This was sent to me by a friend, a good tennis player and former government employee who held many significant positions. (See 1 below.)
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Crowd mania/madness.
Last week, as I wrote, should become, in my opinion, the nail in the mass media's coffin. Their gleeful desire to impale Trump was so blatant and evident anyone who believes what they write about Trump is either a hater or fool. Even Mueller fell compelled to speak out and disavow Buzzfeed as both inaccurate and scurrilous. The mass media's zeal has resulted in a loss of credibility that should be irredeemable. (See 2 and 2a below.)
The Democrats have one goal, regaining power and winning in 2020. I suspect their total disregard for our nation's welfare is going to hurt their chances.
They have gone from Trump is going to fire Mueller, to Trump is deranged, to Trump lies all the time, to Trump has insulted our allies, to Trump needs to be impeached, to Trump said Mexico would pay for the wall, to Trump owns the government shutdown. Everyone of of these statements is either totally true or partially so.
However, the real point is he remains our resident is trying his best to solve many thorny issues and all the Democrats do is confront him. They have yet to offer any constructive solutions. They continue to prove they have no interest in doing so either.
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My friend, John Fund, asks how long can Democrats hold out? (See 3 below.)
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Hanson and The FBI. He reverses the Trump story and turns it into The Obama story..Clever!(See 4 below.)
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Should we put America through more trauma? (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)UNITED STATES JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
OFFICE OF GENDER EQUALITY AND TOXIC MASCULINITY
The office of Gender Equality and Toxic Masculinity (GETM), commonly known as Get Em, is now opening a period of 30 days, beginning on January 18, 2019, for public consideration of the following.
1. Songs of praise sung in churches will no longer be allowed to be called Hymns. In future they must be called Yts.
2. The States of Washington and Pennsylvania, which were named after toxic males must be renamed. Acceptable names are Rose Bud, Petal, Green Grass and Snowflake.
3. Any other state that feels the need to change their name to comport with their feelings, can submit their suggestions to the above-named Office.
4. Towns and local municipalities such as Lincoln, Grant and Jackson etc must also be renamed. See above for acceptable suggestions.
5. Humans can no longer be addressed as Humans and will be renamed as Huits. Apologizes to any one named Hewitt. If they wish, they can submit changes they would like made to their names.
6. Men will no longer be allowed to be called Men and must be called Mits. Women must be renamed as Womits.
7. Those wishing to be considered as females, but who were genetically born as males, can compete in sports, especially Track and Field as a Womit. We understand that all world records held currently by women will, in all probability, be destroyed. But we at the Department of Justice feel that it’s a small price to pay in our never-ending pursuit of gender equality.
8. All males must shave their legs, backs and armpits, this is also in pursuit of Gender Equality. We understand that the Gillette company will be providing free razors to those who can prove that they have given up their pursuit of toxic masculinity.
9. In further pursuit of our goal of eliminating toxic masculinity, the Armed Forces of the United States of America will no longer be allowed to use the term Armed, as it is very provocative. In future the Armed Forces of the United States, will be referred to as the Peace Army. We do understand that bad actors such as ISIS may not at first be very accepting of our offering flowers instead of bullets, but we are convinced that after a cooling off period of some years, during which many thousands of American lives will be lost, that they will be very accepting of the term and goals.
10. The public is encouraged to add to this list so that by the end of the 30 day period we will have further examples of gender inequity and toxic masculinity, that this Department can outlaw.
11. Lastly, we do understand and accept the probability that the name of this country, the United Sates of America, might be very provocative and create undue stress to its population, so we will be accepting changes. These suggestions will be addressed in a further document sometime in the very near future.
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2)The Madness of Crowds and What Lies Ahead
By Jim Daws
In his 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay chronicled the history of the phenomena we now see gripping the Resistance movement to the Trump presidency. Writing on national delusions, moral panics, economic bubbles, and herd behavior, Mackay observed, "We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."
Mackay documents the manias that made traders turn tulips into the most expensive objects on earth in the mid-1600s, caused Christian communities in the American colonies to torture and execute "witches," and caused European nobles to sponsor alchemists to turn base metals into gold (and imprison them until they succeeded). Of these and many other episodes of mass hysteria, Mackay wrote, "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
In his 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay chronicled the history of the phenomena we now see gripping the Resistance movement to the Trump presidency. Writing on national delusions, moral panics, economic bubbles, and herd behavior, Mackay observed, "We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."
In the present madness commonly known as "Trump Derangement Syndrome," the Resistance is led, in order of influence, by Hollywood entertainers, New York City journalists, and Washington Democrat politicians. By any objective measure, all three groups have failed utterly at their primary jobs to entertain, inform, and lead – at least in any way that inspires, educates, or solves problems. Instead, the most notable features of these groups is their desperate need for attention (in an age of unprecedented media saturation) and their obsession with being seen as morally superior to us commoners – the latter to justify the former. Two ingredients combined to create the alchemy of madness now consuming our national politics.
The first was the presidential candidacy and election of an outsider who promised to break the cultural and economic elite's grip on Washington that had inflicted such massive harm on the nation and middle America. Donald Trump emerged as a blunt-spoken real-estate developer and reality TV star with a long history of skewering the social, economic, and foreign policies of the ruling classes.
The second ingredient was the work of fiction commissioned by the standard-bearer for the ruling elite known as the "dossier." Hillary Clinton and her former president husband were consummate Washington insiders and master practitioners of the dark art of dirty politics. The dossier deviously deployed a previous moral panic – the Red Scare of the 1950s – to accuse Trump of being a Manchurian candidate controlled by our formerly communist enemies in the Kremlin. Never mind that Russia is no longer communist and is now a mere shadow of the former Soviet superpower.
That Trump proposed and pursued policies directly contrary to Russia's vital interests, most notably unleashing America's vast energy resources and rebuilding our depleted military, was irrelevant to the present-day witch-hunters. Russia's economy is entirely dependent on petroleum, and it is in no position economically to engage in another arms race. For her part, Hillary opposed fossil fuels and increased military spending. Contrary to Trump, she wanted to keep Obama's agreement that would allow Russia's ally Iran to become a nuclear power. But it was entirely lost on our betters that it was Clinton, not Trump, espousing policies more aligned with Russia's interests. The madness of the elite crowd had been unleashed.
Since he announced for president, we've seen the Washington establishment corrupt and debase our intelligence and law enforcement agencies in its fevered pursuit of Trump. Now that Democrats have retaken the House, they promise to use their committees to impeach him in a total absence of any evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors. As the president works to keep his campaign promises to secure our borders, realign our trade relationships, create good jobs, and get us out of useless wars, the swamp, whose interests are cheap labor, globalism, and foreign conflict, vows to overturn the voters' will in 2016.
Gripped by the delusion they helped create, the mainstream media have abandoned all pretense of objectivity and professional ethics to become the fake news for the Resistance. Few news cycles pass where they fail to break a story of Trump's traitorous exploits while arguing for and predicting his impending removal from office and criminal prosecution. When the stories are promptly debunked by the emerging alternative media, the Resistance journos move shamelessly to the next cycle and repeat. While Trump ridicules them and calls them to return to the higher ideals of their profession, they suffer no consequence for their incompetence and dishonesty.
From Tinseltown (once the domain of Bogart, Hepburn, Garland, and Gable) mentally unstable and narcissistic "celebrities" are going full-bore insane while flooding popular culture with vulgar insults and violent threats against Trump and his supporters. They exhibit severed heads, produce assassination porn, and challenge Trump-supporters to fist fights, all the while dropping a steady stream of F-bombs. Not surprisingly, impressionable young, university-indoctrinated leftists react by donning black clothing and masks to assault normal, sane people in the streets.
Fueled by cultural, media and political elites, it seems likely that the madness of crowds Charles Mackay wrote of 1841 will continue gripping weaker minds as Trump skewers their sacred cows and upends their carefully constructed fantasies. We can only hope enough voters maintain their sanity until November 3, 2020.
By Jim Daws
In his 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay chronicled the history of the phenomena we now see gripping the Resistance movement to the Trump presidency. Writing on national delusions, moral panics, economic bubbles, and herd behavior, Mackay observed, "We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."
Mackay documents the manias that made traders turn tulips into the most expensive objects on earth in the mid-1600s, caused Christian communities in the American colonies to torture and execute "witches," and caused European nobles to sponsor alchemists to turn base metals into gold (and imprison them until they succeeded). Of these and many other episodes of mass hysteria, Mackay wrote, "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
In his 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay chronicled the history of the phenomena we now see gripping the Resistance movement to the Trump presidency. Writing on national delusions, moral panics, economic bubbles, and herd behavior, Mackay observed, "We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."
In the present madness commonly known as "Trump Derangement Syndrome," the Resistance is led, in order of influence, by Hollywood entertainers, New York City journalists, and Washington Democrat politicians. By any objective measure, all three groups have failed utterly at their primary jobs to entertain, inform, and lead – at least in any way that inspires, educates, or solves problems. Instead, the most notable features of these groups is their desperate need for attention (in an age of unprecedented media saturation) and their obsession with being seen as morally superior to us commoners – the latter to justify the former. Two ingredients combined to create the alchemy of madness now consuming our national politics.
The first was the presidential candidacy and election of an outsider who promised to break the cultural and economic elite's grip on Washington that had inflicted such massive harm on the nation and middle America. Donald Trump emerged as a blunt-spoken real-estate developer and reality TV star with a long history of skewering the social, economic, and foreign policies of the ruling classes.
The second ingredient was the work of fiction commissioned by the standard-bearer for the ruling elite known as the "dossier." Hillary Clinton and her former president husband were consummate Washington insiders and master practitioners of the dark art of dirty politics. The dossier deviously deployed a previous moral panic – the Red Scare of the 1950s – to accuse Trump of being a Manchurian candidate controlled by our formerly communist enemies in the Kremlin. Never mind that Russia is no longer communist and is now a mere shadow of the former Soviet superpower.
That Trump proposed and pursued policies directly contrary to Russia's vital interests, most notably unleashing America's vast energy resources and rebuilding our depleted military, was irrelevant to the present-day witch-hunters. Russia's economy is entirely dependent on petroleum, and it is in no position economically to engage in another arms race. For her part, Hillary opposed fossil fuels and increased military spending. Contrary to Trump, she wanted to keep Obama's agreement that would allow Russia's ally Iran to become a nuclear power. But it was entirely lost on our betters that it was Clinton, not Trump, espousing policies more aligned with Russia's interests. The madness of the elite crowd had been unleashed.
Since he announced for president, we've seen the Washington establishment corrupt and debase our intelligence and law enforcement agencies in its fevered pursuit of Trump. Now that Democrats have retaken the House, they promise to use their committees to impeach him in a total absence of any evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors. As the president works to keep his campaign promises to secure our borders, realign our trade relationships, create good jobs, and get us out of useless wars, the swamp, whose interests are cheap labor, globalism, and foreign conflict, vows to overturn the voters' will in 2016.
Gripped by the delusion they helped create, the mainstream media have abandoned all pretense of objectivity and professional ethics to become the fake news for the Resistance. Few news cycles pass where they fail to break a story of Trump's traitorous exploits while arguing for and predicting his impending removal from office and criminal prosecution. When the stories are promptly debunked by the emerging alternative media, the Resistance journos move shamelessly to the next cycle and repeat. While Trump ridicules them and calls them to return to the higher ideals of their profession, they suffer no consequence for their incompetence and dishonesty.
From Tinseltown (once the domain of Bogart, Hepburn, Garland, and Gable) mentally unstable and narcissistic "celebrities" are going full-bore insane while flooding popular culture with vulgar insults and violent threats against Trump and his supporters. They exhibit severed heads, produce assassination porn, and challenge Trump-supporters to fist fights, all the while dropping a steady stream of F-bombs. Not surprisingly, impressionable young, university-indoctrinated leftists react by donning black clothing and masks to assault normal, sane people in the streets.
Fueled by cultural, media and political elites, it seems likely that the madness of crowds Charles Mackay wrote of 1841 will continue gripping weaker minds as Trump skewers their sacred cows and upends their carefully constructed fantasies. We can only hope enough voters maintain their sanity until November 3, 2020.
2a)
Yet another Trump 'bombshell' ends up being a hoax
Another leak about President Trump, supposedly from federal prosecutors, and another media freak-out.
This one was different from the earlier ones in its seriousness. Two reporters from BuzzFeed, citing two anonymous law enforcement officials, reported that Trump had instructed his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, or at least that this accusation had been passed on to special counsel Robert Mueller.
In a late Friday night news dump 24 hours after this "scoop," Mueller released a statement that the whole thing was a big hoax — "not accurate."
We had drafted an editorial warning people to exercise caution about this big story. Given the media track record under Trump, we didn't need to be fortune tellers to issue this warning. But for so many journalists, whose loathing of Trump has become an obstacle to their professional credibility, this story was just too good to check. People kept believing in it, wanting to believe it, even after the two reporters behind the story gave conflicting accounts of whether they’d seen the documents in question.
On Thursday evening, cable news talking heads were already discussing Trump's impending impeachment. DNC Chairman Tom Perez sent a fundraising email accusing Trump of "PERJURY" in all caps in the subject line.
Their certainty, and their barely contained glee, should be deeply embarrassing to them all now. And the deflation of this bogus scoop leaves the conspiracy theorists back at square one.
Their December narrative centered on hush-money payments Trump made to a porn star and a nude model with whom he had allegedly cheated on his wife. The supposedly impeachable offense in this tawdry episode was that he paid out the money from private funds rather than his campaign coffers. This charge was always too clever by half. Another presidential candidate, John Edwards, once defended a similar payout, arguing that he had made it to protect his family and his personal reputation.
Another, earlier line of attack had to do with the firing of FBI Director James Comey. As dumb as Trump's behavior in this regard may have been, it is highly doubtful that this could constitute obstruction of justice in any context we can imagine.
The longest-running line leading to Trump's impeachment has involved the ominous and undefined idea of “collusion” with Russia. On its own, "collusion" isn't even an actual crime, but there was always at least an outside chance that it involved some kind of real, prosecutable offense, especially if finances were involved.
In this case, however, Trump was finally being accused of something unambiguously illegal. Lying to Congress is a crime, and telling someone to lie to Congress can be obstruction of justice. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, William Barr, had written as much in a memo. Finally, Trump wasn't going to get out of this one.
Or was he?
Reporters and commentators should have suspected this could blow up. Recall the dossier BuzzFeed fed us, which is still uncorroborated. Recall ABC’s report about the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia, which sent markets tanking — and which also turned out to be false. One of the BuzzFeed reporters involved in this story has a history of fabulism.
This should be a lesson about jumping the gun on Mueller's work. At some point soon, the special counsel and other federal prosecutors will wrap up their investigations. We’ll get to see the documents that the reporters either saw or didn’t see. We’ll get sworn statements from agents instead of selective leaks from anonymous sources.
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3)
By John Fund
Lots of people are wondering just why Democrats rejected President Trump’s plan to reopen government agencies even before he announced the plan. House speaker Nancy Pelosi called it a “non-starter,” and Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin rejected it even though, as the Daily Caller noted, Trump’s proposal to protect immigrant “Dreamers” from being deported “included everything” that Durbin had asked for “just over two years ago.”
Democrats have to recognize that the Trump Derangement Syndrome that drives much of their base often clouds their political judgment. If they persist in viewing him as a devil they can’t compromise with, they may soon find they’ve compromised their own standing with the American people.
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3)
Why Democrats Said No to Trump’s Border Compromise
They view him as a devil they must defeat at all costsBy John Fund
Lots of people are wondering just why Democrats rejected President Trump’s plan to reopen government agencies even before he announced the plan. House speaker Nancy Pelosi called it a “non-starter,” and Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin rejected it even though, as the Daily Caller noted, Trump’s proposal to protect immigrant “Dreamers” from being deported “included everything” that Durbin had asked for “just over two years ago.”
The Washington Post editorial page, normally one of Trump’s harshest critics, was puzzled by the Democratic intransigence:
To refuse even to talk until the government reopens does no favors to sidelined federal workers and contractors. . . . A measure of statesmanship for a member of Congress now is the ability to accept some disappointments, and shrug off the inevitable attacks from purists, if it means rescuing the lives of thousands of deserving people living among us.
So why are Democrats so dug in? GOP congressman Peter King, who is frequently critical of Trump, says it’s because the issue of a border wall is secondary to their hatred of Trump. “The fear is, among the Democratic leadership, if they make any agreement with President Trump, it’s like compromising with the devil,” he told New York radio station AM970.
In other words, when Democrats now hear talk of “border security,” they think only of Trump and want to make sure that their base won’t see them as surrendering to him in any way. Forget the fact that Democrats have voted for a border barrier in the past and that the $5.7 billion Trump wants is meant only for stretches that U.S. Border Patrol officials have identified as needing barriers to interdict illegal entrants and drugs.
The Democrats seem have to been captured by the thinking of radical community organizer Saul Alinsky. The author of Rules for Radicals, Alinsky inspired both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He used to tell his protégés that “the issue is never the issue.” As historian David Horowitz notes
The cause of a political action — whether civil rights or women’s rights — is never the real cause; women, blacks, and other “victims” are only instruments in the larger cause, which is power.
Indeed, the New Republic reported in a 2008 article that Alinsky would ask his new students why they wanted to organize. After they gave rambling answers about wanting to better social conditions, Alinsky would get angry and tell them that was all wrong. “You want to organize for power!” he screamed.
As columnist Roger Kimball emphasizes, almost everything the Democrats are now doing is about their hatred of Trump and the 2020 election:
The Democrats are attempting to destroy Trump, gambling that prolonging the government shutdown redounds to their benefit while also calculating that more illegal immigrants means more welfare recipients, which means more Democratic voters.
Polls show that President Trump has been hurt more politically than the Democrats by the government shutdown, but I suspect the longer it drags on, with Democrats unwilling to even negotiate seriously about Trump’s proposal, the worse the Left will look to voters.
Democrats have to recognize that the Trump Derangement Syndrome that drives much of their base often clouds their political judgment. If they persist in viewing him as a devil they can’t compromise with, they may soon find they’ve compromised their own standing with the American people.
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4) Should The FBI Run The Country.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Since the media would doubtless answer that loaded question, “It depends on the president,” let us imagine the following scenario.
Return to 2008, when candidate Barack Obama had served only about three years in the U.S. Senate, his sum total of foreign policy experience. And he was running against the overseas old-hand, decorated veteran, and national icon John McCain—a bipartisan favorite in Washington, D.C.
During the campaign, unfounded rumors had swirled about the rookie Obama that he might ease sanctions on Iran, distance the United States from Israel, and alienate the moderate Arab regimes, such the Gulf monarchies and Egypt.
Stories also abounded that the Los Angeles Times had suppressed the release of a supposedly explosive “Khalidi tape,” in which Obama purportedly thanked the radical Rashid Khalidi for schooling him on the Middle East and correcting his earlier biases and blind spots, while praising the Palestinian activist for his support for armed resistance against Israel.
Imagine that all these tales in 2008 might have supposedly “worried” Bush lame-duck and pro-McCain U.S. intelligence officials, who informally met to discuss possible ways of gleaning more information about this still mostly unknown but scary Obama candidacy.
But most importantly, imagine that McCain’s opposition researchers had apprised the FBI of accusations (unproven, of course) that Obama had improperly set up a private back-channel envoy to Iran in 2008. Supposedly, Obama was trying secretly to reassure the theocracy (then the object of Bush Administration and allied efforts to ratchet up pressures to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weapons) of better treatment to come. The conspiratorial accusation would imply that if Iran held off Bush Administration pressures, Tehran might soon find a more conducive atmosphere from an incoming Obama Administration.Additional rumors of similar Logan Act “violations” would also swirl about Obama campaign efforts to convince the Iraqis not to seal a forces agreement with the departing Bush Administration.
Changing Status Quo Calls for a Federal Investigation
Further, conceive that at least one top Bush Justice Department deputy had a spouse working on the McCain opposition dossier on Obama, and that the same official had helped to circulate its scandalous anti-Obama contents around government circles.
Further, conceive that at least one top Bush Justice Department deputy had a spouse working on the McCain opposition dossier on Obama, and that the same official had helped to circulate its scandalous anti-Obama contents around government circles.
In this scenario, also picture that the anti-Obama FBI soon might have claimed that the Obama Iran mission story might have been not only an apparent violation of the Logan Act but also part of possible larger “conspiratorial” efforts to undermine current Bush Administration policies. And given Obama’s campaign rhetoric of downplaying the threats posed by Iran to the United States, and the likelihood he would reverse long-standing U.S. opposition to the theocracy, the FBI decided on its own in July 2008 that Obama himself posed a grave threat to national security.
More importantly, the FBI, by its director’s own later admission, would have conjectured that McCain was the likelier stronger candidate and thus would win the election, given his far greater experience than that of the novice Obama. And therefore, the FBI director further assumed he could conduct investigations against a presidential candidate on the theory that a defeated Obama would have no knowledge of its wayward investigatory surveillance, and that a soon-to-be President McCain would have no desire to air such skullduggery.
The Bush FBI would be further alarmed in 2008 that Obama would, in addition, reverse long-standing U.S. foreign policy by restoring relations with Venezuela, Cuba, and “resetting” policy with Russia. In short, the intelligence community might suspect that a President Obama would turn enemies into friends, and friends into enemies—and thus endanger the entire post-war order.
Envision as a result that the Bureau would have notified the CIA of its concerns about a likely Obama radical new change in U.S. foreign policy toward archenemy, theocratic Iran. The CIA director would then also begin tipping off important Republican senators of the dangers Obama posed. He would spice up his warnings with the preliminary “data” gleaned from shared FBI-inspired counterintelligence surveillance operations of the various members of the Obama campaign—specifically, FISA-court ordered surveillance focused on, say, the Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett.
Again, no proof of any collusion, but lots of worries that the outsider Obama would pose a level of danger to the status quo.
At about the same time, in the weeks before the election, the Bush FBI and Justice Department would have presented to the FISA court a dossier paid for by the McCain campaign—produced through the use of both law and opposition research firms that had hidden the improper use of McCain campaign fund payments, as well the fact that the anti-Obama dossier was compiled by a British retired spy, with a long known hostility to the Obama candidacy.
Unverified Claims, Anonymous Sources
In this continuing thought experiment, the FBI would not verify any of the dossier’s salacious accusations, which covered lurid accusations concerning Obama’s personal life, his college years, his real estate deals with Tony Rezko, contacts with the felon Bill Ayers and the firebrand Father Michael Pfleger, his full relations with the anti-Semitic and anti-American Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity church, his mysterious college-era trip to Pakistan and his Pakistani friends, his own references to prior drug use, and additional and assorted quite sensational and inflammatory rumors that had come up during the 2008 campaign.
In this continuing thought experiment, the FBI would not verify any of the dossier’s salacious accusations, which covered lurid accusations concerning Obama’s personal life, his college years, his real estate deals with Tony Rezko, contacts with the felon Bill Ayers and the firebrand Father Michael Pfleger, his full relations with the anti-Semitic and anti-American Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity church, his mysterious college-era trip to Pakistan and his Pakistani friends, his own references to prior drug use, and additional and assorted quite sensational and inflammatory rumors that had come up during the 2008 campaign.
Many of the dossier’s details had been earlier leaked to conservative journalists by the deputy director and general counsel of the FBI, with the intent of damaging the Obama campaign. The conservative media would legitimize its gossip and anti-Obama smears by using terminology such as “two unidentified FBI sources” and “an anonymous source at the DOJ.” During the closing stretch of the campaign, suddenly lurid details from the dossier would be published to suggest that Obama was either a foreign stooge or unfit personally for the nation’s highest office.
Nonetheless, the Bureau would still believe that the dossier was important enough to support further investigation into Obama’s radical and suspicious behavior during the campaign—including the possibility of conducting federal surveillance on his staffers through the FISA courts. Such warrants would be obtained and used to reverse-target Obama campaign officials through the excuse of focusing on Valerie Jarrett and her supposed Iranian ties.
In addition, imagine that in talks with the CIA, the FBI director decided to insert a government informant into the Obama campaign to ascertain whether his outreach to Iranian officials or his ideas about resetting the Middle East comprised a national security threat—and, given some of the salacious material in the McCain bought dossier, whether Obama himself might be compromised as some sort of Manchurian candidate by blackmailers working for Iranian or Russian intelligence.
Finally, after the stunning defeat of John McCain, both the CIA and FBI would have been worried that the incoming Obama Administration might soon learn that the intelligence services had warped the FISA process by not apprising the court that the dossier was unverified, much less that it was paid for by the McCain campaign and its author severed from FBI contact. And they were further anxious that members of the Bush Administration had deliberately unmasked names of surveilled Obama aides and advisors, and leaked them illegally to the press.
Suspicious Activities, Thickening Plots
As a result of partial disclosures of such intelligence community misbehavior, President Obama would have fired the FBI director, who in retaliation would have leaked confidential memos of his private talks that he had with President Obama himself—in hopes of creating enough outrage to lead to the appointment of a special prosecutor to review Obama campaign and administration suspicious activity abroad. The FBI would attempt to create such hysteria over the firing of the director and charges of Obama collusion that the rogue behavior of government agencies would be largely ignored.Meanwhile, imagine also that the FBI secretly continued with its prior counterintelligence investigations of the new president. The Bureau based its persistent surveillance on grounds of new worries during the transition and early months of Obama’s presidency that tended to fuel old suspicious of radical and dangerous new foreign policies.
As a result of partial disclosures of such intelligence community misbehavior, President Obama would have fired the FBI director, who in retaliation would have leaked confidential memos of his private talks that he had with President Obama himself—in hopes of creating enough outrage to lead to the appointment of a special prosecutor to review Obama campaign and administration suspicious activity abroad. The FBI would attempt to create such hysteria over the firing of the director and charges of Obama collusion that the rogue behavior of government agencies would be largely ignored.Meanwhile, imagine also that the FBI secretly continued with its prior counterintelligence investigations of the new president. The Bureau based its persistent surveillance on grounds of new worries during the transition and early months of Obama’s presidency that tended to fuel old suspicious of radical and dangerous new foreign policies.
The FBI noted that Obama’s first interview as president was with the Arab language Al-Arabiya, in which he sharply criticized past U.S. policies toward the Middle East; his June 2009 Cairo speech, in which he seemed to fault the West for much of the chaos in the Middle East while parroting Islamic “talking points” about Islam’s key contributions to Western culture; his silence when 1 million Iranians protested the theocracy during the so-called “Green Revolution”; and assorted loose gossip that he might be willing soon to trade billions of dollars for hostages and ease sanctions to conclude a so-called Iran deal.
Finally, also imagine that by 2012 under increasing pressure due to endless leaks, and Republican hostility, President Obama had relented and allowed the appointment of a special counsel, who turned out to be a friend of the fired FBI anti-Obama director. The counsel was charged with investigating whether Iran and radical Islamic groups had played an inordinate role in the 2008 campaign, and whether other foreign entities had exercised undue influence on the Obama campaign and administration.
Almost immediately, more leaks from the new special counsel’s team suggested that Obama himself might be also compromised by Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Accordingly, the counsel’s team quite expansively was suddenly also investigating the laxity shown the Russian government after its annexations of Crimea and eastern Ukraine; the administration’s unwillingness to provide arms to Ukrainian forces; the open mic quid pro quo pre-reelection promise to consider ending completely the U.S.-led efforts to install missile defense in Eastern Europe, should Putin stay quiet during the 2012 election campaign and thus give Obama space and flexibility and a boost in the elections; the strange decision to block U.S. oil companies from federal lands rich in natural gas and oil that enhanced Putin’s pivotal role in adjudicating world energy prices; and serial laxity in replying to continued Russian cyber attacks against private American companies and U.S. government institutions. Again, the effort would be to rebrand Obama’s legitimate but radical shifts in policy as criminal activity in a fashion designed to abort the Obama presidency or at least to shield public scrutiny from past FBI and CIA misdeeds.
During the 2012 Obama reelection campaign, Republican activists, former administration officials, and members of the Romney campaign would find access to some of the Bush-era surveillance dating back to 2008 and began leaking transcripts to the press. At the same time, the special counsel’s “dream team” (inordinately stocked with McCain and Romney contributors) would be rocked by scandal, once it was disclosed that in a series of texts two members of the investigatory team had expressed hatred for Obama, claimed that one could “smell” the presence of his supporters, and had hoped to derail his 2012 campaign. Some of their embarrassing texts would later mysteriously be proved to be unrecoverable, apparently erased or lost by the special counsel’s team.
Where Does It All Lead?
An exasperated Obama himself would have threatened to dismiss the special counsel as he serially complained that he had been an earlier victim of “wiretapping,” based on purchased smears by the McCain campaign, the use of a foreign former national intelligence officer to subvert his campaign, and the serial misconduct of the FBI that had illicitly surveiled his campaign and presidency on the bogus notion that his re-calibrations in the Middle East either amounted to treason, or were the result of blackmail by foreign powers who had evidence of the sort of behavior documented in the opposition-research dossier. Why, Obama would complain, was the special counsel team stocked inordinately with Bush conservatives, McCain donors, and even a few lawyers who had at times been McCain subordinates?
An exasperated Obama himself would have threatened to dismiss the special counsel as he serially complained that he had been an earlier victim of “wiretapping,” based on purchased smears by the McCain campaign, the use of a foreign former national intelligence officer to subvert his campaign, and the serial misconduct of the FBI that had illicitly surveiled his campaign and presidency on the bogus notion that his re-calibrations in the Middle East either amounted to treason, or were the result of blackmail by foreign powers who had evidence of the sort of behavior documented in the opposition-research dossier. Why, Obama would complain, was the special counsel team stocked inordinately with Bush conservatives, McCain donors, and even a few lawyers who had at times been McCain subordinates?
Obama was especially infuriated that Bush Administration officials in the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, State Department, and the National Security Council had worked with McCain campaign operatives to circulate the dossier on his prior friends and activities to media outlets. And why were former Bush CIA and FBI officials going on television to charge Obama with veritable treason?
The president was even more incensed that after his inauguration, the FBI had continued its FISA court surveillance of former campaign operatives, and persisted with surveillance of his own national security advisor.
For most of his presidency, an exasperated and harried President Obama tweeted incessantly that the FBI surveillance and special counsel investigation were constantly marked by leaks to Fox News and the conservative press on irrelevant issues and unproven stale gossip—such as old 2008 Obama campaign finance violations; ancient allegations that Michelle Obama had received favorable treatment at her University of Chicago hospital job once Obama had been elected senator; fossilized stories that Obama had still not paid taxes on the Rezko discounted gift of tangential property; tired narratives that in Obama’s prior senate campaign the sealed divorce records of both his primary and general election opponents had been mysteriously and unlawfully been leaked and published; new revelations that Obama’s own autobiography was little more than a mythography of composite sketches and made up narratives; and insinuations that ongoing scandals at the General Services Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, IRS, and the Environmental Protection Agency might have cross-fertilizations with the special counsel investigations. Racy elements within the fabricated so-called McCain dossier such as unproven drug use, alleged manic chain-smoking, and libelous, unproven personal liaisons, would be favorite gossip of journalists.
A number of former Obama associates—Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, David Axelrod—were reportedly being leveraged by special counsel attorneys in exchange for limiting their own legal exposure in a variety of areas. A sleepless Obama often railed that both the FBI and the special counsel were conducting “witch hunts” and “fishing expeditions,” and that there had been no “collusion” with either Middle East or Russian interests.
Obama, in our thought experiment, would have charged that the role of the Bush-era FBI, CIA, DOJ, and special counsel’s team had become part of a “resistance” to delegitimize his presidency. Indeed, Obama charged that conservative interests had long wanted to abort his presidency by fueling past efforts to subvert the Electoral College in 2008, to invoke the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, and the Emoluments Clause (based on rumors of negotiating lucrative post-presidential book and media contracts by leveraging his presidential tenure), as well as introducing articles of impeachment.
Celebrity talk of injuring Obama and his family would be daily events. Actor Robert De Niro talked of smashing Obama’s face, while Peter Fonda dreamed of caging his children. Johnny Depp alluded to assassination. It soon became a sick celebrity game to discover whether the president should be blown up, whipped, shot, burned, punched, or hanged.
Imagine that if all that had happened. Would the FBI, CIA, or FISA courts still exist in their current form? Would the media have any credibility? Would celebrities still be celebrities? Would there ever again be a special counsel? Would we still have a country?
Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won (Basic Books).
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5) On MLK Jr. day, call issued for new investigation into assassinations of the 1960s
Posted: Personal Liberty News Desk
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed while riding in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald was charged in his death but was executed by Jack Ruby two days later.
On February 21, 1965 Malcolm X was assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam. Three members were convicted for the murder.
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down as he stood on a hotel balcony in Memphis. James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, pleaded guilty and died in prison.
On June 6, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was murdered as he walked through the kitchen of The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan was charged in the shooting and is serving life in prison.
All four of these assassinations have been surrounded by conspiracy theories. Now a group of prominent American academics, journalists, lawyers, Hollywood types, activists, researchers and pundits are calling for new investigations to determine once and for all what really happened.
The group calls itself the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. It includes family members of King, Malcolm X and the Kennedys, former political types (including G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel on the House Select Committee on Assassinations that investigated the JFK murder), Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the surgeons attending JFK after the shooting, and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.
A statement from the group calls for Congress to release documents as required by law and for a public inquest into the assassinations which would include testimony from living witnesses, legal experts, investigative journalists, historians, family members and victims. The JFK Records Collection Act mandated that all government documents related to the JFK presidency and assassination be released to the public in 2017. But President Donald Trump put off the release in October 2017, and in April 2018 released some records but continued to hold others. Those records are now set for release in 2021.
According to the group, a growing body of evidence confirms that JFK was probably killed by a conspiracy, Ray’s conviction has lost credibility, and Sirhan’s trail was a “mockery.”
To read the group’s statement and view the list of signatories to it, go here.
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