“I wonder if I can prevail upon the nation’s many multidimensional-chess players to tell me, a mere dilettante of the 2D game, which variant of strategic dexterity this bewildering little incident is supposed to represent:
Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have been telling him for months that he needs to return the documents. But other allies, including Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, have been telling Mr. Trump that he is entitled to keep the documents and never should have been pushed to return them
Granted, I lack the raw political sagacity of your average Roger Stone or Jason Miller, but to my uninspired eyes, this seems to have been transparently stupid. “What,” I have been asked in recent days, “is the difference between what Donald Trump did and what Hillary Clinton did?” Well, I’ll tell you one thing: Unlike Trump, Hillary Clinton is actually good at being villainous. Informed that the feds were onto her, Hillary proceeded as a veteran mobster would have: She lawyered up, feigned ignorance, and destroyed evidence, playing the game like a champ. At home, no doubt, she cackled herself to sleep each night. But when the lights were on her and the tapes were whirring away, she was disciplined enough to get away with it.
I do not find this admirable. I do, however, find it instructive. For eight long years now, the case made in defense of Donald Trump has been that, unlike the feckless yellowbellies he replaced, he has the courage and the capacity to “fight.” Washington, D.C., we have been told, is a “swamp,” a “sewer,” a breeding ground for out-of-touch hypocrites, and Trump, that plucky little outsider, is those hypocrites’ worst nightmare. Only he can effect substantial change. Only he can take on the entrenched special interests. Only he can survive the gauntlet of the elites.
To which I would respectfully inquire: When, exactly, did they decriminalize LSD?
The most devastating sections within the latest indictment of Donald Trump are the ones that star the man in his own words. In the minds of his admirers, Trump is a populist Sir Humphrey Appleby. In the transcripts of the indictment, he’s Marv from Home Alone, explaining to anyone who’ll listen how he knocked over all those houses. Not only does Trump explain that he did it, he establishes that the defense on which his champions have relied — that he had secretly declassified every document he kept — was untrue. Effective political reformers are deft, intentional, and covered in well-tailored armor. Trump is a klutz, a narcissist, a bumbler. He’s a manatee in a jacuzzi, making mess after mess after mess while insisting to the world that he’s a mermaid. That — that— is the guy who’s going to vanquish the “deep state”? Get real.
With the notable exception of belligerence, Trump lacks all of the characteristics that would be necessary to such a job. A president who can rein in the bureaucracy will be a president who understands that the serious obstacles in his way must be eliminated from within rather than without; who is prepared to utilize the existing levers of power against those who installed them; who can distinguish between good and bad advice; who is capable of evaluating which risks are worth taking and which are not; and who grasps instinctively that if he is to avoid the worst consequences of having a giant target painted on his back, he must appear cleaner than clean. Entrenched institutions will invariably fight back against those who wish to renovate them, and they will invariably do so in unfair or inconsistent ways. Morally, that unfairness and inconsistency matter. Practically, they do not. Here, there are no half-victories to be had. A reformer who cannot survive his own attempts at reform is useless.
Donald Trump cannot survive his attempts. Worse still, Donald Trump does not want to survive them. It is true that, on the matter of classified documents, there exists an infuriating difference in the justice system’s treatment of Hillary Clinton and its treatment of Donald Trump. It is also true that Donald Trump’s choices made it easier for that double standard to be observed. Trump did not need to take classified documents and store them in his home. He did not need to reject the DOJ’s overtures and refuse to return those documents. He did not need to be caught on tape admitting that he was breaking the law. He did not need to ignore the advice of his lawyers in favor of the bad counsel offered up by the head of Judicial Watch. These were choices — bad choices. What, may I ask, does Trump have to show for them?
It has become popular in recent years to argue that it does not especially matter how a given Republican politician behaves because, irrespective of who he is, he is destined to be treated in exactly the same way by the press, by the Democratic Party, and by the permanent bureaucracy with which both are now so closely entwined. This is false. It is true, indeed, that all Republicans are reflexively accused of the same sins. But it still matters whether those accusations happen to be true. Every Republican is deemed corrupt, selfish, a wannabe dictator. Not every Republican is caught standing over the body saying “bang.” There is nothing to be gained by self-deceit here: GOP primary voters can have reform of the bureaucracy, or they can have Donald Trump’s endless sh**show. If they try to have both, they will get neither — and they’ll deserve it, too.
Though the rest of us who see through Trump’s blusterous bombast will have to live with the consequences along with our blinded brethren.
“Speaking from Minneapolis on Friday morning, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the findings of a federal investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department and its officers’ conduct, as well as an “agreement in principle” to “negotiate a consent decree” that is court-enforceable between the Biden Justice Department, the City of Minneapolis, and MPD.
Garland said that federal officials reviewing MPD conduct “observed many MPD officers who did their difficult work with professionalism, courage, and respect” but also witnessed “patterns and practices” that “made what happened to George Floyd possible.”
…Minneapolis’ Democrat Mayor Jacob Frey spoke after Garland and other federal law enforcement officials, saying that “the data and the facts the DOJ have presented in these findings are aligned with what communities of color have told us for several years, in fact generations.” Despite being the mayor of Minneapolis since 2018, Frey said on Friday that the DOJ’s investigation was needed for change to happen and pledged that the federal report marks the “beginning of new chapter of public safety in Minneapolis.”
Frey did not explain why, despite being in charge of the city for more than five years and having a nearly unanimously left-wing city council, he hadn’t done anything to address the issues outline by Garland, ones he says he’s known about for years.”
“The end of this month can’t come soon enough for Paul Lewis. He’ll get to hand over the keys to his house in a Dallas suburb and start a long drive north, where he’ll become the latest LGBTQ+ Texan to leave the state in hopes of finding a friendlier place to call home.
“Part of me hates the fact that I’m leaving Texas, the home I’ve always known,” Lewis said. “But part of me is also excited by the fact that I get to start a new chapter.”
The lifelong Texan committed in January to begin looking for somewhere else to move. He explained how two factors ultimately solidified that decision, pointing to the growing number of LGBTQ+ restrictions introduced this legislative session as well as the frequency of deadly mass shootings happening in the state. He noted his home in Carrollton is 20 minutes from the Allen Premium Outlets, where a gunman killed eight people in May. Plus, the governor recently signed a bill into law that would ban transgender minors from receiving certain health care options to help in their transition.
“I don’t feel like Texas is my home anymore,” Lewis said simply.
He ended up selling his home through a real estate service launched last summer by the Dallas-based broker, Bob McCranie, who sought to help LGBTQ+ people list their homes in Texas and then connect them with an agent in another state or even a different country where they’d like to go next. McCranie initially called it “Flee Texas,” but soon changed the name to reflect a broader group of people expressing interest in the service.
“What we discovered was we got so much response from other states that we decided to expand and become ‘Flee Red States,’” McCranie said Tuesday. “We’ve helped 27 groups of people so far get out.”
“We’re calling it kind of the ‘rainbow Underground Railroad,’” McCranie said. “We’re trying to get people out quietly and get them to someplace where they feel safer.””
Here’s the juice: Though McCranie is inadvertently doing Texans a favor, what right-thinking STRAIGHT citizen would do business with this Santanista?!? WE say, BOYCOTT BOB MCRANIE!!!
Moving on, here’s a special sextet of selections certain to pique the curiosity of inquiring Conservative minds:
(2). NRO‘s Dan McLaughlin offers his expert advice in an in-depth analysis of how to read the Trump boxes indictment, his first suggestion being not to “let knee-jerk partisan tribalism prevent you from reading the Trump boxes indictment critically.”
“A screenshot of a Fox employee portal shared by Walsh showed that the company encourages employees to donate to the Trevor Project, the Ali Forney Center, and the L.A. LGBT Center. Fox also encourages employees to read explicit LGBTQ books like one that gives a sexually explicit description of a “glory hole” and another that describes pornographic scenes between two gay characters.”
Though we stopped watching FOX well over a year ago, we now suggest it’s time others join us. But given Newsweek’s reportthe network’s 120-week reign atop prime-time cable news ended Sunday when FOX surrendered its #1 position in the ratings to MSDNC, it appears many already have. As Michael Shwarz observed at The Western Journal, “It takes a special effort to make MSNBC look good, so congratulations to Fox executives on their improbable achievement.”
(4). In another indication the depths of Progressive perversion haven’t begun to be plumbed, The Washington Free Beacon reports long-time Dimocrat donor and Penn State chemical engineering professor Themis Matsoukas, 64, was caught on tape—naked from the waist down except for shoes and socks—performing bestiality with his collie in Rothrock State Forest in Pennsylvania. He purportedly told park rangers, “I do it to blow off steam”, though we’ve no doubt steam isn’t the only thing Matsoukas blows off.
(5). So it’s no shocker that Biden wanted to smooth things over with Xi Jinping after belatedly shooting down his surveillance balloon which passed over the U.S. earlier this year. According to sources, top National Security officials were forced to talk Biden out of making a call to apologize to Xi in the days immediately following the downing of the spy balloon after it passed over the Atlantic off the coast of South Carolina.
Biden evidently thought Xi would make him reimburse China personally out of the bribes they’d paid Hunter and him.
(6). This tweet says all that need be said about the mental condition of our Commander-in-Chief:
I have seen countless – and I mean countless – drunk people say something totally obscure like “God save the Queen” and then jaunt around like a Joe Biden just did in an effort to play it off as if they were sober. He’s truly incapacitated.pic.twitter.com/XhNfFwyTwK
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Speed…
…and Balls Cotton:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with a cross between News of the Bizarre and yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, as FOX informs us…
“An American tourist was arrested in Germany Thursday for allegedly pushing two fellow American tourists down a steep slope – killing one of them – near a famous German castle. The incident took place Wednesday afternoon near the Marienbruecke, a bridge over a gorge that offers a view of the Neuschwanstein Castle. The 30-year-old man met the two American women, ages 21 and 22, on a hiking path and lured them onto a trail that leads to a viewpoint, police said.
“The younger of the two women was attacked by the suspect,” said police spokesman Holger Stabik. “The older one tried to rush to her aid, was then choked by the suspect and subsequently pushed down a slope.” The assailant then allegedly tried to sexually assault the 21-year-old before pushing her down the slope as well. She fell nearly 165 feet, ending up close to her friend.
…The suspect left the scene but was quickly arrested nearby.”
Seriously…you’re going to spend the money to travel overseas and commit crimes you could have perpetrated back here in the States; like…seriously?!?
Magoo
Video of the Day
Florida Congressman Brian Mast KNOCKS IT OUT OF THE PARK!!!
Tales of The Darkside
In case you missed it, Dave Rubin calls it like it is: There IS NO ANTI-TRANS LEGISLATION, only anti-gender mutilation of minors legislation.
On the Lighter Side
Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma literally embarrasses a “witness” who doesn’t know her a*s from a piece of plastic.
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