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Required Reading
Powerline’s Scott Johnson has this brief, outstanding summary of the greatest political scandal in our nation’s history up today. This is absolutely required reading.
At the time, I thought Fast & Furious was the greatest political scandal in our history. Getting American law enforcement officers killed with weapons that our own government sold to criminal gangs in a foreign country in an effort to change popular opinion sufficiently to demand that we change the 2nd Amendment of our own Constitution. Holy Toledo.
But this scandal, in which officials of our own government attempt to overturn an election by using the power of their unelected offices, with active assistance from the media – my God. When appointed bureaucrats decide that they consent to democracy only when it goes their way, then how far are we from typical third world socialism?
At first, I thought the term “Deep State” was a bit overwrought. I was wrong. This is not hyperbole. This is an immediate threat to freedom and democracy around the world (imagine the world without American democracy). This ends either with one party rule, or it ends with torches and pitchforks. Unless our government successfully excises this “Deep State” cancer, which is now widely metastatic. Regardless, I think this is enormously important, and I don’t see how it can end well. Somebody, please tell me I’m over-reacting. Please?
Published in General
Is there any reason to hold off on the torches and pitchforks?
Seriously. Stuff like this should cause a critical mass of conservatives to march on Washington demanding justice.
I wish I had the time, funds, and ability to organize something like this. The media gatekeepers will make sure this doesn’t make it out to the Low Information Voters. We must get their attention somehow.
No, not gonna do it, wouldn’t be prudent.
Also, you’re not overreacting. This is an attempt at a coup. And I put that in present-tense because it’s still going on.
This piece is a good round-up:
7 Big Takeaways From Andrew McCabe’s Planned Coup
I vote for door number three. I don’t like one party rule, and I don’t want a revolution. Most revolutions end badly — ours being a rare exception — and conservatives like me prefer fixing what’s broken to throwing things out and starting over.
Talk, loudly and often. If democracy dies in darkness, truth dies in silence. Don’t be silent.
But who will let us speak?
You aren’t. The Democrat Party is a branch of the MSM, which has been liberal for over 50 years. Democrat supporters embedded within the Executive branch don’t even need explicit direction from their superiors to know what they need to do. They are driven by philosophy.
Both elected Dems and embedded Dems take their marching orders from what the MSM says.
Powerline is always worth reading.
Is there room for me on the ledge? I don’t think you are wrong at all.
At times like this, I think about what my younger (63, so should know something) brother knows. He lives in Seattle, gets his news from NPR and the late-night comics and was for Bernie. I doubt that he knows about any of this based on that news input.
It reminds me of the weeks of non-coverage of Fast and Furious. Something came up that forced them to cover it and that Sunday, Chuck Todd (I think it was him) introduced the segment by saying “For those of you who haven’t been following this issue….” In other words, those of you who follow his news.
Media Research does a good (but depressing) job of tracking the coverage of different issues. They have a pretty interesting newsletter. The other day, they reported that after 2,202 minutes of coverage on the Russia investigation, there was zero coverage of the Senate committee saying that there was no collusion.
I tried to get my brother to read the MRC news letter, pick one thing he had not seen covered and then follow it up enough to see if it was important. He never did.
That is a major part of the problem.
One aspect of this that bothers me a lot is that if Clinton had won the election, which she very nearly did, then all this would have just disappeared. Instantly. Like it never happened.
But the American people loudly declared that this was unacceptable, by electing the most disruptive force they could find to destroy the Deep State. Even many who voted for Trump didn’t like him, but they felt that he was the most likely to stand up to the forces arrayed against the American people.
And I sense that this is just going to disappear anyway. In a month or two, maybe six, people will be talking about something else. I’m sure the search is on for some Republican, somewhere, who had his picture taken in blackface or something. Just anything they can change the subject to. Anything at all.
And this just fades away. Like it never happened. Because nothing really happened, right? Trump is still president, right? So relax. It’s old news, anyway. Geez. Move on.
And on and on we move…
Let me just say that I appreciate the few liberals and Democrats such as Mark Penn, Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley who have been willing to look at this through a non-partisan lens and openly state their position.
I agree that the entire Clinton email/Russian collusion scandal is the biggest political one in my lifetime. One big difference with scandals involving Republicans like Watergate and Iran-Contra is that in those cases there were Republicans willing to investigate. In this case there has not been one Democrat willing to do so. The D’s are accomplices in democracy dying in darkness.
A fair assumption, but I think they would have gone after Trump with the same or even more zeal so as to punish him for daring to stand up straight. They would have made sure he could never run again.
If Trump had lost the election, he would have been defeated, and they wouldn’t have cared about him anymore.
I agree that they would have continued to go after him anyway, but not to punish him. It would be to warn anyone else who might consider running for office as a Republican. Anywhere. At any time in the future.
I agree. That’s what I was trying to say.
For the first time in my life, I am genuinely concerned about the future of my country. I can’t see how this conflict ends well or with the geopolitical landscape resembling what it does now. Sigh. Perhaps it’s just all-gray February on Cape Cod. :-)
Seriously?
There are more ways for people like you and me to communicate now than at any time in history. If we are silent, too often it’s because we don’t want to upset people — or don’t want to bother. No one is stopping us.
I can’t figure out McCabe. He publishes this in a book and goes on TV to tell the story of his rogue and lawless behavior? I understand that he wants to take a bunch of people down with him, but still?! Is he stupid or figures no one will come after him? Has our respect for the law declined to the degree that nobody in the government needs to worry about prosecution? What the heck is going on??
It would seem that the thought that he might be prosecuted for breaking the law has never crossed his mind. Which I can understand. He’s on the correct side.
If the police showed up at his house with a warrant, Mr. McCabe would say that he didn’t know why they were there. And I think he’d be telling the truth. It just wouldn’t make sense to him.
I gather also that this book is his opportunity to cash in before his role in history is forgotten.
Okay, great. How do you get the message out to the low-information voter? The left controls the narrative. Via the news media, the entertainment media (mostly the same thing), academia, social media . . . how do you get the message out in such a way that it can’t be ignored?
There are people on this very website who are fully invested in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, wish to see the President removed from office, and they are allegedly on our side. If we can’t convince them, how are we going to convince the low-information voter?
@drewinwisconsin, I’ve heard this argument many times, and I can’t believe that a group of intelligent, creative and dedicated people on the Right can’t figure this out. These are high tech times, and there must be a way to get over and around this media control. I’ve said before, maybe ads on TV; maybe we need to ask all those conservatives in Hollywood an instead of hiding, have them band together for an add or something on YouTube. There must be a way!
And the media was working to uncover evidence, not cover it up. I am not sure which is worse.
Like I said, by talking about it. Posting on Facebook (where, oddly enough, there are a lot of low-information voters) and other social media. By not being silent when someone says something silly, by educating the people you interact with.
Look, I’m not saying it’s easy or a slam-dunk. But, what, you want to throw up your hands and surrender?
People who imagine that torches and pitchforks will somehow reach the masses with a useful message, but who despair of doing the day-to-day outreach required to convince their friends and neighbors, are, I think, deeply misguided.
F&F was the worst case of government abuse ever, yet nothing came of it – Congressional hearings were impotent, and even the new administration hasn’t directed a probe.
The McCabe thing is just as frightening, a bunch of Executive branch bueaucrats taking it on themselves to remove a duly elected President. I want a special counsel for each of these acts . . .
I disagree about both of these scandals.
People had concerns about President Trump’s mental and emotional stability. While I don’t think that he has these problems, I think that there is a good-faith basis for concern, given some of his comments and Twitter posts. Given such concern, I see nothing wrong with senior government officials having a discussion about the criteria and procedures for implementing the 25th Amendment provisions regarding removal of the President, which would have required action essentially by the Cabinet. Nothing came of these discussions, but I see nothing wrong with getting information about options and contingencies.
Fast & Furious was a perfectly legitimate sting operation, though apparently handled badly. The idea was to allow licensed firearms dealers (in my home state of Arizona) to sell guns to buyers believed to be strawmen for drug cartels, then track those guns to identify higher-ranking cartel members. It is my understanding that some such guns were used in subsequent murders, but I don’t think that there was any “but-for” causation between such crimes and any failures in the Fast & Furious program. It’s not as if Mexican drug cartels have trouble getting weapons. If they had not obtained a particular gun as a result of Fast & Furious, they doubtless would have simply used a different gun.
Sorry to be disagreeable. Well, no, not really. I find this to be misplaced conservative outrage, better directed at genuinely outrageous actions like the IRS scandal, the dreadful enforcement of racial quotas by the Obama Education Department (including quotas for punishment — no kidding), the lies supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, the War on Boys, abortion, and many other genuinely dreadful positions and actions taken by Democrats.
Agree. After all it’s where I found out, somewhere in the early fall of 2010, about some site called Ricochet . . . .
Ricochet Mods maybe?
Most likely there are official communications, or perhaps he fears some exist. His statements are in the line of enabling some to portray those statements as “old news”.
Plus, the guy has a book to sell. Those giant legal bills won’t pay themselves.
No, it was the furthest thing from a legitimate sting. If one is going to “map and/or illuminate the network” and the materiel being used for that is lethal, the control measures emplaced are huge. To traffic in lethal commodities, you would have to have a plan that accounts for each individual weapon, it’s location, and taking the weapon back out of circulation. F&F did none of those things.
I did something like this for DoD, but it was DOJ lawyers that put down the prohibitions and constraints.