Category: Enemies Domestic
Ever since this dog-and-pony show culminating in today’s articles of impeachment got started, something has been on my mind.
It’s clear the FBI is corrupt at the upper most levels. Chief Weasel Jim Comey, and the dishonor roll of his underlings: McCabe, Strzok, Page, and lots more are all partisan hacks. We know this. We know they used the absolutely bogus Steele dossier to justify the need to monitor American citizens to the FISA courts (overview). Borepatch started the day with post that it’s time to Disband the FBI. Count me on board with that. While, from all I know, the majority of the agents and lower level staff are still honorable, there’s a saying in management classes (I originally heard it was taken from the mafia) that goes, “the fish rots from the head down.” If there are systemic problems in an organization, the problem lies in the top management’s offices.
What I’ve been saying since this whole mess started is “what about the FISA courts?” In my mind, if they were honest and honorable, they’d bust the FBI like 13 year olds pretending to be college students at spring break in south Florida.* I’d very publicly and loudly tell the FBI, “you’ve proven you’re not trustworthy. Because of that, from now on there will be no warrants issued to you unless you bring 10 times the amount of justification we used to require, and you’d better have far more than one source. You will be questioned about it relentlessly, and you’d better damned well have every last detail documented.” Or something similar. Let everybody know the FBI is getting their chops busted for their partisan politics.
The fact that this hasn’t happened doesn’t mean the FISA courts didn’t slap down the FBI in some classified meetings that we’re not allowed to know about. The fact that it wasn’t public, though, implies that the FISA court is just as rotten as the heads of the FBI fish. They could have dressed them down in secret but made a public statement about how shocked – shocked! I tell you – and how appalled the court is at having been lied to by the FBI. The fact that didn’t happen tells you the FISA court needs to be disbanded, just like the FBI. The whole Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act needs to be torn up and started again from blank paper.
The Danger of Making Ruthlessness Seem Reasonable
I use a lot of dangerous drugs. Well, not me personally, but on my patients. Of course, I use dangerous drugs only when the disease I’m treating is more dangerous than the drug.
In diseases that are not life-threatening, naturally I avoid dangerous drugs and try to stick with safer therapies. Chemotherapy drugs can save your life, but they can also have significant side effects. Side effects that you would not tolerate if you were treating a sinus infection. But if you have cancer, and you’re trying to avoid dying, it may make sense to take a chance on side effects – even very serious side effects. In truly desperate circumstances, there are few actions one would not consider, no matter how drastic.
That’s what always bothered me about the great leftist / progressive / socialist leaders of the 20th century: Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, and so on. They saw a problem and took drastic measures to fix it.
When I consider the horrifyingly drastic measures they took, I wonder, “What possible problem did they see that warranted such drastic actions? Who on earth could have possibly thought that was a good idea?” Even for those who lack sympathy for others, killing millions of people is no small thing. They claimed that they were trying to save or improve their countries for their citizens. Which some considered to be an adequate reason. Think about that. And then, think about Greta Thunberg.
There are many facets of the global warming fraud that I find concerning, but what bothers me the most about it is that its adherents claim to on a mission to save the world. Ok, so what would you not do to save the world? At that point, any action could be considered, right? Even horrible side effects are worthwhile in this case because the patient is dying and we’re desperate. So no action, no matter how drastic, is off the table.
It’s easy to chuckle when a self-important 16-year-old girl explains that the world is ending. It’s ridiculous.
Well, it may be ridiculous, but it’s not funny.
These people are dangerous. Their polarizing extremism encourages ruthless actions that would otherwise be unthinkable. Just ask a dead German Jew from 1943.
A few days ago, at a town hall on CNN, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi explained her concern about President Trump with the following statement: “Civilization as we know it today is at stake in the next election, and certainly, our planet. The damage that this administration has done to America, America’s a great country. We can sustain. Two terms, I don’t know.”
Not that long ago, Mrs. Pelosi would have said no such thing. She might have said, “I have serious disagreements with Mr. Trump’s policy proposals, and I don’t like where he is taking this country. I hope my fellow American citizens will choose to vote Democrat in the next election. Let me explain why I think that would be a good decision.” And she would then outline her specific disagreements with Mr. Trump, and how she would propose to do better for the American people than he would.
This is how the Republicans won the House in 1994. The “Contract with America” explained what they saw as problems, and how they intended to fix those problems. It worked – they won.
I’m not sure that approach would work now. As I often say, I hope I’m wrong about this. But American politics has changed. And more importantly, American society seems to have changed.
There are those who think that the Democrats’ repeated impeachment attempts against Mr. Trump and other extremist tactics are due to their particular dislike for Mr. Trump. I disagree. If Mitt Romney or Scott Walker were president, I suspect the Democrats would be using similarly ruthless tactics. This shift in tactics occurred before, and independent of, the inauguration of Mr. Trump.
President Trump may be a response to this new approach to American politics, but he is not the cause of it.
It seems strange that such extremism and such vicious approaches to politics occur now, in a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, here in modern America. American politics were vicious and nasty in the mid-1800s, but slavery and other issues were on the verge of tearing our country apart. One can understand how such serious disagreements about such serious issues would lead to divisive politics.
But we’re not arguing about slavery and basic human rights anymore. We’re not even arguing about foreign wars or Prohibition. We’re arguing about transsexual bathrooms. It’s hard to understand such vicious political tactics in times of peaceful prosperity like these.
I’m not sure of the cause, but I suspect it started with the extremist environmental movement. Silent Spring was published in 1962. The Population Bomb was published in 1968. The cold winters of the 1970s led many to believe that we were all about to die in the next ice age.
All of those predictions turned out to be wrong, but the potential power of such messages was hard for some politicians to ignore. Particularly politicians who had no other compelling reasons for anyone to vote for them. Al Gore is an extreme example of this phenomenon, but many others on the left are using this technique now. And when one considers the success rate of leftist policies, one can understand why they use this approach.
A leftist politician no longer has to explain why socialism has never worked anywhere else, and how exactly it will work here. That’s a tough sell. All he/she has to do is convince voters that Republicans are evil capitalists who want to get rich by destroying the world, like a James Bond villain. And then convince those voters that global catastrophe is certain unless they vote for the leftist, who cares for the environment. Skip the details, just paint the picture.
At that point, no actions, no matter how drastic or ruthless, are off the table. Confronting and shaming people in public. Scaring the families of prominent conservatives. Arresting elderly nobodies like Roger Stone in SWAT raids in the middle of the night, with CNN along to broadcast it worldwide. It seems vicious, but hey, we’re trying to save the world here, so it’s ok. Really. Are you with us, or against us? Are you evil, or nice?
These people are dangerous.
So when I hear Nancy Pelosi say, “Civilization as we know it today is at stake in the next election, and certainly, our planet,” I don’t laugh. When I hear Greta Thunberg say, “For way too long, the politicians and the people in power have gotten away with not doing anything to fight the climate crisis, but we will make sure that they will not get away with it any longer,” I don’t just roll my eyes. When I hear AOC say, “There’s no debate as to whether we should continue producing fossil fuels. There’s no debate,” I don’t wonder what she’s been smoking.
These people are dangerous. They make ruthlessness seem reasonable.
In the past, people have agreed to drastic actions simply to save their country, as they saw it. People actually voted for Adolf Hitler for little more reason than that. What if they thought they were saving the whole world? What would they not do?
Saul Alinsky.
The impeachment charade is not a joke. Neither are climate protests, or boycotting businesses suspected of being insufficiently leftist, or economic sanctions against businesses in states that don’t enact your preferred policies regarding transsexual bathrooms. It may seem ridiculous, but it’s not funny.
This is scary stuff. And I don’t see a solution. This is just the way the left does politics now. It wasn’t just Hillary Clinton who learned a lot from Saul Alinsky. The Democrat party has decided that such ruthless tactics are reasonable. I suspect that things will get much worse before they get better.I really hope I’m wrong about all this…
Trump on IG Report: ‘This Was an Attempted Overthrow… We Caught ‘em Red-Handed.’
He’s not wrong.
And a lot of people were in on it and they got caught. They got caught red-handed. And I look forward to the Durham report, which is coming out in the not-too-distant future. He’s got his own information, which is this information plus, plus, plus. It’s an incredible thing that happened and we’re lucky we caught them.
The last time the Democratic Party blew up in a presidential election year was 1860. It had evolved from Jefferson’s 1800 bloc of yeoman farmers to Andrew Jackson’s rowdy caucus of frontier populists in the 1830s, and settled into a slough of pro-slavery apologists by the 1850s, including two do-nothing Democratic presidents, Pierce and Buchanan. The party held a nominating convention in the spring of 1860 and couldn’t come up with a candidate when a claque of southern “fire-eaters” walked out. They tried again a few months later and cracked up into three separate parties with three nominees — and of course Mr. Lincoln won the election. The result was the bloodiest war in US history.
That’s one way to drain a swamp. Historical obfuscators might say the Civil War was a lofty, legalistic quarrel over “state’s rights,” but of course it was really about the intolerable depravity of slavery. A hundred years later, the mysterious inversions of history converted the old slaver’s party into the Civil Rights party. That had a good fifty-year run. It included a hearty side-dish of anti-war sentiment, and a general disposition against the Big Brother treatment of citizens, including especially the overreach of the CIA and the FBI.
What is the Democratic Party today? Well, it’s the cheerleading squad for “seventeen” government agencies that add up to the craftily-labeled “intel community,” a warm-and-fuzzy coalition of snoops, false witnesses, rogue lawfare cadres, seditionists, and bad-faith artists working sedulously to hide their previous misdeeds with ever-fresh ones. They’re the party against free speech, the party against due process of law, the party determined to provoke war with Russia. They’re the party of sexual confusion, sexual hysteria, and sexual conflict, the party of kangaroo courts, cancel culture, erasing boundaries (including national borders), and of making up rules for all that as they go along — like the Nazis and Soviets used to do. The ideas and policies they advocate are so comprehensively crazy that their old support of slavery looks quaintly straightforward in comparison.
It’s taken a while for the full efflorescence of these political pathologies to present. But now they are finally on display for all to see in what is supposed to be a climactic impeachment melodrama. The impeachment process itself has revealed the party’s genius for inventing new debaucheries of law and government misconduct — the latest being Rep Adam Schiff’s blatantly illegal cadging of his opponents’ phone logs. And now, after three years of unchallenged wickedness, they literally face the moment of truth.
That is, when all the many players in this grand game of Gotcha have to face the consequences of what they have done.
This hag was on Hillary’s short list for the Supreme Court. That, if nothing else, should convince anyone with 1/2 a brain just how dangerous demoncraps are.
The impeachment hearings are on, with a spotlight on the three anti-Trump law professors who ranted before Rep. Jerry Nadler’s House Judiciary committee on Wednesday.
Their testimonies were a disaster for the Democrats. They proved they were anything but constitutionalists. It took the fourth “witness,” the eloquent Jonathan Turley, to drive that home. These other three were quite the opposite, fans of abrogating most of our founding document.
What will be remembered forever is the condescending arrogance of the professors — Pamela Karlan, Noah Feldman and Michael Gerhardt.
If there were ever an expose of the kind of people who inhabit the ivory towers of academia, this was it.
These three law professors were a flashing neon warning: Do not send your kids to prestigious law schools. People like this are not educating kids, they are numbing their brains with destructive Marxist nonsense.Nadler did us all a favor, actually: He exposed for all to see just how far gone the American left is. Not one of those three extreme partisans has any knowledge of the actual Constitution nor do they have any respect for it.
That was made very clear on Wednesday. There are numerous constitutionalist scholars Nadler could have called upon — John Eastman, Mark Levin, Hugh Hewitt — for example. That Jonathan Turley was allowed to speak was a Christmas miracle. Like Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz, Turley is the real deal, a non-partisan legal scholar.What would be hilarious if it were a SNL skit was the “testimony” of Pamela Karlan, a venomous anti-Trump law prof at Stanford, which does not speak well for Stanford.
She was on a short list of Hilllary’s picks for SCOTUS so it is a safe bet that she is angry that HRC lost. She has been onboard every anti-Trump campaign from the day he won the election.
The same goes for Feldman and Gerhardt; they are each on record in favor of impeachment long before President Trump’s conversation with the president of Ukraine.
Bottom line?
Each of them is a radical leftist plant and Nadler, House Intelligence committee chairman and impeachment master Adam Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi think the American people are so stupid they will be fooled by what they saw on Wednesday.
They are not that stupid. These impeachment junkies have guessed wrong.Karlan was the most egregiously partisan and thus the most entertaining. Her arguments in favor of impeachment were laughable.
She was so annoying she made Elizabeth Warren seem warm and fuzzy.
She is on record in favor of impeachment from day one.
That Stanford employs this woman is not comforting.
That Harvard employs Feldman is distressing.
Karlan made what she clearly thought was a clever joke about Barron Trump’s name.
How low will they go? This low. Gutter low.
Karlan’s career should be over as of Wednesday for she is not a teacher, she is a propagandist.
Her students will not be taught to grasp the wisdom of the Constituion, they will learn to dismiss it as a document written by old white men. Karlan and her fellow travelers are a menace to society.It calls to light that Nadler’s initial impeachment hearings were a disaster so Pelosi handed that off to Schiff’s intel committee for the deed, right there an abrogation of the Constituiton.
That turned out to be an even bigger disaster. Schiff called up people who don’t like President Trump because he did not listen to them, whose feelings were hurt!
Trump actually thinks for himself and acts on his best instincts, a no-no in Schiff’s world. So far, given all the economic and foreign policy successes, his instincts have served him well. This is very likely what has driven the left to madness, President Trump’s success on nearly every issue.
No matter how hard Pelosi and her colleagues try to sabotage him, he is making America greater and safer. This enrages the left; they are apoplectic that this outsider is exposing them as the saboteurs they are.
They hate all of us who voted for Trump and they mean to punish us for our crime of loving our country as founded.Nadler may have assumed that bringing Pamela Karlan to speak was a stroke of brilliance but she was the nail in the coffin of impeachment. She, even more than the two men, is the epitome of the contempt the left has for the American people.
Her arrogance, her oh-so-planned but unwise and cruel joke about President Trump’s son as her punchline should be all anyone needs to hear to understand exactly who these people are.
These are not the people who should be entrusted with the education of our young people.
They are not teaching them to think; they are teaching them to capitulate unthinkingly to their progressive will.
If their students resist, they are pilloried, made outcasts on their campuses.One only had to watch Schiff’s show trial to realize they will not allow an opposing witness to speak.
Schiff is a Stalinist; what is so frightening is that no one in his own party is standing up and screaming STOP!
That pretty much says all we need to know about the Democratic party today.
Like Obama promised, they mean to transform America into something it was never meant to be: fascist.
Our left is now officially, openly fascist. They mean to control how we live, what we eat, what we drive, how much of our money we can keep, what we can say, write, tweet, and think. Thought crimes are on their agenda.That Donald Trump was elected was divine intervention. The miracle of his win was a stopgap, an interruption of the left’s takeover of our republic.
Unless all Americans become enlightened and involved, these enemies will win.
They will ruin this once great nation with their toxic progressivism, their stealth fascism.
If Schiff, Nadler, and Pelosi think their pet law profs did them proud on Wednesday, they are sadly mistaken. They actually exposed the totalitarian underbelly of our vicious and intolerant anti-Trump left.
Karlan, Feldman and Gerhardt willingly exposed the intellectual vacuity of our professorial class.
In the end, the “hearing” on Wednesday was a grand failure for the anti-Trump left and an eye-opening education for all Americans who watched the grotesque pompousness of the left.
Pamela Karlan is their poster-girl. She must be so proud.
In fact, she will be a laughingstock for the rest of her life.Ambrose Bierce, ever a brilliant observer of the human condition wrote: “They say that hens do cackle loudest when there is nothing vital in the eggs they have laid.”!
Pamela Karlan sure laid an egg today.
The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, kicked off its first impeachment circus Wednesday morning.
Noah Feldman, the first impeachment ‘witness’ the Dems rolled out on Wednesday not only called for Trump’s impeachment shortly after Trump was sworn in, he actually argued in a NY Times op-ed titled, “Why Shariah?” that Islamic Sharia law is more humane than US law.
Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law professor, bashed legal systems created by Western countries including the United States and argued Sharia law is more ‘just’ and ‘fair’ than the US Supreme Court.
Mr. Feldman actually believes that a medieval system of laws that chops off the hands of thieves, stones ‘adulterous women,’ blames the woman when she is raped by a man, publicly hangs and tosses homosexuals off of buildings, is more “progressive” and “humane” than Western laws.
“In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation,” Feldman argued.
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Feldman also claimed that the West “needs Shariah and Islam.”
“It sometimes seems as if we need Shariah as Westerners have long needed Islam: as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible, and as a foil to make us look good,” he added.
Read more of Feldman’s NY Times 2008 op-ed:
FOR GENERATIONS, WESTERN STUDENTS OF THE TRADITIONAL ISLAMIC CONSTITUTION HAVE ASSUMED THAT THE SCHOLARS COULD OFFER NO MEANINGFUL CHECK ON THE RULER. AS ONE HISTORIAN HAS RECENTLY PUT IT, ALTHOUGH SHARIAH FUNCTIONED AS A CONSTITUTION, “THE CONSTITUTION WAS NOT ENFORCEABLE,” BECAUSE NEITHER SCHOLARS NOR SUBJECTS COULD “COMPEL THEIR RULER TO OBSERVE THE LAW IN THE EXERCISE OF GOVERNMENT.”
BUT ALMOST NO CONSTITUTION ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD ENABLES JUDGES OR NONGOVERNMENTAL ACTORS TO “COMPEL” THE OBEDIENCE OF AN EXECUTIVE WHO CONTROLS THE MEANS OF FORCE. THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES HAS NO ARMY BEHIND IT.
INSTITUTIONS THAT LACK THE POWER OF THE SWORD MUST USE MORE SUBTLE MEANS TO CONSTRAIN EXECUTIVES.
LIKE THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL BALANCE OF POWERS, THE TRADITIONAL ISLAMIC BALANCE WAS MAINTAINED BY WORDS AND IDEAS, AND NOT JUST BY FORCIBLE COMPULSION.SO TODAY’S MUSLIMS ARE NOT BEING COMPLETELY FANCIFUL WHEN THEY ACT AND SPEAK AS THOUGH SHARIAH CAN STRUCTURE A CONSTITUTIONAL STATE SUBJECT TO THE RULE OF LAW. ONE BIG REASON THAT ISLAMIST POLITICAL PARTIES DO SO WELL RUNNING ON A SHARIAH PLATFORM IS THAT THEIR CONSTITUENTS RECOGNIZE THAT SHARIAH ONCE AUGURED A BALANCED STATE IN WHICH LEGAL RIGHTS WERE RESPECTED.
Feldman was widely criticized for this New York Times piece which was an excerpt from his book, “The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State” for “promoting” Sharia law.
This is who the Democrats trotted out as a legal scholar and Constitutional expert to sell the American public on impeaching President Trump. Let that sink in.
Criticizing George Soros Is Not Anti-Semitic
The former senior director for European and Russian affairs for the Trump administration, Fiona Hill, testified last week in the House impeachment hearings.
At one point, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., asked her: “Would you say that these different theories, these conspiracy theories that have been targeting you, spun in part by folks like Mr. Stone as well as fueled by Rudy Giuliani and others, basically have a tinge of anti-Semitism to them at least?”
This was Hill’s response:
Well, certainly when they involve George Soros, they do. I’d just like to point out that in the early 1900s, the czarist secret police produced something called ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ which, actually, you can still obtain on the internet. And you can buy it, actually, sometimes, at bookshops in Russia and elsewhere. This is the longest-running anti-Semitic trope that we have in history. And the trope against Mr. Soros, George Soros, was also created for political purposes, and this is the new ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ I actually intended to write something about this before I was actually invited to come into the administration. Because it’s an absolute outrage.
What is really an “absolute outrage” is that anyone—especially someone testifying in Congress before a national audience—would compare criticism of George Soros with “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
For those unfamiliar with “The Protocols,” they are the most infamous anti-Semitic forgery in history. Believed to have been written by Russian czarist officials in the 19th century, they purported to be a document written by Jews that outlined a Jewish plot to take over the world.
“The Protocols” are a lie, and their sole intent was to create anti-Semitism.
Criticism of Soros is rarely a lie, and its intent is rarely to create anti-Semitism.
Soros is a billionaire whose Open Society Foundations, with offices in 70 countries, is the world’s major funder of left-wing causes.
If Soros were to come from a Lutheran or Catholic family, there would be no less criticism of him. While it is always possible that some people attack Soros solely because he was born into a Jewish family (he does not identify as a Jew), there are few such people.
Much of Israel’s Jewish population, for example, loathes Soros. Are they anti-Semites?
Moreover, Soros loathes Israel. As Joshua Muravchik reported in The Wall Street Journal, “[I]n a speech … to the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, Mr. Soros likened the behavior of Israel to that of the Nazis … “
“George Soros,” the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement in July 2017, “continuously undermines Israel’s democratically elected governments by funding organizations that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself.”
Martin Peretz, former longtime editor-in-chief of The New Republic, wrote:
Soros is ostentatiously indifferent to his own Jewishness. He is not a believer. He has no Jewish communal ties. He certainly isn’t a Zionist. He told Connie Bruck in The New Yorker—testily, she recounted—that ‘I don’t deny the Jews their right to a national existence—but I don’t want to be part of it.’
Hill’s charge that criticism of Soros is “the new ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’” is vile. It is what leftists like Hill—who was a member of the board of Soros’ Open Society Institute from 2000 to 2006—always do when a fellow leftist (who is not a Christian white male) is criticized. Leftists constantly labeled criticism of former President Barack Obama “racist” and branded criticism of Hillary Clinton “sexist” and “misogynist.”
Their goal is to inoculate leftists from criticism.
Former CIA Officer Sentenced to 19 Years for Conspiring With Chinese Spies
“Chinese spies are being found out, abroad and in the United States, in surprising numbers. That means there are even more of them out and about, of course. But for the Chinese, it raises the question of how many we knew about before, and how many we fed bogus information to.”
A former CIA case officer was sentenced Friday to 19 years in prison for conspiring to provide American intelligence secrets to the Chinese government, in an espionage case that some current and former officials say dealt a devastating blow to U.S. intelligence operations.
Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 55, served 13 years as a Central Intelligence Agency case officer in several locations overseas, including China, where prosecutors said he had firsthand knowledge of some of the agency’s most sensitive secrets, including the names of covert CIA officers and clandestine human sources in China.
Know the Opposition: Everytown for Gun Safety
New York City/United States – -(AmmoLand.com)
The one group at the forefront of trying to take away our right to keep and bear arms today is perhaps the best-funded such group in history. Despite the attempt to have a grass-roots name, this is a group largely funded by Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor currently running for president.The Everytown group, which counts Moms Demand Action as its force of grass-roots activists, is proving to be very potent. It’s not hard. Bloomberg’s money has been able to provide a sustained grassroots force that past groups like the Brady Campaign and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence haven’t been able to really build.
Backed by Bloomberg’s billions, Everytown simply will flood a state with wall-to-wall TV advertising. In addition, Bloomberg’s group has a director of “cultural engagement.” In short, if you want to know why the social stigmatization of gun ownership and support for the Second Amendment has taken off, this is the group to thank for it. The fact of the matter is that Bloomberg’s gun-control empire is re-shaping the political landscape – and not in favor of those who support liberty.
Bloomberg’s resources have been a huge game-changer. For the longest time, the biggest strength that pro-Second Amendment groups had was the NRA’s ability to mobilize thousands of grass-roots supporters in a Congressional district to do all of the little things – really, Democracy 101 stuff – that either supported candidates or who helped educate the public in the legislative and political arenas.
The fight is now a full-spectrum fight. Bloomberg has managed to fuse an offensive on not just the political and legislative fronts, but he also leverages Hollywood, and he leverages “research” into gun violence as a public health problem. While the Violence Policy Center long pushed that, Bloomberg has again packaged it in a form that is delivered by Moms Demand Action.
It should be noted that this full-spectrum fight is also being waged with a long-term plan in mind. He is not only an incredibly wealthy anti-Second Amendment extremist, he also is very strategically and tactically astute – far more so than we’ve seen from other anti-Second Amendment groups in the past. Just how good is Everytown’s strategic acuity?
Well, let’s put it this way, the Brady Campaign was dangerous because it used emotional stories well, and it sought to separate gun owners from the NRA – it passed legislation, it made gains, but it was primarily media-driven. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence had more of a religious fervor, but it wasn’t as effective, given its past push for outright gun bans. The Violence Policy Center was too extreme, even as it provided the intellectual underpinnings for the “public health” push for gun control. None had real grassroots strength.
Everytown doesn’t just unite those three “legs” of the stool, it has also shown a cold ruthlessness not seen from other groups. Bloomberg’s group has set in motion a chain of events that poses an existential threat to all pro-Second Amendment groups.
According to court filings, Everytown was involved in pushing Andrew Cuomo’s regime to engage in the politically-motivated abuse of financial regulations to financially blacklist the NRA. The resulting legal battle has since crippled the organization, touching off the infighting that we see today, and the needs of the NRA to fight the lawsuit ended up destroying the NRA/Ackerman-McQueen partnership in a very ugly way. Meanwhile, Bloomberg and Cuomo have taken advantage of the infighting they stirred up to win elections.
How can Everytown be beaten? The first step is unity. The infighting has to stop – and the NRA and other pro-Second Amendment groups need to get their act together. Second Amendment supporters must hang together, or Bloomberg will pick off pro-Second Amendment groups one by one and leave us isolated. Once isolated, our rights will be gone.
The second step is to hit Bloomberg – and his group – where it is vulnerable. There are three areas: One is Bloomberg’s nanny-state tendencies in general, ranging from the size of one’s soda to his environmental agenda. The other is the fact that he is an out-of-touch billionaire who is more than little hypocritical on some of these issues. The third is that his group peddles phony caricatures about gun owners – and those who support the Second Amendment.
The third step is to begin a long-term effort of our own. The fact is, we must build a pro-Second Amendment culture in this country, to make the thought of punishing millions of Americans for crimes and acts of madness they did not commit repulsive. We must work every day to prove Bloomberg is a liar about us, through how we address Americans we are trying to persuade to support our battle for freedom, through the approach we take in defending our rights, and being mindful about how we come across.
If we fail, Bloomberg may well succeed where Sarah Brady, Pete Shields, and others have failed.
Sondland’s Presumptions, And All The Presidents’ Powers
The main point I got from the last two weeks of these shenanigans was that the bureaucraps in the state department and national security council were royally insulted that the President didn’t follow the policy decisions and talking points that they, in their vastly more experienced judgement, had devised and decided that such diminution of their political powers could not stand. Such could been taken as they weren’t necessary and their well paid and prestigious positions might be eliminated.
Previous administrations had almost always let the executive department’s employees perform the behind the scenes background work since the ‘upfront’ work of giving speeches, cabinet & committee meetings, travel junkets and signing documents is so exhausting. /sarc
Despite the establishment media’s declarations that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland provided the smoking gun proving that President Donald Trump conditioned military aid to Ukraine on its government investigating the energy company Burisma and the 2016 election, Sondland soon told us this was merely his “presumption.”
We already knew from the transcript of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that aid being conditional on investigating the Bidens was a stretch, certainly nothing near the evidence that would be needed in any respectable court.
Witnesses and Democrats on Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee made much of unofficial channels being used to conduct foreign policy, such as the efforts of Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani – hardly a surprise since these witnesses are all part of the official foreign policy bureaucracy that includes more than 77,000 employees of the State Department alone, each of whom is all too happy to justify their collective existence.
As Assistant Defense Secretary Laura Cooper said in her private deposition earlier in the month, and reiterated on Wednesday, “my sense is that all of the senior leaders of the U.S. national security departments and agencies were all unified … in their view that this assistance was essential.” Cooper added that “they were trying to find ways to engage the president on this.”
The president ultimately agreed it was essential. But why would they be trying to engage the president? Because they wanted to convince the only “official” in the executive branch who really matters, the one who – unlike them – is bestowed by the Constitution with massive power in executing the foreign policy of the United States. The one for whom they work – as advisers whose advice the president is entitled to heed or ignore, or anything in between, at will.
Those who think such near-total control is irresponsible might want to consider the observations of Edward Samuel Corwin, a famed president of the American Political Science Association brought into the Princeton University faculty in 1905 by Woodrow Wilson, and author in 1940 of “The President, Office and Powers.”
As Corwin opined: “A solitary genius who valued the opportunity for reflection above that for counsel, Lincoln came to regard Congress as a more or less necessary nuisance and the Cabinet as a usually unnecessary one.” That’s Honest Abe, not Tweeting Don.
Supreme Court: President Is ‘Sole Organ’ of Foreign Policy
Georgetown law professor for more than 50 years and ex-State Department attorney Don Wallace, Jr., in an article entitled “The President’s Exclusive Foreign Affairs Powers Over Foreign Aid,” noted GOP President Dwight Eisenhower declaring, “As president I have taken an oath to defend the Constitution. I therefore oppose any change which will impair the president’s traditional authority to conduct foreign affairs.”
He also quoted Democratic President James Buchanan’s contention “that the people have ‘rights and prerogatives’ in the president’s execution of his office which each president is under a duty to see ‘shall never be violated in his person’ and shall ‘pass on to his successors unimpaired by the adoption of a dangerous precedent.’”
Those rights and prerogatives are tremendous and unshared when it comes to conducting U.S. foreign policy, as strongly affirmed 7-to-1 by the Supreme Court in the 1936 Curtiss-Wright decision.
The court described them as “the very delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the president as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations – a power which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress but which, of course, like every other governmental power, must be exercised in subordination to the applicable provisions of the Constitution.” (Emphasis added.)
The court’s reasoning was that, without it getting into the details, the Constitution gives the president full power to conduct foreign policy in stating at the beginning of Article II, section 2 that “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”
The question of whether this or that private presidential conversation – listened in on at remote locations by a veritable army of bureaucrats – contains untoward assertions or requests is secondary to another question: How can any president possibly act effectively as “the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations” not requiring “as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress” if those listening can run to a politically hostile Congress with their accusations of impropriety?
When these presidential powers, and the obvious threat to them, are understood, the weakness of basing any case for the impeachment of Trump on what was just served up by Sondland and other presidential servants before Schiff’s committee becomes clear.
Attempted Theft In Progress
The impeachment push is straight up attempted theft of the 2016 election. .
I am now going to give you the least surprising announcement in the history of unsurprising announcements:
“Breaking: Dems say enough evidence to move forward on impeachment. Vote likely by mid-December. They will not wait for courts to force additional witnesses”
In other news, thieves believe they have a right to steal.
Make no mistake, the current impeachment push is attempted theft of the 2016 election.
The people behind impeachment have been declaring their intention to impeach Trump since before he was elected, before he was sworn in, and ever since. Their tools have been a concerted effort to paralyze the executive branch until they could find something, anything to impeach; the mainstream media have been crucial, willing, and knowing participants in creating a permanent frenzied news cycle and hunting for the excuse. Poisonous characters in the highest echelons of the FBI played a central role.
The excuses to steal the 2016 election have varied over time, and are completely pretextual: The ‘unfairness’ of the Electoral College; the Russia collusion hoax; the Mueller Inquisition; the Emoluments Clause; and the 25th Amendment delusion, among others.
The result in House committees controlled by Democrats, and likely the full House vote, was preordained. The hearings have been a charade, the window dressing, with rank speculation, supposition, opinions, hurt feelings, and bureaucratic turf battles posing as evidence.
The thieves disabled the alarm system by manipulating and selectively leaking closed-door testimony, and by refusing to allow Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to call the witnesses they wanted to call during the public portion. It was a show trial manipulated by Adam Schiff with Nancy Pelosi’s blessing.
Jim Jordan had it right. Democrats have not accepted the outcome of the 2016 election. That’s what the past three years of impeachment fever have been about.
This is straight up attempted theft.
There’s no good faith.
There’s no honesty.
There’s not even honor among thieves.