Just Think Independently Based on Sound Reasoning and Solid Information. Cast of Characters: Tillerson, Comey, Mueller

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I use cartoons and articles to challenge my memo readers to think independently, to refute the hypocrisy we are drowning in and to, hopefully, bring light where there is darkness and lock stepped thinking void of reasoning.

I do not claim that all I post is necessarily correct or that my own thinking should prevail but conservatism does suggest one proceed with caution before replacing what works with something "new and improved." Conservatism also requires we pay for what we want.  That is a curb on greed and excess.  Our deficits are going to crush us one day as more wealth creation will go to  government to pay the interest on our mounting debt. Government basically produces nothing but misery.

I am a skeptic and pessimist because I have met too many optimists.

I also believe the dumbing down of education is at the root of one of the greatest threats to our republic and what is taking place on college and university campuses today is tragic and dangerous.

Thus I urge my readers to read this re-posted book review (See 1 below.)

Then see the posting below and think about what we are doing to our nation by disregarding enforcement of our immigration laws and the danger posed  to our nation by allowing open borders, sanctuary cities and homeless populations to shape our cities etc.. (See 1a below.)

And if that is not enough to concern you think about this.

The former head of The FBI, who remembered enough to write a book, could not respond to over 200 questions because he could not remember, did not know or sought to be purposely evasive. etc.

It is interesting when so many high profile government employees cannot remember diddly squat when it comes to something that reveals their own potential skulduggery. However, they can remember the smallest detail when it comes to nailing an antagonist/adversary. Particularly this has been an increasing fact for Democrats seeking to "character assassinate" some one from the opposite party.

Comey will continue to receive his pension, will go free even though he has allegedly lied and possibly broken several criminal laws. 

No wonder  so many Americans have concluded there are  two sets of  jurisprudence- one for you and me, the other for "establishment types." (See 1b and 1c below.)

Finally, I wonder what Trump was thinking as he attended the ceremony for 41 in D.C?  Was he wondering how history would judge him and his presidency?  Would Trump conclude the mass media, which attacked 41 for being a "lap dog" and now were falling all over him and his history, would do the same at his own funeral or post presidency phase?

Is it possible 41's funeral had any impact on Trump which might soften his style, make him less combative?

The attack by Tillerson may include aspects of truth but for him to do what he did reflects poorly on Tillerson.  Then Trump unloaded all four barrels and I have to conclude 41's funeral had no effect at all.
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Wrap it up Mr. Mueller. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)Consider this as you see your children or grandchildren go off to college.

A review of Heather MacDonald’s excellent new book: The Diversity Delusion in the Claremont Review of Books, one of the few essential journals worth reading in its entirety. 

Justice Lewis Powell evidently thought that his opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) struck a compromise that offered something to both sides in the debate over racial preferences in college admissions: one side got a ban on quotas and explicit racial preferences, while the other got individual admission decisions that could take into account the desirability of a diverse incoming class. When academia immediately began to use Powell’s concept of diversity as a cover for the racial quotas he thought he had banned, it was clear that he had badly miscalculated. But it took somewhat longer for a much more dangerous consequence of his ruling to emerge. While the argument over college admissions was conducted using the language of racial quotas and preferences, the pro-quota side was at a disadvantage: those words were unpopular and obviously clashed with the language of the Constitution. But Powell had unwittingly made it possible to replace those rather squalid words with an attractive concept that was to become much more than a convenient euphemism: it came to serve as the proud banner for what could now be portrayed as a noble crusade. “Diversity” in effect allowed identity politics to seize the moral high ground.

Until about 1980, speeches by university presidents harped obsessively on “excellence.” Powell’s concept changed that. “Excellence” was replaced by “diversity,” now the new guiding light of the academy. The newer concept’s altruistic aura allowed dissent of any kind to be stigmatized as moral failure, a mean-spirited refusal to join the great crusade. Meanwhile this appearance of high moral purpose helpfully deflected attention from the ruthless elimination of real diversity—diversity of opinion—that was happening at the same time. Because it was the means by which identity politics was placed at the center of the campus agenda, smoothly and even with aplomb, “diversity” was probably the single most important factor in the radical Left’s takeover of academia.

* * *

Heather Mac Donald’s splendid new book is the first comprehensive look at how “diversity” has thoroughly corrupted the campuses since Bakke. The first two of the book’s four sections look at the impact of the two major aspects of identity politics: race and gender. The third deals with the damage done by the huge diversity bureaucracies that have developed, and the last with the corruption of campus curricula that “diversity” has brought about.

Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal, combines two strengths that don’t often go together: the meticulous, in-depth research of a hard-headed investigator, and the fluency and lucidity of a skilled journalist. The effect is one of a generally engaging and easygoing argument that can suddenly deploy an overwhelming firepower of facts and statistics whenever a critical juncture is reached where a key point needs to be settled once and for all. If you wondered whether police target black men more than whites, Mac Donald removes any doubt: they don’t. If you wondered whether Proposition 209, a 1996 effort to end affirmative action by amending the California state constitution, stopped the University of California from admitting minority students with test scores hugely below those of white students, she nails the point down conclusively: no, it didn’t. And if you thought the question of whether preferentially admitted students are helped or damaged thereby was still unclear, you won’t after you look at the evidence assembled here: indeed, they are badly damaged.

The heart of the book is its first two sections, in which Mac Donald shows how the obsession with race and gender has reduced the academy to a caricature of what it once was. Some of this is so bizarre as to be almost unbelievable. I was recently at a neighborhood watch meeting at which a local sheriff’s deputy gave us the good news that local crime statistics are way down. The audience was delighted. Compare this normal, sane reaction to what Mac Donald tells us of a Yale vice president’s reaction to the news that Harvard has a higher rate of sexual assaults than Yale. Good news for Yale? No, the reverse. The Yale official groused that Harvard must have been double counting some incidents. Imagine: Yale jealous because Harvard has a higher rate of sexual assaults. What explains this insanity? It’s simply that campus radical orthodoxy has it that our society is racist and sexist to the core. High sexual assault rates confirm campus orthodoxy, low ones don’t, so Yale must not be pulling its weight.

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But as Mac Donald reminds us, the American campus is the most politically correct place on earth, and thus racism and sexism are much harder to find there than anywhere else. Being a campus rape hotline operator is a lonely and frustrating business because nobody calls. And so rape must be found in such things as morning-after regrets, or drunken stupors that neither side remembers very well. It’s about 30 years since the infamous “one in five women will be raped” figure was debunked as the product of crude statistical manipulation, but it’s back on the campuses now. It’s hard to believe that those who use it don’t know that it has long since been shown to be false, but they evidently don’t care. Mac Donald has a devastating answer to all of this: when a real forcible rape takes place on a campus, that campus instantly goes into “emergency mode,” showing that it knows perfectly well the difference between its make-believe and reality.

The desperation to prove that there is a rape culture on campus does real damage: accused males are often convicted on evidence that can be quite absurd. The damage done by the obsession with race is even greater: the educational progress of a whole generation of black students is disrupted by the “mismatch” effect, described by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., in their book Mismatch (2012)—that is, too many black students are being placed in academic environments for which they are not ready. And there is broader damage too: under “diversity” the campus climate has become one of lies and deceit, which damages everyone, not just minorities.

Mac Donald describes a number of campus incidents that became full-scale (though fraudulent) racial crises, but their essential shape doesn’t vary much. They generally start out with an incident that no fair-minded person could call racist: at Evergreen State College, Professor Bret Weinstein’s saying that it’s not a good idea for black students to tell all whites to stay away from campus for a day; or at Yale, Erika Christakis saying that, as Mac Donald puts it, the Yale multicultural bureaucracy didn’t need to oversee Halloween costumes. In the next stage, campus radical activists, always desperate to find an opportunity to cry “racism,” eagerly seize on these non-events and treat them as if they were nothing less than a massive KKK march. The campus goes to full racial hysteria, with much lamenting about the racial humiliation that minorities must live through every minute of every day, with even their very lives in danger. In the next stage, campus administrators tell them to grow up and stop being stupid—wait, no, that would certainly be the only intelligent response but it never happens. What really happens is that campus presidents all seem to read from the same script. They announce their solidarity with this absurd self-dramatizing; they apologize on behalf of their campuses for the pain they have inflicted; they praise the students and tell them how much they have learned from them; and finally they announce huge expenditures on new diversity offices and other sops to the student activists. Whether the campus is a minor one like Evergreen State College, or a major one like Yale University, the script is much the same. It’s probably written by the same high-priced diversity consultant.

* * *

Mac Donald punctures all of this silliness by pointing out how safe and how privileged these students are to be on an American campus. Senior administrators seem never to think about the lessons that students are learning from these incidents, and the perverse incentives that result. Surely, it must be great fun for minority students to have the president of Yale grovel before them whenever they feel like staging a racial incident. For mismatched students, classes are probably depressing: who can blame them if they much prefer making senior administrators humiliate themselves? Reliable recent research has shown that minority students are putting in fewer hours of study than others, and so the large gap in test scores that they start with only widens at college instead of narrowing. Yet to save themselves, cowardly college presidents are reinforcing and rewarding this destructive misdirection of effort. Could the most ill-intentioned racists have done more damage to minorities?

Mac Donald’s section on the sheer size of the diversity bureaucracy will astonish her readers. After noting that in 2012 U.C. San Diego hired its first vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion, she gives a long list of already existing campus diversity offices to which it adds: “the Chancellor’s Diversity Office; the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity; the assistant vice chancellor for diversity; the faculty equity advisers; the graduate diversity coordinators.” This goes on for half a page—for just one campus. Small wonder that “From 1998 to 2009, as the [U.C.] student population grew 33% and tenure track faculty grew 25%, the number of senior administrators grew by 125%.” There were twice as many professors as senior managers when this period began, but their numbers were equal by the end of it—all in one decade!

One has to wonder: as tuition soars well beyond the rate of inflation and students take on ever more crippling debt, doesn’t it ever occur to them (or anyone else) that their skyrocketing tuition and debt pays for all of these useless diversity bureaucrats that they themselves keep demanding more of?

* * *

Mac Donald’s third section looks at the gutting of the curriculum as our civilization’s great literature and thought are replaced by shallow race- and gender-obsessed nonentities. Here she covers ground gone over by others before her, but she states the case with great force and eloquence, and I must say that you could not find a more compelling account of the simply enormous loss to students that results.

Having shown how badly “diversity” has damaged academia, Mac Donald bluntly recommends “[t]he most necessary reform: axing the diversity infrastructure….every vice chancellor, assistant dean, and associateprovost for equity, inclusion, and multicultural awareness should be fired and his staff sent home. Faculty committees dedicated to ameliorating the effects of phantom racism, sexism, and homophobia should be disbanded.” She’s absolutely right about this, but it leads us to the problem of the faculty, now almost universally left and mostly radical left at that. The vast diversity infrastructure is safe while they want it to stay in place. Reform will have to begin by breaking the radical faculty’s stranglehold on the campuses.

1a)

One of Maxine 's very best!!  Minorities We need  to show more sympathy for these people. *  They travel miles in the  heat. *  They risk their lives crossing a  border. *  They don't get paid enough  wages. *  They do jobs that others won't do  or are afraid to do. *  They live in crowded conditions  among a people who  speak a different  language. * They rarely see their families, and they face adversity all day ~ every day. * I'm not  talking about illegal Mexicans  ~  I'm talking  about our troops! Doesn't it seem strange that so many are willing to lavish all kinds of social benefits on illegals,  but don't support our troops?  Wouldn't it be great if we took the $360,000,000,000 (that's billion) we spend on illegals every  year, and spent it on our troops!!!  Please pass this on; this is worth the  short time it takes! A veteran is someone who, at one point in their life, wrote a blank check made payable to The United States of America for any amount, up to  and including their life.

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2)

"You never surprise me! " a woman moaned one day to her long-suffering husband.

  " Buy me a surprise for my birthday.   Something that can accelerate   from 0 to 180 in under 4 seconds, ......and I would prefer it in blue,"   she hinted.

Happy and excited, she was counting down the days to her birthday.

Finally, she got the beautiful present her husband had thoughtfully chosen for her.

He's dead now, but to his friends, he died a legend.

1b)James Comey Makes Shocking Admission

• Source: TTN

During a closed-door sit down with Congressional lawmakers James Comey did not offer much information. But he did let something slip. The former director of the FBI admitted that their attainment of FISA warrants against the Trump campaign was flawed. The information used was tainted and should never have been relied upon.

According to The Daily Wire:

James Comey, the former FBI director fired by President Trump after he botched the handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation, testified in a closed-door meeting Friday in front of congressional leaders, and some of his responses, including his repeated claims of lack of knowledge or recall, have caused a stir. Perhaps most notable of his comments is his admission that FBI officials had not verified the information in the notorious Democrat-funded Steele dossier when they used it to obtain a FISA warrant for a Trump associate.

On Friday, Comey acknowledged under oath that the FBI used an uncorroborated document funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC as "evidence" in officials' request for a FISA warrant to surveil Trump adviser Carter Page, a key step in the Russia collusion "witch hunt," as Trump calls it. Not only was the dossier, produced by ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, not verified when it was used in the Carter request, Comey admitted, it was still unverified when he was fired six months later.

The Hill's John Solomon, who has been closely following the developments in the Russia probe, highlights the "enormity" of Comey's bombshell acknowledgment that his "investigative team (in the form of the Steele dossier) and his general counsel James Baker (in the form of evidence from a Democratic Party lawyer) accepted politically tainted evidence to further the probe of Trump."

"Everyday Americans now know that the FISA court process is an honor system and that the FBI may only submit evidence it has verified to the judges," he writes. "Comey now has confirmed what Republican lawmakers like Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Rep. Mark Meadows(R-N.C.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) have warned about for months – that the FBI used an unverified dossier, paid for by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party as political opposition research, to justify spying on the duly nominated GOP candidate for president just weeks before Election Day."

It was also revealed that the top counsel for the FBI wanted to charge Hillary with mishandling documents, but it was Comey who persuaded him to not do so. Comey also admitted that he never directed agents to investigate the infamous tarmac meeting between former Attorney General Lynch and Bill Clinton.

1c) The Unbelievable James Comey

The former FBI director professes to know little about how the government came to spy on the political opposition.

By James Comey

Can the story former FBI Director James Comey told Congress on Friday possibly be true? In a joint executive session of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, Mr. Comey presented himself as unaware and incurious regarding one of the most consequential investigations the FBI has ever conducted. After describing how little he knew about the federal government’s use of its surveillance powers against associates of the presidential campaign of the party out of power in 2016, Mr. Comey then assured lawmakers that the launching of the investigation was proper and free of political bias.

On Saturday a transcript of the Comey testimony was released by the congressional committees. President Donald Trumptweeted without subtlety on Sunday:

On 245 occasions, former FBI Director James Comey told House investigators he didn’t know, didn’t recall, or couldn’t remember things when asked. Opened investigations on 4 Americans (not 2) - didn’t know who signed off and didn’t know Christopher Steele. All lies!

This is perhaps an overstatement. But some skepticism is clearly in order on the part of the President and every other American who wants free and fair elections. Lawmakers were interested in finding out who exactly initiated the investigation and when. Here’s a portion of the transcript in which the Obama administration FBI boss was questioned by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.):

Mr. Gowdy. Do you recall who drafted the FBI’s initiation document for that late July 2016 Russia investigation?

Mr. Comey. I do not.

Mr. Gowdy. Would you disagree that it was Peter Strzok?

Mr. Comey. I don’t know one way or the other.

Mr. Gowdy. Do you know who approved that draft of an initial plan for the Russia investigation in late July 2016?

Mr. Comey. I don’t.

This was not just any investigation. On the other hand the FBI is a big place and perhaps the director would not recall which of the staff had worked on a particular document. Under further questioning from Mr. Gowdy, Mr. Comey added that he didn’t remember ever even seeing the document. Again, one might hope that consequential cases going to the heart of our democratic process would be closely supervised by the most senior officials, but any case generates some volume of documents and an FBI director may be able to learn enough from staff briefings to make sensible decisions. The next part of the transcript is harder to swallow:

Mr. Gowdy. How does the FBI launch counterintelligence investigations? What documents are required?

Mr. Comey. I don’t know for sure because it’s opened far below the Director’s level. But there’s documentation in criminal investigations and in counterintelligence investigations to explain the predication for the opening of a file, that is, the basis for the opening of a file.

Mr. Gowdy. Who at the FBI has the authority to launch a counterintelligence investigation into a major political campaign, and would that eventually have to be approved by you?

Mr. Comey. I don’t know for a variety of reasons. I’ve never encountered a circumstance where an investigation into a political campaign was launched, and so I don’t know how that would be done.

Saying that he’s never dealt with the investigation of a political party may seem like a falsehood but Mr. Comey argues that his bureau was not investigating the 2016 Trump campaign as a whole but particular people associated with it. This must be reassuring for Americans to know that the next time they are surveilled while engaging in political activity, perhaps not all of their friends and colleagues will be subjected to such treatment.

However Mr. Comey chooses to characterize the cases he was supposed to be overseeing, he is now saying that neither at that time nor in the more than two years since did he ever know or bother to find out how investigations of political campaigns begin or who authorizes them. Wouldn’t even a passionate anti-Trumper—which Mr. Comey is—be at least curious how the machinery operates when his own subordinates take the extraordinary step of investigating the party out of power?

At least according to his Friday testimony, Mr. Comey did not become any more interested in details once the FBI surveillance machinery was grinding its way toward a series of wiretaps. By now many Americans have understandably grown weary of the various Russian collusion claims. But in the summer and fall of 2016 the FBI was supposedly trying to determine if a hostile foreign power had compromised a leading candidate for President.

This is the stuff of spy novels. But even the real former spy peddling bizarre claims that would assist the Obama administration’s pursuit of those wiretaps didn’t arouse much curiosity or suspicion in the FBI chief, according to Mr. Comey’s Friday testimony. In this portion of the transcript it appears that to this day Mr. Comey doesn’t much care whether the bureau’s source was indirectly paid by the Democratic National Committee to generate dirt on Mr. Trump:

Mr. Gowdy. Who is Christopher Steele?

Mr. Comey. My understanding is that Christopher Steele is a former intelligence officer of an allied nation who prepared a series of reports in the summer of 2016 that have become known as the Steele dossier.

Mr. Gowdy. How long did he have a relationship with the FBI?

Mr. Comey. I don’t know...

Mr. Gowdy. When did you learn he was working for Fusion GPS?

Mr. Comey. I don’t know that I ever knew that...

Mr. Gowdy. When did you learn that Fusion GPS was hired by Perkins Coie?

Mr. Comey. I never learned that, certainly not while I was Director.

Mr. Gowdy. Well, when did you learn the DNC had hired Perkins Coie?

Mr. Comey. I never learned that. Again, while I was Director. I think I’ve read it in the media, but, yeah, even today, I don’t know whether it’s true.

Wouldn’t a reasonable person make it his business to find out who paid whom if for no other reason than to make sure that as FBI director he hadn’t been taken in by a partisan attack disguised as a national security case?

Mr. Comey rejected the possibility that law enforcers in the Obama administration targeted Team Trump in response to questioning by Rep. Ted Deutch (D., Fla.):

Mr. Deutch. Director Comey, do you believe the FBI or DOJ ever investigated the Trump campaign for political purposes?

Mr. Comey. I not only don’t believe it, I know it not to be true.

Mr. Deutch. I’m sorry, would you repeat that?

Mr. Comey. I know it not to be true. I know that we never investigated the Trump campaign for political purposes.

How would he know, if the rest of his testimony is accurate?

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2)Wrap It Up, Mr. Mueller

Democratic dilemma: Impeach Trump for lying about sex?

By The Editorial Board

Last week was supposed to be earth-shaking in Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe, with the release of sentencing memos on three former members of the Trump universe—Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. Yet Americans learned little new and nothing decisive about the allegations of Russia-Trump collusion that triggered this long investigation.

The main Russia-related news is the disclosure, in Mr. Mueller’s memo on Mr. Cohen, of a previously unknown attempt by an unidentified Russian to reach out to the Trump presidential campaign. “In or around November 2015, Cohen received the contact information for, and spoke with, a Russian national who claimed to be a ‘trusted person’ in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign ‘political synergy’ and ‘synergy on a government level,’” the memo says.

The Russian also offered the possibility of a meeting between Mr. Trump and Vladimir Putin. Alas for conspiracy hopefuls, Mr. Cohen “did not follow up on this invitation,” the memo says, because Mr. Cohen says he was already talking to other Russians about a Trump Tower hotel project that has been previously disclosed. Mr. Trump has said he shut down that hotel negotiation in 2016 because he was running for President.

So a Russian wanted to insinuate himself into the Trump orbit but nothing happened. Why drop this into a sentencing memo? The press is breathing heavily that it signals Mr. Mueller’s intention to promote a narrative that the Trumpians were all too willing, for commercial and political reasons, to hear Russian solicitations.

This would make Trump officials look dumb or naive, as Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner were when they took that famous meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016. Such a narrative would be politically embarrassing, but it’s not conspiring to hack and release the email of Democratic Party officials.

The Manafort memo is even less revealing. The memo says Mr. Manafort lied about his contacts with a Ukrainian business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik. But the memo redacts the details about those lies, so it’s impossible to know if they concern Russia or the tax and other violations that Mr. Manafort has pleaded guilty to. We are left again with media speculation about what else Mr. Mueller knows, not with evidence of any attempt to steal an election.

More legally troubling is the separate sentencing memo on Mr. Cohen from the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Mr. Mueller handed off the probe into Mr. Cohen’s business practices, including the legal grifter’s payoffs to porn actress Stormy Daniels and another woman who claim to have had affairs with Donald Trump and threatened to go public during the 2016 campaign.

This was another example of dumb and dumber, since any sentient voter knew Mr. Trump had a bad history with women. Voters ignored it in 2016 because Hillary Clinton spent years apologizing for worse behavior by her husband. But the payoffs are now a political problem for Mr. Trump because Mr. Cohen has pleaded guilty to violating campaign-finance laws and implicated Mr. Trump.

Campaign violations are often treated as civil, not criminal, violations, and the Justice Department dropped criminal charges against Democrat John Edwards in 2012 for payments made by campaign donors to his mistress. But acting U.S. Attorney Robert Khuzami is playing up Mr. Trump’s role, saying in the memo that Mr. Cohen “acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1” (Mr. Trump).

The memo waxes on about the importance of campaign-finance law to American democracy, which suggests Mr. Khuzami would indict Mr. Trump if he could. Justice Department guidelines advise against indicting a sitting President, so Mr. Khuzami’s memo looks more like a road map for House Democrats. So much for all the media handwringing that Mr. Trump has interfered with the independence of the Justice Department. He has less influence at Justice than any President since Richard Nixon in his final days.

The political dilemma for Democrats is that lying about sex and paying to cover it up are wrong, but they’re a long way from collaborating with the Kremlin to beat Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Trump lied to the public about his dealings with Mr. Cohen. Bill Clinton lied to the public and under oath in a legal proceeding, yet Democrats defended him. Good luck trying to impeach Mr. Trump for campaign-finance violations.

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All of this argues for Mr. Mueller to wrap up his probe and let America get on with the political debate over its meaning for Mr. Trump’s Presidency. Mr. Mueller has been investigating for 19 months, and the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign began in July 2016, if not earlier. The country deserves an account of what Mr. Mueller knows, not more factual dribs and drabs in sentencing memos.

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