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New York Sun Editorial:
“…The most striking thing about the impeachment report of the House Judiciary Committee is its upside-down nature. The report is a 650-page doorstop that is designed to accompany the impeachment resolution that the House will put to a vote on Wednesday. Yet the part of the report that is likely — not certain but likely — to prevail in the Senate is not the vast verbiage from the majority. Rather, it’s the part called “dissenting views.”
Normally one would expect “dissenting views” to be a kind of historical footnote. Grand juries, to the function of which the Judiciary Committee role in an impeachment is sometimes likened, don’t even issue “dissenting views.” Grand juries either hand up a true bill, meaning an indictment, or not. In this case, though, if and when the impeachment report goes to the Senate, the dissenting views could well prove dispositive.
They certainly strike us as a devastating reprise. The dissenters — the document is signed by Congressman Doug Collins, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican — start with the fact that the impeachment of President Trump arose in a different way from the impeachment efforts against Presidents Andrew Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton. In those cases, the facts had been agreed on by the time impeachment articles were considered.
In the Clinton case, an independent prosecutor had labored for years to build the case. That work should have been done in the House, we’ve always felt, but there it is. The impeachment of Mr. Trump would, if it happens Wednesday, be the first time the House decided to, as the dissenters put it, “pursue impeachment first and build a case second.” It was done “in haste to meet a self-imposed December deadline.”
The dissenters complain of being sidelined during the hearings and the run-up to them. They fault Judiciary’s majority for failing to invite fact witnesses of any kind during the committee’s investigation and for relying instead on the work of the Intelligence Committee. (In the Senate, ironically, the Democratic minority is now complaining that the facts should now be adduced in the upper chamber.)
Impeachment, the dissenters point out, is warranted only for conduct that constitutes treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. Yet the impeachment articles the House will vote on “do not include any of those specific offenses.” Rather, Article One centers on an “amorphous charge” of power abuse precisely, the dissenters allege, because majority members “lack the evidence to prove bribery, extortion, or any other crimes.”
The dissenters’ reprise of the particulars focuses on statements by President Zelensky that he was unaware of any quid pro quo involving American security assistance. One of these was made as recently as December 2. Dissenters also mark the denial of an aide to Mr. Zelensky that the aide discussed with Ambassador Sondland a quid pro quo that the dissenters reckon is the “linchpin of the Majority’s factual case.”
In respect of the second article of impeachment, the dissenters contend that obstruction of Congress “does not constitute a high crime or high misdemeanor while further recourse is available.” They focus on the failure of Congress to pursue remedies — directly and through the courts — to enforce the inter-branch disputes with the White House over the production of evidence and witnesses. They deem it neglect.
These, of course, are just the broad outlines of a devastating dissent. It reminds us of Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent from the Supreme Court majority that okayed, in Morrison v. Olson, an independent counsel. It was one of the few cases in history where the dissent became, in effect, the precedent. If the President survives a trial in the Senate, the GOP dissent to the impeachment report will be studied for generations…”
Related:
GOP Voter Purges in WI & GA Could Tip 2020 Election
These are the crazy years!
I like it. Click over for a good read.
PETER VAN BUREN:
“…When our kids were little, we would make Santa’s magic boot prints from the front door to the Christmas tree by sprinkling baking soda around a crude cardboard cutout. This explained how the presents showed up on Christmas morning, since we didn’t have a fireplace. It was cute to watch our daughters react back when they believed it was all true. But as they got older, logic began to creep in—how did Santa get past the locked front door? And why didn’t the dog bark?
That’s how the real world works, sad as it can be to see them grow up. Logic overcomes belief. Otherwise you’d be 45 and still wondering why Santa didn’t eat the cookies you left out.
The bad news is that magic is back, at least in terms of politics. And it isn’t the good kind, the one that makes holiday marshmallow memories. It’s the bad kind, which turns rational people into blithering idiots ready to believe anything that supports their point of view. Accusations become evidence, for impeachment or harassment or Islamophobia or a society gone white nationalist wild, and the more accusations, the stronger the evidence seems to be. Simply filling a bus with people claiming without evidence that someone did something should mean nothing, but it now means more than ever.
So even as the hive mind agrees that a flippant remark is “demanding foreign intervention” or “a national security threat,” or that an investigation is “interference in our democracy,” or with even less evidence that Trump is a Russian agent, Tulsi a Russian plant, Facebook a Russian tool, Jill Stein a Russian something or other, it does not make it true. Adding “-gate” to a noun does not create a crime. Believing a phone call is bribery, or a tweet is witness intimidation, does not negate the need for the law degree that allows you to use those words accurately. This is about the law, not about writing marketing copy. And kids, I’m sorry, I know how much you wanted to believe in the elves, but it really was Mom and me buying the presents all those years.
It is sadly no surprise that the one semi-favorable witness Democrats allowed to testify at the Impeachment Gladiatorial Thanksgiving Spectacle, Gordon Sondland, was soon accused of misconduct by not one but three women (so it has to be true). The alleged incidents took place years ago, there were no witnesses or physical evidence, and none of the women found reason to bring the accusations forward until Sondland emerged as a possible weak point in the Dems’ case against Trump. What they said is fully and forever unprovable, and can only be “believed” because anyone who supports Trump must be on the naughty list.
Watching those accusations front-paged by a believing media, and with memories of the ugly Kavanaugh confirmation still fresh, one can only view Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s deteriorating health with concern. We all know that whomever Trump nominates as the Ghost of Christmas Past’s replacement will be accused of terrible things. For a male nominee, it will be more sexual harassment incidents than Jack the Ripper. For a female, something “racist” she wrote in junior high. And that doesn’t even include the hidden horrors in their taxes, decisions from their days on the traffic court bench, and so on. It is as inevitable as Santa’s yearly visit…”
USA Today:
41% support
56% oppose
Independents oppose by 11 points
Quinnipiac:
45% support
51% oppose
Independents oppose by 22 points, 58-36
Anthony McAuliffe was the acting commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Bastogne, Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge.
Coup plotters Brennan and Clapper push the dossier…https://t.co/6JN77jSJCa
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) December 17, 2019
Horowitz did NOT actually make a judgement about ‘proper motive’ by dirty FBI agents, despite the media refrain. He also mentions that Comey refused to sit for an interview with Horowitz to discuss any classified matters, then quickly pivots and says ‘but Durham doesn’t have that problem. He can compel testimony.’
Conrad Black:
“…the substantial detachment of the United Kingdom from an integrated Europe so it may retain the primacy of the political institutions and the legal system it has developed over many centuries, and align itself, implicitly, more closely to its senior Commonwealth associates, Canada and Australia, as well as to its sometime senior partner in the modern world’s greatest crises, the United States, is a geostrategic development of the first importance…
…Americans generally favored the progressive federalization of Europe towards a single continental state, at first to strengthen it against the temptations and occasional outright threats of Soviet Communism, and eventually, when that threat had dissolved, as a strong ally in the advance of the general Western interest in the whole world. These were reasonable conceptions, but few American officials—and essentially only the senior echelons of the Nixon, Reagan, and Trump administrations—recognized the extent to which a united Europe was in some measure an anti-American enterprise….
…Europe can scarcely deny that it desperately needed the intervention of the United States to defeat the Nazis and fascists, and very few would dispute the utility of the American alliance in deterring Soviet aggression against Western Europe during the Cold War. But…There was always some condescension to the United States in the European idea, and after the Cold War ended, a good deal of resentful rivalry as well…
…German Chancellor Angela Merkel could have been the first German leader to govern Germany responsibly as Europe’s strongest nation since Bismarck. Wilhelm II and Hitler pushed the world into terrible wars, (and the Third Reich committed unimaginable genocidal atrocities), and the distinguished statesmen of divided Germany, especially Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, were leading a truncated state with approximately 1 million members of the armed forces of its former enemies encamped in East and West Germany. Instead of seizing that opportunity, Chancellor Merkel has admitted over 1 million desperate fugitives from unassimilable and backward cultures, shut down Germany’s nuclear program and made her country an energy vassal of Putin’s Russian paper tiger, has reduced her country’s military to a token, and squandered her Christian Democrats’ ability to assure stable government.
Germany is a mute effigy of the third or fourth power in the world that it should be, and is overtly somewhat hostile to the United States, from whose hand it was fed for half a century. President Truman protected West Berlin just three years after the death of Hitler a block from the Brandenburg Gate; President Eisenhower brought West Germany into the Western Alliance over the objections of France and the misgivings of Britain. Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush were instrumental in Germany’s reunification.
France has the opposite problem to Germany’s: it is too active and intrusive for the power it possesses.
France has seen the movement to a federal European Union as a method for the enhancement of French influence in Europe. It twice vetoed British entry, schemed to encourage French Canada to secede from Canada, opposed almost every foreign policy the United States has undertaken in 60 years, particularly direct negotiations with the USSR, and today is trying to set itself at the head of a neutralist officially French-speaking, post-British Europe. This is the point of the British election: the Europeans are stagnant and unreliable, arm-flapping moralists waffling and posturing and without political will. Britain’s exit is the loss of their second economy, most distinguished nationality, and it is emancipating itself from the dead hand of Eurosocialism as it rejected the Neanderthal Corbyn version of it at home. It is, moreover, setting a parallel course with its natural and historic allies…
…In a word, the hackneyed nonsense of recent decades about the post-Reagan-Thatcher decline of the Anglo-Saxons—beloved of the Chinese, French, Russians, Arabs, and Iranians—is shown, yet again in modern history to be bunk. Three of the G-7 are now floating together and the EU has suffered a loss as great as the loss of all the Pacific Coast states would be to America….
…Johnson has, like Trump, fashioned an alliance of traditional conservatives with angry lower-middle class and blue-collar workers who resented the elites. His flamboyant personality can be pitched to such a wide following but he will have to make Brexit work economically.
Like the dire threats of economic calamity with a Trump victory, Project Fear, a farrago of blood-curdling Jeremiads from treasury and central bank officials about post-Brexit gloom, will prove to be just hot air. As in Elizabethan times (16th-17th centuries), under Walpole and Pitt (18th century) and under Palmerston and Disraeli (19th century), Britain has again chosen immersion in blue water rather than Europe. They are right again and the United States will benefit from it.
On his first meeting with a British leader, Theresa May, President Trump said, “a strong and independent Britain is a treasure to the world.” The times and personalities are vastly different but the geopolitical realities are not so much changed: Trump and Johnson should get on as well and benignly as did Roosevelt and Churchill and Reagan and Thatcher…”
Charles Hurt:
“…At some point you start to wonder if just maybe the system isn’t rigged against us.
I mean, how many times do the good folks of the United Kingdom have to vote to quit the European Union before they are actually allowed the hell out of the international racket?
In 2016, they stunned the globalist cartel by declaring independence. Ever since, globalist kleptocrats in the U.K. and abroad have been hand-wringing and making all sorts of excuses about how voters did not really mean it when they said they wanted a divorce from Olde Europe.
In the nearly four years since, U.K. voters have had to cast ballots again and again to make clear that “go” really means “go.” They ousted one prime minister who could not make the exit. They voted in a new one who said he could.
And then they voted again last week to give Prime Minister Boris Johnson the biggest conservative victory since Margaret Thatcher in 1987 so that he can once and for all get them the hell out of Rhineland. Or Brussels. Whatever.
Does this sound familiar?
Of course, it does. Because it is the same electoral shell game we the voting dupes on this side of the Atlantic have been playing for nearly the past four years.
In 2016, Americans cast the ultimate “throw all the bums out” ballot by voting for Donald Trump. And yet, here we are less than one year before the next election and we are still being told why Donald Trump isn’t really president.
Unpresidential. Illegitimate. Imposter.
Impolitic. Exactly!
That was just the first of a thousand coups they launched.
After all the screaming and squalling and caterwauling, they sent the feds after him.
They illegally spied on his campaign. They cooked up evidence against him. They rounded up any of his associates they could find and threw them in prison. Literally. (These are the tricks of a police state, not a democracy.)
Then they brought in one of their most fearsome federal agents to orchestrate a sprawling investigation with unlimited resources. Every bit of it, of course, paid for by you, the silly schmucks who voted for Donald Trump in the first place.
After two years of running down every rabbit hole between here and Siberia, the great federal prosecutor came in from the cold. Empty-handed. The once-vaunted G-man was turned to mud after he proved incapable of taking out President Trump.
Suddenly realizing they were stuck between a rock and an election, Democrats in Congress decided to take matters into their own hands. Just too important to leave to stupid voters next November.
Bogus charges. Sham investigation. Circus hearings. Rushed impeachment.
The result is the most hotly partisan, half-baked, nakedly political impeachment in American history…”
Dominick Mastrangelo:
“…Local leaders in a southwest Virginia county have approved a resolution placing emphasis on citizens’ rights to form a militia and disavowing gun control measures expected to pass through the state legislature next year.
The Board of Supervisors in Tazewell County approved on Dec. 3 two resolutions according to local television station WJHL.
The first resolution declared the county a “Second Amendment Sanctuary,” mirroring an effort displayed by several other local municipalities fearful of strict gun control measures that could be handed down from the Democratically-controlled state government in Richmond.
That amended says the county would not devote county funds to “any effort that would infringe upon its citizens’ Second Amendment rights.”
The second resolution emphasized “the right to a well-funded and regulated militia described in the U.S. Constitution and Commonwealth’s constitution,” the TV station reported.
Board supervisors said the resolution would allow the county to intervene in any measure from another form of government that would infringe on county residents’ Second Amendment rights, though it is unclear how such a protection would be granted.’…”
Victor Davis Hanson:
“…When a party, an ideological movement, and an entire political agenda is based on hatred, people and policies become warped. The left-wing loathing of Trump has now tainted almost every Democrat’s agenda and unhinged most of the party’s major players…
…Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report proved a compendium of FBI lying, fraud, and vendetta. There is not a single prominent figure in Horowitz’s lengthy report who has not left a written or video trail of anti-Trump bias (James Comey, Peter Strozk, the Ohrs, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith) or has had some sort of questionable financial relationship with the Clintons or their affiliates (Alexander Downer, Andrew McCabe).
Meanwhile, the progressive presidential field is in a sort of collective meltdown, as candidates begin recalibrating and trading accusations as they fear their own early anti-Trump agendas have little public support…
…the common denominator in all these catastrophes is an existential hatred of Donald Trump—his person, his family, his successes, his agenda, and his supporters. The two writs for impeachment are simply: 1) We loathe Trump 2) He will sabotage our agenda if we don’t impeach and remove him…
…Horowitz’s report on FISA abuse, neatly summarized in Appendix 1 with the FBI response in Appendix 2, is a litany of FBI deceit. The bureau’s lawyers and agents altered documents, withheld and misrepresented evidence before a FISA court, peddled an unverified opposition research dossier among government and the media, sought to deprive Carter Page of his constitutional rights, and engaged in character assassination of his person—and we have not yet heard from federal prosecutors investigating these and other misbehaviors.
The Horowitz report is simply the endnote to three years of rank criminality that have led to the firings, retirements, reassignments, and demotions of most of the FBI’s top Washington echelon: James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, William Priestap, James Rybicki, James Baker, along with Josh Campbell, James Turgal, Greg Bower, Michael Steinbach, John Giacalone, and Kevin Clinesmith. Comey, McCabe, and Clinesmith were criminally referred to the Justice Department by various inspector general reports, respectively for leaking, deceiving federal investigators, and altering a document presented to a FISA court.
Page and Strzok were both fired from the Mueller investigation. Their texts—including, one assumes, an entire corpus of exchanges that remains missing and was apparently destroyed by FBI employees—are a repository of conflicts of interest, unprofessionalism, and unadulterated hatred of Trump and his supporters. Clinesmith, who likely committed a felony by doctoring an email submitted to a FISA court, openly cheered on “le (sic) resistance.”…
…Comey likely would have been guilty of a felony for leaking such secret government documents had not a team of FBI cronies, including Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, retroactively classified his leaked presidential memos as “confidential” rather than feloniously “secret.”
The FBI deliberately leaked false information to Yahoo News apparently to rush the dossier’s lies into the public domain before the 2016 election. The FBI used at least four undercover sources who were recording conversations with unsuspecting targets. It edited or ignored exonerating written memos about FBI questioning of suspects like Michael Flynn. James Comey confessed that his certainty that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election had massaged the way he conducted his exoneration of the Clinton email scandal. Thanks to the FBI, the reputation of the FISA court has been stained to the point that some in Congress are calling for its suspension.
A suddenly amnesiac Comey on over 245 occasions under oath said he could not recall or did not know when asked direct questions by House members. He lied about not knowing that the dossier was unverified. He lied when he said there was other key evidence presented to a FISA court beside the dossier. He lied when he said the FBI had followed procedures in applying for FISA writs to surveil Carter Page…
…If Adam Schiff were a private citizen, he likely would have been indicted by now, too. He serially lied throughout the Mueller investigation by falsely announcing impending bombshells and indictments, based on his supposed exclusive knowledge of damning classified information.
Schiff hijacked the impeachment inquiry and rigged the rules of examination by holding hearings in secrecy in the House basement, characterized by threats to Republican colleagues not to leak incriminating cross-examinations of witnesses, even as initial exculpatory statements were leaked to the press.
Schiff lied when he read into the congressional record a “version” of the transcript of the Trump Ukrainian phone call that was full of errors and fantasies. When caught in his deceit, he pleaded it was a “parody.”
Schiff lied about the circumstances of the so-called whistleblower. Schiff never called him as a witness as promised. He lied about the whistleblower’s relationship with his own staff. He lied about the timeline, contacts, and trajectory of the whistleblower’s journey from his own office to the filing of a complaint with the inspector general. And he probably lied about his own supposed ignorance of the whistleblower’s identity—evident when he stopped congressional questioning of Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman on grounds that it would expose the whistleblower’s identity.
Schiff’s minority House Intelligence Committee final report was full of untruths. The Horowitz report exposed them by demonstrating that Schiff lied when he wrote that the Steele dossier was not central to requests to a FISA court, that the dossier was verified, that the FBI did not omit key information to the court, and that Carter Page’s testimonies were not misrepresented by the FBI.
Schiff may be the first known congressional representative to use his office to subpoena the phone records of his own colleagues, of journalists, and of a president’s personal attorney, and then to selectively publicize names from his huge trove of metadata in an attempt to embarrass his political enemies…
…The Democratic field’s reason to be is now the hatred of Trump. The Democratic debates so far have been characterized by two themes: 1) no candidate shall appear to the left of any other candidate 2) no candidate shall be outdone by any other in expressing hatred of Trump.
Such antipathies have translated into the most far-left Democratic agendas in modern memory: Medicare for all, health care for illegal aliens, the Green New Deal, open borders, a wealth tax, a 70-90 percent top income tax rate, slavery reparations, free college tuition, and late-term abortions if not permissible infanticide. None of these issues warrants 51 percent public support; all are the wages of Trump hatred.
Nihilism is the theme: abolish ICE! Abolish student debt! Abolish the Electoral College! Abolish border security! Abolish the idea of Medicare for seniors! These are the highbrow versions of left-wing street nihilism from toppling statues to wiping out murals and the names of buildings and streets.
The antipathy to Trump has unhinged the candidates themselves to the point that so-called prior moderate candidates (such as Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Corey Booker, Kamala Harris) either sought to shed their prior records and careers or went full socialist as in the case of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren…”