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Stephen B. Presser:
“…Nevertheless, we are quite likely soon to witness the most important revelations that, as the president has maintained, he has been the wrongful victim of a witch hunt, of a manufactured conspiracy, of an attempt to frame and discredit him by officials of the Obama administration. This is the expected outcome of the report coming soon from the DOJ’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, who is likely to report that criminal acts were performed in the original surveillance of the president and his aides on fabricated evidence of Russian involvement in his campaign.
This report, coupled with the recent transformation of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s inquiry into the beginnings of that surveillance into a criminal investigation, is, according to some astute observers, likely finally to result in grand jury indictments and trials of some senior officials, and may turn out to be the greatest political scandal of our era.
Even when this happens, however, and even if many independent and objective observers become convinced that great wrongs were perpetrated against this president, his most rabid detractors are likely to be unmoved. His principal tormentors, Congressmen Adam Schiff and Jerold Nadler, with exquisite chutzpah, have already denounced Durham’s investigation and Attorney General Bill Barr’s similar efforts, as a wrongful politicization of our criminal law.
What could account for such spectacular hypocrisy or, to be a bit kinder, such obduracy on the part of the Democrats? I have sought to argue here that what is going on is an ideological battle, one where reality is colored by cultural preferences, where one sees only what one wants to see, and where, given the now clear lines drawn between conservatives and liberals on charged matters such as race, religion, abortion, gender, wealth redistribution, and regulation, political compromise seems impossible.
And yet — if it is true that partisans in the Obama administration flagrantly and wrongly twisted the law to serve their own selfish political ends, perhaps this sorry episode will offer an opportunity for the nation to make a long-overdue renewal of commitment to the rule of law and the Constitution itself.
For too long all three branches of our government have been rejecting prior precedent, and have been making up law, policy, and procedure out of whole cloth, and the same has been true in many of our administrative agencies — the bureaucracy and the “deep state,” so much lamented by Mr. Trump.
All of this has led to the arbitrary actions most feared by our framers, an alarming loss of state and local political power, and a concomitant failure of local governance, as many of our cities become increasingly unlivable.
If the revelations of wrongdoing are as dramatic as expected, they just might shock Americans into realizing that the 2020 elections ought to be about returning this country to more honest, and, perhaps, more modest federal government, and restoring the original Constitutional doctrines of federalism and separation of powers…”
ANDREW T. WALKER:
“…On Friday, anyone with a pulse would have seen the news of the release of Kanye West’s newest album, Jesus Is King. It comes after months of news stories about West’s very public conversion to Christianity, a Christianity that bears no resemblance to the vague spiritualism of Moral Therapeutic Deism that is often associated with celebrity conversions.
The lyrics to each song in Jesus Is King are shockingly Christian. It is not an album of feel-good Christian spirituality aimed primarily as a message of uplift. West co-wrote and sang the hit “Jesus Walks” on his debut album The College Dropout (2004), but Jesus Is King is different. Throughout the whole of the new album, West is in many respects deeply critical of modernity and cultural progressivism. There are calls for a focus more on the family than on individual glory. He seems to applaud Chick-fil-A, which in our age is tantamount to endorsing bigotry. Social-media obsession should be exchanged for family prayer. Fatherhood is characterized as a virtue. Materialism is pilloried. Calls for worshiping Christ redound to such effect that West’s first Christian album is arguably more Christian than what most contemporary Christian artists could similarly muster.
But in the media rollout of West’s album, it’s worth paying attention to other statements he’s made. He’s criticized abortion and believes that the African-American community is getting played by Democrats. He remains defiant in the face of political correctness. A man of evolving identities who has struggled with mental illness in his past, he told Zane Lowe during a two-hour long Beats 1 interview that during the planning of the album, he insisted that those around him fast and abstain from premarital sex. In the interview with Lowe, West has the anthropology of C. S. Lewis, the economics of Wilhelm Röpke, the cultural mood of Wendell Berry, and the defiance of Francis Schaeffer. In Jesus Is King and in interviews, we see a Kanye West upholding what Russell Kirk referred to as the Permanent Things.
He’s rejecting the hyper-sexualization of culture that he admitted he helped create. In an ode to the Niebuhrian Christ-and-culture typology, he said he’s now living his life for Christ and ostensibly against culture.
In a word, Kanye West is now a cultural reactionary by the standards of our society, and could be, in time, a cultural wrecking ball that dislodges so much of the assumed, comfortable, and unchecked cultural liberalism that dominates the most elite sectors of our country and mocks anything resembling traditionalism and social conservatism. In an age of libertarian sentiment, when the currency of American society appear to be glamorization and the notion that consent is the only reasonable moral standard, West is calling for restraint and limits…”
Brian C. Joondeph:
“…Democrats and their media propaganda arm have been telling us since President Trump took office that “The walls are closing in.” First it was the Mueller investigation, then every fake news story from the media, from Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen being in Prague to Don Jr. calling his father about the Trump Tower entrapment meeting with some Russians.
Every “bombshell” revelation about Stormy Daniels or Omarosa meant that “the walls are closing in.” Mueller’s report, despite the best efforts of Andrew Weissman and his merry band of partisans, was a dud. As was the Ukraine phone call, with whistleblowers and Rep. Adam Schiff, perhaps one and the same, contradicted by the actual call transcript which Trump released.
For a humorous walk down memory lane, watch this YouTube montage of Democrat and #NeverTrump stooges telling their shrinking cable news audiences repeatedly that, “The walls are closing in” on President Trump.
Other oft-repeated phrases were, “This is the beginning of the end” and “It’s a tipping point” as this montage reminds us, with every bit of news described as “a bombshell.” It seems the entire U.S. media receives its talking points from a single source, as they all sound the same and use the exact same words or expressions. The original JournoList may be defunct, but media collusion is alive and well…
…Lots of walls are closing in, but not on President Trump. The reckoning may now be underway as the Storm blows into Washington, D.C., heralded by Trump’s Lone Ranger and Tonto, Barr and Durham. Obama and his deep state players are on the Edmund Fitzgerald, when the gales of November come early…”
Victor Davis Hanson:
“…Shouldn’t Hillary Clinton also take the MoCa Test? At times she seems completely delusional—or is she a bit unhinged?
In one of the strangest paradoxes in American history, Clinton apparently does not accept or cannot remember that she hired Christopher Steele, a foreign national, through the use of three deceptive firewalls—the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS—in order to smear candidate Trump from bought Russian sources. She also simply will not admit that other campaign aides in 2016 were working to get dirt on Trump as well from disgruntled Ukrainians.
While fleeing from this reality, she had concocted a fantasy that Donald Trump won the Electoral College not because her hare-brained campaign team sent her southward to win a “mandate” by flipping unflippable red-states Georgia and Arizona, while neglecting a supposedly secure blue wall in the north.
Now she apparently believes an erstwhile, post-election ally, third-candidate leftist Jill Stein, was a Russian “asset” used by Moscow to draw votes from her candidacy, while current Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard likewise is in the de facto service of the Russians. Who knew that outsiders Trump, Stein, and Gabbard were all Russian moles variously working against Hillary’s interests?
And all this from Hillary Clinton, who inaugurated the 2009 disastrous Russian appeasement scheme known as “reset” by pushing a red plastic Jacuzzi button in Geneva, and who was instrumental in green-lighting North American uranium sales to Russian interests, which interests through third parties had donated to her foundation and indirectly paid Russians to interfere in the 2016 election to destroy her opponent?…”
UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY, COMRADES:
“Governor Newsom Announces New Partnerships and Tools to Help California’s Most Vulnerable Residents During Power Shutoffs… New resource guide outlines resources available for those in de-energization areas.”
Or to translate the phrase “de-energization areas” back into English: PG&E Shuts Power to 2.8 Million Californians as Fires Burn.
Found via Seth Mandel of the Washington Examiner, who tweets, “A giant state bordering the ocean keeps running out of water so I’m not surprised it also runs out of electricity. What I find incredible is the humiliating Orwellianism of calling ‘de-energization’ for ‘vulnerable populations’ what is actually ‘shutting off poor people’s power.’”
Related: San Jose Proposes Leaving PG&E And Creating It’s Own Public Utility.
Fake but accurate. That is the standard, right?
Roger Kimball:
“…James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence and now one of his spokesmen on CNN, was asked whether he was concerned that the investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia hoax (my term, not the interlocutor’s) might implicate senior members of the so-called intelligence community, i.e., chaps like James Clapper.
Clapper’s response was revealing, not to say hilarious. Remember, the question is: Are you “concerned” (i.e., worried, anxious) about the investigation overseen by Attorney General Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham.
Clapper’s multipart answer: I don’t think there was any wrongdoing; I was just trying to help the country; if there was wrongdoing, it was not my fault; I was just following orders.
Ipse dixit: “I don’t think there was any wrongdoing.”
“All of us were trying to navigate a very, very difficult, politically fraught highly charged situation.”
“For my part, my main concern was the Russians, and the threat posed by the Russians to our very political fabric.”
The “message” he is getting from the controversy is that we should “ignore the Russian interference and meddling and the threat that it poses.” (Read: “Don’t blame me,” he seems to say, “if the Russkie’s take over.”)
Big takeaway: it is “disconcerting” now to be “investigated for doing our duty, what we were told to do by the president.”
And exactly what were they doing? Investigating a candidate, President-elect Trump, with the end, said Clapper, of preparing a big, comprehensive report for Congress and “the next administration.”
You see that James Clapper, despite appearances to the contrary, does have a wry sense of humor. He can say with a straight face that the covert investigation aimed at destroying Donald Trump was actually an investigation intended at least in part for the incoming Trump administration.
Yuck, yuck, yuck. What a card!
But note that Clapper, funny though he was, was not himself laughing. I don’t blame him. The spook-turned-media-lap-dog is as much in the crosshairs as anyone, except perhaps another spook-turned-media-lap-dog, former CIA director and Gus Hall voter John Brennan, who now lends his authoritative anti-Trump commentary to MSNBC…”
Clarice Feldman provides some good commentary on current events including the apparent framing of General Flynn by the FBI and weakness in the Republican ranks. Republican weakness is relatively limited and focused in the places you can probably guess. Worth clicking over for her interesting analysis.
