hijack the future. So far, however, we have only heard from one side, the revolutionaries and their enablers themselves.
Those trying to reject and then reboot America are small as a percentage of the population, but their tactics are diverse, and their frightened abettors and closet appeasers numerous. The result for now is that, as with most cultural revolutions, a tiny percentage of the population seems to be ascending, given that there is no real organized resistance other than isolated and disgusted individuals.
The cultural revolutionaries are a tripartite group.
On the front lines are the shock troops. For the most part, middle-class urban and suburban white kids, many of them in college, graduated, or dropped out, make up Antifa and its affiliates. They seem to organize the statue toppling, graffiti, and vandalism, as well as the violence at the demonstrations. They show up in ridiculous black-clad Road Warrior outfits, fitted out with cobbled-together hoodies, bicycle helmets, knee pads, and various sports-equipment armor, and occasionally with testudo-like umbrellas and assorted fireworks, rocks, bottle, and bats. All that is a psychodrama far more interesting than showing up at Starbucks at 5 a.m. to start the day’s machinery.
They are the new superfluous elite, in that their college investments brought them neither prestige nor money, but only debt and sloganeering memorized from the sermons of their tenured and comfortable lounge professors. History shows that when would-be, self-important elites are in surfeit and extraneous, they grow volatile. They wake up to learn that their vaunted education and training were not appreciated and properly compensated by society.
And so they often can turn to violence and indeed revolution if it comes their way. In the profiles of the Jacobin, Bolshevik, and Arab Spring second-stage revolutions, the common denominators are frustration and the feeling that the agitators deserved honor, money, and influence that either never was forthcoming or went to undeserving others.
Antifa’s aim is to cause chaos and anarchy, in hopes of eliciting a police response that will fuel nonstop street brawling, akin to Germany’s in the 1920s, and a general sense of pandemonium that will leave the democratic capitalist state weak, directionless, and without a reply.
Then the more unhinged among them believe that they can carve out “autonomous” zones of “resistance” in places such as Portland and Seattle and gradually spread their revolution through threats and intimidation — and perhaps more formally hijack the Democratic Party and come to power. Cellphones, selfies, networking, and childish coloring-book graffiti make the whole thing a sort of carnival where the like-minded frustrated agitators can vent about the unfairness of the world.
Many of these self-righteous are indeed racist, as we see from the sheer joy they show at yelling in the face of black policemen and orchestrating the demonstrations while avoiding the televised looting.
In the 1960s and early ’70s, the U.S. was convulsed by massive protests calling for radical changes in the country’s attitudes on race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. The Vietnam War and widespread college deferments were probably the fuel that ignited prior peaceful civil disobedience.
Sometimes the demonstrations became violent, as with the Watts riots of 1965 and the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Terrorists from the Weathermen (later called the Weather Underground) bombed dozens of government buildings.
The ’60s revolution introduced to the country everything from hippies, communes, free love, mass tattooing, commonplace profanity, rampant drug use, rock music, and high divorce rates to the War on Poverty, massive government growth, feminism, affirmative action, and race/gender/ethnic college curricula.
The enemies of the ’60s counterculture were the “establishment” — politicians, corporations, the military, and the “square” generation in general. Leftists targeted their parents, who had grown up in the Great Depression. That generation had won World War II and returned to create a booming post-war economy. After growing up with economic and military hardship, they sought a return to comfortable conformity in the 1950s.
A half-century after the earlier revolution, today’s cultural revolution is vastly different — and far more dangerous.
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.
The president and founder of the Coalition of African American Pastors (CAAP) has launched a petition calling on the Senate to censure Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for his threatening remarks against two Supreme Court justices.
Rev. William Owens said in a statement that Schumer’s remarks against Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh promote “violence and hate”:
This is the kind of language that promotes violence and hate. We’ve had enough of politicians who bemoan partisanship on the campaign trail while still catering to the most extremist elements of the hard Left. To make an open threat against two sitting judges – in an attempt to influence a case currently before the Court – goes far beyond acceptable behavior for a U.S. Senator.
Last week, during a rally near the Supreme Court where oral arguments were heard regarding a Louisiana abortion safety law, Schumer stated that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will “pay the price” if they vote against pro-choice advocates in the case.
Schumer said:
Over the last three years, women’s reproductive rights have come under attack in a way we haven’t seen in modern history. From Louisiana, to Missouri, to Texas, Republican legislatures are waging a war on women, all women, and they’re taking away fundamental rights.
I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you, if you go forward with these awful decisions.
Schumer’s comments drew a rare rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and, on Thursday, a Senate floor speech by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), in which he referred to Schumer’s remarks as “unhinged” and “shameful.”
A few months ago, I wrote a column saying I would vote for Elizabeth Warren over Donald Trump. I may not agree with some of her policies, but culture is more important than politics. She does not spread moral rot the way Trump does.
Now I have to decide if I’d support Bernie Sanders over Trump.
We all start from personal experience. I covered the Soviet Union in its final decrepit years. The Soviet and allied regimes had already slaughtered 20 million people through things like mass executions and intentional famines. Those regimes were slave states. They enslaved whole peoples and took away the right to say what they wanted, live where they wanted and harvest the fruits of their labor.
And yet every day we find more old quotes from Sanders apologizing for this sort of slave regime, whether in the Soviet Union, Cuba or Nicaragua. He excused the Nicaraguan communists when they took away the civil liberties of their citizens. He’s still making excuses for Castro.
To sympathize with these revolutions in the 1920s was acceptable, given their original high ideals. To do so after the Hitler-Stalin pact, or in the 1950s, is appalling. To do so in the 1980s is morally unfathomable.
President Trump and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien have removed 70 Obama holdovers from the NSC, which previously boasted a staff of roughly 200 people, according to the Washington Examiner.
The news follows Saturday’s CNN report, which indicated “major cuts” to NSC staff in the coming days, citing “two sources familiar with the matter.”
It comes days after the contentious impeachment battle on Capitol Hill — a battle ignited by a complaint from a so-called “whistleblower.” The “whistleblower’s” complaint, regarding Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, sparked the House Democrats’ partisan impeachment inquiry, which ultimately ended in a full acquittal.
The administration removed Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a key witness in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, from his post at the NSC last week. It also removed his twin brother Yevgeny, who worked as a lawyer on the NSC.
While Vindman has denied knowing the identity of the “whistleblower,” he has been suspected of being a leaker in the past.
The cult of Pelosi isn't just a 'hot take' or a 'be smart,' it's a mindset through which Washington's media elites interpret the world. It's false, and the harsh light of reality easily shows as much.
There are many cults in Washington, D.C. The Founding Church of Scientology sits between Dupont and Logan Circles. The earth-worshiping Defenders of Wildlife are just a few blocks south, their entrance guarded by imposing bronze grey wolves. One block north, the Human Rights Campaign dispatches starry-eyed adherents with clipboards to recruit followers, and to the east lie the child-harvesters. Two blocks away, the remnants of the Church of Her keep Hillary’s flame burning; and crowning them all: the mighty cult of SoulCycle.
But today, the city has another faith working reporters into a fervor, and her name is Nancy Pelosi.
Reporters have called her “basically invincible,” a “political grandmaster,” an “icon of female power,” a “rockstar” and, time and time again, “a fashion icon.” Reporters have venerated “her clothes, her hand gestures, her facial expression” and placed a halo ’round her head. Activists projected her image on San Francisco’s city hall and a D.C. restaurant dedicated a Christmas tree in her honor.
“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is doing to President Donald Trump what no one else has in the nearly three years since he took office: She’s making him squirm.” Business Insider pronounced two days after Christmas. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has managed to accomplish what no one else has even tried in the past three years: sticking it right back to Trump,” RawStory echoed the same day in an article that includes “squirm” in its headline.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton presidential candidate hired an ex-intelligence officer and foreign national, British subject Christopher Steele, to use Russian sources to find dirt (“opposition research”) on her then political opponent Donald Trump. So much for the worry about “foreign interference” in U.S. elections.
The public would take years to learn of the funding sources of Steele, because Clinton camouflaged her role through three firewalls: the Democratic National Committee; the Perkins-Coie legal firm; and Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS opposition-research firm.
Steele had collected rumor and gossip from mostly Russian sources in an effort to tar Trump as a Russian colluder and asset. We know now that his sources were either bogus or deliberately warped by Steele himself.
Almost everything in the dossier was unverified and later was proved fanciful. Yet with the help of high Obama administration and elected officials, the dossier’s gossip and rumor were leaked throughout the top echelons of Washington politics and the media. Its lies spread because its chief message — Donald J. Trump was a fool, dangerous, should never be elected, and once elected had no business as president — was exactly what the establishment wished to hear. In other words, the dossier was infectious because it was deemed both welcome and useful.
The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz, after an exhaustive study, found that the Steele dossier not just unverifiable but unethically and unprofessionally used to delude federal judges to issue warrants to surveil an American citizen.
Horowitz simply confirmed what a number of journalists had already discovered, namely, that Steele was both a pathological liar and an inveterate hater of Donald Trump who acted to ensure that Trump would not be president. Although the befuddled special counsel Robert Mueller, in sworn testimony before Congress, seemed to have amnesia about the Steele dossier and its chief purveyor Fusion GPS, his own investigation was de facto repudiation of the entire Steele dossier in its conclusion that Donald Trump did not engage in collusion with the Russians to warp the 2016 election.
As a result, all who trafficked in the infectious dossier as if it were factual and disinterested have lost all credibility. Many are now seeing their careers demolished and in ruins. Here is a small sampling of reputations that were marred or destroyed.
4 Reasons Trump’s Impeachment Is The Weakest In U.S. History
Critics of Trump note that no crime is necessary to impeach the president. While that's true, it speaks to how weak the Democrats' case against Trump is.
President Donald Trump joined Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson in the club of impeached presidents Wednesday night. Like the other two, Trump will be acquitted by the Senate once the articles of impeachment are delivered.
The case for Trump’s impeachment is the weakest of the three. If we include Richard Nixon, who resigned on his way to impeachment, it’s the weakest of the four. Here’s why.
1. No Actual Crime
Previous impeachments at least had a crime. Andrew Johnson was the first U.S. president to be impeached. He faced 11 articles of impeachment, mostly built around his violation of the Tenure of Office Act of 1867. That act limited the power of presidents to fire employees in Senate-approved positions without the consent of the Senate. While the law was blatantly unconstitutional, Johnson did violate it by getting rid of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
Clinton was impeached for actual crimes that would get the rest of us in a whole lot of trouble. He was impeached for lying to a grand jury about his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, false statements he’d made in an earlier deposition, and false statements he allowed his attorney to make about witness tampering. He was also impeached for obstructing justice in a case filed against him by encouraging Lewinsky to make a false statement and give false testimony, by hiding gifts he’d given to her, getting her a job in exchange for favorable testimony, attempted witness tampering with his secretary, and making false and misleading statements to jurors.
Nixon would have been impeached for obstructing an investigation into the unlawful break-in by his Committee to Re-Elect the President at the Watergate building and using the IRS and other agencies to violate others’ privacy.
By contrast, President Trump was not impeached for any recognizable crime. Critics of Trump note that no crime is necessary to impeach the president. While that’s true, it speaks to how weak the Democrats’ case against Trump is.
2. Punishing Trump for Exercising Constitutional Privileges
Trump is being impeached for abusing his power and for obstructing Congress.
Something continues to rot in the State of the Union. The FBI has been criticized by the Justice Department's Inspector General for for "wrong doings" in its investigation of former President Trump's campaign staffer.
Now this is starting to get down into the weeds, but nonetheless it is surprising that the FBI would not have been thoroughly scrupulous in its processes.
The over 400-page report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz criticizes the FBI for “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the bureau’s applications to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, stating agents “failed to meet the basic obligation” to make sure their applications were accurate. [Breitbart News]
The Inspector General has been focusing on the procedures and activities surrounding applications by the FBI to spy upon a US citizen, Carter Page--who was an election campaign adviser to Donald Trump. It's all a bit abstract and distant now. But it appears as though the FBI was less than thorough and professional.
Schiff’s Report Will Not Attract New Impeachment Supporters
In no serious, objective investigation would the tribunal deny one side the opportunity to present its case, and then write a report concluding that no evidence supported that side’s position.
The most striking thing about the impeachment report filed Tuesday afternoon by the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) is how unapologetically partisan it is.
Don’t get me wrong. Chairman Schiff is fiercely partisan and no one would have expected him to call it down the middle. A serious impeachment effort, however, has to try to attract support from Republicans and independents. Schiff gives us not a feint in that direction. His narrative is the Democratic base’s political case against Trump. There is no pretense of at least presenting the other side of the story, even if only for the purpose of refuting it.
To repeat what I argued in Faithless Execution (2014), impeachment is counterproductive if there is no plausible chance of removing the president from power. To impeach under circumstances where the president is certain to be acquitted at the eventual Senate trial (where a two-thirds supermajority is required for conviction and removal) is only to encourage further executive excesses.
That is why impeachment is a historical rarity even when the House (where only a simple majority is needed to file articles of impeachment) is controlled by the president’s opposition party. Prudent lawmakers grasp that it is not merely a waste of time to pursue impeachment in futility; doing so fosters divisiveness in society and dysfunction in government.
Schiff is not trying to develop a broad public consensus that the president should be removed from office. His report is a 2020 campaign document. Its heavy-handedness is only going to irritate Republicans. That includes many who are not particularly enamored of the president but want to see a fair process.
There is also the point I made in Tuesday’s column: If there were truly an impeachable offense, one that was patently egregious and provoked grave doubt about the president’s fitness for office, there would be no need to spin it. All that would be necessary would be a straightforward, nonpartisan recitation. Schiff, to the contrary, is spinning at every turn.
It now appears that the US Intelligence services are riddled with partisan corruption. In a nutshell, here is what has gone down.
US Intelligence personnel decided that it was time to get rid of Donald Trump--thereby defiling their constitutional and lawful obligations.
They secretly changed a fundamental requirement of "whistleblower" evidence. Previously, if a whistleblower were making a complaint about his/her employer (that is, the US Government and/or the political establishment, or the President of the US) they had to have first hand knowledge of the breach or illicit practice being alleged. But way back in August, this requirement was secretly removed. It then became acceptable for any government apparatchik to complain to Congress about any alleged breach of law or regulation--without any personal knowledge of the alleged breaches whatsoever.
This "move" has all the signs of corruption and attendant cover-up.
Intel Community Secretly Gutted Requirement Of First-Hand Whistleblower Knowledge
Federal records show that the intelligence community secretly revised the formal whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 to eliminate the requirement of direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.
Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings.
The complaint from an anti-Trump "whistleblower," released Thursday, is a mix of gossip, hearsay, and misstatements of fact contradicted by publicly available evidence.
The formal complaint from an anti-Trump “whistleblower” alleging various crimes by President Donald Trump is riddled with third-hand gossip and outright falsehoods. The document was declassified by Trump Wednesday evening and released to the public Thursday morning. The complaint, which was delivered to the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees, follows the same template used in the infamous and debunked Clinton campaign-funded Steele dossier.
Rather than provide direct evidence that was witnessed or obtained firsthand by the complainant, the document instead combines gossip from various anonymous individuals, public media reports, and blatant misstatements of fact and law in service of a narrative that is directly contradicted by underlying facts. A footnote in the document even boasts about its use of “ample open-source information.”
Contrary to news reports asserting that the complaint included volumes of information incriminating Trump, it is instead based entirely on the president’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and various public media reports. “I was not a direct witness to most of the events” characterized in the document, the complainant confesses on the first page. Instead, the complainant notes, the document is based on conversations with “more than half a dozen U.S. officials.” Those officials are not named, and their positions are not identified anywhere in the letter.
John Durham, the U.S. attorney selected by Attorney General William Barr to examine the origins of the FBI’s investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia, has hit the ground running for answers, according to a report.
Durham, a seasoned federal prosecutor from Connecticut, is “very dialed in” to the sweeping review, reports Fox News, citing multiple sources. Durham has also met with Barr “on multiple occasions in recent weeks” in Washington, D.C. and is posing “all the right questions,” according to the news outlet. Further, the hard-nosed U.S. attorney is said to have already received briefings concerning the “four corners” with respect to the bureau’s use of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants as part of its controversial counterintelligence operation.
“Durham is specifically reviewing the FISA warrant obtained by the FBI to surveil former Trump aide Carter Page, as well as general issues relating to surveillance during the 2016 campaign and matters flowing from the FISA process.
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
So, it's now official. The Obama administration systematically broke the law and used various intelligence agencies in an attempt to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump. All the "dirty little (and big) secrets" are now coming to light.
Here are some excerpts from a piece published in the Federalist, written by Mollie Hemingway:
“Spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” Attorney General William Barr told a Senate committee on Wednesday morning. Barr’s comments came in the context of potential Justice Department reviews of the Trump-Russia investigation and how it began in 2016.
While it is important that the top law enforcement in the United States publicly acknowledged that the Obama administration and its intelligence agencies surveilled its domestic political opponents during the heat of a presidential election, it is what he said next that was most startling: that the CIA and other federal agencies in addition to the FBI may have been involved. “I’m not talking about the FBI necessarily, but intelligence agencies more broadly,” he said.
The FBI, which has incredibly friendly relations with the media, has taken the brunt of the public outcry against the anti-Trump operation. That project included the use of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants, national security letters, human informants, and strategic leaking to craft a narrative of treasonous collusion with Russia to steal an election from Hillary Clinton. It even included leaks of classified records from former FBI director James Comey, which he said was done for the purpose of launching a special counsel investigation as retaliation for his firing. . . .
The fact of the matter is that federal intelligence agencies spied on a rival political campaign. They illegally leaked information about that surveillance. They abused their authority to at best undermine the duly elected president and at worst to attempt a soft coup against him. They did so with the near-total cooperation of the American media establishment.
This is a scandal of epic proportions. It is one that threatens the foundations of constitutional government. It is a direct attack on American democracy.
If it is true, as the Washington Post asserts, that democracy dies in darkness, then every single improper deed done under the cloak of secrecy must be fully brought to light. The only way to restore the definitively lost credibility of the FBI and other intelligence agencies is through a thorough investigation of what happened, who was involved, and how they will be held accountable.
Sean Davis contributed to this report. Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. Follow her on Twitter at @mzhemingway
We hope that the guilty are hauled into the dock. We hope they are fined to a state of impecunity and spend most of the rest of their lives in klink. The stakes are high. If they are allowed to get away with their treasonous acts, it will signal the end of the rule of law in the United States, and possibly throughout the West.
Since May 2017, 533,074 web articles have been published about Russia and Trump/Mueller, generating 245 million interactions — including likes, comments and shares — on Twitter and Facebook, according to data from social-media analytics company NewsWhip. [Emphasis, ours.]
[One would imagine that most of the chattering would have been negative towards and critical of the President. This situation shows all the signs of a massive echo chamber in which the echo serves as verification for those within the chamber.]
Now that the Mueller report has been turned in, and it does not appear that any new heads will roll, and we are witnessing a reprise of Election Night Horror with leftists sobbing, I thought that this would be a good time to present my thoughts on Trump that have been gestating for some time now, thoughts I have teased and promised on various occasions. What on earth are thoughtful Christians supposed to do in the upcoming presidential election of 2020?
I ask this question on the supposition that Trump will run again, and that one of the likely Democratic candidates will obtain the nomination. We do not yet know who that will be, so let us use the placeholder name of Some Commie (SC).
To set the problem up, I believe the honorable options to choose from would be 1. To refrain from voting for president at all; 2. To vote third party or a write-in candidate; or 3. To vote for Donald J. Trump. Given how the Democrats have made the slaughter of infants their bloody and non-negotiable sacrament, and how pride in sexual perversion is highlighted on the front of all their political brochures, I believe that for any Christian to vote for the Democratic nominee, regardless of who it is, represents a deep moral confusion, compromise and failure.
But for the Evangelical Kool Kids it won’t look or feel like deep moral confusion, compromise, and failure, and because the #3 option that will be chosen by most evangelical voters will look to them like deep moral confusion, compromise, and failure, I thought I should outline my thinking now. I say this as I have come to the decision that—if things remain largely the same as they are now—I will be voting for the president.
And so here’s my thinking. I would really like to have a discussion on this one, so I am going to leave comments open on this post. Have at it, but behave yourselves.
When one contemplates the apparent outcome of the Mueller investigation into alleged collusion between Donald Trump and the Russian intelligence services, "underwhelmed" is too weak a word. On the other hand, it's pretty much what we expected, having kept an eye on the scribblings of the more reliable (conservative) media as Mr Mueller and his staff left not a stone unturned. But the Chattering Classes have been left, well, chattering.
One is reminded of a couple of images. The first is the Star Trek creation known as the Borg, a fictional creation, but nevertheless an apt description of the Chatterers. As Wikipedia has it:
The Borg are a fictional alien group that appear as recurring antagonists in the Star Trek franchise. The Borg are cybernetic organisms, linked in a hive mind called "the Collective". The Borg co-opt the technology and knowledge of other alien species to the Collective through the process of "assimilation": forcibly transforming individual beings into "drones" by injecting nanoprobes into their bodies and surgically augmenting them with cybernetic components.
Picture the Democratic Party and its PR department, otherwise known as the "Main Stream Media", all minds working in syncopated harmony, buzzing and droning, buzzing and droning, buzzing . . . You get the picture. They present a closet representations to an actual real life Borg on the earth. For two years they have droned on with endless replays of manufactured horror, anger, disgust, and outrage at something they imagined and cooked up from the outset.
The second image is conjured up by T. S. Eliot's poem, The Hollow Men.
