Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Statists Protect Their Own
I finally got around to opening up my latest issue of “Claremont Review of Books” today. What a fantastic publication. If you don’t subscribe, you really should. Anyway, this issue features a long essay from Michael Anton titled “The Empire Strikes Back.” He provides an outstanding summary of the various impeachment attempts against Donald Trump, starting immediately after his election. He also shares several fascinating insights into the people and events involved, but it was this paragraph that really caught my eye (emphasis mine):
It is no accident or coincidence that the only three presidents who have fundamentally challenged the administrative state … have been dogged by “scandal” and threatened with impeachment: Richard Nixon by Watergate, Ronald Reagan by Iran Contra, and now Trump. (Whatever you think of Bill Clinton’s impeachment it was emphatically not driven or supported by the administrative state, which protected him at every turn.) Trump would likely take this as small consolation, but it’s a measure of how much he’s feared that his enemies are running this play against him now, rather than simply trying to defeat him next year. Which more than suggests they doubt they can.
President Obama repeatedly said how proud he was that his administration was free of scandal. After Fast and Furious, weaponizing the IRS against political opponents, Benghazi, illegal State Dept email servers, various VA cover-ups, weaponizing the FBI against political opponents, and so on and so forth, you might find that to be an extraordinary claim. But those issues never hurt him, since the press buried them as soon as they came out. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times said that the Obama administration was “without any ethical shadiness.”
I often refer to what I call the Jane Fonda Rule of the American legal system. If you’re a leftist, there is no political crime that you could possibly commit that will ever be prosecuted, up to and including (in the case of Ms. Fonda) outright treason with photographic evidence. Hillary Clinton will never be prosecuted for anything and just think of all the things she has done. But she’s a Democrat. So, there you go. I’m not saying this is right or wrong. It’s just the way it is.
One thing we have learned through these various Trump impeachment investigations is that foreign governments did not meddle in our elections, but our government did. But when I hear people ask why no one at the FBI is serving prison time for their role in the greatest political scandal in American history, I refer them to the Jane Fonda Rule. If FBI agents had been trying to destroy President Obama, they’d be in prison for the rest of their lives. But they didn’t. They tried to destroy a Republican president. Legally, that’s an entirely different matter. We are a nation of men, not of laws. It’s just the way it is.
Modern American leftists are essentially statists. They believe in using the power of the state to accomplish their goals, which tend to start out as giving people free stuff, and tend to end up as taking away people’s stuff. That transition doesn’t take as long as you might think.
Our media is made up nearly exclusively of leftists. They go to journalism school to make the world a better place, which to them, means promoting leftism. To them, their motives are pure. So they defend other statists. When the Obama administration does something that might be sort of a little illegal if it were misconstrued by some uneducated deplorable redneck, it’d probably be best to just make it go away. Let the president do his job, right?
So the Obama administration had no scandals. The media even cut the compliant President Bushes a little slack – they were just politely holding down the fort until the next Democrat was elected president. They understand the established norms of Washington and were too nice to rock the boat. They also understood who was really in charge, and they knew it wasn’t them.
But if anyone considers significantly modifying the administrative state, it’s remarkable how that presidential administration seems to instantly develop leaks, “scandals,” and investigations. As surely as night follows day.
This serves to hamstring the current Republican president, and warn the next one. I think the warning is more damaging to our country than the immediate impact of such attacks.
If they really do manage to get rid of Trump, I presume that President Pence will decline to consider real changes to the administrative state. Partly because he’s a career politician, and partly because he’s a nice, polite person who’d prefer not to upset people. But mostly because he understands who’s really in charge. It wasn’t President Bush, and it wasn’t President Trump, and it most certainly will not be President Pence. That has been made clear to him. If it hasn’t, former President Trump can explain it. Probably in a crudely written but extremely clear Tweet.
If that happens, the leftists, statists, and administrative state denizens will have won. For the foreseeable future. Elections don’t matter that much anymore, because the next president will either politely ignore the administrative state, or give it whatever it wants. There is no third choice, and every politician knows it. So vote for whichever politician you want, but nothing will change. Not really. It can’t.
So you know those leaks, “scandals” and investigations are coming when someone has the temerity to rock the boat. It could be an amiable Ronald Reagan. It could be an uncouth Donald Trump. It doesn’t matter who it is. All that matters is whether they understand who’s really in charge of the American government. As long as they play nice, like Obama or Bush, they’ll have a scandal-free administration.
But those “scandals” spontaneously crop up every time someone directly challenges the administrative state. As surely as night follows day.
What a remarkable coincidence.
Unless you ask Michael Anton, who sounds skeptical.
Please read Mr. Anton’s article. It’s outstanding.
And again, if you don’t subscribe to “The Claremont Review of Books,” you really should.
Published in General
Editor Note:
That was way out of line, Valiuth. Control yourself or you will be suspended. -Max[Redacted]
It’s not clear what I get from a subscription that I couldn’t get online for free, but I just now subscribed. Thanks.
Speaking of self pitying delusions…
Leave it to a lefty to insert the ” the Jews” . You tipped your hand here.
It’s never too late. What’s the statute of limitations for treason?
Imagine this scenario:
Jane Fonda is tried for treason, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Now, imagine two things:
Both the administrative state and the press were terrible to George W. Bush. In fact, I had a letter to the editor published in the Wall Street Journal in which I wrote that President Bush’s only mistake was that he didn’t fire everyone his first day in office, and I mean everyone. Our presidents need to take a page from the old Big Business playbooks in which the new chief executive simply fired everyone the first day. It’s actually a good idea because it’s not personal. :-) I think the WSJ editors must have agreed with me. :-)
The press was terrible to GW. I remember one day a reporter was hounding him about something, and the reporter said to him, “Mr. President, I represent the people,” to which GW sternly replied, “No, you do not. I do.” :-)
Well I don’t get this, but will check out the article in long form.
If one has a theory that those who “fundamentally challenged the administrative state” may be impeached (with the implicit connection between the two), it would help if the first two candidates didn’t also preside over actions that were 1) impeachable in the first instance and 2) at least arguably impeachable in the second. Placing Trump in that company is not overly kind to Trump.
I’ll leave aside for now the matter of whether Nixon actually challenged the administrative state.
So all the stuff we’ve learned about what the Obama DOJ and CIA were doing is just conspiracy stuff huh?
Man talk about having your head in a dark place.
That part caught my eye as well. In my essay I compared Trump to Reagan, but I didn’t use Nixon as an example, because I don’t quite understand it. It may be true, but that’s not my impression of his presidency. I don’t know as much about Nixon as I should, though.
Jane Fonda acted unpatriotically. And she deserves eternal condemnation.
But I don’t think she committed treason. She did not levy war against the United States and I think providing aid and comfort requires more than just some photo ops and scripted condemnations of the President.
I’d just as soon not return to 1918 when the Wilson administration was prosecuting public figures for criticizing American entry into WW1.
That’s certainly true, of course. But they didn’t begin impeachment investigations before he took office. You make a good point, but I think this is different.
Very cool! I hope you have that framed somewhere!
There are positives and negatives to this approach. Many jobs in government benefit from experience. But you want to limit the ability of bureaucrats to build mini-empires in their sphere of influence within the administrative state. Much like congressmen and underwear, it’s generally a good idea to change them frequently. And for the same reason (to paraphrase, I think, Mark Twain).
We already know the why of the Nixon tragedy. It’s not because of a supposed plan to reorganize the cabinet departments and the bureaucracy. We all know that the average cabinet department couldn’t organize a two car funeral. It’s because Mark Felt was mad at being passed over for FBI Director.*
If anything, Nixon was, in the spirit of progressive Republicanism, striving to enhance government power.
* That and payback for Hiss and Helen Gahagan Douglas. Donkeys hold a grudge much longer than elephants.
You make a fair point. I’m not sure I agree with you, but I can appreciate your point of view.
At the very least, she certainly tiptoed along that line.
In my view, though, her actions were way past “unpatriotic.” Unpatriotic is not removing your hat during the national anthem. What Ms. Fonda did is very, very different.
But that’s just my point of view. I understand your point.
I am not sure about this. I would not be surprised if they were trying from day one. It was right after the Clinton impeachment event, whatever that was. They were ticked off.
No. I wished I had. But from then on, I used it with my then-teenagers to gain their compliance. :-) “Hey, the Wall Street Journal listens to me. You should too!” :-)
I think that is deeply unfair to elephants. Seriously, they are very intelligent and interesting creatures.
I am for limiting government intervention in speech as much as is humanly possible. That means allowing incredibly stupid and offensive speech. I’d be happier if Fonda was blacklisted because of her indecency but we don’t want to give government that kind of power. There is a very good reason why the first amendment was first after all.
Okay, well it leaves me to say it, then.
It’s wrong.
Dude. Who are you convincing? I don’t know if Dr. Bastiat voted for Trump but if he did, it wasn’t with great enthusiasm. What’s the point of insulting folks? You might as well be throwing a MAGA hat at Dr. Bastiat. Why didn’t you write something like the following.
“While I share concerns about political bias among the media and government bureaucrats, Dr. Bastiat’s argument is far too conspiratorial for my sensibilities. If the statists are so powerful, why don’t they simply kill Trump? It would be alot quicker than this whole impeachment thing. Using Occam’s razor, doesn’t it make more sense to believe that Trump illegally withheld aid from a foreign county in order to put the squeeze on a political opponent? Trump has a history of shady dealing in New York beforehand anyways.”
Furthermore, you don’t need to fabricate a corruption case against Biden’s son. A Tammany Hall politician in a Louisiana whorehouse would look at Biden’s son and say, “seriously man a little discretion.”
Where did you get self-pitying vibes? Nobody’s trying to impeach Doc…
Richard Nixon challenged the administrative state?
Heck, Reagan and Trump barely have in real terms.
(Perhaps Nixon simply challenged the administrative state by not being LBJ.)
I believe that was what he set out to do during his second term.
The statists are not really in control. It only looks like they are. There is One who is in control.
I concur with the interesting paragraph you wrote regarding the three Presidents, Nixon, Reagan and Trump, who were targeted for their approach against the Deep State.
However it should be pointed out that one reason that Bill Clinton had the governmental agencies working against those who sought impeachment was because he was a process-driven individual. Once he gained the governor’s mansion in Arkansas, he made sure that every puppet string from every state agency and many local agencies remained firmly in his hands. That is why he managed to commit so many crimes while governor in Arkansas, and why no charges against him for his malfeasance ever stuck.
He employed the same canny ability to have his and only his people surrounding him and in the alphabet agencies once he became President.
Trump has many talents/strategies in terms of assessing how to maneuver into beneficial positions with regards to accomplishing goals. If he did not have those abilities, he would have lost to HRC. But he is not at all used to having to process his way through the tangled web of massive inter-connected bureaucracies, all of which hold important people in important positions left over from the Obama/Clinton regime. Since his impeachment was planned months before he even was elected, his Presidency was a sitting duck.
Senior Executive Services people who were Obama appointees remain in positions & they currently number in the thousands. They exist in all levels of DC bureaucracies, from FBI to various judicial positions. So Trump needed to clean house, & clean house quickly. But before he began, the Deep State was already hindering him. It’s salient to note the first person in his Administration that the Deep State went after was Gen Michael Flynn.
By having Flynn as his National Security Adviser, Trump had someone he trusted who was privy to how the “enemy” Dems operated. Flynn also brought with him a massive experience regarding current day military operations, and a fine mind that ably analyzed how foreign intelligence worked.
Additionally, Dem leaders who might not be the enemy would surely respond favorably to Flynn, and might even see that Trump was attempting to reach across the aisle. (Flynn had been a lifelong Democrat for much of his career.)
Trump even used the various “pussy hat parades” & other Left wing nonsense to hide his activities in succeeding in placing Flynn on the National Security Council. This was a big moment for Trump: no recent president had ever had his National Security Advisor also on the Council.
The removal of Flynn was a stunning blow. This removal was a blow to both Trump and the nation at large.
Trump has had to invest certain amounts of his energy to simply remain in office. It seems any plans he held for an infra structure program have been dealt the inevitable blow of not having a leader who can marshal both his own will and that of political opponents into accomplishing that program.
I think Trump apologists like Anton should take a deep breath and look at the billows of smoke before they say the Deep State overreacted when looking for fire. [I concede that Trump was mistreated by the Deep State in a way a President Al Sharpton would not have been.] Trump had not been able to borrow a dime from a reputable lender for 20 years before he ran for office due to his manifest bad character and compulsive embezzlement. His spinning plates trick depended on gullible suckers, usually Asians bamboozled by his snazzy branding, Russian money launders and Trump University chumps dazzled by The Apprentice after The Jerry Springer Show went off. The man went out of his way to express his sympathies for poor Putin, his personal lawyer was the son-in-law of the head of the Ukrainian Mafia in Brooklyn, he hired guys like Manafort with a known history of being nogoodniks and crackpots. He asked for Russian hacking of Hillary’s e-mails at a rally and Trump’s apologists demand it be ignored as a lame joke.
It was a joke.
His candidacy was a joke, until it came true.
Alright.There you have them. Trump was in collusion with the Russians to fix the election, and his means of communication for this endeavor was to utilize nationally broadcast events to send them messages.
The difference between Trump telling that joke and me telling that joke was I did so a few months before he did, I was referring to her personal email server (the one with Chelsea’s wedding plans, Hillary’s yoga routines, and top secret State Department memos), and when I told it, it was funny.
Gee, maybe I was in collusion with the Russians.
My comment was about the smoke that led the FBI/CIA/Deep State to start looking for fire. Trump is not a virgin sold to a brothel by diabolical bad guys. He is our side’s version of Al Sharpton and deserved scrutiny. I’d also argue that he hasn’t done much to really change things other than pushing every hot button he can to inflame the culture wars. His signature issue was immigration – ask Mark Krikorian how the Trump Administration has eviscerated every attempt to impose a mandatory E-Verify program that would be the best way to counter illegal immigration,.
I would be reluctant to characterize a victorious candidacy as a joke unless I had a deep-seeded distrust of democracy.