It’s Wednesday, January 31st, 2018…and yesterday morning Jim Geraghty entitled his Morning Jolt, “Can You Feel the State of the Union Excitement?“, a question we answer with an emphatic “NO!”, just as we have every year since Ronaldus Maximus left a seat in the Oval Office which has yet to be filled.
So anyone looking for observations on The Donald’s first foray into the belly of the beast, other than this, courtesy of Balls Cotton…
…should seek entertainment elsewhere.
Though if we were writing The Donald’s address, we’d open with Trump holding up an easy-to-read chart highlighting America’s economic boom over the last year, have him look straight in the camera and say…
“...President Trump often is accused of being at war with fundamental American institutions, and that criticism is not without some merit.Trump is not what one would call a nuanced critic. The press that is critical of him is horrible, in his view, and might reasonably be suppressed by various official means, including gutting the libel laws in such a way as to make it easier for the powerful to sue their critics. On the other hand, the president loves the press that is friendly to him, though here “friendly” must necessarily be read “obsequious,” as Breitbart, Fox & Friends, et al. have been. President Trump does not think very much about institutions at all. He thinks of friends and enemies.One of the problems with his bitter, often excessive criticism of American institutions is that such abuse, coming from the president, can have the effect of corroding faith in our institutions. The other problem is that he is sometimes right.
Another big tranche of missing communications?Really?
When the IRS was in trouble for targeting tea-party organizations and other conservative groups in the run-up to the 2012 election, thousands of emails — evidence under subpoena — went missing. John Koskinen, then acting commissioner of the IRS, lied to Congress about how and why that happened, a fact he was later forced to acknowledge. As a legal question, the result of all that malfeasance — destroying evidence — was precisely squat. Lois Lerner walks the streets a free woman with a fat federal pension, and John Koskinen is perfectly comfortable showing his face in the daylight.And now it is the FBI’s turn. With serious questions being posed about the bureau’s activities during the 2016 election — about whether the bureau protected Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama in the matter of their habit of using off-the-books email communications to avoid ordinary oversight — the FBI has suddenly discovered months’ worth of communication between FBI counterintelligence specialist Peter Strzok and his paramour, FBI lawyer Lisa Page. The two exchanged politically charged messages about Trump and the Clinton email investigation, and Strzok wrote darkly of developing an “insurance policy” against Trump’s election, still regarded as highly unlikely at that time.
The texts went missing, and then were recovered. Or some of them were recovered. All of them? Whose word would you take on that? And why would you take the FBI’s word? Aaron Blake, writing in the Washington Post, argued that the “insurance policy” message looked bad, but not as bad as some on Trump’s side insisted. Well. He allowed that “it’s 100 percent true Mueller and his probe aren’t above reproach.”
And that, of course, is really what this is all about.
“Above reproach” does not mean “never made a mistake,” “never got it wrong,” “never had a rogue employee misbehave.” No, “above reproach,” in this context, means that the institution behaved and responded institutionally in a way consistent with its duties, its mission, and its public purpose.That means, among other things, acknowledging forthrightly when bad actors within the agency abuse their offices and their powers for political purposes and tilt the table toward their political friends and benefactors. That means treating such situations with complete and total transparency.
It means, at the very least, not destroying evidence in a federal investigation.And no sane person believes for a nanosecond that those “lost” communications represent anything other than willful obstruction of justice. If you are on the FBI’s radar and you got a parking ticket in Sheboygan in 1983, the FBI knows whether you paid it. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is a federal bureau in the business of conducting investigations.
No one believes that the IRS or the FBI is above reproach. No one seriously believes that the editors of the New York Times would have treated a President Hillary Clinton and a President Donald Trump in the same way. (One likewise wonders what Fox News would have made of partially documented claims that President Bill Clinton had paid $130,000 in hush money to a porn star who says she had an affair with him.) President Obama’s so-called scandal-free administration was in fact rife with abuses of power, from the IRS to the ATF to the EPA to the NLRB.Trump may sometimes attack our institutions without good cause; the Obama administration gave critics good cause to attack our institutions.
We have not yet reached the point of no return, but the diminishing faith in our institutions — the media, the government, law enforcement, the universities, and more — is not the result of Donald Trump’s wounded egomania or talk-radio screeds against the mainstream media and the “deep state.” (Some of those are amusingly daft: Sean Hannity lamented that the mainstream media was sure to ignore a certain story while he was reading aloud on the radio the text of an Associated Press report about that very story — which of course is how he knew about it in the first place.) Yes, conspiracy theories are to be resisted and ridiculed, and the institutions that make possible our free society are to be cherished.But they need not be cherished blindly. In fact, it is essential that we do the opposite, that we keep them under close and aggressive oversight — conducted both by government institutions and by the press — and that we weed out corruption, self-dealing, and political abuses where we find them.
It isn’t up to Donald Trump to see to the FBI’s reputation if the FBI will not see to it itself.“
Welcome to Washington: like Chicago, this town stinks..
From where we sit, America is at a crossroads. While The Left continues its refusal to countenance any Republican success at the ballot box, the Deep Staters within the federal government have heretofore undermined the Constitution and the rule of law with utter impunity, fearing neither penalty nor reprisal, as Kevin Williamson noted of Lois Lerner and John Koskinen above.
Which is what makes this such a watershed moment, on a par with the implications of another scene from The Untouchables:
Like the fictional representation of Eliot Ness outside Capone’s bootlegging operation (or was it Joe Kennedy, Sr.’s?!?), America is facing her own door; and it’s just as Jimmy Malone said: once we go through it, there’s no turning back.
But rather than deciding to take on a known criminal operating outside the law, America is faced with bringing to justice bureaucrats and politicians…
…who’ve been subverting the system from within.
Where we go as a country will depend on whether we have the courage not only to confront the evil in our midst, but make it pay for its sins.
Since we’re on the subject of squandered trust, not to mention evil, also writing at NRO, Arthur Herman takes us back to where Fake News was born…as well as correctly identifying he who birthed it:
“Josef Goebbels called it the Big Lie, the deliberate misrepresentation of facts and reality in order to achieve a political objective. It’s been part and parcel of the New World Disorder we’ve lived under for the past century, ever since Vladimir Lenin first used a Big Lie to disguise his seizure of power from Russia’s post-czar provisional government in November 1917, by telling the Russian people he was preventing a coup not perpetrating one.
America’s first major encounter with the Big Lie, with all its disastrous consequences, started 50 years ago today, when the American mainstream media — CBS and the other networks, plus the New York Times and the Washington Post — decided to turn the major Communist Tet offensive against U.S. forces and South Vietnam on January 30, 1968, into an American defeat, rather than what it actually was: a major American victory.
We’ve all lived in the disorder and chaos that campaign set in motion ever since.
…So while many in mainstream news outlets wring their hands today about a widespread lack of trust in media, it’s important on this 50th anniversary to remember the part they played in squandering it.“
Though with all denigration due Uncle Walter, who thoroughly inculcated his successor Dan Rather in the ways of the Dark Media, we should mention Cronkite…
…was only following the example of another Walter, The New York Times‘ infamous Stalin-apologist Walter Duranty, who deserves dishonorable mention as the Grandfather of Socialist-slanted Fake News.
So here’s to you, Walter Duranty, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Brian Williams, Charlie Rose, Jimmy Kimmel, Joy Behar and anyone else who peddles lies to promote counterproductive Progressive policies:
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to the Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (aka, Lenin) Memorial “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them” segment, aka The Muslim Minute, courtesy again of NRO, as Sam Westrop highlights how…
“On January 1, President Trump tweeted that Pakistan gives “safe haven to the terrorists.” The State Department subsequently suspended over a billion dollars of security assistance and military funding to the country. The suspension of this aid is both welcome and long overdue. For decades, elements within Pakistan’s government have openly supported America’s most virulent enemies, including funding and training the Afghani Taliban and sheltering Osama bin Laden. Today, the country continues to provide support and sanctuary for the perpetrators of terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies. But if the Trump administration is determined to cripple Pakistan’s support for Islamist terror, it cannot limit its focus to South Asia; it must also confront Pakistan’s Islamist proxies in the U.S...”
Again, America stands at a door: and the question againis, particularly in these politically-correct times, whether we’re willing to pass through it.
And in the Health Section, a Canadian couple discovers the limitations of single-payer, Socialized healthcare:
“…The couple, according to Stephens’ Facebook post, contracted larva migrans, known in layman’s terms as hookworms. She said she likely came into contact with the parasites while walking on the sandy beaches of their resort in Punta Cana. A doctor prescribed the two ivermectin — a medicine used to kill worms developing in the body.
However, Stephens said Canada’s national public health department, Health Canada, denied their request for the medication because it’s not licensed in Canada — so her mother had to drive to Detroit, Michigan, to get the medicine…”
What inquiring minds want to know is what the heck Canadians are going to do when the U.S. healthcare systemfinally mirrors their own?!?
And does anyone seriously believe the extended Obama Family will ever suffer the indignities visited upon this Canadian couple?!?
Turning from the merely unhealthy to the decidedly deadly, the Washington Examiner reports that the…
This despite the fact the legislation made exceptions for rape, incest and the health of the mother.
As Jim Freeman relates at Best of the Web:
“…On Monday the Senate voted not to consider Sen. Lindsey Graham’sPain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which is supported by the President and would ban abortions performed after 20 weeks of pregnancy, except in cases of rape. incest or a threat to the life of the mother.
The legislation secured 51 votes, mostly from Republicans, shy of the 60 the bill needed to move forward.The three Democrats to support the bill—Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Joe Donnelly of Indiana—all face re-election this fall and represent states that President Donald Trump carried in 2016.
The legislative findings section of the bill states in part:
For the purposes of surgery on unborn children, fetal anesthesia is routinely administered and is associated with a decrease in stress hormones compared to their level when painful stimuli are applied without such anesthesia. In the United States, surgery of this type is being performed by 20 weeks after fertilization and earlier in specialized units affiliated with children’s hospitals…
The position, asserted by some physicians, that the unborn child is incapable of experiencing pain until a point later in pregnancy than 20 weeks after fertilization predominately rests on the assumption that the ability to experience pain depends on the cerebral cortex and requires nerve connections between the thalamus and the cortex. However, recent medical research and analysis, especially since 2007, provides strong evidence for the conclusion that a functioning cortex is not necessary to experience pain.
The foregoing is perhaps why, outside of elected officeholders, even many Democrats support a ban after 20 weeks. The New York Timesreports:
The United States is one of just seven countries — including China and North Korea — that permit elective abortion after 20 weeks, a fact that backers of the failed measure brought up repeatedly on Monday.
“The United States keeps the company of countries like China and North Korea. They deny unborn children the most basic of protections,’’ Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, said on the Senate floor Monday. “This, folks, is not who we are as a nation.”
Supporters of the ban cite medical studies suggesting that fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks. But the science surrounding fetal pain is complex. In a July 2013 memo, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists wrote that “the fetus does not even have the physiological capacity to perceive pain until at least 24 weeks of gestation.
So at least based on the Times account there is reason to question whether pain is really felt at five months. But surely no such question exists regarding development at ninemonths. Here’s a partial transcript from thefinal presidential debate in October of 2016:
Trump: If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby. Now, you can say that that’s okay and Hillary can say that that’s okay, but it’s not okay with me. Because based on what she is saying and based on where she’s going and where she’s been, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb. In the ninth month. On the final day. And that’s not acceptable.
Clinton: Well that is not what happens in these cases.(REALLY!?!)And using that kind of scare rhetoric is just terribly unfortunate. You should meet with some of the women I’ve met with. Women I’ve known over the course of my life. This is one of the worst possible choices that any woman and her family has to make. And I do not believe the government should be making it. You know, I’ve had the great honor of traveling across the world on behalf of our country. I’ve been to countries where governments either forced women to have abortions, like they used to do in China, or forced women to bear children like they used to do in Romania. And I can tell you the government has no business in the decisions that women make with their families in accordance with their faith, with medical advice. And I will stand up for that right.
The Senate debate this week was a reminder that Mrs. Clinton’s views on this issue are shared by many Democratic officeholders. Given the alternatives, conservative voters are supposed to care about Stormy Daniels?“
Much mention is made by Progressives the United States is the only G7 country which still has a death penalty. Conveniently unmentioned is the unpleasant reality America is also the only G7 country which permits unrestricted abortion after the 20th week of pregnancy…the point at which the unborn not only feel pain, but, thanks to modern medicine, have a very limited but ever-increasing chance of surviving outside the womb.
Indeed, while there are 52 nations which still retain capital punishment in both law and practice, only 7, including Communist China and North Korea, still allow abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy.
Margaret Sanger, Mao Zedong and Kim Il-sung would be so proud; as evidenced by this vote in the Senate, we know the rest of Progressives, including RINOs Linda Murkowski and Susan Collins, certainly are!
If there are levels to Hell, a concept with which we don’t necessarily subscribe, advocates of abortion will surely share a seat equal in temperature to that of Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
On The Lighter Side:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Sports Section, and the living, breathing embodiment of the term “nitwit”…
…as well as yet another reason we never watch ESPN. Thus does this douche’s anecdotal evidence render invalid WaPo polling…yes, THATWaPo…which consistently shows 90% of American Indians are not offended by sports logos or mascots. Progressives: they think, therefore they KNOW! And always more than the rest of us…combined.
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