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About Draining That Swamp…
I mean to speak plainly. There’ll be no polemical high-wire acts this time around, no rhetorical flamboyance and none of the gallows humor that rolls so trippingly off the tongue when one pauses to contemplate our disastrous current state of affairs. And as consequential as ideology is in this election, I will eschew discussion on those terms as well.
Instead, I write simply as a veteran with over 20 years of military service who has seen both honor and dishonor in action, who has seen the effects of integrity as well as corruption. I’ve worked with leaders for whom I would storm the gates of hell, and I’ve worked for scoundrels who unleashed hell on everyone around them. I’ve experienced both the exuberance of working within a strong and ethical command structure, and the misery of being trapped in a crooked and shady chain of command that poisons everything it touches. But in 54 years on this earth I’ve never seen anything approaching the sheer magnitude of the criminal enterprise that threatens this nation with a level of debauchery whose width and breadth will defile everything and everyone in its insatiable orbit.
In short order we will have a new president-elect. That this person will either be the Democratic or Republican nominee is assured, as is the fact that a great many of us fervently wish our choices were otherwise. We might as well wish that we could control gravity or redirect the storm clouds for all the good our dreams will do at this point. We could vote for a third party candidate who has as much chance of winning as I have of wearing a tutu and dancing with the Russian Ballet, but that accomplishes about as much as Arlen Specter voting nolo contendere’ or whatever damn thing he voted during the Clinton impeachment trial in the Senate. Specter’s vote afforded him a certain amount of self-satisfaction but ultimately helped Bill Clinton get away with his crimes.
Similarly, I respectfully submit the there is a choice to be made in this election which, in this observer’s opinion, transcends the traditional left/right political spectrum. Which is not to trivialize nor marginalize the stark alternatives on a spectrum ranging from individual liberty on one end to collective servitude on the other. Those differences are real and the consequences momentous. This year, however, the choice is as much between right and wrong as it is between right and left.
For perhaps the first time in history, we have a candidate who has been the subject of multiple criminal investigations by the FBI. If you suspect this is the result of political chicanery, please consider that the candidate and her staff responded to the FBI’s investigation by:
- Providing two BlackBerry devices with their SIM or SD data cards removed.
- Destroying or losing 13 of Hillary’s personal mobile devices being sought by the FBI as evidence while claiming publicly that she only used one device.
- Deleting server backups to avoid FBI examination.
- Wiping laptops with BleachBit when notified that they contained records sought by the FBI and the House Benghazi Committee.
- Permanently deleting emails from her “PRN” [Platte River Networks] server after those emails were subpoenaed.
- Manually deleting backups of the PRN server after her records were subpoenaed.
Despite these extraordinary efforts by the candidate and her staff to circumvent lawful subpoenas by hiding and destroying evidence, further FBI investigation discovered:
- 2,093 emails that the State Department classifies as Confidential or Secret despite Hillary’s claims that there were no classified emails..
- 193 emails (totaling 81 individual email chains) that ranged in classification, at the time they were sent, from Confidential to Top Secret/Special Access Program.
- 8 Top Secret email chains.
- 37 Secret email chains.
- 36 Confidential email chains.
- 7 Special Access Program email chains.
- 3 Sensitive Compartmentalized Information email chains.
- 37 Not Releasable to Foreign Government email chains.
- 2 Releasable Only to Five Allied Partners email chains.
- 12 of the above email chains which were withheld by Clinton attorneys, but which the FBI recovered using other methods.
- The above email chains also contained classified information from CIA, DOD, FBI, NGA, and NSA.
Why, you ask, would a Secretary of State take such stunning measures to conceal official correspondence, to the point of compromising some of America’s most sensitive and highly classified secrets? The answer was revealed when we learned that the FBI has also been investigating the subordination of the US State Department specifically, and US foreign policy generally, to the financial goals and personal aggrandizement of the Clinton Foundation and Bill and Hillary Clinton. “It is,” as Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review, “suggestive of a pattern of pay-to-play bribery, the monetizing of political influence, fraud, and obstruction of justice that the Justice Department should be investigating as a possible RICO conspiracy under the federal anti-racketeering laws.”
Compared to the Clintons, Richard Nixon was guilty of selling Girl Scout cookies without a permit. But the problem goes deeper than even the Clinton Foundation putting US foreign policy on the auction block. Please stay with me here: As McCarthy explains, and as the Wall Street Journal’s Devlin Barrett confirms, when FBI agents investigating the Clinton Foundation corruption case requested access to emails on the nongovernment laptop computers that were part of the FBI’s Clinton classified email case, the Justice Department refused the agents’ request. As McCarthy explains it:
…[I]t was already clear that Lynch’s Justice Department was stunningly derelict in hamstringing the bureau’s e-mails investigation. But now that we know the FBI was simultaneously investigating the Clinton Foundation yet being denied access to the Clinton e-mails, the dereliction appears unconscionable.
“It had to be screamingly obvious,” McCarthy continues, “that the Clinton State Department e-mails, run through a server that also supported Clinton Foundation activities, would be critically important to any probe of the Foundation.” And yet Loretta Lynch, an Obama appointee who owed her original position as a US attorney to Bill Clinton, whose wife is the subject of said investigation and who met with Lynch privately on the tarmac in Arizona just days before an announcement was made that Hillary would not be indicted — yes, that same Loretta Lynch stonewalled the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation. This is political inbreeding at its worst and demonstrates the awful consequences of a Department of Justice which has been compromised and corrupted by the machinations of a comprehensively criminal political enterprise.
Elsewhere, recall please the evidence confirming that the Democratic National Committee broke its own rules of impartiality to actively help Ms. Clinton defeat Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries. When DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz denied access to voter database files to the Sanders campaign, DNC Deputy Communications Director Mark Paustenbach responded to the backlash by writing to a colleague, “Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess.”
When this and similar emails became public, correspondence between MSNBC’s Chuck Todd and a DNC staffer surfaced in which the reporter and the DNC staffer discuss how to discredit calls for Wasserman Schutz to resign. Above all, the progressive industrial complex protects its own. Indeed, the DNC soon found itself in hot water when Politico revealed that the organization’s joint fundraising committee was funneling money to the Clinton campaign itself, rather than fundraising for down-ticket Democrats. Thus has the Democratic National Committee itself been contaminated by Clinton misconduct.
Meanwhile, CNN has had to sever ties with its contributor Donna Brazile when it became known that she severed ties with any semblance of professional ethics by providing Hillary Clinton with debate questions in advance. Brazile remains interim Chair of the DNC however, underscoring the ethical rot infecting both organizations. Then came news that an interview with popular entertainer Steve Harvey was completely scripted down to the questions from audience members and Hillary’s answers, which were prepared in advance, planners having evidently concluded that Hillary was incapable of an extemporaneous exchange, and that little niceties like journalistic ethics shouldn’t stand in the way. From moderators who tip the scales, to ostensible newscasts which distort events and reporters who collude with political operators to advance one candidate over another, the media showcases the ubiquitous reach of the Clinton machine’s corrupt tentacles.
It is my hope and ardent wish that the reader will consider the magnitude of the damage such a thoroughly corrupt organization will inflict should it obtain the power inherent in the presidency. We already have an IRS which persecutes with impunity citizens whose political opinions deviate from progressive orthodoxy. We already have an EPA that wages war on energy producers and the property rights of private citizens. We already have a Justice Department that is actively engaged in a federal takeover of local police departments. We already have a federal assault on the integrity of the voting ballot, on the right of people of faith to exercise their religious beliefs, on the right of little girls and ladies to the most basic privacy in the ladies room, on the right of school sports teams to say a simple prayer before a game, and on the right of unborn children to their first breath.
Yes, there is a liberal agenda and a conservative one. But such considerations and ideological struggles could be superseded and even rendered obsolete under a nationalized, ham-handed yet iron-fisted rule of a candidate and organization that is currently under criminal investigation. History shows that inept utopians at the levers of power can be bad enough. But granting presidential powers to a person who has demonstrated in every conceivable way utter disdain for the law or even a modicum of ethical behavior would be catastrophic.
The failure of the progressive industrial complex and their enablers in both parties is, in a pivotal way, an intellectual failure because as Bill Buckley observed, “…all intellection is moral, because disembodied from moral precepts, thought is misleading, empty, vulgar.” For all the talk of Donald Trump’s vulgarity, his “moral precepts” do not revolve around bribery, subterfuge, lawlessness, the destruction of evidence, the compromising of national security, and a network of accomplices both in and out of government who actively undermine the democratic process.
Over 40 years ago, a President was forced to resign over a mere fraction of what the Clinton political machine has wrought. Under the circumstances, we must not entrust instrumentalities of the state to a presidential candidate whose moral compass consistently points the wrong way, whose administration would make the Nixon administration look like the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Published in General
I agree but that message doesn’t get listeners for talk radio and Hannity. According to them, the Republicans gave Obama everything he wanted without a fight.
That’s an if. It will differ from what Hillary promises exactly how?
Besides, if Trump does do that, wouldn’t that bring the Reluctant Trumpers back and make for a better realignment in the Republican party?
be
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
I also think that @claire has the intellectual integrity to admit it (and discuss it, and discuss it :-) ) if Trump is elected and turns out OK.
There is a lot of ground between doing nothing and doing everything you can.
Decent job? I’d say marginal.
Please do as I was getting pretty discouraged the last few days about this site. I am making my own plans to deal with a Hillary win. That includes moving out of California, which I have been thinking of for several years. Fortunately, I am retired although I do do a bit of part time work. We are looking for a house with some land to install a propane tank to fuel a generator. I think if Hillary wins, we will stumble into a war when she loses her bad temper and tries to rescue some stupid policy like those she has participated in with Obama. She is far more dangerous than Trump who has spent a career negotiating with people he does not control. Has she ever accomplished anything honest ?
I’m glad to see what I consider a sensible piece. If Trump wins I will be pleasantly surprised.
I see a great deal of irony in this argument. We’ve been complaining for at least 8 years that the GOP keeps doing nothing more than blocking actions and buying time until the fabled moment when we could really do good things. After the failed Obama administration and with the dems nominating a candidate whose corruption makes Nixon look like a choir boy, in the very moment we’ve been waiting for since the last Clinton administration, the party nominated the one person Clinton could beat. And now we’re being asked to vote for more blocking actions and time buying until our moment really, really comes. SMH.
I’m always interested in those who can predict the future. What will the stock market be a year from now ? Interest rates ?
If Trump does 50% of the things he says he will, he will have done far more than the Republicans have.
He says he will void the executive orders ( which should have been stopped by congress years ago!).
He says he will repeal and replace Obamacare, while the Republicans have shied away from any concrete actions (don’t want to close the government! ) (I hate the ‘replace’, but it is a political reality now that you can’t just go back to where we were)
He says he will enforce immigration law, and we ALL know the GOP has no intention whatsoever of doing any such thing.
He says he will oppose the importation of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. GOP has done nothing to impede them.
Republicans just don’t really fight. Trump isn’t always right, and not always smart, but he fights. Like McClellan vs Grant, we need someone who will fight.
I hope you’ll consider Arizona!
Wait, seriously? Someone whose writing and ideas you’ve respected in the past, who is intelligent and thoughtful, grappled with the same evidence that you did and reached a different conclusion, and that makes them traitorous?
I’m a little disgusted with both of you, to be honest.
I agree with you here. Also, a statement of support or at least tolerance of a hard-line pro-choice, anti-religious freedom agenda.
Which is why I won’t vote for Hillary.
But that means it’s nonsense to turn around and say – as many have done, not necessarily you, Lily – that a vote for Trump isn’t actually a vote FOR Trump, it’s a vote against Hillary. If a vote for Trump is just a vote AGAINST Hillary and not an endorsement of Trump, then a vote for Hillary could be just a vote AGAINST Trump and not a vote for Hillary’s corruption, etc.
But I don’t see it that way. By my vote, I am endorsing the candidate and his/her agenda; it’s a statement that I can in good conscience wish the candidate to hold that office and pursue his/her agenda. I cannot do that with Hillary or Trump.
If a vote for Clinton is an endorsement of corruption and abortion, then a vote for Trump is an endorsement of racism, or at least race-baiting; of misogyny and sexual assault, of the idea that character doesn’t matter; of xenophobia, fascism, authoritarianism, and alliance with Putin.
God bless you and VDH.
From Bob Owens at Bearing Arms
Inversely, people who think Trump will change course from being a fraudulent blowhard, are equally, trying to predict the future.
The strategy apparently is to vote for the guy that donated money to help Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, enemy #1 and 2 of the 2nd ammendment, stay in power. Ugh….I hate this election.
I can get behind that sentiment.
TY Dave! You cheered me up and helped clarify the evil that is Hillary.
Until the fabled moment when the geniuses-that-be looked at Eric Cantor’s defeat and decided that what the Republican Party really needed was the third Bush presidency in less than 30 years. Running Jeb! meant setting Hillary (because the fix was clearly in because it Was Her Time) up to run against GWB and against an aristocratic dynasty that wasn’t hers. I did think it was going to be Warren providing cover for her move to the Left, but it turned out to be Bernie. I thought and think that a Democrat victory this year would/will be the final demographic nail in the conservative movement’s coffin.
Worse, anybody serious about immigration would see what Jeb! said about “first comprehensive reform” for the scam it has been since Teddy Kennedy rolled Reagan.
What to do next? I’ve been futilely backing Republicans for a long time, and I got that futile smell good and strong from Cruz, Jindal (my choice) and Fiorina. That’s not issues based, more “does it have a beat and will anybody dance to it” or is it going to be another Romneyesque loss.
I couldn’t see anyone generating enough enthusiasm to beat her until Trump came along.
Sorry you feel that way, but to my way of thinking, anyone who advocates and votes for a known evil and traitorous person is condoning the evil. It goes beyond “ideas” and I haven’t respected her ideas in a long, long time.
Yeah, but Trump said “P###y” and is a boor and icky, and his supporters are so, unhip.
Never mind
Dave Carter,
As a baby Catholic, you might enjoy this priestly wisdom.
From Fr. Z:
He has more, but these seem to be universal. Pass it on – it is good stuff.
I can attest to #4.
Cheers.
I’m thinking of starting a new political party: Americans against hyperbole. I’m hoping its members will recognize that few people agree with you 100%, but it’s worth keeping friendly ties with those who make common cause with you on most issues.
But, you know, way to double down on calling fellow conservatives traitors for making a different risk assessment than you.
While I am handing out recommendations Mr. Carter, you might also enjoy this column by Fr. George Rutler. An excerpt:
I’m not Catholic, so we’re not instructed to talk to a guardian angle. Go right to the source – God’s listening – he’d love to hear directly from you!
We aren’t instructed to either, but it is an option. In fact, the view that everyone has a guardian angel seems well founded in Scripture. In Matthew 18:10 Jesus states, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones; for I tell you that in heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.” He said this before the Crucifixion and was speaking about Jewish children. It would therefore seem that non-Christian, not just Christian (baptized) children have guardian angels.
Angels are real.
But I don’t understand bypassing God to talk to Angels when you can go to the source.
I don’t know that is really true. Robert Nisbet makes the argument that constitutional checks and balances are a fallacy (“The Twilight of Authority”). And it is a good argument. Unless the three branches start hacking each other’s computers ala WikiLeaks, I don’t see how they get the goods on each other. Congress seems to be the last to know how bad corruption is. And Obama says he finds out by watching the news. I think the checks and balances are about power and frustrating/slowing down impatient people, not corruption.
Home run Dave! Well summarized. It Is quite a list isn’t it? How does one explain to the grandkids that a person whose only qualifying “experience” for the presidency is participation in a series of foreign policy disasters in which brave countrymen were left to die for political expediency, a region plunged into a bloody Chaos, our allies rejected and our enemies embraced, who expedited the sale of strategically critical uranium to a foreign government (or their reps), and who believed her personal convenience and the need to avoid possible access to emails that exposed never-before-seen levels of political corruption while also compromising our intelligence assets around the world is better than a vulgar man who uses dirty words.
At one point early in the primaries I thought our nominee would be someone else. There were several good choices. But now it is Mr Trump. Do I wish he spoke more coherently? Yes. Do I wish he’d studied some of the important isssues better? Yes. Do I think he ever intended to get this far? Not likely.
Still, a vote for him represents hope (cautious hope.) versus known corruption and awful policies. That’s enough for me.