https://youtu.be/MdAyn89hFIo
This is why "Upchuck" Schumer is such a slime and sickens me.
And:
https://www.city-journal.org/
Just too good not to be re-posted. (See 1 below.)
Klavan on mass media scandals. (See 1a below.)
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Karen House, Google and The Saudis. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) HERE COMES THE DEMS’ NINETEENTH NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
After FISA memo, are leftists fearful of an approaching political reckoning?
By
To paraphrase a more recent song, it’s hard out there on a Dem. Staggered by Donald Trump’s unthinkable victory in the presidential election, Democrats have continued to be pummeled by the Trump’s tax reform, the supercharged economy, his withering tweet-scorn for them and their media flunkeys, their own failed government shut-down, and a rousing State of the Union address that raised his poll numbers and made the Democrat Congressmen in the audience look like pouting prom wallflowers.
And now comes the “Memo,” the House Intelligence Committee’s exposure of the slow-motion coup engineered by partisan FBI and DOJ functionaries, and other deep-state members of the “resistance.” Now it’s up to “we the people” to demand accountability from these abusers of the public trust and violators of the Constitution.
The intensity of the hysterical spin before and after the memo’s release has revealed the depths of anxiety over the chickens of corruption coming home to roost. Shrieks of “nuance” and “context” are desperate attempts to drown out the bad news. “How dare you!” protestations of the “professional integrity” and “sterling character” of political appointees and rank careerists in the intelligence agencies are pleas to the voters to pay no attention to the blue-state man behind the curtain.
Equally duplicitous as the Dems’ desperate misdirection is the squealing about damaging national security or intelligence gathering methods or vulnerable spies or the Constitution. But we know the FBI wanted to redact the names only to shield the possibly guilty men and women. None of the contents of the memo exposed intelligence-gathering techniques or undercover agents. And since when have progressives cared about the integrity of the Constitution? Where were they when their Messiah Obama, an alleged Constitutional scholar, trashed the Constitutional separation of powers and used an executive order to legislate the DACA program––something he said several times he couldn’t do because it was un-Constitutional?
All this caterwauling and bluster are an obvious misdirection away from the what the memo has revealed: compelling evidence that a cabal in the FBI and the DOJ––anxious to ensure a Hillary victory, and then determined to derail Trump’s presidency––used a flimsy, unverified Russian-manufactured “dossier” financed by Hillary Clinton and the DNC to get a FISA warrant to spy on a fringe member of the Trump campaign preposterously suspected of being an agent of a foreign government. They didn’t inform the court that the dossier was paid for by the political party opposed to Trump, nor did they tell the judge that their other pretext for a warrant comprised leaks to the media engineered by the same fabulist who created the dossier in the first place.
But larger issues are at stake here than the abuse by some in the intelligence agencies to serve partisan or careerist interests. This whole sordid business is a deep and dangerous attack on the foundations of our political order. The Constitution is based on a healthy fear of human nature and its subjection to the corruption of power that is known as tyranny–– “arbitrary power . . . which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No freeman willingly endures such a government,” as Aristotle defined it. This classic definition of tyranny lay behind the indictment of George III in the Declaration of Independence, which accused the king of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
Fearful of tyranny and its assault on political freedom, then, the Founders dispersed political power among the three branches of government, and between the federal government and the states. The scope of power is reduced, and checked by countervailing powers, all subject to accountability to the sovereign people through their elected officials. This is the structure that progressives starting in the late 19th century sought to dismantle, and that the current scandal undermines to serve ideology and personal interests at the expense of the sovereign people.
Take a further step back, and we see that the arrogance and power of the government agencies multiplied and expanded by progressives have created the opportunity for the abuse evident in the current scandal. It’s bad enough when the IRS or EPA––their mostly anonymous bureaucrats shielded from accountability to the people––usurp the political power of all three branches of government. Just ask the conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was delayed and subject to arbitrary barriers by IRS functionaries who were opposed to their politics.
But intelligence and law-enforcement government agencies can wield much greater power much more directly on private citizens. The power to surveil secretly American citizens, and to interrogate and indict them based on the secret intelligence the agencies have gathered, lends itself to even worse tyranny. We may not be at risk of torture, death, or endless incarceration, but our lives can be destroyed by the expense of defending ourselves, and our reputations ruined by indictments and convictions not for crimes, but for procedural missteps engineered by zealous prosecutors who, as the cliché goes, can indict a ham sandwich. Soft despotism is still despotism, an assault on our foundational freedoms.
Take the case of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was Dick Cheney’s assistant during the George Bush administration. He was caught in the ginned up “scandal” over the alleged outing of CIA analyst Valerie Plame, whose husband was a vocal critic of Bush’s rationale for the Iraq War, and hence a darling of the progressive media. Libby wasn’t convicted of revealing Plame’s name after a two-year investigation, but of questionable charges of “perjury” and “obstruction of justice.” Libby was punished even though the man who revealed Plame’s identity, and was known to the prosecutor, went free. Such injustice should infuriate anyone who prizes freedom.
Such prosecutorial abuse is the embodiment of tyranny as defined by Aristotle and the Founders. Hidden behind veils of secrecy, such inquisitions can use a power that is “arbitrary” and “responsible to no one.” Often the tool of partisan interests, given that so many wielders of this power are political appointees, this power is used “with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects.” The abuse of the FISA court unveiled by the House’s memo, and the investigation of “collusion” with Russia by Robert Mueller, both fit the paradigm of tyranny.
The Constitution, however, has given us our defense against this tyrannical power. Currently Congress is holding investigations to expose those responsible. The memo is just the first step in this process, and we are told it will be followed by others. And there are many more abuses to expose: Uranium One, the rapacious Clinton Foundation, Hillary’s private server and exposure of classified information, her pay-to-play State Department, the Obama administration’s blatant lies about the Benghazi attacks, James Comey and Loretta Lynch’s torpedoing of the investigation into Hillary’s server, Comey’s perjury and leaking of classified information––all need the disinfectant of sunlight provided by the sovereign people’s representatives in Congress.
More important, the abusers of power must be held to account. The DOJ must indict and prosecute all those responsible. We cannot continue to go through year after year of hearings that never end up punishing the guilty. The politicizing and weaponizing of the intrusive power of our intelligence agencies for partisan ends must be stopped, and the deterrence of prosecution created to concentrate the minds of those inclined to continue such abuses. It is intolerable to see a politician as corrupt as Hillary Clinton has been for over two decades profiting from her abuses, or an arrogant partisan careerist like James Comey issuing self-serving tweets, or a disappointed office-seeker like Robert Mueller assembling a partisan staff to weaken a duly elected president with rumor and innuendo.
In the end, though, it is “we the people” who must demand that their rights to equality under the law, and to accountability from those given such power, be respected. We must make it clear to the Attorney General, the President, and Congress that we hold the sovereignty, that we are the “guards of the guardian,” and that we will not let stand such abuse of their sovereignty. In short, we all must act in such a way that shows we are worthy of political freedom, and that as free men and women, we will not “willingly endure such a government.”
The Dems’ current nervous breakdown suggests that the reckoning may be getting closer, that the people will punish them in November for their shameless rationalizations for these abuses of power. So far, their desperate pleas to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” haven’t worked. Thanks to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes––who has doggedly weathered the calumny and sabotage of the two-bit Iago Adam Schiff and his media flying monkeys––we can see blue-state political and media minions twirling the dials and pulling the levers of their lies and misdirection. We may see that voters in November will not allow them to redraw the curtain.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and a Professor of Classics and Humanities at the California State University. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays on classical culture and its influence on Western Civilization. His most recent book, Democracy's Dangers and Discontents (Hoover Institution Press), is now available for purchase.
1a)
The Real FISA Scandal
A bill for eight years of willful media blindness is starting to come due.
Scandal is not an exact science. But on a scale of “nothing burger” (Bret Stephens of the New York Times) to “worse than Watergate” (GOP congressman Steve King), the information in the House Intelligence Committee FISA Memo comes in at about a solid seven. It now seems very likely the FBI and Department of Justice deceived a FISA court with an uncorroborated piece of Democrat-funded oppo research in order to obtain a warrant to spy on American citizen Carter Page. If, as seems reasonable to conjecture, the broader target turns out to have been the Donald Trump presidential campaign for which Page had recently worked, the needle on the scandal meter will begin to edge up into the red zone.
Let’s put it this way: if this sort of thing had gone on under President Trump or even George W. Bush, the Times would have announced the news in front-page headlines so large it would have taken two strong men just to carry the letters to the press room. An enormous collection of Times reportage on the subject—with a black cover and some title like “The Path to Tyranny”—would have been on the bookstore shelves within the month.
And yet mainstream journalism’s reaction to the memo has so diverged from its past practices—and indeed from the media’s usual narrative about its own heroic role in our republic—that it constitutes a sort of meta-scandal within the scandal that in some ways is more dispiriting than the FISA scandal itself.
America’s news centers—from 42nd Street in Manhattan all the way to 57th Street in Manhattan—did everything within their power to suppress, taint, and minimize the impact of the memo, even before they knew what was in it. “President Trump’s assault on the nation’s law enforcement apparatus is unlike anything America has seen in modern times,” wailed a Times “analysis” (the paper’s term of art for front-page editorializing). “The memo is the most explicit Republican effort yet to discredit the FBI’s investigation into Trump and Russia,” reports CNN, increasingly the most trusted name in hysteria.
One CNN commentator—former CIA guy Phil Mudd—actually threatened that the memo would set off a vendetta by the Deep State against our elected president: “So the FBI people, I’m going to tell you, are ticked. And they’re going to be saying . . . If you think you can push us off this because you think you can intimidate the director, you’d better think again, Mr. President. You’ve been around for 13 months. We’ve been around since 1908. I know how this game is going to be played. We’re going to win.” It was almost as if Mudd were channeling The Onion’s satirical headline: “FBI Warns Republican Memo Could Undermine Faith in Massive, Unaccountable Government Secret Agencies.”
All this comes after a solid year of media whining about Trump’s criticism of their biased and dishonest coverage of his presidency. The general idea, in the words of one Times op-ed writer, is that “the unrelenting attacks on the news media damage American democracy.”
But is it Trump who is doing the damage? After all, those of us who still go to the movies have just sat through Steven Spielberg’s The Post, a two-hour left-wing talking point about how brave The Washington Post was when it defied President Nixon’s concerns over national security in order to expose government malfeasance by publishing the Pentagon Papers. Yet now—even before the FISA memo was published—news outlets, including both CBS and NBC, were highlighting and giving credence to dire warnings that the FISA memo would damage national security and, channeling The Onion again, undermine trust in unchecked law enforcement. After decades of listening to leftists screech about J. Edgar Hoover’s unjustified wiretapping, we are suddenly told to believe that a little unjustified FBI wiretapping now and again is a “nothingburger.”
In short, a press that should on principle raven for every piece of information that might be damning to the powerful of every stripe—a press that has shown itself willing to publish anonymous anti-Trump leaks that sometimes turned out to be false—has made it clear that they do not want you to know what they do not want to know themselves.
The truth is both the memo itself and the press’s unforgivable lack of curiosity and outrage about the memo are part of a much bigger scandal that has gone further to damage our republic than anything Trump has done or said. The memo represents just one more jigsaw piece in a picture of the Obama administration as a Chicago-style Democratic machine rife with cronyism and abuse of power, a machine to which the media closed its eyes.
We know this. It’s not conjecture. We know that Obama’s IRS made successful efforts to silence conservative voices during the president’s reelection campaign. After a settlement agreement in Z Street’s lawsuit against them, we know that the IRS also targeted Jewish groups that supported Israel. We know that Obama appointed one attorney general who styled himself the president’s “wing-man . . . there with my boy” (imagine Jeff Sessions saying that), and another who held a secret meeting with Bill Clinton while Hillary Clinton was under investigation. And now we begin to learn that the Obama Justice Department may have colluded with a Democrat’s campaign to spy on a Republican’s. Obama misled us about much of this and more: about the IRS; about when he himself gained knowledge of Hillary’s secret email server, a server he used under a pseudonym; about his secret dealings with Iran; and about the effects of his signature health-care bill.
All this—really a steady stream of deceptions and abuses of power—while journalists kowtowed to, flattered, and ultimately raved about the administration being “scandal-free.” The press sacrificed its credibility with eight years of willful blindness. Those who asked with the ancient Roman poet Juvenal, “Who will guard the guardians?” were answered by the self-styled heroes of journalistic truth-telling: “Not us.”
That’s the real scandal here, and it’s beginning to come out.
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2) Saudi Reforms Get a Boost From Google
Alphabet’s interest in the kingdom is a signal that Crown Prince Mohammed is serious about change.
By
Since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced his intention to transform this country nearly two years ago, Saudis and foreigners alike have questioned whether he is serious or merely enjoying power. The time for doubt is over. Last week’s news that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is in talks to build a tech hub in the kingdom is only the latest sign. Look for more such initiatives when the crown prince visits the U.S. in early March.
Whatever one may think about Saudi Arabia or its new young strongman, there is no longer any dispute as to his resolve. Prince Mohammed is determined not just to reform the country but to wrench Saudis out of a 30-year torpor that he rightly sees as inexorably leading them toward poverty and instability. The radical change he is imposing isn’t a choice: It is the only choice.
He has inherited a nation of 22 million spoiled children, each of whom wants a cushy life in the national nursery that oil-rich Saudi Arabia used to be. But with crude oil crashing to $26 a barrel in 2016—and even now at almost $70 a barrel—Riyadh can no longer afford the pacifiers to tranquilize its population, not to mention the 10 million foreign workers who have tended to Saudi citizens’ every need.
Prince Mohammed’s Saudi Vision 2030 is a push away from dependence on government and toward self-reliance. To jump-start the transformation, he has instituted social changes no one could have imagined only a few years ago: Saudis are now free to attend concerts and cinemas, and in June women will be driving, all of which were previously forbidden by religious authorities backed by royal rulers.
More significantly, Prince Mohammed has rounded up prominent people accused of financial corruption—royal cousins, cabinet ministers, businessmen—and forced them to turn over what the government says will be $106 billion in exchange for their freedom.
These are shocking tactics in a country accustomed to royal rule through laborious consensus-building among the senior princes. But the truth is that most of these senior princes are now dead. More to the point, that unwieldy method of governance failed for 30 years to wean the country off oil dependence, despite repeated commitments to that end. Prince Mohammed knows the folly of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Almost since the founding of modern Saudi Arabia in 1932, its stability has rested on three pillars: unity among the royals, their symbiotic cooperation with the Wahhabi religious establishment, and oil wealth. The new crown prince has upended each of these pillars—arresting and humiliating his royal relatives, insisting on moderate Islam and a more open society, and imposing high taxes on the cheap oil that Saudis regard as their birthright.
During my January visit, Saudis were in shock at the social, political and economic changes. In a single week last month, electricity prices tripled, gasoline prices doubled (to roughly $2 a gallon), and the first-ever value added tax, of 5%, was imposed. If asked Ronald Reagan’s famous 1980 debate question—“Are you better off than four years ago?”—almost all Saudis over 30 would say “no.”
The arrests of elite princes and businessmen, as well as conservative religious sheikhs, have chilled older Saudis. During my visit, more than one old acquaintance declined to meet me for “health” reasons and other polite excuses. But Prince Mohammed’s constituency is not the royal family or the religious sheikhs. It’s the 70% of Saudis who are under 30. He essentially is playing generational Robin Hood—taking from the elite who for decades helped themselves to the nation’s oil revenues, while freeing the young from the smothering hand of Wahhabi sheikhs who sapped Saudi initiative by controlling every aspect of daily life. The crown prince clearly hopes that if citizens are allowed to manage their lives, they will take responsibility for their livelihoods.
This is a brave gamble, but without significant change Saudi Arabia’s future looks dark. The economy is growing more slowly than the population. Domestic oil consumption is rising nearly 6% a year, a trend that would leave Saudis consuming all the Kingdom’s oil production—with none left for export—by 2030. The economy shrank 0.5% last year and is estimated to grow only 1.6% in 2018, according to the International Monetary Fund, though the Saudi government projects faster growth of 2.7%. The official unemployment figure is 12.7% nationally, but it’s nearly double that for men between 20 and 29 and 33% for young women in that age group.
Prince Mohammad’s economic transformation represents a huge task. If that isn’t enough, he also confronts a hegemonic and meddling Iran, a feud with Qatar, and a war in Yemen. Knowing the price Saudi Arabia has paid for decades of dithering, the crown prince has dared to impose rapid top-down change. Inevitably he will make some mistakes. Those he can repair. More troublesome is that some Westerners whose investment and support he seeks may insist on seeing Saudi Arabia as stuck like a fossil in its past Wahhabism and limited personal freedoms. While the Saudis are far from perfect on human rights, the West should acknowledge that the recent progress is real.
The biggest risk remains the economy: It is far from clear that Prince Mohammed can transform the country fast enough to meet the pent-up ambitions of young Saudis. The West has a stake in doing what it can to assure his success. A collapse that turns Saudi Arabia into another chaotic Iraq or theocratic Iran would be a disaster for the region and the world. Right now, the young prince with his agenda for radical change is Saudi Arabia’s best, and probably only, shot at moderate—and modernizing—reform.
Ms. House, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is author of “On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines—and Future” ( Knopf, 2012).
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