Buy American - Rebuild America
And:
I believe next week will give us some indication regarding the market's direction for a while. Stock prices are somewhat inflated after the recent rally and we still do not know what earnings will be nor how the opening up of America turns out among other matters.
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As I have been posing for years the U.S is under a threat of losing to China:
The End of America’s Era of Military Primacy
As China’s advanced arsenal grows, the Pentagon must focus on emerging technologies, not traditional weapons platforms
By Christian Brose
Could the U.S. lose a war with China? That alarming possibility was one of the last things I ever discussed in person with my old boss, Sen. John McCain. In late 2017, we had just left a briefing that he had asked me to arrange for his colleagues about China’s growing arsenal of precision-strike missiles, long-range sensors, counter-space capabilities and other advanced weapons. Every senator was invited to the briefing; about a dozen showed up. They got a depressing dose of reality.
One briefer was a senior Pentagon official in the Obama administration named David Ochmanek. Last year, he spoke publicly about the many war games he has conducted for the Department of Defense. “When we fight China or Russia,” Mr. Ochmanek said, the U.S. military “gets its ass handed to it. We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary.”
As Sen. McCain and I sat in his office after the briefing, we talked about the waning of the military dominance that the U.S. has enjoyed since World War II. We spent the evening imagining how a war with China might unfold. He worried that our forward bases in Asia could be reduced to smoking holes in the ground, our aircraft carriers and other ships knocked out of the fight and possibly sunk, our communications networks shattered, our satellites jammed and shot out of orbit, and perhaps thousands of Americans lost in action. “Future generations of Americans are going to look back,” Sen. McCain said, “and ask how we let this happen.”
The message was clear: If we don’t reimagine America’s outdated model of national defense and harness emerging technologies to build a different kind of military, we will fail to deter the next war—or even lose it.
Even before Covid-19, defense budgets were declining. With trillions of dollars urgently needed in stimulus spending, political leaders are already calling for sharp Pentagon budget cuts, especially to pay for enhanced pandemic preparedness. The result will be a reckoning that our “military-industrial-congressional complex”—as Sen. McCain used to call it—has long sought to avoid.
The core problem is that the decades-old assumptions underlying the U.S. military are increasingly obsolete. We have long assumed that no adversary would be able to overmatch us technologically and deny our ability to project military power world-wide. As a result, we have built our force around small numbers of large, expensive, manpower-intensive and hard-to-replace platforms: ships, aircraft, satellites and vehicles. Our political, military and industrial leaders have continuously directed most defense resources to these traditional platforms. And nothing—not even the 2009 recession and the painful budget “sequestration” that followed it—has altered the demands of our defense establishment for more of the same.
As the U.S. has doubled down on old priorities, China’s military has surged forward over the past three decades and is now aggressively embracing new technologies such as artificial intelligence, advanced drones and hypersonic missiles. Beijing’s new arsenal is focused not on confronting the U.S. military directly but on undermining the way it operates—what China calls “systems destruction warfare.”
This doesn’t mean that China is 10 feet tall. But it does mean that the U.S. is playing a losing game. And we cannot spend ourselves out of our predicament.
To change course, we must first redefine our objectives. If China continues to grow in wealth, technology and power, it will become a peer competitor to the U.S. Recovering our global military primacy is no longer a practical goal. We must instead pursue a more limited and achievable goal: denying military dominance to China. The U.S. military will have to focus less on projecting power and controlling territory than on preventing China (and other competitors) from projecting power themselves and committing acts of aggression beyond their borders. We must create defense without dominance.
This will require us to think differently about modernizing the U.S. military. The goal cannot be to accumulate more and better versions of traditional platforms in the expensive pursuit of a 355-ship Navy or a 386-squadron Air Force. We must focus instead on developing networks of systems that enable U.S. commanders to understand the battle-space, make decisions and act—the process that our military calls “the kill chain”—and to do so better, faster and more dynamically than our adversaries. This battle network, not platforms alone, creates real military advantage.
The military we need will be rooted in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, distributed networking and advanced manufacturing. Our current force won’t survive on future battlefields. A truly digital force must be built around large networks of smaller, cheaper, more expendable, more autonomous systems. (Disclosure: I now work at a technology startup that builds national-security products.)Producing this military will require a defense industrial base very different from the insular and consolidated one we now have. In 1991, according to a paper from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), there were 107 major defense firms; a decade later, there were five. In the 15 years that followed, nearly 80% of new entrants that sought to work for the U.S. government eventually quit, as another CSIS report has noted. Some 17,000 companies left the defense business between 2011 and 2015 alone. And while more than 100 U.S. startups have grown into billion-dollar “unicorns” in recent years, barely any have been in the defense sector.
As a result, the U.S. military is shockingly behind the commercial world in many critical technologies. For example, the AI-enabling computers in self-driving commercial vehicles can be hundreds of times more capable than the “flying supercomputer” on the F-35 combat aircraft.
The U.S. can make this transition, even with smaller defense budgets, but only if our political leaders understand that the short-term pain of these choices pales in comparison to the consequences of failing to change, such as losing a future war. These changes were long overdue before the Covid-19 crisis created new budget constraints. Now they are nonnegotiable.
—Mr. Brose is the chief strategy officer of Anduril Industries and the author of “The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare,” recently published by Hachette Books. From 2015 to 2018, he was staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
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These are three WSJ editorials and op eds that address topics I have been discussing long before they were written/posted:
The real tragedy is that Democrats and the mass media want to defeat Trump even if it means harming America.
In 27 states, “a voter can designate someone to return their ballot,” says the National Conference of State Legislatures. This practice is often restricted to family members and caregivers, or with rules that cap the number of ballots any single person may return. Not always. “Ballot harvesting” has made news in California, where activists have canvassed neighborhoods collecting votes. The registrar in Orange County reported in 2018 that his office had “people dropping off maybe 100 or 200 ballots.”
These are three WSJ editorials and op eds that address topics I have been discussing long before they were written/posted:
The real tragedy is that Democrats and the mass media want to defeat Trump even if it means harming America.
A Vote-by-Mail Nightmare
Trump or Biden by a whisker, with a million ballots thrown out.
The Editorial Board
Roughly 100 million Americans voted in the flesh during the 2016 elections, mingling at 117,000 polling places with 918,000 staff, many of whom were seniors. Given how fast Covid-19 has spread without this kind of national mixer, it’s easy to see why an epidemiologist might dread November.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an order this month ensuring that every registered voter in his state will receive a mail-in ballot this fall. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said Tuesday that every voter there will be sent an application to cast a ballot by mail. Other states will probably expand their absentee options. This is understandable in a pandemic, but it’s worth keeping in mind what can go wrong.
In 2016 almost a quarter of votes were carried by the post, according to the federal Election Assistance Commission. But roughly 1% of submitted absentee ballots were rejected. About half of the time, the voter’s signature was missing or didn’t match the John Hancock on file. Another quarter of these ballots arrived after the deadline. All in all, 319,000 votes were thrown out.
Black and Hispanic mail voters in Florida had rejection rates in 2018 that were twice as high: 2% and 2.1%, compared with 0.9% for whites, according to a study by the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. In several counties the minority rejection rates passed 3% or 4%. Among first-time voters, 3.1% of ballots were thrown out. That call is often made by local officials, who are simply eyeballing the voter’s signature against the version on record.
Some states allow voters to “cure” a signature mismatch after Election Day. In Ohio they have seven days to fix the issue. It’s eight days in Colorado and 14 in Illinois. North Carolina says mail ballots are valid if they arrive three days after Election Day, provided their postmarks beat the deadline. It’s six days in Iowa and 10 in Ohio.
Ballot harvesting isn’t widespread, but laws in 13 states are “silent on the issue,” the NCSL says. That includes Wisconsin, where the Elections Commission told voters in March that ballots may be returned by “a family member or another person.” Technically, that covers anybody at the door in a Biden shirt or a Trump hat. Last year when the commission flagged the issue, it said Wisconsin law also doesn’t “clearly prohibit failing or refusing to deliver a marked ballot collected from another voter.”
So imagine: It’s Nov. 4, 2020. Swarms of people have voted by mail for the first time, many of them incorrectly. State election officials are struggling to keep up with the deluge. The presidential race is tight, with Donald Trump or Joe Biden (pick your poison) leading nationally by 500,000, similar to the popular vote in 2000. But something like a million mail-in ballots have been thrown out.
The Electoral College comes down to Ohio and Wisconsin, where the contenders are separated by several thousand votes. For 10 days, late ballots keep being counted in Ohio. As voters race to fix bad signatures, it sets off a scramble of challenges and counter-challenges. Mr. Biden files a lawsuit pointing to higher rates of ballot rejection in areas with more black voters. Mr. Trump accuses Democratic activists in Wisconsin of mass ballot harvesting. Maybe a canvasser in Milwaukee finds a box of votes in his trunk that he—whoops—forgot to deliver.
The worst of this nightmare can be avoided. As states extend mail voting, they should tighten deadlines and ban ballot harvesting. The push for all-mail voting is relentlessly focused on ballot access, which is important. But ensuring ballot integrity is crucial for public confidence in election outcomes and, ultimately, for democratic legitimacy.
Democrats in Congress want to go the other direction. The Heroes Act, passed by the House this month, would mandate the counting of late ballots postmarked before Election Day, with a uniform 10 days to cure bad signatures. The bill also says that states “shall permit a voter to designate any person to return a voted and sealed absentee ballot,” on the sole condition that canvassers not be paid per vote. In effect it would impose ballot harvesting nationwide.
At best, mass mail voting is a roll of the dice, calculated against the grim reality of the pandemic. If the country is lucky, the 2020 election, whoever wins, won’t be decided by a whisker. Then as the coronavirus is tamed, the temporary measures should end. For ballot security and democratic legitimacy, it’s hard to beat going to the polls on Election Day.
Media Cowardice and the Collusion Hoax
What happens when the press becomes an interest group whose interest isn’t the truth?
ByHolman Jenkins Jr.
To many hack commentators, “conspiracy theory” has become a term used to make certain kinds of implicit and explicit cooperation unacknowledgeable.
With evidence newly in hand last week, we see that the resources poured into promoting the Steele dossier before the 2016 election were nothing next to those mobilized by Clinton campaign chief John Podesta after the inauguration. Transcripts two years old show various Obama officials denying under oath that they possessed evidence of Trump-Russia collusion while they implied the opposite on TV.
Even the outside firm that the FBI relied on for its claim that Democratic emails were hacked by the Russians admitted under oath to finding no evidence that emails had been actually removed from Democratic servers.
Newsies in the aftermath of the Russia hoax now insist they were merely reporting on official actions. They carefully avert their eyes from the fact that the leaks they received and possibly even the official acts they reported were manufactured deliberately to put lies into the news.
If they had any grit, many of our senior reporters would be hopping mad now to learn they had been manipulated into reporting untruths to the public.
If they had any grit. Instead many of them seem to be hanging around the same leakers and whisperers, hoping for new talking points to get themselves off the hook in the air-clearing now coming. It’s all part of what Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Aaron Maté of the Nation (two left-wing critics of the Russia hoax) call the “privilege protection racket.”
Take a podcast in February with former Obama adviser David Axelrod and Rep. Adam Schiff, under the auspices of the University of Chicago and CNN. In an hourlong, intimate setting, how could Mr. Axelrod not ask about the unraveling of the Russia collusion theory and the Steele dossier that Mr. Schiff so assiduously promoted for three years?
The questions needn’t be accusatory, but how does someone with a living mind not ask? Instead, Mr. Axelrod abused JFK by painting Mr. Schiff as a profile in courage for peddling a lie that made him extraordinarily popular with the anti-Trump media (as if this could ever be courage).At least Mr. Axelrod noted that Mr. Schiff comes from a safe seat unlike the many Republicans Mr. Schiff constantly accuses of cowardice. But how could any GOP officeholder work with Democrats to rein in Mr. Trump when voters back home see Mr. Schiff falsely trying to frame the GOP president as a Kremlin mole?
The failure to think about these larger consequences is the real cowardice. (For the record, Messrs. Taibbi and Maté in their own podcast refer to Mr. Schiff as a “pathological liar” and the person most likely to assure Mr. Trump’s re-election.)
When all is said and done, half the story of our age will be how Democrats and the press became more Trumplike than Trump in their opposition to Trump.
My own taste in presidents runs in an Eisenhowerly direction, but I know an interesting experiment by the voters when I see one. Worth 1,000 Washington Post op-eds was Duke University polymath Timur Kuran’s analysis of Mr. Trump’s famous campaign cheap shot at John McCain. Even veterans who revered McCain rallied to Mr. Trump because of his “fearless” willingness to hit back against a Republican icon.
Or take his continually misrepresented comment about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, which reporters still advance as proof that Mr. Trump thinks a president is above the law. Mr. Trump was speaking as a candidate: If you’re a pressie who still doesn’t understand that he was marveling (and hyperbolizing) in real time about the mainstream press’s hostility as his best recruiting tool, you are unfitted to be an observer of anything.
The most interesting question would concern the political establishment’s response to the 2016 message from voters. Whatever you think of this moment in our history, 100% of your contempt should be reserved for those who responded by inventing the Russia collusion hoax. The purpose of reporting is not to propagate falsehoods; what good are commentators who lack the judgment to recognize that the Steele dossier (a collection of accusations by somebody who would neither vouch for their accuracy nor reveal their source) had no journalistic value except as proof of the concocter’s low opinion of journalists?
Fools become liars when they knowingly persist in their misrepresentations to preserve personal dignity and professional standing. By rights, the rectification should begin with the dismissal, on competence grounds, of the leadership in many newsrooms. It won’t. But at least register in your own mind how routinely and sometimes completely press behavior is at odds with values the press claims to represent.
Coronavirus and the Chernobyl Analogy
Edward Luttwak wrote the book on regime change, and he sees parallels between China’s pandemic response and the Soviet Union’s late years.
By Adam O'Neal
As Chinese authorities botched their response to the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, a quote from the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl” went viral on the Chinese messaging app WeChat: “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”
The analogy between the 1986 nuclear accident and the 2020 pandemic—Communist regimes trying to cover up the truth of a disaster and thereby worsening it—may seem a little pat. It may also seem wishful: After all, the Chinese Communist Party, unlike the Soviet one, emerged from the unrest of 1989 with a tighter grip on power. Edward Luttwak doesn’t exactly agree with the analogy, but he takes it seriously. “The Wuhan virus has made it impossible for Xi Jinping to continue with this program of staying in power for another 10 years,” he says. “Impossible.”
Mr. Luttwak, 77, knows a thing or two about regime change. A military strategist and historian, he may be best known for his 1968 book, “Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook.” Rumor has it that a copy was found on the body of Moroccan Gen. Mohammad Oufkir after he failed to overthrow King Hassan in 1972.
Over a half-century, Mr. Luttwak has produced a significant body of work on international affairs and military strategy. He also has built a lucrative career advising businessmen, political leaders, even the Dalai Lama. Along the way the Romanian-born polyglot made powerful friends across the world—from liberal democratic civil servants to party apparatchiks. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote that “like Machiavelli himself, he enjoys truth not only because it is true but also because it shocks the naive.”
Mr. Luttwak has come to believe that “regimes fall because of stylistic failure.” That happens “when the more alert members of the ruling elite are prompted to realize that the regime’s official ideology and style of government have become totally outmoded, obviously irrelevant and even ridiculous.”
The Soviets are a case in point. “I visited the Soviet Union almost every year for years and years. It didn’t fall for material reasons. And in Chernobyl itself, it didn’t fall for moral reasons,” he says. “Even at the end, the Soviet regime was able to summon people to sacrifice themselves for the system.” Instead, he argues, the Politburo sealed its fate in 1984 when it appointed the ailing, 72-year-old Konstantin Chernenko general secretary.
“He could barely talk. He could barely walk. However, the requirements of the Soviet system were that when a new general secretary is installed, his colleagues are filmed saying that they swoon with delight, as if it’s a beautiful 19-year-old girl in a bikini coming out of the water,” Mr. Luttwak says. Chernenko “never did anything. His name is associated with nothing. And now, they’re all pretending that they are swooning with delight.”
People throughout the Soviet Union, including party elites, were disgusted with the spectacle. They wondered, in Mr. Luttwak’s words, “What is this absurdity?”
When Chernenko died a year later, the Politburo moved in the opposite direction and chose Mikhail Gorbachev, 54, in what Mr. Luttwak calls “a desperate attempt to overcome stylistic failure.” But Mr. Gorbachev “had been harboring these revolutionary thoughts.” By 1991 the Soviet Union had dissolved. Mr. Gorbachev had sought to save it, but Mr. Luttwak insists stylistic failure had already broken the system.
In China today, Mr. Luttwak sees ample evidence of stylistic failure. Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, shifted power away from Beijing and promoted “peaceful development.” Mr. Xi, who took power in 2012, has made himself the most powerful Chinese ruler since Mao. “Prior to this great disaster in China,” Mr. Luttwak says, “he had chosen to redefine his role from first among equals to being the all-powerful and therefore all-responsible.” That put him “in charge of two great disasters.”
The first was “waking up the world to protecting its technological assets.” Mr. Xi’s Made in China 2025 initiative sought to displace the U.S. as the world’s paramount technological and economic power through forced technology transfer and aggressive state subsidies for Chinese firms. Beijing dropped the program’s name last year as criticism grew, but the program already had alienated many U.S. supporters—or, as Mr. Luttwak puts it, “killed off the panda huggers from the American system.” Other countries were taken aback by China’s new brashness. Mr. Luttwak says the international backlash was a “disaster that’s not felt by the man on the street but precisely by alert members of the ruling elite.”
Then came Wuhan, where doctors first noted the novel coronavirus in December. Mr. Xi didn’t speak publicly about the outbreak until Jan. 20, when Beijing acknowledged human-to-human transmission of the virus. But he had been leading the response since at least Jan. 7. As the virus spread, 40,000 families attended a massive Lunar New Year banquet on Jan. 18. Millions continued traveling out of Wuhan without screening.The Communist Party’s subsequent spinning of Wuhan as evidence of Mr. Xi’s exemplary leadership enraged everyday Chinese and elites. Italy made similar mistakes in handling the virus, but “nobody in Italy is ordering embassies around the world to proclaim the genius of Prime Minister Conte,” he says. “This is the stylistic failure.”
Mr. Luttwak likes Caixin Global, a Beijing-based investigative outlet that the Chinese authorities tolerate. “I read the English edition,” he says. “But I always look at the Chinese edition to make sure that the pictures and so on are the same.” He recently noticed Caixin running “story after story with things like, ‘China needs more than one opinion.’ ” The story of coronavirus whistleblower Li Wenliang—the ophthalmologist who was punished for warning about the virus, which later killed him—appeared across the country “again and again as a case of the cost of suppressing the truth.”
Along with Chernobyl comparisons, Chinese citizens online started describing the regime as “ridiculous,” Mr. Luttwak says. “Not evil, not bad—ridiculous. Suddenly, they’re ridiculous.” Some elites joined in. “I saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his ‘new clothes,’ but a clown who stripped off his clothes and insisted on continuing being an emperor,” billionaire Ren Zhiqiang, a retired real-estate tycoon and Communist Party member, wrote of triumphant February remarks by Mr. Xi. “Without a media representing the interests of the people by publishing the actual facts, the people’s lives are being ravaged by both the virus and the major illness of the system.” Mr. Ren has been arrested, but his words circulated widely.
Mr. Luttwak doesn’t go so far as to foretell the fall of Chinese communism, but he’s bearish on Mr. Xi. Elites are “going to say, ‘Xi Jinping is too much. Let’s go find our Gorbachev, who is more reasonable, and sits around the table and listens to opinions.’ And from then on, who knows which way they’ll go. I’m not a prophet,” Mr. Luttwak admits. But “it will be either Gorbachev, or something bigger happening.” Whatever happens, “people will go back to the events of the coronavirus in Wuhan and thereafter” for an explanation.
Mr. Luttwak joined Twitter in March after avoiding social media for years. The short-form platform suits his astringent sense of humor. His first tweet: “Anti-semites are dumb—so let me try. Obviously the Rothschilds launched the pandemic to depress stock prices to buy up the world economy cheaply. All I want to know is when the bars will re-open. Good news: the Bank of Israel just called me: it will all be over by June 15.”
His Twitter bio describes him simply as a “Historian and Rancher” based in San Joaquin, Bolivia, though he spoke to me through Skype from his home in Maryland. Ranching has been more than an investment. It has helped him understand the fundamental weakness of post-Soviet Russia. “Between Vladivostok and the North Korean border, there is the most wonderful grassland in the world,” he says. “I wanted to go there and bring some angus cattle.” He met with Vladivostok’s governor in 2017.“He says to me, ‘You should go talk to this guy who is an agriculture expert.’ ” The “expert” eventually made clear “that the only way that I could do this investment was by giving a 70% share to his friends.” Mr. Luttwak says he replied: “I went to school in Palermo, Sicily, and I see now that Russia badly needs to have technical assistance from Sicily—to learn how to do extortion properly.” Such clumsy corruption kept him from investing in the country. “And I’m a guy who has access to the governor! This is happening to the guy who is trying to open a sandwich stand.”
Mr. Luttwak notes Russia still produces plenty of highly educated and sophisticated workers, but “the problem with the overall thing is that it is actually a gangster regime.” This leaves the country “as dependent on oil as if it was a [expletive] Arab emirate with nothing but sand.” Vladimir Putin remains in power because he can pay off a large undergrowth of corrupt elites and “has a wonderfully coherent message to his people.”
Mr. Luttwak says Mr. Putin essentially acknowledges that “you will never be living so well as the Western Europeans. You will not have big cars, but you are an imperial people. You hold the largest country in the world. You rule many nationalities peacefully. Well, there’s the Chechens, but nobody can deal with Chechens.” Mr. Putin has convinced the Russian people that his predecessors “lost part of your inheritance. And they allowed chunks of it to fall off. I will not do that.”
But this style of governance is susceptible to failure. “We know that another two years of $20 oil would mean that the Russian state would not be able to pay its people, except in ever-more-inflated rubles,” Mr. Luttwak says. “The Russian elite is very import dependent. They consume foreign things. They have their mistresses and wives in Mayfair apartments that they have to pay for in pound sterling. So $20 oil could bring an end to it.”
Mr. Putin’s departure from power could prove anticlimactic, in contrast with the Soviet Union’s fall. Mr. Luttwak thinks the “Chernobyl” miniseries may be “the No. 1 film ever made in the history of mankind.” He says it’s “right up there with films like ‘Seven Samurai,’ which contain universal teachings.” As for the Wuhan outbreak, the history and its teachings are still being written.
Mr. O’Neal is a London-based editorial page writer for the Journal.
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Was it really treason? According to Barr he thinks it might just have been a terrible/despicable act that does not reach the level of a crime.
Was it really treason? According to Barr he thinks it might just have been a terrible/despicable act that does not reach the level of a crime.
Acts of Treason
The crime that dare not speak its name.
“This was all Obama. This was all Biden. These people were corrupt. The whole thing was corrupt. And we caught them. We caught them.” - Trump.
Perhaps the most troubling - and dangerous - aspect of the current political conversation is the unwillingness of virtually every elected official and every media pundit to confront what “Obamagate” is obviously about, which is treason.
Specifically, treason committed by the Obama White House in attempting to block and then overthrow the Trump presidency.
Obamagate is about the failed attempt by President Obama and his appointees to use government intelligence agencies to spy on the Trump campaign and White House, to concoct a phony accusation of collusion with Russia against the president and then to obstruct his administration and overthrow him.
Semantic deceptions are the currency of political conflicts designed to take the public’s eye off the ball. So it’s no mystery as that Republicans, whom Democrats regularly slander as racists, xenophobes, Islamophobes and deplorables should be cautious around a word as volatile and subject to misrepresentation as “treason.”
It doesn’t help that the last individual charged with treason was Tokyo Rose, a Japanese propagandist during World War II. In the intervening years, the ties of national loyalty have been so eroded, the idea of patriotism so demeaned by the political left, that the charge of treason was not filed against the Rosenbergs, Aldrich Ames, Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, or many deserving others.
If all parties remain reluctant to name the threat embodied in Obamagate, it’s not only unlikely but also unreasonable to expect justice to be the outcome. Fortunately, at least one political figure is ready to do this. One can assume it was President Trump who provided Rudy Giuliani, with the license to speak frankly. “They wanted to take out the lawfully elected President of the United States,” Giuliani told talk show host John Catsamatidas, “and they wanted to do it by lying, submitting false affidavits, using phony witnesses — in other words, they wanted to do it by illegal means . . . What is overthrowing government by illegal means? It’s a coup; treason."
This aggressive statement by the president’s lawyer is a sure guarantee that a reckoning is coming in the days ahead. But first there are the semantics. Responding to Giuliani’s accusation, law professor Jonathan Turley wrote: “No, James Comey Did Not Commit Treason.” According to Turley: “Giuliani is engaging in the same blood sport of using the criminal code to paint critics as not just criminals, but traitors. Where one can dismiss some of these charges as political hyperbole, Giuliani was sure to preface his remarks as coming from ‘an experienced prosecutor.’”
Technically, but in a very limited way, Turley is right. Treason is defined in Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution in these words: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”
There’s a reason the Founders designed so restrictive a definition of treason. They were all guilty of it for rebelling against their king. This led to Benjamin Franklin’s famous quip: “We must all hang together or we shall all hang separately.”
But this legal definition of the crime is only one aspect of the issue, and in the end it is the less important one for understanding the significance of what has happened. There is also the common usage of the words “treason” and “traitor,” which speak to the moral dimensions of the crime. It is these meanings that provide a proper guide to the seriousness and scope of what Obama, Biden, Comey, Brennan, Clapper and the others involved actually did.
This is the Merriam Webster definition of treason:
“1: the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign’s family.
“To overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance” –is a pretty precise definition of what Obamagate is about.
Although early on, the outlines of this conspiracy were clear to dogged investigators like Congressman Devin Nunes, they have remained obscure to anti-Trump partisans. This is due to the protective wall created for the conspirators by Obama appointees at the Department of Justice, unprincipled Democrats on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, and a corrupt news media that has redefined its mission to be that of a propaganda squad for the conspiracy itself.
Consequently, it has taken nearly four years to recover the documentary evidence that might persuade an honest critic of the Trump administration of the crime the anti-Trump camp has committed.
Two recent actions have served to demolish the plotters’ protective wall and bring the true dimensions of Obamagate to light.
The first was Trump’s appointment of Rick Grenell as acting Director of National Intelligence. Until then the transcripts of the impeachment hearings had been closed to the public by the Intel Committee chairman, Adam Schiff. This allowed Schiff to leak testimony damaging to the president and suppress testimony exonerating him.
The full testimonies by high-ranking foreign policy officials had remained under Schiff’s lock and key for over a year. Grenell told Schiff that he would unlock the testimonies if Schiff didn’t, which is how they came to light.
What the newly released testimonies showed was that one Obama appointee after another when questioned by Republicans on the committee had said they had no evidence whatsoever that there was any collusion between Trump or the Trump team and the Russians.
In other words, from the very beginning of the plot against Trump, the conspirators including President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and the heads of the intelligence agencies knew that the charge of collusion – of treason – which they had concocted to destroy Trump was fraudulent. Despite this, they went ahead with the $35 million Mueller investigation that tied Trump’s hands in dealing with the Russians and spread endless false rumors about his allegiances, and in the end found no evidence to support the character assassinations the investigation spawned.
The second revelation was the result of an FBI declassification of hitherto hidden documents describing a White House meeting on January 5, 2017 - two weeks before the inauguration of the new president.
The meeting was attended by the outgoing president and vice president, the heads of the intelligence agencies, the acting Attorney General and Obama’s outgoing National Security adviser Susan Rice.
The subjects of the meeting were the targeting of General Michael Flynn - Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser - and the infamous Steele dossier which the Hillary campaign and the DNC had paid a former British spy to compile with information from the Russian secret police. The dossier was designed to discredit Trump and set up the Russia-collusion narrative.
The targeting of Flynn involved unmasking an innocuous conversation with the Russian Ambassador which was then used to smear Flynn and get him fired. Shortly after the meeting the fact that Flynn was under investigation was leaked to the Washington Post – a felony punishable by 10 years in jail.
This leak opened a floodgate of public accusations - backed by no evidence - that Trump and everyone close to him were agents of the Russians.
The secret war the Obama White House declared on Trump before he was even elected, was a war on America.
Several years prior to the 2016 election, Obama had begun using the intelligence agencies to spy on his Republican opponents. This was a direct attack on the most fundamental institution of our democracy - elections. It was a much more destructive interference in the electoral process than anything attempted by the Russians.
The subsequent cynical attempts to frame Trump as a traitor and then to impeach him for concocted offenses is without precedent.
Because they were attacks on our democracy itself, Obamagate is the worst political crime committed against our country in its entire history.
The culprits involved need to be exposed and prosecuted, so that – in the words of President Trump – this never happens to another American occupant of the White House.
David Joel Horowitz is an American conservative writer. He is a founder and president of the think tank the David Horowitz Freedom Center; editor of the Center's publication, FrontPage Magazine; and director of Discover the Networks, a website that tracks individuals and groups on the political left.
Meanwhile:
This beautiful young lady has guts:
Kayleigh McEnany DESTROYS Reporters With Latest Statement |
She’s not messing around
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Is it time for the U.S to confront Iran? Tanker fleet nears Venezuela amid US tensions
Five Iranian tankers filled with gasoline were nearing Venezuela Saturday morning. The Fortune, the
Satellite images show Iranian ships
lead tanker, is estimated to arrive on Sunday, while four others are strung out across the Atlantic
Ocean. It is unclear if the US will try to interdict the tankers, but the movement of the gasoline runs
counter to sanctions on Iran and is a flagrant red flag in the face of Washington which denounces the
current Nicolas Maduro leadership of Venezuela, and supports his opponent.
Venezuela and Iran are to key issues for the US administration. Iran was supposed to see its oil
exports reduced to near zero due to US sanctions that were put in place after the Trump administration
walked away from the Iran deal. In May 2019 tensions increased between the US and Iran and Tehran
has mined tankers in the Gulf of Oman, attacked Saudi Arabia and killed US and Coalition forces in
Iraq using proxies. In Venezuela he US supports Juan Guaido who declared himself president in
January 2019 after disputed election results. He was formerly the speaker of parliament. In early May
two US citizens were detained in Venezuela as part of an ill-conceived coup plot that was hatched by
Venezuelan dissidents.
Iran’s tankers were pumped full of gasoline more than a month ago and have been making their slow
journey toward Venezuela for weeks. They exited Gibraltar’s straits in early May and have been
tracked by groups such as Tanker Trackers that monitor shipping. The first tanker has at least 1.5
million barrels of gasoline. Both Iran and Venezuela are oil-rich countries but Venezuela has
destroyed its oil and gas industry, which means oddly that it is importing gas from Iran. Venezuela’s
regime is an ally of Iran, Turkey and Russia. Iran has been taking gold out of Venezuela as payment
for the gas. Turkey also took gold from Venezuela last year.
ImageSat International using tracking algorithms post satellite images of the tankers on May 22. It
shows the Forest tanker making is way toward Caracas. The ISI assessment notes that if the tankers
keep the same sailing speed the Fortune will enter Venezuela’s exclusive economic zone on May 23,
Saturday. The Forest and Petunia will arrive soon after. The tankers must first navigate some beautiful
Caribbean islands before coming to port in Venezuela. Two other tankers, the Faxon and Clavel may
arrive next week.
The US has naval ships somewhere in the Caribbean that could interdict the ships but so far it is
unclear if there will be any standoff. The US appeared to downplay rumors that there would be a
conflagration. Iran has warned the US that any interference will result in retaliation. This appears to
mean Iran will target ships in the Persian Gulf. Iran’s navy recently shot a missile at one of its own
ships, killing its own naval members, as part of a drill to show off its capabilities. Iran also downed a
Ukrainian passenger jet during tensions with the US in January after Iran fired ballistic missiles at a
US base. The US killed Iran’s IRGC Quds Force general Qasem Soleimani in January. Iran has shown
that its missiles are effective against unsuspecting targets and that its fast boats can harass US ships.
Trump warned in April Iran that he would sink Iran’s IRGC fast boats. US officers in the past have
assessed that Iran’s navy could be destroyed in a day of combat with the US. It is not a serious
military challenge. But it can threaten ships and has waylaid tankers in the past, stopping a British
ship last year after the UK stopped an Iranian ship destined for Syria. Iran knows how to retaliate
using asymmetric methods and it will use them if its ships are stopped off Caracas.
And:
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